Page 252 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

MANA GEMENT STRATEGIES F O R THE CL OUD R EV OL UTION

The subjects came up in a panel on cloud interoperabil-
ity, where the discussion shifted from APIs to cloud brokers to
emerging standards. The panelists were Jason Hoffman,
founder and CTO of Joyent; Chris Brown, VP of engineering
with Opscode; consultant John Willis of Zabovo; and Bitcur-
rent analyst Alistair Croll. The gist was that we’re still in the

early days when it comes to cloud interoperability and that
while Amazon’s API may be the center of the cloud universe
right now, it’s hardly enough.
The discussion turned to portability, the ability to move
data and applications from one cloud environment to another.
There are many reasons IT organizations might do that: dis-
satisfaction with a cloud service provider, new and better alter-

natives, and a change in strategy, to name a few. The issue hit
home earlier this year when cloud startup Coghead shut down
and SAP took over only its assets and engineering team, forc-
ing customers to find a new home for the applications that
had been hosted there.
The bigger the data store, the harder the job of moving
from one cloud to another. Some companies are putting hun-
dreds of terabytes of data—even a petabyte—into the cloud,
according to panel members, and some of these monster data-

bases are reportedly in Amazon’s Simple Storage Service. Ama-
zon’s S3 price list gives a discount for data stores over 500 TB,
so that’s entirely feasible.
“Customers with hundreds of terabytes in the cloud: You
are no longer portable, and you’re not going to be portable,
so get over it,” Joyent CTO Hoffman said.

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