Good points Alan. About Facebook, they do have their own infrastructure, but it was all built using new-fangled "cloud" technologies that weren't adequately baked just a few years back. Anyway I'm just ripping off Marc Andreessen in an article he wrote recently, I don't know too much more about the details :)
Vendor lock-in is a very important issue - there's no doubt about that. What I've noticed though, is whatever technology you use, be it open-source, closed-source, standards-compliant etc. there is always a relatively high degree of lock-in once the app starts getting medium complex. Let's take SQL for example, you can stick to the lowest-common-denominator syntax, but how long does that last before you you need full-text search, stored procedures, nested queries, custom functions, and so on. I've almost never worked on an app that wasn't married to its DB. Now what about open-source - how many people do you know can reliably fix a bug in Linux or MySQL or Apache, at a reasonable cost? It would often be cheaper/easier/safer to just move to Windows, Oracle or IIS to solve the problem. Not to mention writing the patch is only the beginning, it starts getting real hairy managing that patch, testing for regression when the core is updated, etc. It's a costly, complicated and delicate endeavor to maintain your own branch of a complex open-source software. As for GAE, it's Java! Or should I say it's OpenBD! Yes, there are many custom aspects to it, especially if you have a lot of datastore logic - but I think you'd be able to re-use 70%-80% of your code on a standard Java platform if you needed to. In my experience, that's about exactly the same as if you moved from SQL Server to MySQL, or ACF to OpenBD. Amazon, Rackspace and GoGrid aren't that portable either. Before you know it you will start having complex scripts to build/setup your AMI's, you'll use SQS, SimpleDB, and so on. Even S3 is kind-of a weird beast. None of that is insurmountable of course, but I'd be leery about how much easier it is to switch a complex AWS app to GoGrid, than GAE to Tomcat. Baz On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 11:51 PM, nitish pandey <[email protected]>wrote: > Hey i had to go through both the posts multiple times to dissect the mix up > here. Why are and how can we mix up a development platform (as openBD or > Tomcat) with I/PaaS (such as Amazon, GoGrid) with SaaS (salesforce,zoho)? > > We need all of that. What needs to be added is data portability. I don't > like salesforce, i should be able move data to zoho.com or something like > that. > If that happens (which probably is not possible without working on > transformation post the decision and some SLA fatality): > > No lock in on dev platform since openBD is open. > No platform/infrastructure lock in because that is just plain platform. > > > Regards, > Nitish > 2011/10/1 Alan Williamson (aw2.0 cloud experts) <[email protected]> > > Interesting points here Baz. >> >> I personally think the likes of GAE, SalesForce, Azure, are _NOT_ the >> future of cloud computing. This is vendor lockin at its worse. It does >> not matter what SLA is in place, there is no SLA that will make up for lost >> revenue and lost good will in the event of a failure. If you are at the >> point of executing the SLA in an agreement then your business is already on >> the dry ground in its last death flap. They are a placebo, something the >> higher ups need to cross the i's and dot the t's. >> >> I do believe Amazon, Rackspace, GoGrid, Joyent etc are the future of cloud >> computing. This is where we gain the portability, the flexibility and the >> ability for competition. Once you have your enterprise on GAE/SalesForce, >> you are forced to eat their charges, because the cost of redevelopment to >> move will most like be too much. Where as moving between Amazon and >> Rackspace is a piece of cake - something you don't have to let your >> developers get involved with, you let your IT department make that call. >> >> As for Facebook - I am not aware they run on the public cloud (amazon >> etc). I always understood they had their own data-centers. Twitter >> utilizes Amazon S3, but they run their own servers from what i understand. >> I know Facebook developers, have benefited from the cloud (Amazon and >> Joyent) when developing their 3rd party apps/games. But the core Facebook >> platform is on their own stuff. >> >> >> http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/04/17/a-look-inside-facebooks-data-center/ >> >> Now as for renaming "OpenBD" ... don't joke ... that is something we've >> kicked around a long time, as well as the notion of whether we really need >> to be "CFML" anymore and evolve the language ourselves. We no longer race >> to keep up with ACF because, we do as our community, you, want us to do. >> >> >> >> Baz wrote: >> >> Guys, PAAS is the future, there is no doubt about that. Right now >> companies are wasting tons of money duplicating IT departments that run >> grossly under-utilized hardware. This is not going to last. Companies that >> go cloud will have a significant competitive advantage and win. I was just >> reading an article about how Facebook would not have been possible a few >> years earlier because the lack of cloud technology would have made their >> growth too costly and painful. There was a time, less than a decade ago, >> when tech startups would have to cut checks for half their seed money on the >> first day of business to the likes of Oracle, SUN, BEA, EMC, et al, just to >> get up and running. No more. >> >> This is a new game, and OpenBD is early out the gate. We survived the >> toughest phase, and things will certainly and necessarily stabilize through >> time. Especially now, Google is releasing an >> SLA<http://code.google.com/appengine/sla.html> and >> are starting to take things seriously. I'd start pushing even harder right >> now - maybe even doing a big release to coincide with the SLA. It may even >> be time to rename "regular" OpenBD to >> Qwikster<http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/18/netflix-qwikster/>or something :) >> >> -- >> official tag/function reference: http://openbd.org/manual/ >> mailing list - http://groups.google.com/group/openbd?hl=en >> > > > > -- > -Nitish > "Faith is a free Option" > http://www.forcesofindia.com/profiles/np > > -- > official tag/function reference: http://openbd.org/manual/ > mailing list - http://groups.google.com/group/openbd?hl=en > -- official tag/function reference: http://openbd.org/manual/ mailing list - http://groups.google.com/group/openbd?hl=en
