> i have seen, some minutes ago, a message about cloud with BSD! > I have seen announcements on cloud computing every where. What is the > difference between a BSD cloud and a linux cloud ? A windows cloud and a > linux cloud ? > Isn't all that the new buzz word in the market ?
It's bullshit marketing blah-blah if the "cloud" cannot be automated, i.e. it must be possible to provision new RAM and CPU resources with an API. In fact, it's all about APIs ... the OS defines the APIs available to access those RAM and CPU resources (most significant difference would be Windows vs Unix). It's all about abstraction of the infrastructure, and automation. As a user, I don't care if my API calls manage virtual machines or force an intern to timely do everything manually on bare metal for me, using jolts of electricity. That's also what makes it potentially interesting -- just not from a security point of view. In case of virtualization, the guest OS (possibly OpenBSD) can never be any more secure than the host OS (usually Linux), and the whole setup is more risky overall due to added complexity and additional attack vectors. On the plus side, the things one can build with an infrastructure that can be 100% automated are quite cool, at the very least in terms of auto-repair (covering most types of failures) and the hyped auto-scaling. > So what would a BSD cloud be different in the context of cloud (not openbsd > features) ? Different long- and short-term maintenance, I would say (in my experience with OpenBSD, better + cheaper than Linux). And, with OpenBSD as the guest, I would also expect significant benefit wrt security: due to its nature in general, and lack of unnecessary complexity in particular. From a dogmatic point of view, however, OpenBSD "in the cloud" is not desired (due to the security issues wrt virtualization). IOW, I'd also be very much interested in a proper compute cloud offering OpenBSD instances, ideally with an EC2-compatible API ... it would be an improvement. > So in essence what is it really cloud we have not doing since networks have > been in the game ? > Don't take this as an offense, i just cannot understand all this frenesy > about clouds ... Automation. 42. Many people seem to mix up cloud computing with plain virtual servers, grid computing, clustering, whatever ... but those are just possible components, and what it boils down to is abstraction and automation -- at least from an engineering point of view. Moritz
