My colleague Chris Wells turns the tables on me and interviews me about the characteristics of an open cloud. These include:
- is open source
- has a viable, independent community
- is based on open standards
- gives you the freedom to use IP
- is deployable on the infrastructure of your choice
- is pluggable and extensible with an open API
- enables portability of applications and data to other clouds
Listen to OGG (0:09:09)
[Transcript]
Gordon
Haff: You're listening to the Cloudy Chat Podcast with Gordon Haff.
Chris
Wells: Welcome, everyone. For today's podcast, we're going to do
something a little bit different and turn around. My name is Chris Wells and
I'm a Product Marketing Manager here at Red Hat. Today I'm actually going to
interview Gordon Haff, our cloud evangelist.
Gordon:
Hey. Thanks, Chris.
Chris:
We'll turn the tables here a little bit. I'll ask you some of the
questions. I understand that you've been doing a lot of work, and Red Hat in
particular has been doing a lot of work, around open cloud. Could you just talk
a little bit about what does Red Hat mean when it says "open cloud?"
Gordon:
Sure. Well, the idea of an open cloud is really that you can build a
cloud out of all your IT infrastructure and not just a part of it. Also, there
are a lot of other characteristics that are very important to, really, all the
customers we talk about ‑ the ability to move applications from one cloud to
another, the ability to develop applications once and deploy them anywhere you
want, the ability, really, to be in control of your own roadmap. Obviously, as
an open source company, Red Hat places a lot of value on openness across a number
of different dimensions. I have to say, we've actually been a little bit
surprised maybe about how much this message has resonated with our cloud
customers.
Chris:
Well, when you talked a little bit about the open source piece there, is
it simple enough to say that open cloud equals open source, or is there more to
it than that?
Gordon:
There's a lot more to it than that. Open source is clearly very
important. I think a lot of the aspects of openness around clouds are kind of
hard to imagine how you might get there without open source, but open source by
itself does have a lot of benefits. It lets the users control their own
implementation. It doesn't tie them to a particular vendor. It lets users
collaborate with communities. If they want something that's a bit different, or
maybe they and some other end users want something that's a bit different, they
can go in that direction and don't have to convince some vendor to do it.
Obviously,
part of that is viewing source code and being able to do their own development.
Although that's very important, it doesn't stop there.
Chris:
Where else does it go?
Gordon:
Staying on the open source theme, one of the first things is that open
source isn't just code and license. Not like, "OK, I can see the code.
It's licensed under Apache. Everything's great. Don't need to worry about it
any more." The community that's associated with that open source code is
really important. Really, if it's just open source and it's still just a single
company that's involved in it, that probably doesn't buy an end user an awful
lot, because all the developers are still with that single company. Really
realizing the collaborative potential for open source means that you have a
vibrant community, and that involves things like governance. How do you
contribute code? What are the processes for that kind of thing? Where does
innovation come from?
Also
related to that is open standards. Again, these things are all related to each
other. Again, I'd probably argue truly open standards aren't possible outside
of open source, because then they're always going to be tied to a single vendor
in some way or another.
Standardization,
in the sense of official standards, even isn't necessarily the critical thing
here. These things take a long time to roll out, and cloud computing is such a
new area, but the idea that you have standards, even if they're not fully
standardized yet, is still very important.
Chris:
That's very interesting. Now, you mentioned a little bit earlier about
talking to different types of customers. Do you see as customers have more and
more interest in going to cloud computing, are they more interested in the open
cloud or open source type of approach than they might have been in a
traditional data center?
Gordon:
Yeah, I think so because cloud is really about spanning all this
heterogeneous infrastructure, whether it's public clouds, whether it's
different virtualization platforms, or whether it's physical servers even. I
think a lot of people think cloud is just virtualization or public clouds, but
actually, pretty much everyone we talk to says that they really see for a lot
of workloads, that maybe 20 to 25 percent of the workloads in organizations,
that those are really going to stay in physical servers for the foreseeable
future. There's definitely an interest in moving those workloads to the cloud.
Chris:
Now, there's a lot of vendors in the cloud space besides Red Hat. Red
Hat's obviously taken this approach to really go down the open cloud paradigm
that we talked about because that's pretty consistent with our heritage and our
history around being open source. What do you see as challenges for other
vendors that today aren't open?
Gordon:
The big challenge is that users are demanding openness. And in fact, if
you look at the cloud computing marketing literature out there, not to mention
any names, but you see some very much closed vendors out there who have
"Open" in huge type on their websites. It's usually because they're
trying to frame themselves as being open in some narrow sense. Perhaps they've
contributed their APIs to some standards organization or something. I think
they're going to be challenged when you compare them with a company like Red
Hat, for example, which has a long heritage in open source, knows how to work
with communities, knows how to ‑ really understands the depth of openness that
is required. I think they're going to be challenged to combat that effectively.
Chris:
For our listeners out there in the audience, I think most of them would
agree, because I think you and I have talked to a lot of customers that
definitely want this openness. The question's going to be everyone is trying to
say that they're open. If you're in the customer's shoes today, or our
listener's shoes, what kind of questions can they ask to actually figure out is
something truly open versus someone just saying the word "open?"
Gordon:
I've gone through a few of these already, but let me go down the list of
things that we've come up with that, as we talk to our customers, really resonate
with them as mattering. I've mentioned open source, mentioned the community
associated with that open source, mentioned open standards.
Another
important aspect of openness is freedom to use IP. Now, we don’t have a lot of
time to get into that here but, suffice it to say that, although modern open
source licenses and open standards can mitigate certain aspects of IP
issues—patents, copyrights, and so forth—freedom to use IP is a separate issue
that users ought to be aware of.
Is
deployable in the infrastructure of your choice. This speaks to in cloud [how]
it really can't be just an extension of a particular virtualization platform,
for example. It really needs to be independent of that other layer and
deployable in public, choice of virtualization platforms and physical servers.
The
ability to extend APIs, adding features, can't be under the control of a single
implementation or vendor. That was one reason that something called the
Deltacloud API that Red Hat uses is under the auspices of the Apache Software
Foundation, which is a very well‑regarded, meritocracy‑based governance regime,
so that kind of governs how people can contribute and extend that.
Finally,
just the idea that you have portability to other clouds. You can't have a cloud
that requires that you develop your software in a particular way that's tied to
that particular cloud so that you have to port it if you want to move it
somewhere else. Those are really the main things that we think about when we
think of an open cloud, and that's really resonated with our customers.
Chris:
Well, Gordon, this is some great information that you've shared with our
audience today. I think you've given them some great takeaways of
characteristics they should look for around choosing a vendor around open and
cloud and some key questions to ask. Thank you very much.
Gordon:
Thanks, Chris.
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