﻿ Sun exec: Future cloud apps will not need humans | ZDNet

Sun exec: Future cloud apps will not need humans

Summary: Sun's Lew Tucker foresees cloud apps that are entirely self-sufficient, but says they must be unified and driven by a compatible set of protocols in order to create a global cloud of clouds


Topics: Cloud, Networking



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  • What a goof

    This guy should stop making up nonsensical works, like "appcentric", and think in terms of real business. All the "cloud" allows for is decentralizing of infrastructure. The partitioning and scaling of application functionality lays within the software design itself.
  • Cloud, the opposite of decentralised

    For my money, decentralised would mean people self hosting all of their own resources except the raw data comms and using secure interoperability standards to link to the relevant bits of their correspondents systems. The Cloud as an approach infers massive data centres with everyone's stuff all gathered together under one roof. This really is not decentralisation and furthermore has always struck me as a monumentally bad idea for a huge array of reasons.

    The overwhelming majority of businesses in this country, and that's high 90s percent, are small and micro sized affairs. Much as they make a load of noise in the press and the corridors of power, the large concerns are far less important than they would have us think. As far as I'm concerned, they can arrange their data however they please. I am however, deeply concerned that the small businesses of this country will fall for the hype and entrust their data to these disasters waiting to happen.
    Andrew Meredith
  • Well...

    If all the big company's decide to pursue a path of interoperability so that the end users can either move, merge, branch, and manage there data as painlessly as possible across the greater cloud spectrum, then yup I think thats the way to go.

    But the real danger is when these company's start to patent and proprietary each and every single step they discover along the way, ultimately the only thing that they will achieve is locking each other into a stalemate position taking us all with them.
  • Still not decentralised

    Breaking the system up into a small number of centralised data repositories still doesn't make it decentralised; however interoperable they are. You are still trusting your life blood data to some faceless corporation that genuinely doesn't give a fig about you as an individual customer.

    It's amazing how people have been snow blinded by the big corporations into thinking that big and central is the only way to go. Small, distributed and smart is how the internet was designed and what made it a success. The designers deliberately avoided the pre-information-age "Make it big and put it all here" model for reasons of system integrity and security. Why do we suddenly believe that they had it all wrong when this approach has created the largest computer network ever conceived and moreover one that has stayed up for decades now. Sure, bits of it have come down, but never the whole lot.

    What is needed is the ability for businesses and householders to easily put together their own cloudlets, and for them to interoperate with other cloudlets belonging to their business partners, suppliers, customers, friends, family, whatever. This way your data remains *your* data. it doesn't get accidentally lost, trafficked across international borders, data mined for "Legal Market Research", accidentally exposed to the world or any other of the kinds of FUBAR that we read of in these pages every day.
    Andrew Meredith
  • It will...

    The thing to remember here is that this is still uncharted territory and techs are still in the process of being developed for it along with universal formats to be agreed upon, as per usual its the big company's that will take the first steps into these areas mainly because they have the resources to do so.

    Its not to say that smaller cloudlets won't appear I believe they will indeed appear, and as you say people will have a choice of where and how there data will be managed, I don't think many if any at all small business will risk venturing into this field yet as its still early days.

    I also believe that the underlining (yet to be discovered) format of choice will be derived from an open source background, and I think the big corporations also believe this hence why a some are becoming more active in open source fields.

    The risk here is that some of them may try to lock down parts of the open source community's working in these fields, for personal gains later on down the road.
  • Exactly


    I couldn't agree with this bit more. This is indeed a huge danger. In the same way that M$ have had an almost total strangle hold on the office document editor market, by means of their closed and infinitely mutating .doc "standard"; another company, God forbid maybe even M$ again, manages to shanghai the "Cloud Interoperability" protocol, whatever that turns out to be. Then we have another couple of decades of turgid progress while another few hundreds of billions worth of resource gets drained into yet another "richest man in the world"'s pocket.
    Andrew Meredith