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On Thurs 19/11, BigG released Google Chromium Source code to community while hosting an announcement/demo event.
Parallerly some high level architectural description has been as well released and the greater focus has been undubtably put to security concepts and browser role.
The leading concepts that inspired Google when conceiving Chrome Os leaves little open to the discussion and starts from the overall assumption that Chrome Os will be something new and, radically, different.
The approach of realizing something so new and push it so aggressively on the market can be considered fool (if you think how different will this be from any former commercial OS existing) or, at least, very ambitious.
Consciously enough, Big G embraced the open source model to develop this assett even if the whole licensing policy it’s not so clear, at least to me, up to now (anyway, it should be a mix of GPL for Linux kernel derivative/mixed part such as the window manager and BSD, as formerly adopted for Chrome).
The experience matured with Android demonstrated Google that commoditizing the OS and reducing BOM is the main road to create a special feeling with hardware vendors and ensure radical penetration of the OS in hardware vendors roadmaps (for those non deeply inside the mobile market, expect a 2010 full of Robots outside).
But, at the end, given that is also very well backed in terms of investments and market strategy, will it become “the new thing” as expected by much?
Chrome OS introduces lots of radical technology changes as well as some cultural ones. The fact that Chrome Os is actually a commodity to users and vendors, leaves, as said, Big G a big design freedom that, eventually, will transform the user in what really was meant to be from the start.
In fact, if the high level suggestions will be confirmed, you’ll no more be able to completely admin your computer (that is no more a “personal” physical thing): it’s actually Google, to ensure that your security and the compelling performances promised are granted, controlling the machine that runs your “personal session“. User and applications will be sandboxed, updates will be forced and signed (trusted) where considered radically needed.
To do this, Google will follow a streamlined paradigm that has been embraced, if not invented, by Apple for the iPhone: controlling what runs on your machine with certified apps (only one in case of Chrome Os actually, the browser) will grant security and performance requirements.
If they will succeed to create a convincing new user experience there’s a big chance that Chrome Os, as happened to iPhone os, will be a substantial success.
At one point, the question:
“will user give up desktop applications?”
is, IMHO, quiet old fashioned by itself. I mean, who’s a user? we have plenty of users neither knowing what a “desktop application” is! …the parallel to iPhone is back again: most of the iPhone users bought this as the first smartphone in their life and discovered the “mobile connected life” just thanks to buying an iPhone for it’s status symbol appeal.
Many people only use a browser all day (e.g terminal operators); sometimes they also use an office automation suite (already migrated to good web implementation); few of us use the so called “desktop apps” for two main use cases:
- computing intensive operations, typical to a workstation user
- apps needing to access device hardware
While for the first topic grid\nw computing solutions are well trained (think to Citrix Xen), the second one is one of the key innovation points expected to be improved by Google Chrome OS itself being also a potential reason of instability.
Transforming Chrome OS from a niche product to the new standard will be a hard but not impossible move, depending on how much of the entire technology megatrends have been intercepted by Google product thinkers.
In case they’ll succeed this will be probably fatal to a huge number of the “old world” technologies. We’ll forget Java and interpreted languages on clients; untrusted computing will be outdated as well in favour of sandboxing; distributed peer to peer systems as we know it will probably disappear (maybe I’m a bit radical on this) thanks to the central role of networks resident data.
The process of shifting user ownership from the piece of metal (personal computer) to the sensible data and computing sessions (personal computing) will eventually get onto subsidizing the Hardware via ads: is data lock in being important to Google, they’re open to pay you a pc in change of hosting your data.
Do you trust them?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/ / CC BY 2.0
http://www.flickr.com/photos/paul-w-locke/
It’s something like one month I haven’t posted on meedabyte.This doesn’t mean that nothing deserving to be on the blog was happening 
. Actually I’ve been quite absorbed from writing an interesting (fully open source powered) architecture for a Business Process Management and Business Activity Monitoring facility for a client. This activity and others eventually made some thoughts come up to my mind.
I’m starting to think that we need new tools, both theoretical and practical, to manage the process of develop “solutions” at today. I use the word solution, and not something like architecture or software, infrastructure or service. This because, from an ISV, SI, or consulting point of view., is not more a software or a service that customers are demanding. Customers demands solutions for their problems:
- that can deliver value in short terms
- needing very low upfront costs
- able to scale and adapt to hopefully growing businesses
First of all we all need to change our mindset about requirements. With less to spend you need to focus on your real requirements. From one hand it means that customers are no more willing to pay for requirements that are shared globally since such requirements, almost surely, have generated in time one or more open source communities providing an open source solution. This trend is really clear if we think about software industry: former market leaders are loosing market shares because of open source newcomers. Look to mobile OS market with Android and Symbian, or to notebooks with linux. Most often, as the last effect, the original product gets commoditized.
From the other hand, the need for less up-front costs will unavoidably lead to more exploitation of cloud services. I’ve recently found an article from Mike Brittain that was -really- like a sort of new bible to me: clearness, vision, value. The guys there actually built a service from scratch with no (or little, since at least the infrastructure management isn’t hosted by the cloud) up-front investments ending up with a “twenty minutes” service start up time Web hosting infrastructure. WOW amazing.
Think about managing more of one of this services in a complex service infrastructure. Think about managing two, three… ten. At this point we will need clouds to inter-operate. And i don’t think that the only solution is to rely on integration efforts made by cloud providers themselves. Just in case they are not going to comply we will create distributed middlewares, built with federations paradigms, and we’ll deploy them on cloud, possibly :).
At the end, I’m quite sure that a transactional based models will become more and more adopted and things like ACID, given that me made some efforts to adapt it in a distributed fashion, will be dusted out rapidly.
If we couple this with a new awareness of what are the core requirements. I we succeed to made our:
“…huge step to recognize that it’s time to get over the bias of applying so called “infrastructure 1.0″ requirements to the rules of engagement in the cloud by recognizing that many of these capabilities don’t exist in the enterprise, either…”
- thanks Chris hoff for this concept I’ve stole on RationalSecurity - we can achieve sensible results in terms of delivered value and Time To Market.
thanks and credits to Pixie Led
It’s been a few months that I’m thinking about “cloud” business. Even if the concept of SaaS is around since early 21th century thanks to visionary people like Tim O’reilly and others, if you give a look to this, it appears very clearly how, instead, “cloud computing” concept seems something that no ones comprehends completely or at least a container of lot’s of interesting things like *aaS, paravirtualization, grid computing, thin clients, etc…
Anyway, let’s try to go beyond the complexity of terms and to focus on a couple of ideas: SaaS on one hand and PaaS/IaaS on the other hand. With SaaS I actually mean a provider creating a software and then suppliyng this software “aaS” via the interent to the customer base (a good example could be SalesForce.com, a truly pioneer company or WordPress.co – even if in this case the end user is more a single person than a company). On the other hand we have PaaS/IaaS offering providing the customers with, generally, lower layers empowered by runnig on top of a cloud (data center 
), easy scaling and exposing (sometimes exclusive) API’s or performance enhancements that can differentiate from what we formarly know as an hosting service.
For what regars the SaaS/IaaS area I completely agree with Simon Wardley at Gardeviance when he says:
“The real battleground for the “cloud” has always been in building an ecosystem around the framework layer of the computing stack.”
So is a matter of enrich a traditional paravirtualization approach with new and powerful tools (like open API’s could be). Isn’t it?
Given that short distinction (I know maybe you could have different ideas) lets try to focus on the opportunities that the gives to different players on the Information Technology market.
From the End user company perspective, I believe that one of the main drivers of IaaS,PaaS is truly the cost. Who would’t agree with having the IT resources commoditized and available on-demand with no or small configuration effort? surely I’ld generally do.
Unfortunately, more or less in line with what Dennis Howlett was saying some days ago on ZDNET:
“Putting my buyer’s hat on, I want my computing infrastructure to be available on demand at the lowest possible cost. I want to drive those baseline cost efficiencies into as many of my applications as possible, but not at the expense of sacrificing or endangering security, or my ability to run a compliant set of applications. In many scenarios and especially those that are regulated, operational code ‘ownership’ is important.”
security and compliance constraints can show up really soon an made you reflect more on the choice.
Some days ago, when I was talking about this with Andrea I realized that, in fact, core services/applications are typically difficult or unworthy to “cloudized” (being erogated via a PaaS/IaaS) due to a bunch of reasons: security and privacy of the data, responsibility about system availability, code ownership and disclosure bonds.
In fact is very common that the bigger part of a solution’s (or architecture) TCO is merely represented by the data tier in itself. Normally, the data tier also is the tier most subject to constrictive security and availability/continuity rules (since, indubitably no system works without the data).
These few reasons actually could represent a blocking issue especially for customers dealing with critical infrastructures (eg: defense or public safety sector) that, on the other hand, would tipically require an adaptive infrastructure able to manage peaks and, sometimes, bursts.
Even if there is a very wide set of end customers in the Service sector that whould be interested in approaching PaaS/IaaS (having a set of less restrictive continuity/security rules) for example TELCOs, Post&Logistics or e-commerce, we must consider that, very often, such kind of customers have a pre-existing infrastructure that have been consolidated in time, often thanks to relevant investments in OSS/BSS systems and often including a relevant level of cooperation among different parts (with a strong SoA orientation) and managed by large teams with consistent knowhows and values.
Instead of focusing on the biggest customers out there, IaaS/PaaS players should concentrate on emerging companies, that from the start, should build their own infrastructures simply seeing IaaS/PaaS as one of the choices, one of the available tools. And, to be true, it’s merely what I see offered right now by MS Azure, Amazon Ec2 or Google App Engine. A powerful and appealing offering in this area should be based on openness (API’s, standards) and ecosystem (spread knowledge, create new skills for developers, engage SIs and other player as partners).
The opportunity for promoting new views when buildling an infrastructure are here, now we wait for the community to get interested, evaluate, promote, use and finally make it a standard solution to standard problems.
Obviously the ecosystem is made in itself by very different players. If we put an eye to potentially involved third parties (ISV, product companies,consulting and oustourcing firms, System Integrators) this effectively represents a big opporunity, and is a matter of vision and promptness to catch it.
I’m not so aware about US situation. I’m quite more informed about EU side, since I’m working for an European consultancy firm that is actually a leader in innovation and very well distributed across all Europe thanks ot its subsidiaries.
I could say that the overall openness to investments in Europe is not so high. IMHO this scarce availability to invest have often prevented good ideas, innovative services and propositions, reliyng on a networked infrastructure, to have their chance on the market. In fact, upfront investments, often keep the ideas sleeping until the first customers shows up and, very often, gets parially and implicitly charged of part of the CAPEX.
We can think PaaS/IaaS and Open Source software to be used from third parties to create SaaS or other offerings with lower upfront investments needed.
It will surely represents a key success factor, the ability of PaaS/IaaS providers to ensure little or no downtime in the future and to avoid that things like this show up again in the future. In fact 8 hours downtime will prevent not only critical infrastructures to exploit the IaaS/PaaS paradigm but also player used to think by a money per transaction per second paradigm.
At the end, I believe that “Cloud computing” actually represents another innovation driver, as Open Source is being more and more.
Is there an opportunity out there. We need only to catch it. And, since we’re talking about clouds, we should start thinking that sky’s the limit 
