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Two Cloud Myths Busted: Lock-in And Locked Up

#1 User is offline   PCWorld 

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Posted 30 April 2012 - 02:31 PM

Post your comments for Two Cloud Myths Busted: Lock-In and Locked Up here
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#2 User is offline   kronoscornelius 

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  Posted 30 April 2012 - 09:05 PM

Usually the company that pioneers the technology has the proprietary interfaces. But the other companies that come close behind are willing to standardize the interface to avoid being left behind by the pioneer.
Nvidia has CUDA, but the rest of the industry (even Nvidia) agree on OpenCL
The same will happen with Cloud API. Amazon and Google will likely continue to develop a propietary API while the competition will create and follow standards. They will commoditize the product, but that is better than being put out of business.
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#3 User is offline   Elaad 

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  Posted 01 May 2012 - 04:41 AM

I didn't get your point from myth 1. You say it's a myth that "Cloud computing is bringing back vendor lock-in" and then you explain why it's not a myth but reality that lock-in is here to stay.

I would like to give an example that breaks vendor lock-in. GigaSpaces (for which I work) produces Cloudify - an open source tool for taking any application (any stack), deploying it on any cloud, managing and monitoring it without changing the application code, and still retaining full control and visibility of the entire process. cloudifysource.org shows that it's not magic but a reality.
You are literally free (as in speech) to choose the processes that make up your app and free (as in speech) to deploy them on the cloud of your choice. Oh, and it's for free (as in beer).
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#4 User is offline   jchalifour 

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  Posted 09 May 2012 - 11:58 AM

Perhaps it's fair to argue that vendor lock-in is still very present, even without cloud computing but that doesn't absolve cloud computing from a charge that clients may be locked in.

Dependency is not the same as lock-in. You can be dependent on a technology but if it's standards compliant, free and open source, or otherwise provides mechanisms for appropriately extracting and porting your data then you won't be locked into it.

Where cloud computing can create a worse situation, for example with APIs, is with changes and other potential disruptions in the provider's business. See even if your entirely locked-in to a propriety vendor's APIs, as an on-premise solution at least you have the software and control it. If the vendor goes out of business your software doesn't stop working. If the vendor releases a new version or changes its APIs that doesn't impact the version you have installed.

On the other hand, if a cloud-based vendor goes out of business or decides to change its APIs, there is a very real risk that your usage of it may not work. You do not have much control over that. The lock-in that you experience for a cloud-based system is qualitatively different than an on-premise one and the ramifications of this ought to be taken into consideration.
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