Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 OSCON Presented by Mark R. Hinkle VP of Community Three Considerations to Prevent Cloud Lock-in

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 OSCON FLOSS Freedoms Prevent Software Lock-In 1. The freedom to run the program for any purpose. 2. The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish. 3. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor. 4. The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 OSCON Organizations Dedicated to Ensuring Software Freedom and Standards

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 OSCON FLOSS Freedoms Don’t Exactly Translate to Clouds In the cloud you need the following freedoms to prevent lock-in 1.Freedom to move from Platform to Platform 2.Access to your Data 3.Tools that that work for all clouds or are extensible to support new platforms

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 OSCON Don’t Sacrifice Freedom for Convenience XKCD -

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 OSCON Organizations Dedicated to Cloud Freedoms

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 OSCON Platform Lock-In No globally recognized standard for virtual machines. Machine images can’t migrate seamlessly from VMware to Xen or from Amazon to Rackspace or other cloud providers Open Virtualization Format – Sounds good but not yet standard, or standardized upon Supported by VMware, Citrix Xen, Oracle Virtual Box, Filesystem emulation varies by hypervisor and OVF doesn’t seem to require consistent filesystem emulation specs Ancillary services may or may not exist on other platforms (e.g. Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) or Google AppEngine (BigTable)

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 OSCON Data Lock-In Basic Rights Cloud Users Should Consider/Demand No vendor should claim ownership of the data Vendors always shall provide at a minimum an API (most often storage is via traditional block and file interfaces such as iSCSI or NFS) Customers own their data, and the security/privacy of data Ideally, there would be a standard for a data store format or at least an accepted Infrastructure-as-a-Surface (IaaS) API that all vendors support. Paraphrased from The ‘Cloud Computing” Bill of Rights’ 2010 Edition By James Urquhart html html

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 OSCON Tools Lock-In User Tools must provision, configure and monitor all types of cloud infrastructure or at least be extensible to adapt to your cloud infrastructure: If management interfaces and APIs are different they can be the least obvious gotcha (e.g. Messages from Amazon SQS, don’t exist in RackSpace Cloud) Can your build tools address different target architectures? Configuration management tools function seamlessly across clouds Are migrated cloud instances still accessible to monitoring tools?

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 OSCON State of the Union Nascent Industry, things move fast Lots of open APIs, but still no true cloud portability Lots of proposed standards, no standardization Make sure you understand what you are getting into when you choose a cloud provider

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 OSCON Once You’re Locked In, Getting Out Can get Messy

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 OSCON Supplemental Reading DMTF Cloud Incubator | Cloud Incubator | VMware OVF | OVF | DMTF OVF Standard | OVF Standard | Ars Technica | EMC's Atmos shutdown shows why cloud lock-in is still scaryArs Technica | EMC's Atmos shutdown shows why cloud lock-in is still scary Zenoss Blog | Three Cloud Lock-in ConsiderationsZenoss Blog | Three Cloud Lock-in Considerations Storage Networking Industry Association | SNIA: Cloud Storage for Computing WhitepaperStorage Networking Industry Association | SNIA: Cloud Storage for Computing Whitepaper Infoworld | Why Open Source Vendors Won’t Prevent Cloud Lock-inInfoworld | Why Open Source Vendors Won’t Prevent Cloud Lock-in National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) | Cloud ComputingNational Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) | Cloud Computing Open Grid Forum Oasis Identity in the Clouds Technical Committee