_Google fires back at VMware about virtualization for cloud computing: "
It’s not a secret that Google is not crazy about hardware virtualization. They made it clear in June 2007, when the engineer André Barroso said:
‘I think it will be very sad if we need to use virtualization,’ he said. ‘It is hard to claim we will never use it, but we don’t really use it today.’…
(Via virtualization.info.)_ Ummm - at the risk of stating the obvious, this whole discussion is only a result of the current fuzzy state of affairs around what constitutes “cloud computing”. Google’s business is built around building an infrastructure to run a relatively small number of homogeneous applications that can be dispersed across what is basically a supercomputing cluster in such a manner that redundancy is a function of the application.
VMware’s cloud architecture is based on enabling people to run a massive variety of applications of a wide variety of heterogeneous operating system platforms.
They are both perfectly viable technical solutions to different problems. Until software vendors start writing software that is designed to run on a Google style architecture and they take the responsibility for building the necessary smarts for distributed processing and redundancy people are going to continue to virtualize their existing software stacks using a VMware style solution.
Currently I can’t just take an existing application stack running a local server (or servers) and convert it to a Google cloud application the way I can do a P2V operation to a VMware virtual machine. While it would be nice to have the wherewithal to rewrite the application such that it is a portable and bulletproof that’s not always (and in fact relatively rarely) a viable option. Often times there are applications running on obsolete hardware and operating systems that have no source code, no author available, but just need to keep on running inside the current architecture. In these cases, the VMware approach is ideal.
On the other hand, if you are developing a new application it’s worth asking the question: do I develop this as a traditional standalone application on a commodity OS or do I develop for a cloud application platform? Can the application stand alone or does it need access to internal only data stores? Google’s offering is designed for a global service platform on which to develop internet scale applications which is often overkill for many applications.
Neither of these two is doing anything wrong - they are simply addressing different markets, each with different needs. I vote that we put a moratorium on the use of the phrase “cloud computing” and everyone can just step up to the plate and explain what they can and can’t do, how they intend to do it and who they’re target market is.
Tempest, meet teacup and have fun exploring.