Tyranny of Choice in the Cloud

Posted by Rod Cope on August 26th, 2010 in The Cloud

There are now so many options when deploying to the cloud, enterprises are being faced with a Tyranny of Choice.

They can get an IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) solution from:

Or they can roll their own IaaS by starting with:

If they require services over and above basic IaaS, they can get a PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) solution from:

And now Red Hat with their JBoss-based PaaS solution for cloud computing. Underlying this solution is an Apache-licensed open source package called Deltacloud, which intends to abstract cloud provider API's to increase solution portability. (The cloud is built on open source, you know.)

But Deltacloud is not the only cross-cloud enabler out there. Not by a long shot. There's also:

fog
jclouds
libcloud
libvirt
lots more

That's a lot of options to get the basics up and running. What if I want monitoring, security, disaster recovering, or other sprinkles on top? Don't worry, there are lots of choices:

AppDynamics – cloud monitoring console, performance stats
BitNami – software packages, multi-cloud deployment
Cloudkick – tagging, monitoring, multiple clouds, web terminal
Cloudscaling – services around building private clouds
CloudStatus – tracks Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine for outages, performance
CloudSwitch – migrating enterprise apps to the cloud, VMware-based
enStratus – management, governance
InMage – cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) solutions
New Relic – cloud monitoring console, performance stats
RightScale – auto-scale, management, deployment
rPath – packaging, deployment, updates
Scalr – auto-scale Amazon EC2, database backup & replication, monitoring, stats
Standing Cloud – software packages, multi-cloud deployment
Ylastic – Amazon and Eucalyptus monitoring

Wow. With all those implementations, it would be great if there were industry standards to rely on so interoperability and portability were realistic goals. Or maybe at least some cross-vendor groups focused on working together, even though some people think it's way too early for cloud standards. No problem:

Cloud Commons – Trip Advisor for the cloud
Open Cloud Manifesto – let's all play nice
Open Cloud Consortium – interoperability, testing
Open Cloud Initiative – OCP (Open Cloud Principles) – definitions
Open Cloud Computing Interface Working Group – IaaS interface API's

Ouch.

There are now so many choices in all these areas that paralysis may set in. Inevitably, consolidation and fall out will take place over the next few years, but anybody who wants to jump in today will need to navigate some fairly murky (cloudy?) waters.

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