1 00:00:00,160 --> 00:00:06,280 Hello everybody, this is Michael Coté with RedMonk. I'll be giving this talk tomorrow, what is it, April 9th? 2 00:00:06,460 --> 00:00:11,740 I probably have my date wrong because my watch is always chronically wrong, at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. 3 00:00:11,900 --> 00:00:15,440 And as I was rehearsing this talk, I thought, why don't I record it so I can publish it somewhere. 4 00:00:15,960 --> 00:00:23,600 The idea of this talk is to give a brief overview of cloud computing and talk about how, obviously being at the summit here, how it relates to Linux. 5 00:00:24,420 --> 00:00:28,780 And to that end, here's some expectations or an agenda, if you will, of what we'll be talking about. 6 00:00:28,780 --> 00:00:33,940 And for the people listening to the recording, this is supposed to be 40 minutes, so if you find me rushing along or something, 7 00:00:34,100 --> 00:00:41,480 I'm trying to shorten what's probably an hour or more long talk into just 40 minutes, where there's a discussion afterwards that people will be talking with. 8 00:00:42,180 --> 00:00:43,880 So, getting back to the track here. 9 00:00:44,660 --> 00:00:55,780 The expectations here is that, you know, when we come to cloud computing, to me, cloud computing is obviously one of the larger hype tech things or tech hype things that's out there nowadays. 10 00:00:56,300 --> 00:00:58,760 Especially in the sort of gas bag world that I'm in. 11 00:00:58,780 --> 00:01:02,880 Or, you know, however you want to describe whatever crazy thing it is that I do. 12 00:01:03,800 --> 00:01:07,480 Basically, you know, it's what people are always interested in talking about. 13 00:01:07,540 --> 00:01:11,000 And in that sense, it's become what SOA was like very early on. 14 00:01:11,060 --> 00:01:17,100 It's sort of a silly putty, if you will, that you can jam into any sort of problem or any hole that you might have to sell to someone. 15 00:01:17,100 --> 00:01:27,800 And I tend to take a pretty pragmatic take on lots of these technology things and go with the most simple definition possible just to sort of clear the deck and get on to the more interesting things, 16 00:01:27,920 --> 00:01:31,300 which usually tend to be the consequences and how it relates to existing stuff. 17 00:01:31,720 --> 00:01:34,920 And to that end, I'm going to go with a pretty simple definition of cloud computing. 18 00:01:34,920 --> 00:01:38,920 And since, you know, the focus here is how Linux fits into the cloud computing world, 19 00:01:39,020 --> 00:01:47,100 I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time debating with myself, so to speak, what exactly cloud computing is or its importance or things like that. 20 00:01:47,100 --> 00:01:52,860 We're just going to set it aside as an interesting sort of touch point and see how the, you know, Linux fits into that. 21 00:01:52,860 --> 00:02:05,140 And to that end, you know, one of the easiest ways to go comparing and seeing how a new technology or an idea sort of works or doesn't work or fits in with an existing technology is to do what they call a SWOT analysis, 22 00:02:05,440 --> 00:02:09,780 which is basically just the strengths, the weaknesses, the opportunities, and the threats. 23 00:02:09,940 --> 00:02:13,240 And that'll be the, hopefully, the bulk of the talk that we go over here. 24 00:02:13,660 --> 00:02:17,240 So first off, we need to establish a baseline of what cloud computing is. 25 00:02:17,240 --> 00:02:25,200 And as you can see on the, with this diagram here, this pretty excellent diagram from Christopher Hoff that was published a couple months ago, 26 00:02:25,660 --> 00:02:32,180 you can really just go crazy with what you think cloud computing is and get like a really complex, detailed definition. 27 00:02:32,720 --> 00:02:39,560 But when I think about cloud computing nowadays, for as long as I've been sort of, you know, excited about it, been a cloud nut, as I like to say, 28 00:02:40,020 --> 00:02:46,020 I end up nowadays dividing it into what I always call, you know, being, you know, not being able to resist a good joke, 29 00:02:46,020 --> 00:02:51,780 the three asses of cloud computing, and that software as a service, a platform as a service, and an infrastructure as a service. 30 00:02:51,960 --> 00:02:57,680 And one of the, my other, my fellow Red Monk, Stephen O'Grady, he makes a differentiation between SaaS, 31 00:02:57,820 --> 00:03:03,040 between SaaS essentially, instead of calling a platform an infrastructure, he calls it fabric versus instance space, 32 00:03:03,100 --> 00:03:04,860 which is another way of breaking it up. 33 00:03:05,400 --> 00:03:10,680 So as the diagram shows, obviously, there's a whole lot more that you could say that cloud computing is, 34 00:03:10,720 --> 00:03:12,380 and a whole lot other ways you could divide it out. 35 00:03:12,380 --> 00:03:18,040 I mean, people will just go nuts and have storage as a service, and security as a service, and networking as a service. 36 00:03:18,100 --> 00:03:23,020 And basically, every single box and more that you see here in Christopher's diagram as a service. 37 00:03:23,620 --> 00:03:29,400 So the question is, you know, looking at these three asses, what are, what are these things? 38 00:03:29,400 --> 00:03:41,660 And again, to use a very simplified definition to sort of move the discussion along, what I look at it is that it's another way of describing the classic sort of triumvirate of computing of IT that you have. 39 00:03:41,720 --> 00:03:44,200 And there's basically applications, middleware, and servers. 40 00:03:45,040 --> 00:03:50,880 And, you know, the ordering there is more of a layering on top of order, not like a judgment call about the importance. 41 00:03:51,060 --> 00:03:57,000 But you can see, obviously, that software as a service is actual applications that an end user interacts with, 42 00:03:57,080 --> 00:04:05,060 whereas platform as a service or the middleware stuff is just the technical goop, if you will, that you use to build together applications. 43 00:04:05,060 --> 00:04:07,480 And then all of this, of course, has to run on something. 44 00:04:08,220 --> 00:04:13,680 And, you know, in the physical non-cloud world, if you will, non-virtualized world, those are just physical servers that you have, 45 00:04:13,760 --> 00:04:17,800 where the servers are obviously composed of operating systems and the hardware that's backing them. 46 00:04:18,120 --> 00:04:20,640 And again, I'm greatly simplifying everything here. 47 00:04:20,720 --> 00:04:25,640 I mean, there's obviously networking and storage and security and all sorts of other things that come into play. 48 00:04:26,060 --> 00:04:32,280 But I think, you know, when you're looking at something as very hype-fed and new of an idea as cloud computing, 49 00:04:32,280 --> 00:04:36,940 it's important to keep things as simple as possible, especially when you're interested in other things, 50 00:04:36,980 --> 00:04:41,340 other than just sort of, you know, how many angels you can get on the head of a cloud, if you will. 51 00:04:42,180 --> 00:04:49,420 So moving on, you know, you know, it's always important, I think, when you have a technology to figure out why you should care about it. 52 00:04:49,480 --> 00:04:54,520 Because there is, I mean, the technology world is really just a bunch of problems looking for solutions. 53 00:04:54,860 --> 00:04:56,220 Or I see I even got that wrong. 54 00:04:56,280 --> 00:04:58,340 It's a bunch of solutions looking around for problems. 55 00:04:58,340 --> 00:05:02,520 I've been so well trained to think positively about that little trope there. 56 00:05:03,140 --> 00:05:11,900 But I think, you know, unlike with sort of, for example, with SOA and a lot of other big hype-fed technologies 57 00:05:11,900 --> 00:05:16,980 and sort of practices in different worlds, I tend to have a lot more hope for cloud computing. 58 00:05:17,640 --> 00:05:22,960 Because the benefits are a lot more, you know, there's the phrase business-oriented, 59 00:05:23,060 --> 00:05:26,660 but they're a lot more goal-oriented rather than necessarily technology-oriented. 60 00:05:26,860 --> 00:05:32,780 There's not a lot of people who sort of are necessarily at the wonderment of the dancing bear that cloud computing is. 61 00:05:32,840 --> 00:05:37,100 Instead, people tend to be excited about it because of what they can do with it, what goals they can achieve. 62 00:05:37,580 --> 00:05:44,420 And to that end, if you divide the world up, as I tend to do, into users or buyers and vendors or software sellers 63 00:05:44,420 --> 00:05:47,620 or people who are producing software, they don't have to necessarily be selling it. 64 00:05:47,700 --> 00:05:49,700 It could just be an open source sort of thing. 65 00:05:50,320 --> 00:05:55,600 But these are, like, the primary concerns, you know, the reasons why people tend to like cloud computing. 66 00:05:55,600 --> 00:06:02,320 And for users, at the moment at least, and depending on the sort of burstiness versus 24-7 runtime you have, 67 00:06:02,420 --> 00:06:06,620 cloud computing is extremely cheap compared to maintaining your own on-premise things. 68 00:06:07,120 --> 00:06:10,560 And part of that cheapness is more than just sort of the charge that you're getting for it. 69 00:06:10,880 --> 00:06:14,960 But it's also driven by the flexibility that you have with cloud computing. 70 00:06:15,100 --> 00:06:20,400 I mean, all the startups that I talk with nowadays, to overstate it, obviously there's plenty of startups who aren't like this, 71 00:06:20,440 --> 00:06:22,340 but many of the startups are people starting things up. 72 00:06:22,340 --> 00:06:28,300 What they really like about cloud computing is how fast and easy it is to get up and running and change things around. 73 00:06:28,420 --> 00:06:32,980 It's a lot better than, you know, going down to the data center or messing around with physical stuff in your own data center. 74 00:06:33,280 --> 00:06:38,440 And it's that quickness, that flexibility, that malleability that users really like quite a bit. 75 00:06:39,320 --> 00:06:44,600 And, you know, all the high-flying cases of cloud computing, they always talk a lot about the elasticity. 76 00:06:44,600 --> 00:06:51,900 I mean, that's the E in EC2, if you will, and the scalability and being able to handle, as we used to call it, 77 00:06:51,920 --> 00:06:54,420 being slash-dotted or being digged or whatever. 78 00:06:54,640 --> 00:07:00,700 Just handling more loads as needed on demand instead of reaching that capacity limit that you have. 79 00:07:00,920 --> 00:07:09,100 And as I think we'll get into in the rest of the talk here, you know, this elasticity is not really a majority concern, I would say. 80 00:07:09,140 --> 00:07:12,100 It tends to be something that only a select amount of people want to use. 81 00:07:12,100 --> 00:07:19,480 But more importantly, if you look at elasticity and scalability as the introduction of sort of unlimited computing power at your disposal, 82 00:07:20,020 --> 00:07:27,600 that's where things can get kind of interesting, where you have access potentially to a lot more parallel processing and larger batch job processing that you might have. 83 00:07:27,760 --> 00:07:35,800 So for users, you can see that there actually are, you know, the, again, it's the effects of cloud computing that users tend to get excited about, 84 00:07:35,880 --> 00:07:40,120 not just the ticks and the flows and cloud computing and the wizardry of it on its own. 85 00:07:40,660 --> 00:07:47,480 And for vendors who are very excited about cloud computing, I mean, the primary thing that cloud computing gives them is brand new business models to sell software to. 86 00:07:47,980 --> 00:07:52,420 And any technology vendor is always going to be excited when there's a new product that they have to offer, 87 00:07:52,420 --> 00:07:54,420 when there's something brand new that they can start selling. 88 00:07:54,860 --> 00:08:00,240 Because eventually with any technology, it sort of taps out and you start getting maintenance fees and you need to come up with something new to sell. 89 00:08:00,820 --> 00:08:02,740 So new business models are always exciting. 90 00:08:03,640 --> 00:08:08,560 And, of course, what drives this is there's new features that people can add, that vendors can provide. 91 00:08:08,700 --> 00:08:13,520 So whether they're actually selling something new or they're, you know, adding new features to existing stuff, 92 00:08:13,560 --> 00:08:15,260 it's just another product that they can sell. 93 00:08:15,840 --> 00:08:19,800 And then in theory, you know, cloud computing hasn't really been around long enough, 94 00:08:19,920 --> 00:08:24,580 but in theory, you'll have lower cost of ongoing maintenance for your application. 95 00:08:24,740 --> 00:08:27,640 So, you know, looking at the very top of the stack when we get software as a service, 96 00:08:28,100 --> 00:08:32,000 instead of having to update and install all these different on-premises versions of your software, 97 00:08:32,040 --> 00:08:34,480 you'll just have the one version that you can get up and running. 98 00:08:34,480 --> 00:08:37,240 And, you know, of course, the granddaddy example here would be Salesforce. 99 00:08:37,640 --> 00:08:42,140 And one would hope, again, in theory, that there are some economies of scale by pooling things together. 100 00:08:42,320 --> 00:08:44,660 But we'll see if that actually pans out. 101 00:08:45,620 --> 00:08:48,380 So I got to some of these, but here's just a quick run through. 102 00:08:48,700 --> 00:08:53,900 You know, it's always good to, like, look at the concerns around a new technology, the potential problems that we'll have. 103 00:08:54,300 --> 00:08:58,480 And top of the list is, especially when vendors get involved who want to do enterprise sales, 104 00:08:58,620 --> 00:09:00,800 is there's a lot of semantic confusion. 105 00:09:01,140 --> 00:09:07,700 I think when we're talking about cloud computing and people don't really divide up their thinking of public versus a private cloud. 106 00:09:07,760 --> 00:09:11,180 And a public cloud is what people usually focus on when they talk about cloud computing. 107 00:09:11,540 --> 00:09:19,400 And that's essentially running something on Amazon or running it on forest.com or running it on some cloud.com on the public internet, accessible in someone else's data center. 108 00:09:19,820 --> 00:09:30,800 But also when people are discussing the cloud, they also might be discussing private clouds, which means an organization or a company is going to have their own cloud behind their data center, behind their firewall. 109 00:09:31,600 --> 00:09:33,120 And they're going to do something with that cloud. 110 00:09:33,300 --> 00:09:39,600 And for, you know, if you think about it, there's, there actually are different scenarios and concerns and things. 111 00:09:39,600 --> 00:09:45,680 If you're actually, if you own your own cloud, it seems like there's a bit of missing the whole point in the first place. 112 00:09:45,680 --> 00:09:50,920 So it's always important to separate public versus private cloud discussions when people are talking about cloud things. 113 00:09:51,360 --> 00:09:56,000 And another concern was, I was saying that, you know, companies will have at their disposal a lot more processing power. 114 00:09:56,000 --> 00:10:08,440 And I think most developers, your run-of-the-mill developer, myself included when I was a developer, are not very good at multi-threaded programming or, you know, concurrent programming and all this, you know, batch-oriented things. 115 00:10:08,500 --> 00:10:14,980 And the style of programming that cloud computing and things like Hadoop and whatnot sort of encourage you to use in the infrastructure. 116 00:10:15,260 --> 00:10:20,000 I mean, to scale out, you have to think in parallel, which is not a normal way for developers to think. 117 00:10:20,320 --> 00:10:28,680 And I think on the other side of the house, when it comes to running clouds, the operations people are not, they don't usually have very grid-oriented sort of thinking, very cloud-oriented thinking. 118 00:10:28,780 --> 00:10:43,020 So there's, the whole point is with a new way of, a new paradigm, if you will, to use a quarter word there, there's all sorts of retraining and reprocessing that you have to do with your existing IT organization if you're moving on from a more traditional setup. 119 00:10:44,060 --> 00:10:45,660 And that's always a concern. 120 00:10:45,660 --> 00:10:59,360 And the other concern is, I was alluding to, you know, that the cost of cloud computing is low, but usually, for example, on Amazon EC2, if you do the comparison of running something 24 by 7 versus running something just in a bursty way, you end up paying quite a lot of money. 121 00:10:59,500 --> 00:11:02,560 You could just pay a hoster to be up all the time or have your own infrastructure. 122 00:11:03,200 --> 00:11:08,560 So it is always important to be leery of ending up paying more when you're just using cloud computing. 123 00:11:08,560 --> 00:11:23,620 And this is a bit of an exaggerated example, but I was talking with someone who manages, excuse me, manages a very non-technology company that has a bunch of franchises and retail locations, their little branch locations. 124 00:11:23,900 --> 00:11:28,660 And they were talking with one of their HR providers, their ERP providers. 125 00:11:29,040 --> 00:11:34,020 And the ERP provider comes in every quarter and wants them to move to an off-premise cloud-hosted SaaS thing. 126 00:11:34,440 --> 00:11:42,620 And they're going to charge them, you know, the low price of $150,000 a year to run their payroll stuff, you know, in the cloud, if you will. 127 00:11:43,140 --> 00:11:54,400 And so this guy did the math, and it turns out that he was either running it in-house and they were only paying $20,000 a year, you know, they were paying for a Windows license, a Windows server's license, and for the actual hardware itself. 128 00:11:54,500 --> 00:11:59,680 And then, you know, for 10, 20 hours a year of a DBA to come in and, like, muck around with their stuff. 129 00:11:59,880 --> 00:12:05,060 And so, you know, for him, while you might look at cloud computing, it's like a great cost-saving thing. 130 00:12:05,140 --> 00:12:07,300 Like, actually having something on-premise was much cheaper. 131 00:12:07,520 --> 00:12:13,660 And then there's also, at this point, with any new technology, I mean, there's lock-in concerns that you'll have that things aren't portable between different clouds. 132 00:12:13,800 --> 00:12:19,560 Same concerns you would have with operating systems that you might be locking into or whatever that middle layer is, if you will. 133 00:12:20,300 --> 00:12:26,720 And then, of course, there's another concern is looking at transitioning existing legacy concrete, if you will. 134 00:12:27,160 --> 00:12:34,140 And while cloud computing might be a more efficient, better way of doing something, it just may be the fact that transitioning what you have that's already working, 135 00:12:34,140 --> 00:12:37,860 that may cost a lot of money might end up not really giving you a good return on investment. 136 00:12:38,040 --> 00:12:43,260 And you might end up with just the same sort of expenses and the same problems if you move your legacy stuff around. 137 00:12:43,420 --> 00:12:49,340 So you don't want to be – you want to be – as someone running IT, you always want to be conservative about mucking with something that's working. 138 00:12:49,820 --> 00:12:56,240 And I think, you know, looking at the wide context of something, I think an interesting thing to worry about is that 139 00:12:57,000 --> 00:13:04,540 getting obsessed with cloud computing might sort of blur the importance of virtualization in the overall world. 140 00:13:04,620 --> 00:13:06,800 And virtualization, of course, is a huge part of cloud computing. 141 00:13:07,000 --> 00:13:10,500 But it could turn out that cloud computing really isn't that big of a deal. 142 00:13:10,940 --> 00:13:14,660 And what we should have been more interested in worrying about was virtualization this whole time. 143 00:13:14,780 --> 00:13:15,780 And I don't have it listed here. 144 00:13:15,820 --> 00:13:22,200 But another thing that always irks me personally is, you know, I think right before cloud computing was a big hype concern, 145 00:13:22,300 --> 00:13:25,840 we were all talking about software as a service and SaaS and all these great things. 146 00:13:26,020 --> 00:13:33,640 And I actually think that for the mainstream world, SaaS is a much more interesting prospect than cloud computing, if you will. 147 00:13:33,720 --> 00:13:41,040 And again, SaaS can be part of cloud computing, but I think focusing on the applications that you're running is really the more widespread, 148 00:13:41,320 --> 00:13:45,820 long-term thing that people should be worried about, not necessarily the full stack of cloud computing. 149 00:13:46,880 --> 00:13:54,820 So for something as new as cloud computing, it's actually – as sort of an industry watcher, it's actually very handy 150 00:13:54,820 --> 00:13:58,240 because you're still at the point where you can kind of point at things and say, that's cloud computing. 151 00:13:59,040 --> 00:14:03,120 And thankfully, at the moment, it's ending pretty rapidly here. 152 00:14:03,160 --> 00:14:08,300 But there's a small handful of people, a small percentage of those that handful, you know, with logos up here. 153 00:14:08,380 --> 00:14:14,080 But basically, you can – there's good examples you can point to of things that are, you know, 154 00:14:14,100 --> 00:14:17,060 the infrastructure and the platform section. 155 00:14:17,060 --> 00:14:24,060 And I didn't list SaaS here because I think SaaS things are pretty obvious, like Salesforce itself and Gmail and Google Apps and Zoho 156 00:14:24,060 --> 00:14:28,200 and all these things are all just software as a service or web applications, as we used to call them. 157 00:14:28,760 --> 00:14:32,920 But you can look at Amazon EC2, which is an instance-based thing, to use Stephen O'Ready's term, 158 00:14:32,960 --> 00:14:33,740 but it's infrastructure. 159 00:14:33,920 --> 00:14:36,780 It's just raw compute that you have. 160 00:14:36,900 --> 00:14:40,360 There's not really any middleware on top of it. 161 00:14:40,580 --> 00:14:41,960 And, you know, S3 is part of that. 162 00:14:42,000 --> 00:14:47,020 It's just raw stuff that you have access to that you need to layer on top, manipulation and usage on top of. 163 00:14:47,460 --> 00:14:53,500 And then looking at the platform stuff, Force.com, which is Salesforce's spinoff of its own middleware, if you will, 164 00:14:54,120 --> 00:15:01,680 is a platform where there's actually services and APIs and things that – sort of things that you would see from the Java enterprise world 165 00:15:01,680 --> 00:15:05,720 or the .NET world where there's established buses and ways of doing things and APIs. 166 00:15:06,060 --> 00:15:11,720 And I'm being very imprecise in my phrasing because I was always trained to just think of services as a developer. 167 00:15:11,800 --> 00:15:17,820 And Microsoft Azure, though it's not out yet, is trying to – is being the same thing where, you know, you might have identity service. 168 00:15:17,960 --> 00:15:20,000 There's just basically middleware that you can plug in to use. 169 00:15:20,340 --> 00:15:26,160 And there's other things to look at, like Sun has the – the cloud that they're working on and they have some nice demos of. 170 00:15:26,320 --> 00:15:32,000 And 3Tera is a provider of public cloud – I mean, of private cloud infrastructure and they have some public cloud partner hosting. 171 00:15:32,240 --> 00:15:37,720 And Rackspace has been doing a lot of cloud things by acquiring Slicehost and JungleDisk and a bunch of other places. 172 00:15:37,860 --> 00:15:38,840 And they have their own Maso. 173 00:15:39,380 --> 00:15:43,500 And there's a bunch of hosters that are sort of rebirthing themselves as cloud providers. 174 00:15:43,500 --> 00:15:46,900 For example, there's Opsource that has been around for a long time. 175 00:15:46,960 --> 00:15:50,940 It's more of an ASP sort of layer, but they fit well into the conception of what a cloud is. 176 00:15:51,640 --> 00:16:04,120 And additionally, I think there's, you know, in addition to virtualization, one of the other things that drives cloud computing is the – you know, when you have a bunch of different nodes you're managing, there's a lot of automation and provisioning that you have to worry about. 177 00:16:04,120 --> 00:16:16,580 And there's folks like Puppet that's sort of patronized, if you will, by Reductive Labs, the company around it, who are, like, very much so involved in a lot of the gorpy-morlock-level stuff of cloud computing. 178 00:16:16,740 --> 00:16:25,140 So these are all just some people – when you're thinking about who's doing cloud computing and you want some examples of stuff that is or could be cloud computing, you can look at these things. 179 00:16:25,820 --> 00:16:29,780 So let's jump right into the SWOT analysis of things. 180 00:16:29,780 --> 00:16:34,600 And I think we're at 16 minutes and 32 seconds, so we're actually doing quite well in the time. 181 00:16:34,720 --> 00:16:36,080 Maybe I can even slow down a little bit. 182 00:16:36,740 --> 00:16:40,540 But so we'll start out with the strengths that Linux has. 183 00:16:40,540 --> 00:16:51,100 And I think when it comes to cloud computing, all of the strengths that you would think about for Linux and all the distribute distros that exist out there, they apply in the cloud computing case. 184 00:16:51,220 --> 00:17:01,560 I mean, top among them, of course, is the sort of potential or perceived or whatever you want to say cost of Linux that potentially could be free for you, monetarily at least, to use. 185 00:17:02,100 --> 00:17:09,580 And obviously, as Jim Zimlin was saying yesterday in the keynote, you know, I mean, would Google have been possible without having Linux? 186 00:17:09,580 --> 00:17:26,000 I mean, would Google have been able to afford all of the – or even negotiate all of the, I don't know, Solaris licenses or Windows licenses or whatever non-free license they were negotiating for all these, you know, however many thousands of servers that they have or instances? 187 00:17:26,500 --> 00:17:34,660 And when it comes to the wide-scale, virtualized, like, pools of resources out there, if you're going to have low cost, something has to be free, essentially. 188 00:17:34,780 --> 00:17:52,100 And I think having the operating system, which does much of the coordination here, be free certainly is a huge benefit for Linux, as has been proved out by most, if not all of the cloud providers, or I would say the majority of them, as I would get told on Twitter that I would be wrong about from Sun folks and other people. 189 00:17:52,520 --> 00:17:56,940 The majority of cloud people out there that exist now are based on Linux things or using free software. 190 00:17:57,060 --> 00:18:01,180 So that's a huge strength that I'm overemphasizing, but nonetheless, it's worth talking about. 191 00:18:01,180 --> 00:18:06,680 And I think, like I said, all of these things are the motherhood in Apple pie of why we love Linux. 192 00:18:07,080 --> 00:18:18,460 But most importantly, you know, Linux has been around long enough and been road-tested that people know that it's reliable and it works at scale, and it's an enterprise-grade operating system, if you will, which I don't think anyone really doubts that very much. 193 00:18:18,940 --> 00:18:26,420 But another interesting thing, you know, cloud computing is, you know, it's based on old concepts, and we've had good computing and things like that. 194 00:18:26,440 --> 00:18:37,440 But basically, at the end of the day, if you're going to be a cloud computing provider, you're going to have to muck with the operating system and have it be kind of malleable and make it fit to what you want, whether that means carving it down or changing things around or whatever. 195 00:18:37,440 --> 00:18:38,740 You're just going to have to mess with it. 196 00:18:39,280 --> 00:18:43,500 And the way that a cloud provider would set up a cloud, they need to differentiate somehow. 197 00:18:43,600 --> 00:18:48,900 So they, in theory, don't want to have the same exact infrastructure, or they would be avoiding lock-in, for one. 198 00:18:48,940 --> 00:18:51,440 But then there would be no reason to go with them instead of someone else. 199 00:18:51,980 --> 00:19:00,500 And from this respect, you know, in a sort of open-source counterintuitive way, the malleability of Linux is very nice because you can shape it to be sort of whatever you want. 200 00:19:00,500 --> 00:19:05,520 And that's kind of due to the transparency that you can actually stare into its guts and understand what's happening. 201 00:19:05,820 --> 00:19:07,600 And it's a classic open-source sort of thing. 202 00:19:07,660 --> 00:19:15,420 I mean, this is the same reason for a technologist why any piece of open-source software is good, because you can understand it and mess around with it. 203 00:19:15,960 --> 00:19:28,860 And, you know, the next thing when it comes to cloud computing, again, it's one of these things where you end up, you know, I always love the classic old saying, you know, we had this problem, and then we bought some technology, and now we have two problems. 204 00:19:29,240 --> 00:19:42,580 And when it comes to cloud computing, it's essentially that sort of thing where once you introduce cloud computing or virtualization, as we'll get to, then you have a huge management problem because you've got all this dynamic stuff running around, and you've got to have some way to corral it and wrangle it and manage it. 205 00:19:42,880 --> 00:19:55,320 But thankfully for Linux, you know, having worked on this stuff firsthand back when I was at BMC working on the, you know, a bunch of IT management software, you know, whenever we would have to manage Linux, and to a lesser extent, Unix-based systems. 206 00:19:55,720 --> 00:20:11,320 But whenever we would have to manage Linux, whatever distribution, it was typically a lot easier to write management software for Linux stuff than it was for proprietary and closed things, especially for Windows, which at the time, at least, was very much, you know, I don't want to get into it. 207 00:20:11,400 --> 00:20:17,020 It was very much more so a binary thing rather than flat files and other things that were very easy in Linux. 208 00:20:17,080 --> 00:20:26,120 And part of that comes from just the general, like, you know, the pipes and redirects and the plain text and everything, sort of the philosophy of Unix programming, if you will. 209 00:20:26,160 --> 00:20:32,760 But that carries over into Linux quite well, and it's a lot easier platform to do tooling for if you're doing weird, kooky things with it. 210 00:20:33,380 --> 00:20:37,740 And so the next thing, like I was saying, is virtualization is extremely strong in the Linux space. 211 00:20:38,300 --> 00:20:46,340 And there's numerous, you know, open source virtualization things, and, you know, like KVM, as the previous speaker was talking about. 212 00:20:46,940 --> 00:20:55,520 And it just, you know, it's one of these things that works well and is understood, and it is itself open source and sort of, you know, very recursively benefits from all these same sorts of things. 213 00:20:56,140 --> 00:20:59,680 And virtualization, of course, is extremely necessary for cloud computing. 214 00:20:59,800 --> 00:21:06,660 Otherwise, you just have magic provisioning and, like, what was that old thing, ghost or whatever, that would, anyways, getting off track here. 215 00:21:06,660 --> 00:21:20,680 And so, you know, I think the other thing that's interesting, and I'll sort of contradict myself when I get to a weakness in the next slide, is that there are a lot of applications and existing software that's already Linux compatible. 216 00:21:21,340 --> 00:21:31,260 And now, you know, one should be never be naive enough to think everything that I've just said about the malleability and being able to, like, you know, silly putty up Linux to stick it into the cloud hole that you have. 217 00:21:31,760 --> 00:21:38,200 Obviously, if you're a good QA department, you're going to want to retest all these things that are supposedly compatible with whatever distribution you're concerned with. 218 00:21:38,600 --> 00:21:48,080 But, in theory, if you're basing, you know, your cloud computing infrastructure or using a cloud compute, you know, a cloud that's based on Linux already, it should be easier. 219 00:21:48,540 --> 00:21:53,100 And I say should with, you know, if I had multiple tongues, I'd be in both of my cheeks there. 220 00:21:53,200 --> 00:22:01,760 But, essentially, it should be easier to run these applications on top of Linux-based clouds, which is a nice strength for Linux to have. 221 00:22:03,020 --> 00:22:11,240 So, on to the weaknesses, and here we go, like I said, I was going to contradict myself, is that it's a little hard to sort of explain this. 222 00:22:11,440 --> 00:22:16,980 But cloud computing, to me, again, is all about the goals and the effects and the application layer of things. 223 00:22:17,460 --> 00:22:21,300 Whereas Linux is more of a Morlock concern, like, way down at the bottom of the stack. 224 00:22:21,360 --> 00:22:28,400 And they may be eating all the pretty blonde people on top and everything, but that's where the attention is, is at the, where they be a Lodi or whatever. 225 00:22:28,900 --> 00:22:45,000 And, you know, I think the weakness here is not so much destructive, but it's that, you know, it comes in the form of a threat that, you know, Linux could just be sort of like another piece of the cloud stack instead of being a dominant part of the stack. 226 00:22:45,180 --> 00:22:52,040 And the attention could move, and for me, hopefully will move, to the application layer, the SaaS layer, where people are concerned about applications. 227 00:22:52,780 --> 00:22:57,220 And there isn't really that much of affection for what's going on underneath the hood, if you will. 228 00:22:57,620 --> 00:23:03,100 And that's just a matter of sort of like the overall care that the mainstream has with the Linux community. 229 00:23:03,760 --> 00:23:12,800 And, you know, I've been around long enough to know that when you make a statement like this, there's all sorts of very fast corrections that come in and correct you. 230 00:23:12,880 --> 00:23:18,240 So that'll be a great discussion point to figure out to how I can remove this bullet point from the weakness. 231 00:23:18,900 --> 00:23:28,300 And so the next weakness, I think, is another sort of, I'm always overly cautious when I'm telling people what their faults are, just because why not. 232 00:23:28,300 --> 00:23:35,260 But anyways, another weakness is that, you know, in my view, Linux doesn't have a huge developer allegiance. 233 00:23:35,520 --> 00:23:40,100 I mean, it's just like something that developers, application developers will run things on top of. 234 00:23:40,160 --> 00:23:45,360 Now, there's an exception like the LAMP stack, which Linux, being an integral part of that, has a huge appeal to it. 235 00:23:45,400 --> 00:23:52,660 And there's certain tools that, you know, the ease of setting up tools and of using AppGit and other things and package management, it's great for developers. 236 00:23:52,660 --> 00:24:04,600 But, you know, if you look at the wide array of Java developers and application developers and sort of enterprise developers out there, you know, there's not a lot of people who run around saying that they're Linux developers or programmers. 237 00:24:04,840 --> 00:24:07,640 It's more that they're Java developers or whatever framework that they're using. 238 00:24:07,740 --> 00:24:10,400 So the allegiance is usually to the framework and not the operating system. 239 00:24:10,440 --> 00:24:20,740 And again, in cloud computing, this becomes a concern or could become a concern because your allegiance could be to the cloud that you're running on, not necessarily sort of like the tooling that's within the cloud. 240 00:24:20,940 --> 00:24:28,140 And another concern is basically, you know, there is a ton of virtualization out there and there's a lot of automation tools out there. 241 00:24:28,240 --> 00:24:38,560 And as there's more and more fragmentation of different hypervisors, or if there is more fragmentation of hypervisors, and there's already, you know, more than one hypervisor running around in the Linux world. 242 00:24:38,600 --> 00:24:47,020 I mean, it's just sort of more hassle and something to worry about when you could just have, you know, one hypervisor and one automation system that you're worrying about. 243 00:24:47,020 --> 00:24:57,600 In the same way that, while there's tons of file systems out there, I mean, there's not, in use, it seems like there's, you know, file systems are not really fragmented in the eyes of the users. 244 00:24:57,720 --> 00:25:00,260 People don't have to worry about the file system they're using too much. 245 00:25:00,300 --> 00:25:04,180 Whereas when it comes to virtualization, it is of a concern, like which hypervisor are using. 246 00:25:04,300 --> 00:25:06,260 It's of concern what automation software they're using. 247 00:25:06,600 --> 00:25:19,080 And then as always, with any open source project, and because of, you know, Linux is susceptible to what I would call bad citizens, people who may basically take, take, take, and take, and not really do anything to support the community. 248 00:25:19,300 --> 00:25:20,940 And there's also plenty of good citizens. 249 00:25:21,460 --> 00:25:30,540 But you can see that if we move to a cloud computing world, that there's even more of a chance for people to be more disconnected, which is really what all these weaknesses, the first two weaknesses at least are getting to, 250 00:25:30,540 --> 00:25:38,920 is having the community, the end users, not necessarily end users, but people who should have that connection with Linux, sort of losing that connection. 251 00:25:39,660 --> 00:25:48,200 And that's really what, I mean, as you look up at the application layer with stack, as I think cloud computing encourages you to do, you lose that connection to the bottom layer of the stack. 252 00:25:48,340 --> 00:25:52,620 I mean, you don't have intimacy all the way down to the chip really anymore, because we've lost intimacy. 253 00:25:52,620 --> 00:25:58,800 And you could see that the world of people using community would sort of lose this intimacy with the operating system. 254 00:25:59,640 --> 00:26:03,860 And, you know, in theory, things could even get to the point where the operating system doesn't matter. 255 00:26:04,120 --> 00:26:09,400 And it's just the fabric that matters or something like that, which I think is, is, is a interesting discussion in a song. 256 00:26:10,080 --> 00:26:22,840 So all those, all those negative ninny things aside there, or whatever that, that nincompoot phrase is, it's, you know, the opportunities, I think, for Linux are far outweigh any of the threats or the weaknesses or anything. 257 00:26:23,240 --> 00:26:28,660 And, you know, I do a lot of, in addition, I have a kind of a schizophrenic, weird coverage areas, if you will. 258 00:26:28,700 --> 00:26:29,780 I mean, we're generalists at RedMonk. 259 00:26:29,840 --> 00:26:38,180 But in addition to covering boring stuff like IT management and software development, I pay attention to things like RIAs and Web 2.0 and other things like that. 260 00:26:38,180 --> 00:26:44,860 And, you know, the rich internet applications are another solution looking for a problem, like any technology. 261 00:26:45,880 --> 00:26:52,120 And I've been, you know, I've been trying to find a back end for RIAs because they sure are damn fine looking front ends, if you will. 262 00:26:52,700 --> 00:27:02,880 And increasingly, it seems like there's sort of an aligning of stars happening where all this cloud computing stuff is positioned well to be basically the back end for RIAs. 263 00:27:03,000 --> 00:27:09,560 And so it's basically positioned, essentially, we're creating a whole new back end where there could be a whole lot of new front ends on top of it. 264 00:27:09,560 --> 00:27:18,980 And one of those front ends, you know, I've only recently gotten sort of like jadedly or jaundacely sort of enamored of netbooks is, you know, you can look at netbooks. 265 00:27:19,100 --> 00:27:21,880 I mean, at one point, someone wanted to call them cloudbooks or something like that. 266 00:27:21,900 --> 00:27:30,200 And you could see that there, the idea is that you really do have, you sort of like got the physical version of this fantasy of the browser being the operating system, right? 267 00:27:30,200 --> 00:27:36,900 Where instead of it being a piece of software that replaces the operating system, it's basically embodied in this hardware and this netbook that you have. 268 00:27:37,000 --> 00:27:40,860 It's lightweight and, you know, depends on being connected and depends on the cloud existing. 269 00:27:41,540 --> 00:27:48,400 And I think, as is painfully obvious and is almost, you know, I mean, it's just the case nowadays. 270 00:27:48,540 --> 00:27:50,600 Tons of netbooks deploy Linux desktops. 271 00:27:50,600 --> 00:28:00,940 And I think it's an interesting, you know, cracking the mainstream Linux desktop market, if you will, has always been the holy grail of Linux stuff. 272 00:28:01,120 --> 00:28:07,600 And, you know, I thought during the keynote yesterday, there was a nice sort of like, what does a desktop really mean thing going on. 273 00:28:07,700 --> 00:28:16,540 And I think this netbook thing really gets to that idea that, you know, there's not really that much reason to switch your desktop around if you don't have a compelling back end for it. 274 00:28:16,540 --> 00:28:23,960 And I think cloud computing is providing an interesting reason to care about desktop links, to care about netbooks, to care about RIAs and mobile things, if you will. 275 00:28:24,000 --> 00:28:28,240 And I put that in quotes because it just means usually small computer that fits in your pocket. 276 00:28:29,120 --> 00:28:41,380 And another good opportunity for Linux is when it comes to automation over virtualization and cloud computing, there's this sort of increasingly theory of operations that sort of model driven automation, if you will. 277 00:28:41,420 --> 00:28:49,420 And it sort of harkens back to the autonomic sort of, you know, fantasy world that marketing stuff that we had in the past that was a great idea. 278 00:28:49,500 --> 00:28:52,700 And it just turned out, for whatever reason, not to sort of pan out for everyone. 279 00:28:53,220 --> 00:28:58,140 But nowadays, there's this return to the idea that you could actually declaratively model the infrastructure that you want. 280 00:28:58,220 --> 00:29:03,820 And there's software that, using virtualization and cloud computing principles, will sort of make it happen for you. 281 00:29:03,880 --> 00:29:09,340 And you can look at a lot of the discussion that the puppet guys, the reductive lab guys have around this. 282 00:29:09,420 --> 00:29:10,780 I mean, this is one of their big theories. 283 00:29:11,000 --> 00:29:15,660 And they've been doing some interesting work with a company called Control Tier that's sort of uniting this together. 284 00:29:15,740 --> 00:29:22,500 And then on the very high end, the work that Cisco and BMC, or the BMC is doing with Cisco around the unified compute thing, 285 00:29:22,540 --> 00:29:32,280 it's interesting to talk with them about that because they use this model driven sort of approach to doing automation that is an interesting way of configuring things. 286 00:29:32,340 --> 00:29:33,460 So how does Linux fit into that? 287 00:29:33,540 --> 00:29:37,940 I mean, Linux basically fits in because, again, it's the easiest thing to fit a model to. 288 00:29:38,080 --> 00:29:41,000 I mean, it's available for anyone to go out and manage, if you will. 289 00:29:41,080 --> 00:29:44,880 It's not quite as difficult as managing Windows might be. 290 00:29:45,640 --> 00:29:51,640 And so it's just the potential is there for people to go mess around with it and do a lot of model driven stuff. 291 00:29:51,700 --> 00:29:55,320 And the people who are interested in this model driven stuff, they tend to be Linux heads. 292 00:29:55,520 --> 00:29:57,540 So it's just the space they're doing things in. 293 00:29:57,700 --> 00:30:02,920 So the most obvious opportunity is already being played out. 294 00:30:03,000 --> 00:30:06,520 And that's basically that you have, you know, to be all funny about this fragmented airspace. 295 00:30:06,640 --> 00:30:10,920 So everyone wants a cloud or, you know, in comparison, you know, 296 00:30:10,940 --> 00:30:13,680 you could probably count the people who want to run their own cloud on your fingers. 297 00:30:13,680 --> 00:30:17,700 There's, you know, there's probably 10 or fewer of them, but they're all going to want to use Linux. 298 00:30:18,260 --> 00:30:19,560 Well, again, I'm overstating it. 299 00:30:19,640 --> 00:30:22,260 Many of them are going to want to use Linux or some free operating system. 300 00:30:22,360 --> 00:30:28,460 So obviously there's just the continuing just proliferation of Linux out there that people will want to use it. 301 00:30:28,560 --> 00:30:31,880 And, you know, it's obvious, but you've got to state it. 302 00:30:31,940 --> 00:30:36,020 And then another interesting, someone pointed out to me when I was talking to them about this topic was that, 303 00:30:36,240 --> 00:30:41,920 you know, there's been great strides to make using Linux as easy as possible, 304 00:30:41,920 --> 00:30:44,240 to introduce yourself, to bootstrap into it. 305 00:30:44,900 --> 00:30:52,660 And you can download, you know, you can download live images and USB images and things that are in comparison to the old bad days of Slackware 306 00:30:52,660 --> 00:30:54,200 or just like drop dead simple. 307 00:30:54,320 --> 00:30:55,560 Like even I can figure it out. 308 00:30:56,200 --> 00:31:01,160 But even more, even more simple is basically just logging into a cloud somewhere, 309 00:31:01,300 --> 00:31:05,380 logging into EC2 or whatever and just spinning up an instance and mucking around with it and then destroying it. 310 00:31:05,460 --> 00:31:09,480 And this is the most important thing, I think, for the easiness of playing around with Linux. 311 00:31:09,600 --> 00:31:10,960 It's like it's one thing to get it up and running. 312 00:31:11,640 --> 00:31:15,260 And then when you mess something up, it's another thing to sort of like quickly get it up and running again. 313 00:31:15,460 --> 00:31:19,960 And you can imagine that if you can go through and have a fresh instance of something to play around with, 314 00:31:20,500 --> 00:31:25,520 you know, 10, 20 times a day, it's a lot easier for you to like make a bunch of mistakes and learn from your mistakes. 315 00:31:25,580 --> 00:31:26,800 And virtualization, of course. 316 00:31:26,800 --> 00:31:33,160 I mean, this is really just virtualization, but it's even easier if you don't even need to mess with your own personal desktop or your own hypervisor. 317 00:31:33,240 --> 00:31:34,040 You just log in somewhere. 318 00:31:34,160 --> 00:31:38,600 And so it's just it's sort of as easy a possible way to like play around with Linux. 319 00:31:38,700 --> 00:31:43,920 And what's good there, again, is just getting more people interested in using Linux and lowering those barriers even further 320 00:31:43,920 --> 00:31:46,860 so they can just get familiar with it and get friendly with it. 321 00:31:48,000 --> 00:31:50,280 So what are some threats to Linux? 322 00:31:50,420 --> 00:31:56,080 Now, threats here in the typical SWAT thing, they're different from weaknesses in the sense that they're external threats. 323 00:31:56,080 --> 00:31:58,780 They're not something necessarily that that's wrong with Linux. 324 00:31:58,900 --> 00:32:00,660 They're just things that are happening in the outside world. 325 00:32:01,160 --> 00:32:04,100 So I already got to some of this in the weakness part. 326 00:32:04,220 --> 00:32:10,320 I mean, there's there's always parallels between weaknesses and threats because you obviously want to threaten your enemy in as weak points, not as strong points. 327 00:32:10,680 --> 00:32:13,720 Or your interlocker if you don't want to be all judgmental in your phrasing. 328 00:32:13,900 --> 00:32:17,980 But I think there is a danger of, you know, looking at it. 329 00:32:18,400 --> 00:32:21,980 And again, it's this is the extreme case, but it's good. 330 00:32:22,180 --> 00:32:25,280 It's a good way to think about what the pragmatic real case would be that 331 00:32:25,360 --> 00:32:29,800 if there is more focus on the upper layers of the cloud stack on applications and middleware, 332 00:32:29,940 --> 00:32:32,540 the question arises, like, why does an operating system matter, right? 333 00:32:32,540 --> 00:32:34,740 Like, why do you have to worry about an operating system? 334 00:32:34,860 --> 00:32:39,200 And I think an interesting analogy here, and I forget if they're still doing this, 335 00:32:39,240 --> 00:32:43,020 but I remember there was talk or there were these these cars with hoods that you never really open. 336 00:32:43,200 --> 00:32:44,820 You don't ever have to, like, go muck with them. 337 00:32:45,320 --> 00:32:48,780 And then, you know, it sort of makes the engine of the car not matter so much. 338 00:32:48,860 --> 00:32:50,740 Someone was was quipping to me yesterday. 339 00:32:50,740 --> 00:32:55,860 They they were working with some some company who wanted to sell the engine instead of sort of like, you know, 340 00:32:55,860 --> 00:32:57,860 what you would do with the engine, sell the experience. 341 00:32:57,860 --> 00:33:03,860 And that all sounds like, you know, that all sounds like a bunch of like marketing hocus pocus and things like that. 342 00:33:03,860 --> 00:33:11,420 But the important thing is that, you know, when when when you go to people who are decision makers or have money or whatever, 343 00:33:11,420 --> 00:33:14,720 the people who are going to decide your fate if you're not deciding your own fate, 344 00:33:15,300 --> 00:33:19,400 the way they're going to make decisions are informed about what it is they touch and feel and hear about 345 00:33:19,400 --> 00:33:20,640 and what they have an intimacy with. 346 00:33:21,180 --> 00:33:27,800 And if people are no longer or, you know, very if they're not interacting with operating systems with Linux very much in the cloud computing world, 347 00:33:28,220 --> 00:33:30,780 then it's hard for them to figure out the value of Linux. 348 00:33:30,900 --> 00:33:36,880 And it just makes the job more difficult, if you will, to sort of sell Linux and drive people's interest in it. 349 00:33:36,880 --> 00:33:44,960 So another, of course, threat is that if you have cloud computing, there'll be plenty of people who who won't want to use Linux. 350 00:33:44,960 --> 00:33:47,600 So they'll basically not have Linux at all in their cloud. 351 00:33:47,600 --> 00:33:51,480 And again, if you have this focus on the application layer of cloud computing, 352 00:33:51,980 --> 00:33:56,240 then that means that you're you're sort of the sort of closed non Linux world, 353 00:33:56,300 --> 00:34:00,940 the proprietary world has a pretty good backdoor to capture market share again, to capture attention and usage. 354 00:34:01,180 --> 00:34:07,240 And you can see that Apple has, you know, I guess, based on on long ago, based on BSD, if I remember, 355 00:34:07,840 --> 00:34:12,080 they they've done a good job of basically carving out their own closed source world nowadays, 356 00:34:12,080 --> 00:34:15,720 where, you know, you can there's not really an Apple cloud per se, 357 00:34:15,880 --> 00:34:24,220 but there is an Apple experience or community that is a very closed world that doesn't really involve as much open source as we might hope. 358 00:34:24,320 --> 00:34:29,780 I mean, now they have cups and all sorts of stuff like that, but it's not really the ideal state of things. 359 00:34:29,780 --> 00:34:33,940 And you can see, you know, Microsoft and Sun are developing their own cloud things. 360 00:34:33,940 --> 00:34:38,300 And IBM has some cloud tools, and you could see that they would have cloud things. 361 00:34:38,460 --> 00:34:43,020 And so the question becomes, if you have very popular clouds, and they're not using Linux, 362 00:34:43,500 --> 00:34:46,500 because they have their own sort of operating systems or things that they're worried about, 363 00:34:46,900 --> 00:34:48,300 then it's just a decrease. 364 00:34:48,420 --> 00:34:53,280 Once you consolidate down to these few cloud providers, then there's less chance for Linux to thrive. 365 00:34:54,140 --> 00:34:59,340 So the other, you know, sort of related to that, or, you know, kind of a sort of a counterintuitive thing, 366 00:34:59,740 --> 00:35:02,220 you know, not all these threats are necessarily consistent with each other, 367 00:35:02,280 --> 00:35:04,080 there's just possibilities of things that could happen. 368 00:35:04,740 --> 00:35:08,740 You could see that instead of having a consolidation of clouds, 369 00:35:08,960 --> 00:35:13,880 you could have like cloud distro madness, where there's like 300 different clouds that you could run in. 370 00:35:14,420 --> 00:35:20,720 And, you know, that's, it's both a good thing and a bad thing for the overall Linux community. 371 00:35:20,820 --> 00:35:25,020 Now, if more of those things are based on Linux, then it definitely is, it's just good for the spread, 372 00:35:25,240 --> 00:35:26,760 the sheer weight and numbers of Linux. 373 00:35:27,360 --> 00:35:33,680 But on the other hand, it's damn annoying if you're a QA, you know, a QA person or a support person or developers or anyone, 374 00:35:34,160 --> 00:35:35,900 and you just have to worry about more stuff. 375 00:35:36,080 --> 00:35:42,820 And I mean, this is sort of like a concern of SOA things is that there's so many different SOA solutions for this complicated thing. 376 00:35:43,260 --> 00:35:46,620 And if maybe if we could just have fewer, it would actually work out well for us. 377 00:35:46,620 --> 00:35:51,580 So there is a danger on the opposite end of consolidation, where you've got way too much stuff, 378 00:35:51,760 --> 00:35:53,600 and you've got to find that nice middle ground there. 379 00:35:54,180 --> 00:35:58,340 So the other issue is that, you know, as with any technology, like I was saying, 380 00:35:58,420 --> 00:36:00,560 virtualization might turn out to be a more important thing. 381 00:36:00,620 --> 00:36:08,980 So you could see that if cloud stuff ended up, whether it consolidated or it sort of collapses an interesting thing, 382 00:36:09,020 --> 00:36:13,080 and there was too much interest from the Linux world in it, you sort of put all of your eggs into one basket, 383 00:36:13,440 --> 00:36:17,680 then you would be kind of left with no, you know, you could be left just like with not, 384 00:36:18,380 --> 00:36:22,320 essentially, you would have put all of your effort into this, this sort of phenomenon, 385 00:36:22,500 --> 00:36:23,800 it would have not panned out so well. 386 00:36:23,880 --> 00:36:26,420 So you've got to make sure to diversify, essentially, is what I'm saying, 387 00:36:27,000 --> 00:36:28,280 sort of the interest that you have with Linux. 388 00:36:28,380 --> 00:36:33,300 And to be frank, this is, you know, something that, you know, you want to avoid happening, 389 00:36:33,360 --> 00:36:36,100 not something that could really necessarily happen. 390 00:36:36,180 --> 00:36:41,400 But it is definitely, you know, because Linux obviously is, there's plenty, like we were saying, 391 00:36:41,460 --> 00:36:44,320 there's netbooks and there's plenty of physical servers and things behind the firewall. 392 00:36:44,480 --> 00:36:46,200 So I really doubt something like that would happen. 393 00:36:46,660 --> 00:36:59,580 But, you know, there are people, for example, who, who based, who based their sort of fortunes on SOA and, and as SOA sort of consolidates and fizzles out, you know, they got to find a new technology to base their stuff on. 394 00:36:59,660 --> 00:37:04,680 So you never want to put too much wood behind an arrow, if you will, in case that arrowhead is just porcelain or something. 395 00:37:06,380 --> 00:37:14,160 So having gone through that SWOT analysis there and the cloud thing, I think, you know, it's always nice to have some pretty immediate takeaways, if you will. 396 00:37:14,640 --> 00:37:24,700 And I think the conclusions that we can draw from this stuff is that in the worst case scenario, you know, I guess actually the worst case scenario would be putting all your eggs in one basket, as we just discussed. 397 00:37:24,800 --> 00:37:30,100 But the worst case scenario is that really, this is all just a bunch of chatter about cloud computing and nothing really changes. 398 00:37:30,720 --> 00:37:32,820 And things just kind of plot on the way they were. 399 00:37:32,920 --> 00:37:37,020 I mean, there might be more people hosting stuff and Amazon might be there and so forth and so on. 400 00:37:37,020 --> 00:37:40,580 But, you know, nothing much would, the dynamics of things would change very much. 401 00:37:40,620 --> 00:37:44,260 And in that scenario, I think the Linux world will be just fine. 402 00:37:44,360 --> 00:37:58,760 I mean, Linux has been around a long enough time and it's really cemented enough into the IT world that, you know, whether or not cloud computing is successful or not is not going to really determine, you know, the continued health of the Linux world, right? 403 00:37:58,820 --> 00:38:04,120 I mean, it could greatly, you know, it could make, it could boost the Linux world a lot more. 404 00:38:04,120 --> 00:38:09,480 But it's definitely, if cloud computing is just a bunch of crap, it's not really going to damage the Linux world all that much. 405 00:38:10,000 --> 00:38:17,980 Now, of course, the best case scenario is that you have more and more Linux instances because more, you know, the majority of cloud stuff out there is based on Linux. 406 00:38:18,260 --> 00:38:30,500 And then in that case, essentially, you know, instead of worrying about other operating systems for servers and sort of enterprise grade stuff running, most of it would be running, you know, the best case scenario on cloud computing grids and things like that. 407 00:38:30,560 --> 00:38:42,760 Most everything would be running on Linux and, you know, that clearly, you know, like, again, from the keynote yesterday, people always like quoting however many like crazy Wall Street transactions and everything that's running across their technology. 408 00:38:42,760 --> 00:38:46,040 Because it really is a statement of the importance and the worth of that technology. 409 00:38:46,160 --> 00:38:53,560 And at the end of the day, if you're a technologist, that's kind of part of how you judge part of your own worth is like, here's what I've worked on. 410 00:38:53,620 --> 00:38:55,900 And here's my, in the positives, it's the word sort of legacy. 411 00:38:56,020 --> 00:38:58,420 And part of that legacy is the usage that I get from the software. 412 00:38:58,940 --> 00:39:03,720 So that really is the best case scenario that you have to look forward to is more and more people using Linux. 413 00:39:03,720 --> 00:39:25,640 Now, more, you know, like, I think if you want something interesting, you can think about, as far as like moving towards that best case scenario or doing something with cloud computing, what I spend a lot of time thinking about and worrying about is how if cloud computing becomes even moderately successful, we've got all this cemented, you know, legacy applications that are going to need to transition to a cloud computing based world. 414 00:39:25,640 --> 00:39:33,960 And the question is, you know, it's never really a question of how greenfield applications, brand new applications are going to fit into a technology because you just write it to fit into that technology. 415 00:39:33,960 --> 00:39:44,300 The question is, how do you move existing sort of brownfield, if you will, applications into the new technology so you can benefit from the new technology with all this old stuff that you have? 416 00:39:44,440 --> 00:39:48,160 And there's not really a lot of answers in the cloud computing world. 417 00:39:48,700 --> 00:39:54,760 And there's a little bit more in the virtualization world, just because virtualization, and I mean this only in the best way, sort of like a dumb approach to this. 418 00:39:54,760 --> 00:40:00,020 It's just virtualizing the whole stack instead of shifting the way the computing happens like in cloud computing. 419 00:40:00,120 --> 00:40:13,320 But there's not a lot of discussion and technologies and thinking about how, if I went to any given data center, any given organization or enterprise or whatever, and I looked at the existing applications in IT that they had, how would I move that to cloud computing? 420 00:40:13,460 --> 00:40:16,060 What's the technology that would drive that and the process that would do it? 421 00:40:16,620 --> 00:40:21,480 And I think anyone who's interested in cloud computing, that's something you can do like tomorrow, if you will. 422 00:40:21,960 --> 00:40:23,840 You can start thinking about solving that problem. 423 00:40:23,920 --> 00:40:28,040 That'll help you out, and it'll help out the industry and help out the concept of cloud computing. 424 00:40:28,220 --> 00:40:36,980 And with that, that's the quick overview of how this new technology, cloud computing, sort of relates to and affects the Linux world. 425 00:40:37,460 --> 00:40:38,020 So thank you. 426 00:40:39,640 --> 00:40:40,140 Thank you.