Cloud Platform: The Battle of the Gods

Michael Driscoll is co-founder and CTO of Metamarkets. He recently published an article about the most competitive cloud platforms: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google App engine, and EMC Virtual Private Cloud, and analyze their strengths. The author believes that the essence of cloud platform is computing, storage and network virtualization (abstraction), who won the Battle of the Cloud platform, will be like the operating system as the next era of the new overlord. And once this overlord is established, technology will continue to evolve toward higher levels of abstraction, when the application of service-oriented start-ups will blossom.

It was clear years ago that there must be some way to make programmers and hardware complex. This layer is the operating system.

-Andrew Tan Ningbong operating System (English)

The cloud is the enterprise new operating system, the service is the new application. The cloud provides shelter for the next generation of services, from Pinterest to Instagram, from Foursquare to Airbnb. Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X, which provides interfaces for the previous generation of desktop applications, have been sunset (note: The conclusions may be too early, and the old operating systems themselves are being transformed, and vendors such as Amazon, which provide the necessary computing, storage and networking for the services, are rising.

Compared with the previous generation, the cloud is a more flexible operating system with higher fault tolerance. These two advantages of the cloud derive from its two signature features: virtualization and distribution. Because of virtualization, failed hardware can be upgraded or swapped out, and virtual processes can be ported to new machines with little impact on end users. Because of the distributed, cloud can be dispersed in thousands of commercially available devices, service computing and bandwidth requirements can be met by flexible scaling, disk storage restrictions have almost become an era of upstream.

The cloud has also brought new challenges in other ways, and, more specifically, brought us back to the former PC-era client/server relationship (Note: Another proof of the spiraling philosophy). If the cloud is a more powerful host, today's clients are smarter than the dumb terminals of the past. The new clients are smartphones, tablets, and more modern web browsers, whose local caching and computing power is the essence of a rich interactive application. However, managing the state between client and server and across different classes of clients can create complexity for developers.

This computing new century opens the door to new markets and opportunities. The theme of the battle is: who will be the standard platform for the cloud computing kingdom?

The stakes are huge, not least because utility computing costs are growing fast. Like the previous operating system, this is a life-and-death war, the focus of contention is running on the cloud platform on the application of control.

Amazon Web Services: the throne is undisputed

Amazon's web Services (AWS) has a rudimentary lead. AWS provides an expanding set of peripherals, such as block storage, load balancing, and content delivery networks, on top of its core elastic computing cloud (Elastic Compute Cloud). In 2011, AWS grew 80% and revenues were estimated at nearly $1 billion trillion, and the market outlook for cloud services could be seen. In a recent meeting with 22 CEOs, I asked how many of them were using AWS: everyone raised their hands.

Microsoft Azure: Microsoft's double-edged sword

Great desktop subversion is taking place. Desktop applications are being replaced one by one with the same cloud services, office, accounting, and even photo editing. These services absorb features that are inherently supported by the server-centric architecture of clouds such as seamless sync across devices (Evernote), social networking, real-time collaboration (Zendesk, Google apps).

For the desktop of the traditional hegemony of Microsoft, the cloud platform is of course a threat. But opportunities coexist. Microsoft also has a strategic leverage over the transition from the current dominant desktop to the new cloud frontier. Microsoft can help desktop developers who are already familiar with their programming APIs and running environments to extend their applications. Similarly, it is relatively easy to make Microsoft's customer base evolve smoothly into cloud services. So it's a little late for Microsoft to enter the cloud platform with Azure, but it has a commanding advantage. The question for Microsoft is how to wield the double-edged sword to kill the enemy and avoid self-inflicted wounds.

Google App Engine: stall platform

Google is the early leader in developing apps for consumers, and Google's app suite is the best known. But Google is slightly less successful in developing its own cloud Platform App engine for developers. As with the operating system, the cloud platform can be successful if you can provide the right tools for application developers.

Compared with Microsoft's Azure and Amazon Web Service, APP engine's developer tools are more advanced, more Google-bound and more restrictive. Only the selected programming language is supported, and there are restrictions on back-end storage. The result is that app engine is less receptive to serious developers.

While Google's ability to create its own cloud services is strong and its presence in the client ecosystem is growing with Android, it needs to shift gears if it wants to compete with others on the cloud platform.

EMC's strengths: The Power of data Trust

EMC is the last competitive big player. Unlike Amazon, Microsoft and Google, EMC is far away from the consumer side of it, with the main focus on business. The fundamental advantage of EMC is data. Its servers have hosted valuable data for some of the world's largest enterprises. This is a powerful strategic advantage because data is both the core of cloud value and the source of its vulnerabilities.

The cloud is essentially a data operating system (like Tim O ' Reilly's assessment of the Internet). The value of cloud services is connectivity-through e-mail, social media, business dashboards, and the digital pulse that vibrates the entire planet.

But the increased connectivity of the data also poses a risk of vulnerability, and there must be more and more violations of consumer privacy. It is difficult for an enterprise to assess the sensitivity of data security. The value of data is unique, is irreplaceable enterprise assets, its loss can not be measured by money.

EMC has won the trust of demanding businesses to reassure them that their data will be delivered to EMC. EMC can leverage this trust. As opposed to Amazon's public cloud, EMC offers a virtual private cloud (VPC), and EMC is smart enough to realize that the word "public cloud" is similar to "communal toilets" and "public pools" for corporate executives.

Changeable, foregone soar

The Battle of the kings of the cloud platform is of paramount importance, as it is the result of the duel, which is the winner of the game. Once a start-up has put its data on Amazon's S3 storage service, it would also be a good choice to deploy its own Hadoop cluster on Amazon (lower bandwidth costs), as well as collaboration with other service providers already on Amazon.

The risk of being locked into a platform has enabled some of the development of open source standards for cloud computing, most notably OpenStack, which has been supported by IBM, Rackspace and HP.

Who can become the market overlord depends on its development momentum, migration costs, security and the friendliness of developers (API design, standards, documentation) of the comprehensive contest. The winners will be the next generation of primary cloud applications and services based operating systems, and will receive substantial material rewards.

No matter who wins, visionary companies can continue to enjoy the benefits of storage, computing, and network virtualization from cloud operating systems, while being able to focus their creativity on the technology stack. The result will be a blossoming of service-oriented start-ups that will have disruptive effects on existing technology companies and the economy as a whole, and the show is just beginning.

Article from 36 Krypton

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)