Ephemeral clouds

I’ve talked about cloud computing a number of times in these  pages. It’s a model of networking that in some ways brings us back to the monolithic data center, but in other ways makes that data center distributed, rather than central. A data cloud, an application cloud, a services cloud. An everything cloud, and, indeed, when one reads about cloud computing one sees a load of [X]aaS acronyms, the aaS part meaning as a service: Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and so on.

I use email in the cloud. I keep my blog in the cloud. I post photos in the cloud. I have my own hosted domain, and I could have my email there, my blog, there, my photos there... but who would maintain the software? I could pay my hosting service extra for that, perhaps, but, well, the cloud works for me.

It works for many small to medium businesses, as well. Companies pay for cloud-based services, and, in return, the services promise things. There are service-level agreements, just as we’ve always had, and companies that use cloud-based services get reliability and availability guarantees, security guarantees, redundancy, backups in the cloud, and so on. Their data is out there, and their data is protected.

But what happens when they want to move? Suppose there’s a better deal from another cloud service. Suppose I, as a user, want to move my photos from Flickr to Picasa, or from one of those to a new service. Suppose a company has 2.5 terabytes of stuff out there, in a complex file-system-like hierarchy, all backed up and encrypted and safe and secure... and they want to move it to another provider.

In the worst case, suppose they have to, because their current service provider is going out of business.

Recently, Google Video announced that they would take their content down, after having shut the uploads down (in favour of YouTube) some time ago. This week, Friendster announced that they would revamp their service, removing most of their data in the process.

Of course, you understand that when I say their data, here, I really mean your data, yes? Because those Google Video things were uploaded by their users, and the Friendster stuff is... well, here’s what they say:

An e-mail sent Tuesday to registered users told them to expect a new and improved Friendster site in the coming weeks. It also warned them that their existing account profile, photos, messages, blog posts and more will be deleted on May 31. A basic profile and friends list will be preserved for each user.

Now, that sort of thing can happen: when you rely on a company for services, the company might, at some point, go away, terminate the service, or whatnot. But what’s the backup plan? Where’s the migration path? In short...

...how do you save your data?

Friendster has, it seems, provided a exporter app that will let people grab their stuff before it goes away. Google Video did no such thing, and there’s a crowd-sourced effort to save the content. But in the general case, this is an issue: if your provider goes away — or becomes abusive or hostile — how easy will it be for you to get hold of what you have stored there, and to move it somewhere else?

Be sure you consider that when you make your plans.

[Just for completeness: I have copies on my own local disks of everything I’ve put online... including archives of the content of these pages. If things should go away, it might be a nuisance, but I’ll have no data loss.]

Cloudy: more thoughts on cloud computing

My esteemed colleague (and occasional commenter here) Nathaniel Borenstein recently had an article published in TechNewsWorld, Is the IT Pendulum Winding Down?

Are we finally nearing a time when IT’s constant swing between centralized and distributed systems might be slowing to a stop? In the case of cloud computing, technology is now reaching the point where we can have our cake and eat it too. Cloud computing is new not because the technologies are new, but because this key combination of technologies has matured past a critical point.

I had something to say about cloud computing about a year ago in these pages. There, I imagined the shifts in centralization vs distribution as a circle, rather than as a pendulum, and I thought of cloud computing as having closed the circle, not as being somewhere along the pendulum’s arc, doomed by inertia and gravity to have the pendulum move away again.

And, so, I largely agree with Nathaniel. In circumnavigating things, we moved away from the centralized computing center because of the disadvantages of having all services in one place, and because of the new capabilities provided to us, first by personal computers and then by mobile and other distributed devices. As we closed the circle, we retained those new capabilities and figured out how to provide the central services in a distributed way over the Internet, getting the best features of each in the cloud.

Yet, I don’t think we can nestle our collective bum in that cloud and sit comfortably, claiming that we’re done. There are still disadvantages to what we have, and whether we can fix them without making another circle (or, if one prefers, pendulum swing) is questionable. I don’t think we can.

The problem is that the issues we need to address — at least the first set of issues — are not technological, but organizational. Here are some of the questions that come up, with no attempt to answer them, because, indeed, we have no idea at this point about what the answers will be.

Who owns the data we put in the cloud? What rights do we have to our data? What rights to the cloud providers have? How will that play out in courts of law?

How is the privacy of our data assured? What about privacy associated with the services we use? Every time we do a web search, every time we use a location-based service, every time we look up a person, send email, post a photo... we’re giving some organization in the cloud private information about ourselves. What rights do we have, and what don’t we have?

What about the long-term viability of our data? What about the services we depend upon? When the company that stores our stuff goes out of business, where do our files go? When the company is sold, what happens when the new owners change the rules (suppose we got free storage from the old company, but the new owners want to charge, and demand six months’ payment in advance if we want to see our data again)?

Even without ownership changes, what about when a service provider suddenly changes privacy or access rules, as Facebook has done several times? What happens when the Google/Verizon deal turns out to have a significant effect on access to the stuff we put on Google Docs?

It’s easy to say that, well, if you don’t like the new rules you can move your data and use someone else’s services. That might not be so easy in practice. Are you really going to spend time to move perhaps terabytes of data from one host to another? In the absence of any migration assistance? And what about if the old host’s rules restrict your access? Maybe the very reason you want to move is that you can’t get at all (or any) of your data any more, or your access is rate-limited.

On the other side, it’s very easy, now, to put a multi-terabyte hard drive on the Internet. And even on mobile devices, we can get a 32 gigabyte SD card for about $75, or 16 GB micro-SD for about $30. That’s around $2 per gigabyte, and that’ll fit into a mobile phone, portable media player, or digital camera. How long before that goes up to hundreds of gigabytes, in a card the size of your fingernail? Maybe we’ll soon just carry everything around in our mobile phones, and it’ll all be accessible over the Internet from there... automatically backed up on another memory card in the phone’s charger (which could also be on the Internet).

The cloud is giving us some great capabilities, as well as possibilities we haven’t realized yet. But I don’t think for a minute that we’re done.

Having one’s head in the cloud

Computer trends are interesting to follow[1]; they keep changing, and, as with clothing, the chic trends this year soon become passé, replaced by newer ones. It often seems that it’s really the words that change, while the actual trends continue pretty much intact. Some years ago, we liked “e-Utilities”, then “autonomic computing”, later “on-demand computing”, and now “software as a service” (SAAS or SAS, depending upon who’s abbreviating it). To be sure, at some level these aren’t all the same thing at all. And, yet, when it comes to describing a way of providing computer services as needed, in a sort of plug-and-play manner, it’s easy to make your project or product fit them all.

In that sense, they become buzz words, and as the operative buzz words change, we spin our project proposals or our product advertising to take maximum advantage of the “new trend”.

So with “distributed computing”, “cluster computing”, “grid computing”, and “cloud computing”, terms that have developed over the last years. Each is distinct from the others in some ways, but there’s a great deal of overlap. A turn-of-the-century distributed computing application that has the right profile could easily have morphed through the series, proudly calling itself a cloud computing application today. There’s a lot of fluff here.[2]

Eric Rescorla gives an opinion on cloud computing over at Educated Guesswork, and I agree with him that it’s a mixed bag. All of the mechanisms in the list above have some of the characteristics Eric talks about, such as the ability to draw on more resources only when they’re needed, avoiding over-provisioning the system all the time. You could actually say that it works autonomically, or on-demand... but never mind.

What I think is interesting about the emphasis on cloud computing, and putting your data and services “in the cloud”, is that we’ve come close to completing a circle. In the 1970s, we used “dumb terminals” that talked to “mainframe computers”, behemoths that sat in large data centers. The terminal was an input/output device, but was not itself a computer... so all the programs and the data lived and ran on the mainframe. We had central management of everything, and the only way to distribute the cost was to charge for use of mainframe resources — processor cycles, data storage, and so on.

In the 1980s, we developed personal computers and started using them seriously. The computer on your desk would run a “terminal emulator” that accessed the mainframe, but it also ran its own programs, starting to pull away from the central management. We did spreadsheets and word processing and that sort of thing without ever touching someone else’s computer. We still stored data in the data center — it had far more capacity, of course — but we no longer stored everything there. And, too, some of the cost was distributed to the users, who paid for their own computers and software.

In the 1990s, as the worldwide web developed, we did more and more on our own computers, and relied far less in the data center, to the point that many people in offices — and pretty much everyone at home — made no use of it at all.

Of course, no one ran everything on her own computer, either. The whole point of the web is to make it easy to find and retrieve things from other computers on the Internet, and over time, more and more services became available to us.

But we ran our own browsers and office software and email programs and lots of other programs. And, as a result, we had to manage all that software ourselves. Be sure to update all your software regularly, we’ve been reminded, to make sure long-fixed program bugs don’t bite you. Upgrade periodically to get new features, keep your anti-virus definitions up to date, and remember to back up your hard drive regularly, lest you have a disk crash and lose all.

Now, in the 2000s, we’re moving back. Keep your backups at someone’s Internet data center — they’ll give you lots of free space, and you can pay for more storage and features. Next, keep your data somewhere else in the first place, using webmail, using “virtual hard drives” on the Internet. Then run your software somewhere else, with things like Google Docs — they’ll take care of storing your data, making sure it’s backed up, scanning it for viruses, making sure the software that uses it is properly updated....

What, now, is the real difference between computing in the cloud — or on the grid or whatever, in what we’ve come to call “federated” systems — and computing in the data centers of the 1970s? Google is talking, with its announced operating system that ties heavily into the cloud, of moving your PC even further back to a not-so-dumb terminal that, through a web browser, gets all of its data and services from what amounts to a data center.

30+ years ago, the data center was a large room with many large, noisy boxes; today, it lives in smaller, probably quieter chunks all over the world. And the circle is very close to being closed.
 

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[1] Well, for some value of “interesting”, but bear with me here.

[2] Yes, “cloud”, “fluff”... sorry.