Ubuntu creator warns businesses to be wary of cloud lock-in - Techworld.com

Ubuntu creator warns businesses to be wary of cloud lock-in

Canonical and Citrix highlight the pitfalls of proprietary cloud computing

By Sophie Curtis | Techworld | Published: 12:45, 27 January 2012

Cloud infrastructure was always meant to be based on open standards, and organisations that choose to buy capacity from public clouds that only support one standard are creating problems for themselves in the future, according to Ubuntu creator Canonical.

“All the world’s biggest clouds are built on open source technology,” said Canonical's vice president Chris Kenyon in a keynote session at Cloud Expo Europe yesterday. “They’re not all built on open standards, but open source underpins all of the largest plans.”

Kenyon explained this is because open clouds are scalable, cheap and secure. He compared the evolution of cloud computing the the evolution of the internet, stating that although the web existed before open standards, it was the arrival of HTML that prompted the explosion of innovation that made the web what it is today.

“Lock-in is fundamentally a bad thing,” he said. “Beware of a cloud solution that’s fundamentally proprietary; beware of cloud solutions that are actually just virtualisation dressed up as cloud, they’re not the same thing – vCloud is not fundamentally where cloud computing is going over the next ten years; beware of cloud solutions that are only offered by one vendor, and beware of anything that comes from the high temple of lock-in: Oracle.”

Kenyon said the industry is moving towards a world where multiple public cloud providers will be competing on price, functionality and uptime. He pointed to HP's public cloud, which is built on OpenStack and will come out of beta this year, as well as Rackspace's plans to move its public cloud infrastructure to OpenStack.

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http://news.techworld.com/virtualisation/3333246/ubuntu-creator-warns-businesses-beware-cloud-lock-in/

All I have to say is... Who didn't see this Coming!???

Don

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