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The truth about Cloud computing

Posted on 28 Apr 2009 at 12:18

Steve Cassidy attends this year's annual VMware convention in Cannes, and is beset from all sides by the magical c-word.

Muddy Shoes syndrome is a vernacular expression that describes a phenomenon sometimes observed where a new appointee to a job brings with them a sour mood and lost battles from their previous employment (the metaphorical "mud").

Inexplicably hostile behaviour is often the result, and the personal, hidden motivation that underpins it boils down to a silent declaration of "There, that showed 'em!". The trouble is that the "them" that has been "showed" is absent from the picture, it's their peer group from the previous job and not their hurt and bemused peers in their new office.

The title for VMware's annual post-convention party, held at the Cannes Convention Centre in late February, was "Cloud '09". The whole theme of this event was clouds, which meant we were treated to ice sculptures of a vaguely cloudy nature, and to the bizarre but fetching concept of vodka girls dressed up as little angels with wings, haloes and holsters full of rocket fuel at their waist (sorry, no pictures).

VMware was indulging itself in a visual pun of a somewhat lumpen and anglocentric kind - if you toed the company line by faithfully attending all the presentations and queuing up for the suggested series of interviews with various VMware luminaries, then you'd have come away from this affair well indoctrinated that this year's big deal is going to be delivering a "Cloud computing experience" through virtualisation technology.

VMware is right there and ready to slap its own toolkit down right alongside the other big Cloud computing vendors, said new CEO Paul Maritz. Nobody should be in any doubt that the company's dominant position in the virtualisation marketplace was inevitably going to translate into good news for Cloud-hungry datacenter operators, and that it would help us all to escape from the Bad Guys who weren't explicitly named and shamed, but were loosely identified as the "?ber-cloud operators".

I find that most things cloudy tend to be similarly loosely identified - which is inherent in the nature of clouds of course, but it also has a lot to do with the thick seam of cynicism that runs through my psyche.

Apparently, the sin of uber-cloudism arises from its proprietary nature. What the people want to be able to do, so it would seem, is freely steer their users to a presentation layer that itself can also be freely steered, on-the-fly and in mid-computation, from one prospective provider of CPU cycles to another. And not only is VMware well-placed to satisfy this want, but it's also obviously and unquestionably the only company that can do it in an open-handed fashion...

At least, that's the official version. There was a demonstration from a hosting company called Terramark on how it can provision a new LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server in a matter of just a few moments by ticking boxes on its server suite control system (which is itself a web page). There were several very proud demonstrations by Germans representing truly enormous companies with millions of clients, hundreds of thousands of users and tens of thousands of servers, but I'll confess their PowerPoint slides were of so high a reading age and so low a mental survivability factor that I was barely awake by the time they proved that they'd "really made it happen".

I was also starting to think I'd been brought there under false pretences. Being able to truthfully report that if you have 10,000 Linux servers all running a suite of operating system and database/website presentation - which you own so utterly that you can change everything about it from the stylesheet to what CPU architecture it runs on - you can then virtualise the whole shebang and throw away 80% of the hardware, is all well and good. However, while it may indeed be perfectly true, it's almost entirely useless to most of us who are not in a remotely comparable position.