How cloud vendors can be evil? | Hacker News Reader

How cloud vendors can be evil?

mohitsoni.com

5 pointsmohit4 comments

"People use banks because banks operates on certain standards and laws, which enables easier movement of money from one bank to another for bank customers. Cloud vendors should also frame certain laws and standards, that will enable moving of data from one cloud vendor to another in future."

I really like this idea, but how does one enforce/regulate those kinds of standards? I feel like google is putting forth a pretty good effort with their protocol based wave, but they have an amazing amount of clout to throw around and are increasingly being accused of being monopolists because of it. A lot of developers could choose to avoid any standard Google puts forward, because anything Google does is obviously only done to promote their own self-interest.

As it gets easier and cheaper to set up cloud servers, I can only foresee a further splintering of existing protocols. If I were to set up my own cloud server, chances are I would build some kind of personalized REST based platform because that's what I know and am comfortable with. It would serve my purposes, but it may not serve my competetion's cloud server. Who would build their own API. How does this ever coalesce into one standardized protocol?

it is in the best interest of larger, more established players to lock you in by using proprietary, patent protected, and/or complex APIs. Smaller players, on the other hand, want to grow, often by undercutting the larger players on cost (the entire market here is priced massively above the costs I see, so just about anyone with a few servers can come in and be 1/2 to 1/4th market price.) In that case, the smaller players desperately want it to be easy to move from one provider to another.

The current situation is that only complex APIs exist.

The problem is that the smaller players often don't have the resources to deal with a more complex API.

I think what we need is a 'simplest thing that could possibly work' API that is easy for good SysAdmins (who may not be good programmers) to integrate into their own system.

But then, I haven't really played much with Eucalyptus. maybe I am wrong about it being too complex. I should throw up a server with Eucalyptus and see what happens.

"Never put data into a program unless you can see exactly how to get it out"

this is key.

I think Cloud vendors should come forward proactively, and frame a set of standards for interoperability in the cloud. An inspiration could be taken from the Virtulization industry, that came up with OVF (Open Virtualization Format).

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