Death by Cloud - How Amazon is Killing Open Source Software

The mood at last week's Open Source Think Tank was surprisingly somber. Two years ago, the open source community was celebrating huge acquisitions such as Sun's purchase of MySQL (and even the VMware acquisition of WaveMaker). This year, the consensus was that the economic model which led to success for companies like MySQL and RedHat is being fundamentally disrupted by cloud computing.

For example, Amazon recently launched a successful Relational Database Service (RDS). This hugely profitable service is based on MySQL, but Amazon doesn't pay MySQL a penny for it. This spells death for the traditional open source business model.

To understand why, let's look at how the open source model used to work. The open source business model has traditionally been based on two revenue streams: 1) revenue from OEMs who embed an open source product into their commercial offering and 2) revenue from providing support services for production systems that embed an open source product.

Whenever a company embedded MySQL into their commercial offering, they had to either license their own product under an open source license like GPL or buy a commercial license from MySQL. Just as importantly, a company using MySQL in a production environment would purchase support from MySQL as an insurance policy.

Now let's look at Amazon RDS. First of all, Amazon gets around the GPL license because they are not delivering binaries to their customers. This means that Amazon can deliver a commercial service without being forced to open source their own software. Next, Amazon has sufficient internal expertise on MySQL that they can provide their own support.

The open source community has tried to fight back. For example, the new Affero GPL license (AGPL) was supposed to fix the loophole which allows Amazon to deliver MySQL as a commercial service. However, since almost nobody is using the AGPL license, every OSS project faces the prospect of seeing someone else deliver commercial services based on their product for which they don't get paid.

New open source companies are trying to get ahead of this trend by offering their own cloud-based service - such as Cloudera (Hadoop). This is a good idea, but it is not clear how these stand alone services will be able to compete with Amazon's Elastic Mapreduce service, also based on Hadoop.

Of course, none of this is going to stop the success of the open source movement in general. There are many projects which have no commercial aspirations. However, until open source companies can articulate a business model that can thrive in the cloud, this does cap the potential valuations of open source companies and hence their access to venture capital.

Cote's rule: If it ain’t broke, don’t cloud it

I took the title of this post from a recent blog entry by Michael Cote. Cloud enthusiasts (often people with limited operations experience) talk in grandiose terms of moving the entire data center to a public cloud. Cloud naysayers (often people with extensive operations experience) talk in detail about all the things you can't get in the cloud, like latency, lack of multi-cast, weaker security etc.

In general, cloud computing fits modern web architectures very well, by which I mean any app built to support a web browser client. These applications are "cloud-ready" and require little effort to move to a public or private cloud.

In general, any application not build to support a web browser client is going to be problematic to move into the cloud. These applications often rely on technologies that are not readily available in the cloud, such as multi-cast.

The decision to cloud or not to cloud is not a binary decision made at the data center level. Instead, it is a more nuanced decision made at the app level.

Similarly, the decision to go public cloud or private cloud is a decision made at the app level.

At the margin, be governed by Cote's Rule of Cloud Migration: If it ain’t broke, don’t cloud it!

PaaS Takes Center Stage

Over the last week, Platform as a Service has moved out of the shadows to become big news in the cloud world. Here is a quick roundup of recent events:

• RedHat acquires Makara: this is a great move by RedHat, who has been hitherto a peripheral player in the great cloud game. Makara gives RedHat a platform that makes it much easier for developers to deploy cloud applications while also providing rich debugging capabilities. The Makara founding team came from Wily and brings deep understanding of application lifecycle management for cloud applications.
  
• Cloudbees gets funding for a Java PaaS: this breathes life into the Java PaaS market, bringing the same kinds of turnkey cloud management to the Java community that Engine Yard and Heroku bring to the Ruby on Rails Market. Cloudbees was founded by the former CTO of JBoss and has tied their Java PaaS to the Hudson
  

The first phase of cloud computing was focused on the hardware side of things and Infrastructure as a Service. In order for cloud computing to gain widespread adoption, a software management layer is required to simplify the process for deploying and managing applications in the cloud.

Citrix & WaveMaker - A Little Leverage Goes a Long Way

Citrix and WaveMaker's partnership to deliver a complete cloud developmentplatform is gaining attention.

This week, John Abbott of the 451 Group wrote a piece on how the Citrix Cloud Center strategy is coming together, thanks to a little help from WaveMaker (registration required).

The Citrix/WaveMaker development and test solution gives Cloud Hosting Providers a way to build a cloud ecosystem that will help them attract and retain customers. As John says:

"Telcos and service providers want the elbow room to differentiate their services from competitors by adding their own intellectual property."

With WaveMaker's cloud development platform, Cloud Hosting Providers make it easy for developers to build applications that deploy seamlessly to their cloud and can take advantage of their unique services for security, scalability and manageability.

Finally, the 451 Group points out that WaveMaker gives Citrix an easy-to-use PaaS solution that can leverage the Citrix cloud stack, much as SpringSource can leverage the VMWare stack. All in all, WaveMaker is shaping up as a game changer for cloud solution providers!

Where To Hide a Dead Horse and Other Uses For the Cloud

With full credit to the Geek and Poke blog, the funniest nerd cartoon I have seen all year!

Cloud Computing - It's The Destination, Not The Journey

I have had some interesting conversations recently with partners about how cloud computing will affect the developer tools market.

I don't believe developers jump on a band wagon just because they like the wagon. They jump on the wagon because they like where the wagon is going!

Roughly every 10 years, a technology disruption changes developer aspirations and drives them to adopt new tools that get them to new places.

With client/server, developers aspired to build "modern" apps and break free of the bureaucracy of central IT. Cloud computing offers a similar, updated, value - deploy web applications without the hassle of central IT.

Developer aspirations are changing - this is the underlying market driver for WaveMaker.

At the same time, IT vendors are seeing their value disrupted. As the data center morphs into a set of APIs, decisions which used to be made by sys admins and DBAs are made by the developer (Cloud Foundry is a good example of this).

The developer platform is becoming the control panel for the data center - this is the WaveMaker's value to partners. This is also the basis for our cloud quick start program with IBM, Amazon and RightScale.

One company that has realized the competitive opportunity in cloud computing is Microsoft. By integrating Visual Studio with Azure, they have created a powerful engine from which to attack the entire data center infrastructure.

If business developers really do "take to the clouds", the challenge I see for IT infrastructure providers is how to harness changing developer aspirations to ensure that the cloud deployment stack includes their solutions.

What Separates A Cloud From (water) Vapor?

I spoke this morning with the cloud evangelist for a hardware manufacturer. Not surprisingly, they come at cloud from the iron up, so for them cloud is mostly about virtualization with a little more buzz.

While I can understand this viewpoint, if today's cloud is just yesterday's server consolidation in new clothes, then Larry Ellison's latest "a cloud is just water vapor" rant is probably appropriate.

So what exactly is the dividing line between virtualization and true cloud goodness? I think the key lies in bringing together a fuller solution with a cloud platform than with a virtualization platform.

Cloud computing gets interesting when the platform includes not just deployment (infrastructure as a service or IaaS) but also development (platform as a service or PaaS). Linking these two capabilities opens up fundamentally new markets as well as compelling economics.

Virtualization is about abstracting application deployment so that one box can run many apps, with each app pretending that it is lord and master of it's virtual computer. The value of virtualization is to reduce the amount of hardware needed to run a set of apps and correspondingly reducing the amount of systems administration time needed to manage the overall data center.

Cloud computing is about abstracting application development and deployment so that anyone can develop and manage applications without needing specialized expertise. The value of cloud computing is to reduce all IT costs while increasing organizational flexibility. More people can build the apps they need and fewer expert developers, DBAs and systems administrators are needed.

At its core, virtualization improves IT efficiency - doing traditional computing with fewer resources. On the other hand, cloud computing improves IT effectiveness - empowering more people to build applications with more flexibility and fewer experts. For example, this is the core value prop behind IBM's Cloud Quickstart Program, which includes IBM, Amazon EC2, WaveMaker and RightScale.

Our view at WaveMaker is that the big private cloud payoff comes only when you make both development and deployment of web apps radically easier (cloud-ready computing). If you will, virtualization and private cloud management (IaaS) both reduce the administration costs - the cost transformation comes when you slash not just administration but also development and maintenance costs (IaaS + PaaS).

Making Cloud Computing Ridiculously Easy

With all the hullabaloo about cloud computing, it is easy to get caught up in the trend of the day and miss the big picture. The big picture is that cloud computing disrupts the data center world by slashing the capital and skills required to deploy a web application.

If that is the big prize, then most of what passes for news in cloud computing is more along the lines of "me speak cloud too."

Today, cloud development and deployment is still the exclusive domain of highly paid web experts and just as highly paid hosting providers and systems administrators. As much as cloud providers like Amazon and Rackspace have done to simplify web hosting and eliminate people from the equation, it still takes far too much expertise and effort to get applications built and deployed in the cloud.

The goal of cloud computing is to make web development and deployment something that any bum can do and charge in on their credit card with nary a care in the world.

With all due humility, I think RightScale and WaveMaker have taken a big step towards that goal this week, introducing an easy-to-use cloud development platform with one-click deployment to Amazon EC2 via RightScale.

It is now monkeys-on-keyboards easy to create a web application and deploy it in a secure, scalable cloud environment using WaveMaker/RightScale and Amazon.

So who cares about this stuff anyway? How 'bout IBM and Amazon!

On Thursday, October 1, IBM and Amazon are hosting a half-day webinar entitled Cloud computing for developers: Hosted by IBM and Amazon Web Services . At that webinar, WaveMaker and RightScale will provide an online demonstration of building a web application with WaveMaker and deploying it to a WebSphere AMI using RightScale. One small click for man, one giant cloud for mankind!

Cloud Ready Computing

Cloud computing offers significant economies in deploying and managing applications. While enterprises are not yet ready to move mission-critical applications to cloud computing, CIOs and CTOs are increasingly wanting to create applications that are "cloud-ready."

A cloud-ready application is based on an architecture which provides the flexibility to deploy the application to either a traditional data center or into a private or public cloud infrastructure. This flexibility ensures that enterprises can take advantage of cloud computing benefits whenever they choose.

Being cloud-ready requires much more than simple virtualization. As the $420M acquisition of SpringSource by VMWare demonstrates, making applications cloud ready requires adopting new development platforms that are purpose-built for supporting on-site and on-demand computing.

Some cloud-ready development platforms (also called Platform as a Service or PaaS) are highly proprietary. These frameworks require a complete rewrite of the application for cloud computing and lock the developer into a single hosting provider such as SalesForce or Google's AppEngine.

Other cloud-ready development frameworks are open, enabling developers to leverage existing application logic and data. Open Platform as a Service, or OPaas, allows CIOs and CTOs to have the best of both worlds, creating applications which can run in the data center or in the public cloud with no changes to the underlying application. Examples include WaveMaker and Corent.

Cloud Ready Case Study - IBM's Cloud Quickstart Architecture

IBM has created a Cloud Quickstart Architecture that embodies what they see as best practices for developing cloud-ready applications. This architecture includes WaveMaker, WebSphere, DB2, Amazon and RightScale. To see a podcast on this architecture, click here (registration required).

WaveMaker is an Open Platform as a Service for developing cloud-ready web applications. WaveMaker includes client and server frameworks that greatly reduce the time to cloud-enable an existing application or create a new, cloud-ready application.

The WaveMaker self-service client framework provides configurable, drag and drop client components that simplify the delivery of self-service web applications. The WaveMaker multi-tenant server framework provides secure, multi-tenant server modules that automate the creation of scalable cloud applications.

The WaveMaker frameworks are backed by a 10,000-strong developer community and complement existing application servers (e.g., Tomcat, WebSphere) and development tools (e.g., Eclipse, Netbeans). WaveMaker customers like KANA, National City Bank and Macy's have cut the cost and time to build cloud-ready applications by over 75% using WaveMaker.

In the IBM Cloud Quickstart Architecture, ISVs can leverage existing Java code written in WebSphere as well as data stored in DB2. WaveMaker provides the cloud-ready frameworks for the client and server. RightScale provides elastic scaling as well as fault tolerance and fault recovery. Together, these companies provide an example of end-to-end cloud computing that leverages existing application resources.

WaveMaker 5 Cuts Java Web Development Time 90%

Today, we launched version 5 of our visual development platform for Java and web developers.

Java developers need the equivalent of MS Access for building Java Web Applications. Currently, a Java developer wanting to build a web application faces a huge learning curve, to say nothing of the coding burden.

WaveMaker 5 addresses the need for easy to use tools for building Java Web Applications. Wavemaker 5 introduces Enterprise-ready Data Widgets. WaveMaker generates these custom components automatically when a developer connects to a database.

With Enterprise-ready Data Widgets, WaveMaker reads the database schema and creates a widget for each table that the developer can drag and drop into an application. Enterprise-ready Data Widgets can display table data as an Ajax grid or as a form with automatic data validation and built in create, update and delete capabilities.

WaveMaker makes it possible for a developer to create a database-driven web application with literally three clicks:

• Click 1: connect to the database. WaveMaker studio automatically imports the schema and creates an Enterprise-ready Data Widget for each database table.
• Click 2: drag Enterprise-ready Data Widget from the studio palette to the application canvas
• Click 3: press Run to perform a test run of the application in a local Tomcat server. The final application can deploy to any Java server.

Try it today! You can download WaveMaker and try it yourself here.

Opening Up Platform as a Service - What is Open PaaS?

Platform as a Service (PaaS) offers a way to build and deploy applications entirely in the cloud. This market was pioneered by SalesForce and their Force.com PaaS offering.

PaaS offers the potential to democratize web development by enabling anyone who can use a browser to assemble and extend web-based applications. Yet early PaaS players, including Force.com, Bungee Labs, Google AppEngine and Microsoft's Azure, have introduced PaaS solutions that are remarkably proprietary.

A proprietary PaaS solution introduces high switching costs to move data or logic from one PaaS provider to another. For example, moving an application from the recently deceased Coghead to AppEngine would require a wholesale rewrite of an application written on one proprietary framework to another.

In short, customers adopting PaaS gain access to powerful new technical capabilities but at the cost of stepping back to the proprietary business models of 20 years ago. Surely the same market forces that have driven greater transparency in the enterprise software world will also prevail in the brave new world of cloud computing!

In talking with customers and analysts, WaveMaker has introduced the term Open PaaS to describe what the next generation of cloud development tools should look like. In our definition, Open PaaS solutions have four characteristics:

1. Portable - customers must be able to run applications built using PaaS tools on multiple cloud offerings. PaaS offerings based on proprietary languages (e.g., SalesForce, Bungee, Coghead) lock customers into a single cloud provider.
2. Based on open standards - customers must be able to leverage existing skills such as Java and Javascript to build applications using a PaaS tool. Offerings that are based on proprietary software stacks (e.g., Google AppEngine, Microsoft Azure) lock customers into a single cloud infrastructure.
3. Available as open source - customers must be able to run applications created with PaaS in their own data center in an open source environment . SugarCRM pioneered the attractive concept of letting the customer "take their ball and go home." For PaaS vendors, it is even more important that customers be able to move a cloud app from the cloud to behind their firewall.
4. Mobile-aware - increasingly, web enablement reaches beyond the desktop browser to smartphones from companies like Apple, RIM and Palm. Customers need PaaS tools that can deliver device-appropriate content and functionality. Effectively, this is an update of the old Java "write once run anywhere" mantra.

As the cloud evolves, it is inevitable that customers will demand more flexibility. With that in mind, WaveMaker recently became a supporter of the Open Cloud Manifesto, a very timely effort spearheaded by Reuven Cohen, CTO of Enomaly.

You can read the Open Cloud Manifesto here, but here is my take on the 6 principles of the Open Cloud Manifesto (the bold titles and italic comments are mine):

1. Commit to cloud interoperability: Cloud providers should collaborate to solve standard problems (e.g., security, interoperability) in a standard way. At a minimum, this requires publishing the APIs needed to build interoperable security and other services across cloud providers.
2. Eschew vendor lockin: Cloud providers must not use their market position to lock customers into their particular platforms. This goes to the heart of the problem. If you are at the head of the pack, why slow down and let others catch you? The answer can only be because doing so gives you access to a much bigger market, of which you are still at the head of the pack but with a smaller lead!
3. Adopt existing standards aggressively: Cloud providers must use and adopt existing standards wherever appropriate. This will be much easier for new cloud vendors, who are starting from scratch, than existing cloud vendors, who built out their infrastructure before many of these standards existed.
4. Minimize proliferation of new standards: When new standards are needed, Cloud vendors must be judicious to avoid creating too many standards. We must ensure that standards promote innovation and do not inhibit it. This shows great wisdom in the ways of the world. What are most standards bodies anyway but the effect to gain or preserve market share by non-market driven means?
5. Focus new standards on actual customer needs: Any community effort around the open cloud should be driven by customer needs. This is another swipe at the self-serving approaches of many standards bodies. From a cynical perspective, we will know cloud computing is successful when its standards bodies become just as opaque and non-customer focused as other entrenched standards like Java ;-)
6. Cooperate between standards groups: Cloud computing standards organizations, advocacy groups, and communities should work together and stay coordinated, making sure that efforts do not conflict or overlap. This is well-intentioned, but also seems to be saying "thou shalt have no cloud advocacy groups before me" (shouldn't that be commandment I?)

Just like that large collection of tubes called the Internet, this notion of Open Cloud and Open Platforms is here to stay!

Thriving Thru Recession With Head In the Clouds

Despite the gloomy headlines, WaveMaker is having a great year - our revenues continue to grow over 50% a quarter and we launched a partnership with IBM at last week's Lotusphere. InfoWorld continues to sing WaveMaker's praises as well.

The worldwide recession is sort of like a giant avalanche, sweeping startups and industry titans alike before its path. Having a leadership position in a rapidly growing market like cloud computing is a way to not only survive the recession but come out stronger on the other end.

Benjamin Thompkins has a good post on the bmighty blog about cloud computing as the ultimate recession-proof technology. Here are my top 3 recommendations for surviving today's economic avalanche:

1. Stay ahead of the destruction - with the economy collapsing, the only safe place is in a market that is growing enough to dampen the blow.
2. Don't waver in your path - survival mode is all about executing - finding ways to bring in as much revenue as possible on the path you are on. Changing course while the avalanche is bearing down on you is corporate suicide.
3. Have friend who can help dig you out - when the going gets tough, you soon find out what kind of investor support you have. All VCs are easy to work with when times are good - it is the behavior of VCs in the bad times that separates the bankers from the builders

The Cloud Is Angry and Other Lessons From Gartner

I attended the Gartner Application Development Conference this week and drank from the proverbial firehouse as Gartner analysts presented their vision for cloud computing

Anthony Bradley, the Web 2.0 analyst for Gartner, beat the drum for front end tools (mashup builders) to complement back end SOA systems. His take was "mashups take the benefits of SOA and make them visible to users - mashups are the face of SOA."

Mark Driver, the open source software analyst for Gartner, said that cloud computing is early in its maturity cycle. He said, "if the cloud were a child, it would be an angry two year old. The challenge for the industry now is how to make it through the terrible twos."

Mark also pointed out some big benefits for IT with cloud computing. "The cloud enables rapid application maintenance - iterating application functionality on a daily basis." The apps can change as quickly as the business situation changes, making IT much more of a real partner in business change rather than an impediment to business change.

Mark introduced the idea of a cloud development platform or platform as a service (PaaS), noting that in PaaS, the developer should never encounter the concept of a server. Instead, the platform abstracts all deployment complexity from the developer, making it ideal for business unit developers who don't have deployment resources readily at hand.

According to Gartner, the important criteria for a cloud development platform include:

• Interoperability: how well does the platform integrate with other web assets like open id and google maps?
• Collaboration: how well does the platform support source code control and social programming (Facebook meets SVN)
• RIA & mobile clients: cross browser and cross smart-phone support. According to Mark, reach wins over richness - supporting more browsers is more important than supporting more widgets.
• Legacy: ability to integrate with enterprise data, security and web services
• Performance: ability to scale significantly with no additional effort/programming
• Longevity: the market momentum of the platform vendor - will they be around in 3 years? The winner will be less about the raw technology and more about the quality of partners and customers the vendor has attracted.

This is a particularly interesting list for us at WaveMaker, as we just released the WaveMaker cloud development platform that does quite well against Gartner's list. In particular, WaveMaker scores highly interoperability, both of component and of applications. WaveMaker is the first cloud development platform to offer portability between the cloud and the data center.

Gartner believes that the market for cloud development tools is very similar to the 4GL market of the early 90s. They see many innovative vendors today offering unique/proprietary solutions, thinning out over the next three years to a handful of winners. Naturally we are doing everything we can to make sure that WaveMaker is one of those winners!

What is NOT Cloud Computing?

I spoke at the Cloud Summit last week put on by M.R. Rangaswami and enjoyed as always the giddy enthusiasm with which Silicon Valley embraces each new technology wave. Cloud computing is custom made for Silicon Valley - it is poorly defined, seemingly vast and has the potential to change human life as we know it (at least for those of us who live in Silicon Valley).

Of course, we have our fair share of naysayers (like Larry and Richard), as well as theories about why those naysayers are down on cloud computing.

Since so many people are jumping on the cloud bandwagon, I thought it would be useful to look not at what cloud computing is but at what cloud computing isn't.

Cloud computing is the hardware equivalent of automatic teller machines. The whole idea is that you don't have to deal with people to get your application deployed, scaled, monitored and managed. Therefore anything that gets between your application and the API to the data center in the sky is taking you away from the cloud.

The other important - and to date largely unrealized - promise of the cloud is choice, aka freedom from lock-in. Today, customers are often locked into a particular cloud provider just as surely as they are locked into their in-house data center. Moving forward, you should have the ability to change clouds providers as easily as you change cell phone providers.