Three Considerations to Prevent Cloud Lock-in

OSCON 2010
Presented by Mark R. Hinkle
VP of Community
www.zenoss.org
mrhinkle@gmail.com
Twitter: @mrhinkle

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 FLOSS Freedoms Prevent Software Lock-In

1. The freedom to run the program for any purpose.

2. The freedom to study how the program works, and

change it to make it do what you wish.

3. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help

your neighbor.

4. The freedom to improve the program, and release

your improvements (and modified versions in
general) to the public, so that the whole
community benefits.

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 Organizations Dedicated to Ensuring
Software Freedom and Standards

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 FLOSS Freedoms Don’t Exactly Translate to
Clouds
In the cloud you need the following freedoms to prevent lock-in
1.Freedom to move from Platform to Platform
2.Access to your Data
3.Tools that that work for all clouds or are extensible to support new platforms

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 Don’t Sacrifice Freedom for Convenience

XKCD - http://xkcd.com/743/

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 Organizations Dedicated to Cloud Freedoms

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 Platform Lock-In
• No globally recognized standard for virtual machines.
• Machine images can’t migrate seamlessly from VMware to Xen or
from Amazon to Rackspace or other cloud providers

• Open Virtualization Format – Sounds good but not yet

standard, or standardized upon
• Supported by VMware, Citrix Xen, Oracle Virtual Box,
• Filesystem emulation varies by hypervisor and OVF doesn’t seem to
require consistent filesystem emulation specs
• Ancillary services may or may not exist on other platforms (e.g.
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) or Google AppEngine (BigTable)

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 Data Lock-In
Basic Rights Cloud Users Should Consider/Demand
• No vendor should claim ownership of the data
• Vendors always shall provide at a minimum an API (most often storage
is via traditional block and file interfaces such as iSCSI or NFS)
• Customers own their data, and the security/privacy of data

Ideally, there would be a standard for a data store format or at

least an accepted Infrastructure-as-a-Surface (IaaS) API that
all vendors support.

Paraphrased from
The ‘Cloud Computing” Bill of Rights’ 2010 Edition
By James Urquhart
http://news.cnet.com/8301-19413_3-20006756-240.html

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 Tools Lock-In
User Tools must provision, configure and monitor all types of
cloud infrastructure or at least be extensible to adapt to your
cloud infrastructure:

• If management interfaces and APIs are different they can be the least
obvious gotcha (e.g. Messages from Amazon SQS, don’t exist in
RackSpace Cloud)
• Can your build tools address different target architectures?
• Configuration management tools function seamlessly across clouds
• Are migrated cloud instances still accessible to monitoring tools?

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 State of the Union
• Nascent Industry, things move fast
• Lots of open APIs, but still no true cloud portability
• Lots of proposed standards, no standardization
• Make sure you understand what you are getting into when
you choose a cloud provider

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 Once You’re Locked In, Getting Out Can get
Messy

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 Supplemental Reading
• DMTF Cloud Incubator | http://www.dmtf.org/about/cloud-incubator

• VMware OVF | http://vmware.mobi/appliances/getting-started/learn/ovf.html

• DMTF OVF Standard | http://www.dmtf.org/standards/published_documents/DSP0243_1.0.0.pdf

• Ars Technica | EMC's Atmos shutdown shows why cloud lock-in is still scary

• Zenoss Blog | Three Cloud Lock-in Considerations

• Storage Networking Industry Association | SNIA: Cloud Storage for Computing Whitepaper

• Infoworld | Why Open Source Vendors Won’t Prevent Cloud Lock-in

• National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) | Cloud Computing

• Open Grid Forum

• Oasis Identity in the Clouds Technical Committee

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