Finally, an open initiative with industry support for cloud computing. Until now, several cloud vendors were taking advantage to be first movers, and proposing technology to lock customers into their platforms.

RackSpace has proposed the project OpenStack: http://openstack.org.

... and the technology is backed by: Rackspace, NASA, Citrix, Dell, NTT, Data, PEER 1, SoftLayer, Rightscale, Cloud.com, iomart Group, Opscode, Puppet Labs, FathomDB, ANSO, CloudKick, Zenoss, Limelight, Enstratus, Cloudscaling, Scalr, AMD, Intel, Autonomic Resources, Riptano, Zuora, Nicira, Spiceworks, Sonian, and CloudSwitch.

It's focused to "to allow any organization to create and offer cloud computing capabilities using open source software running on standard hardware". So it's very infrastructure specific. I hope they'll fulfill the initial purpose and move up along the stack.

Following the excellent thread of articles from ArsTechnica, now they publish "Cloud platform choices: a developer's-eye view". In the overview, we can find the state of the art for a tech business development in the cloud. As bullet point we can have a tech business running on:

• A DIY model (buying servers, building a network, etc)
• Traditional hosting/dedicated services
• Cloud-based Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) (e.g. Amazon or Rackspace)
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) (e.g. Google's App Engine or Saleforce.com's Force.com)

What

We know "Now everything is on line"......Let's be naive:

• SaaS = Software
• Cloud Computing = Hardware
• PaaS = Software for Developers / Operations

We can refer to "cloud computing" as running on line as a general concept. But, talking about hard stuff, a company is providing a software service or a hardware service, so it's SaaS or Cloud Computing. Examples: SuccessFactors vs Amazon EC2.

Who

Based on these simple concepts, you can know if you need Software or Hardware.  If you are looking for a SaaS, you have to find the right package for your needs (features vs monthly pricing). From SMB packages to full enterprise services.

If you are looking for hardware (and the associated network connectivity and human resources to keep the service running), you have to choose between the minimum hosting package to world-wide load balanced servers. Cloud Computing "by nature" is a very high load service. For any regular (small and medium) website, you can easily use a simple hosting or collocated server.

PaaS is a tough call for developers, it changes the standard development model to easy the process to publish and operate a software service.

So, a Salesforce "enabled" web application can be run on the Forge.com App Engine or Google App Engine (integrated with the data located at Salesforce DB).

It means..... Very nerdy stuff... web applications that can be running on different platforms integrated on the same data.

At the end, more options to customize applications, more user licenses for Salesforce.com and support for Google App Engine.

As final conclusion, it's interesting to see how Clouds can be merged, based on a business rationale. For sure, more cloud merging is coming.

I think Cloud Computing is a kind of hosting, collocation, VPS, or remote server.... mixed with parallel computing or distributed computing.

As the main idea is to remote infrastructure; and parallel/distributed computing is a field for a few chosen. I believe Cloud Computing is going nowhere. At the end, it’s just infrastructure.

And... PAAS... no clear path between Cloud Computing and SaaS ... It may be possible to find a business niche, as a common denominator between several SaaS (sharing a platform). Even it may be possible to stimulate the development of SaaS following a Platform/Standard, providing value added services to an ecosystem. I'm setting the idea in the "wait and see" status.

As final conclusion, there's too much anxiety about Cloud Computing & PASS mixed, let's give them 2-5 years to see how they settle.

• 36 data centers across the globe ... 150 racks per data center ... more than 200,000 servers .. clusters of 1,800 servers are pretty routine
• an ordinary Google search query that involves 700 to 1,000 servers
• “Our view is it’s better to have twice as much hardware that’s not as reliable than half as much that’s more reliable”
• “You have to provide reliability on a software level. If you’re running 10,000 machines, something is going to die every day.”
• ... first year, it’s typical that 1,000 individual machine failures will occur ... ... thousands of hard drive failures will occur...... one power distribution unit will fail, bringing down 500 to 1,000 machines for about 6 hours ... 20 racks will fail, each time causing 40 to 80 machines to vanish from the network ...... 5 racks will “go wonky,” with half their network packets missing in action; and the cluster will have to be rewired once, affecting 5 percent of the machines at any given moment over a 2-day span...there’s about a 50 percent chance that the cluster will overheat, taking down most of the servers in less than 5 minutes and taking 1 to 2 days to recover

Also, recently, Google talked about one of its own designed servers:

• each server has its own 12-volt battery to supply power if there's a problem
• Google's designs supply only 12-volt power, with the necessary conversions taking place on the motherboard
• Google's PUE (energy efficiency) scores are enviably low, but the company is working to lower them further.
• the core of the company's data centers are composed of standard 1AAA shipping containers packed with 1,160 servers each, with many containers in each data center.

..

"1. Cloud providers must work together to ensure that the challenges to cloud
adoption (security, integration, portability, interoperability,
governance/management, metering/monitoring) are addressed through
open collaboration and the appropriate use of standards.
2. Cloud providers must not use their market position to lock customers into
their particular platforms and limit their choice of providers.
3. Cloud providers must use and adopt existing standards wherever
appropriate. The IT industry has invested heavily in existing standards and
standards organizations; there is no need to duplicate or reinvent them.
4.When new standards (or adjustments to existing standards) are needed, we
must be judicious and pragmatic to avoid creating too many standards. We
must ensure that standards promote innovation and do not inhibit it.
5.Any community effort around the open cloud should be driven by customer
needs, not merely the technical needs of cloud providers, and should be
tested or verified against real customer requirements.
6.Cloud computing standards organizations, advocacy groups, and
communities should work together and stay coordinated, making sure that
efforts do not conflict or overlap. "