Cloud computing, when done properly, has the potential to boost an organizations’ speed and flexibility, be it in business, research, or education. At a
panel held during the 9th International Cloud Expo, industry experts discussed the benefits of both public and private clouds.
“I think it is fair to say security concerns have probably slowed down the adoption of public cloud—not that public cloud is not being adopted,” asserted Sheng Liang, CTO [Chief Technology Officer] of the Cloud Platforms Group for Citrix Systems, during the panel. “Amazon’s growing faster than ever,” he argued. “But I think in a very positive way that it actually significantly increased the adoption of private cloud and that’s what we see amongst our customers.”
Another speaker, Rick Nucci, Co-Founder and CTO of Dell Boomi, asserted that cloud computing keeps providers honest because the area is so results-driven and anyone can check vendors’ claims in real time. “I think that [cloud computing] holds great promise,” he said, continuing, “and I think that cloud gives us the opportunity and the fundamentals to solve some really age-old problems that really haven’t been solved in the past.” However, he argued, practices such as cloud washing are detrimental. Nucci said that he focuses on the “the application integration world” which he described as perhaps “one of the single greatest areas of failed projects” alongside “big [enterprise resource planning] ERP implementations.”
Building clouds with open source software, however, frees organizations from locking themselves into a single vendor and enables them to use these resources effectively, argues Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona, of Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Mostoles, Spain, in the Foreword to one of IGI Global’s newest releases,
Open Source Cloud Computing Systems: Practices and Paradigms. “After all the benefits of open systems and vendor neutrality, it does not make sense to come to a world where the future strategy of an institution is in the hands of a single vendor,” he writes. He later adds that “Free software products in any realm (and cloud computing is no exception in this respect) need to be closely adapted to user needs, or fail to attract enough attention to survive. […] No vendor road-map can suit as much the future needs of a company than the incentives that they can put directly or indirectly into a free software development community.”
Open Source Cloud Computing Systems, edited by Luis M. Vaquero, Juan Cáceres, and Juan J. Hierro from the Telefónica R&D Labs in Spain, presents the most relevant open source cloud technologies available today using a practical perspective. For those deciding to start the endeavor of creating their own cloud, this book serves as a starting point for research on practical purposes and systems design.