If you’re like me and you like to read about the latest emerging tech stuff, you’ve probably noticed all the debate around these “stack wars”.  There is a lot of movement to embrace this evolving concept of cloud interoperability.  The debate is around what will be the winning standard for legions of infrastructures around the world.  Cloud computing is digging deep into the enterprise and one of the further issues being raised beyond just cloud portability is how to answer the struggles of integrating older applications with new cloud-based apps.  That’s where we see these names come on, OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus, OpenNebula and the companies backing this side or that like Rackspace, Amazon AWS, IBM, and so on.

Momentum

OpenStack seems to have a lot of momentum going for it right now.  One very public example had PayPal moving their platforms recently to OpenStack, and has built up their operations into the thousands of servers, with an operating base of hundreds of developers working with this architecture.  XFINITY, Comcast – whichever one goes first, they’ve moved to OpenStack as well.  There is still a lot of turmoil it seems.  Very recently an OpenStack Manifesto-type letter from Randy Bias hit the internet and it challenged the movement to embrace Amazon’s AWS APIs.  It received a lot of attention, mainly because the underlying argument says the fortunes of OpenStack in the public cloud market were not good and that if this private cloud technology is to survive, it will have to be by embracing interoperability with Amazon AWS and Google Compute Engine.

Has this Open war lost its focus on customers?

So while this debate rages on, one cloud pioneer, a CEO and his company,  has stepped forward to challenge the debate entirely.  Emil Sayegh, the CEO of Codero Hosting, asks the question – Does Open Cloud Really Matter That Much?

I hear so many people talk about the “open cloud” as if it was some sort of panacea. It seems for some the “open” label matters so much now that it supersedes anything truly meaningful to the customer. Too many hosting vendors are talking about openness on cloud as if it’s the ONLY thing that matters. The question is – does “open” really matter that much in the long term? Mind you, my team and I, among others, are the ones that came up with the concept of open sourcing the Rackspace Cloud, which later led to OpenStack…….is an Open Cloud more important than a high performance cloud? Is it more important than a Secure Cloud? Is it more important than a cost-effective cloud? Is it more important than a Cloud that works? Is it more important than a Hybrid Cloud? All the data out there seems to indicate that Open is important, but not the most important criteria to customers.

Why RackSpace Went Open

Sayegh continues with the roots of Rackspace and open-source, stating that the engineering management decision at the time was made to foster an instant and hungry worldwide development team in order to bring new competitive features, and nothing that was marketing-focused.  He further states that the key to all of this is in coding, using good APIs to do the things you need to get done, and in proven migration techniques.  He later points out that operability is better addressed on the functionality of your cloud solution, on whether the scalability and flexibility features that are the most compelling features of cloud computing are being used, and how well it performs.  These thought provoking points parallel the Codero proposition and the path they are on when they deliver no-nonsense high performance hosting and cloud solutions to thousands of customers.

As they say on the internet – a challenger appears!  And Codero is saying Open? – How about a cloud that works well in the first place?  As the enterprise continues to work on these interoperability challenges, and as these various competing standards are trying to align to answer them, it gets even more complicated with a rising tide of mobile and social applications that have high performance demands.  Cloud management is a big deal and the term cloud agility has come into the lexicon because of this open movement.  Proper cloud management can speed the development of new applications, it can help address cloud consumption , it can help lower costs –Codero’s Sayegh doesn’t dismiss these things, but he does prescribe high performance and a customized customer-centric approach to cloud computing.  After all, one size doesn’t fit all.