Thread: Begin the Cloud Wars have

I, in my earlier articles have discussed and introduce cloud phenomenon. But here we will go to some interesting and topsy-turvy things going behind the scene of this buzzword.
There are many internal fights going on. Some of them are:
1. Private versus Public clouds
This involves Public cloud service providers like amazon and google providing services in their own hardware, engaging in fights against service provider where infrastructure are inside the firewalls . Private player says that Private clouds are the way to go. In between lie hybrid clouds. This is a peculiar situation when a enterprise employs its private data centre and public cloud service providers also are needed. One of the thing about clouds are scalability i.e. anytime you can increase the utilization of resources ( up-to a large point). Personally I think public clouds (contrary to general opinion) as the future. Surely you don't see any one every one becoming ISP or electricity generators for just their own self. If I need net for just my own self I will not become an ISP but use an ISP services. Though other side too have many strong arguments. In fact difference between private & public are too much murkier than people will like to believe.

2.Battle of Hypervisors: KVM vs Xen vs VMware ESXi vs Hyper-V
In this great battle we see two open source products( xen & KVM) pitted against two closed source products and all four against each other. KVM is directly built in to the linux kernel ( in fact i.e. the reason that KVM have been adopted by many including Red hat. Also point to be noted( I am a KVM fan no doubt about that) it is the only hypervisor which don't need any other micro-kernel like DOM0 or Microsoft partition So calling it & also calling it type 2 is a myth. But Xen had advantage of being earlier in the market. VMware had also that advantage. Hyper-V seems in comparison to other two a new buddy.


3. Great Battle for Open Source & freedom
You know what is the greatest disadvantage of clouds? You data can be accessed by service provider ( in case of public clouds and also to some extent in private cloud). You are giving them power above them. Richard M. Stallman have in fact oppose this whole cloud hola & advise people to use their own machines. Of course all your data is in hand of other. But I disagree with him ( though I like him & include him in my idol category). I think there will always exist people who never let anyone snatch their freedom. Though majority might be a mute spectator. Time might change so does the evil heads and style but so does we should. AGPL license have closed many loopholes in GPL. I have firm believe that soon a situation will come when service provider will not be able to access people data either by increase in encryption and authentication. Also some close-nit people who have always like choices and have not wanted to be restrict will seek alternatives. Open source community are the one who have defeated the powerful might of the strong enterprises but this is not the time to feel hopeless & take such approaches. Who would have thought 15 years ago that a single piece of linux kernel if have been build would have cost in billions $ but we have got it. Who would have thought that best OS certification (RHCE) in the market would have been ours?Who would have thought that 70% sites will run on Apache not ISS? This is just the beginning & its script will never end but only with total freedom whether it might be for good or bad.

Very well written post

Cloud and all that is all good but its not for India or shall we say Indians cant even dream of using it properly for another 4-5 years and 4-5 years in tech world is more then a century... think about the technology 5 years ago... does it not look ancient to you?

To make good use of cloud computing you need a decent bandwidth and we in India live with 256kbps connections... atleast the majority does and even I use a 750kbps connection that gives me 1.5mbps at night from tata and I feel tied and restricted due to the slow speed but I cannot justify paying Rs20k for a decent speed with a 50gb monthly limit.

So yes talking about South Korea or Hongkong or Singapore... yes cloud computing is great.... Come to New Delhi and you would be struggeling to open simple high media content websites without having to wait more then you can without being annoyed with the speed.

Yes, that's the great trouble here. I have just shifted to limited plan as speed I am getting with unlimited is bad. But then 950 for 7.5 gb with 2mps is hardly justified ( I think cap should be increased to 20 gb) . But with 1200k 512kbps I was having trouble using subversion.