The good news with Cloud Computing is that our clients don’t have to sink precious capital into building or finding a data center or buying servers.
The bad news — at least the concern — is lock-in. Is a business locked in once they have grown? Do we have choices in case Amazon (or whoever) decides to raise their prices? Will the customers be able to take their business elsewhere if that happens?
There are a number of vendors out there providing cloud computing services:
- Amazon, of course.
- Rackspace
- GoGrid
Others will follow. IBM has made announcements regarding Cloud Labs, Microsoft is working on Azure, etc. But I want to focus on Amazon, Rackspace and GoGrid in this post. They offer services that are somewhat analogous, each has the equivalents of S3 and EC2.
All three have RESTful APIs accessible from a range of languages. They perform similar functions, yet the API for each is different. It always happens this way. the vendors are trying to compete and innovate. Lock-in is not a big consideration at this stage, maybe it will be later.
So how can we insure against lock-in? Standardization, of course. If the APIs for the three cloud vendors were the same, lock-in wouldn’t be as much of a problem. Early Stage IT serves a different market and we intend to stay focused on that market. However, if there is a venture that aims to build a standard API, as RogueWave did in its marketplace many years ago, we would be supportive partners.
For background reading, check out InfoWorld’s reviews of some cloud services.
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2 responses so far ↓
Emmanuel Buah // June 9, 2009 at 3:57 pm
Check out http://www.cloudkick.com. They are trying to provide a solution that will solve the problem of cloud lock in. It allows you to move an instance from one cloud provider to another. They dont support gogrid or rackspace yet but hopefully, they do.
J Singh // June 10, 2009 at 6:24 am
Thanks. I loved their pricing page:
Who knew people are clamoring to be able to pay!