Holy cows and puppies: Most cloud analogies make no sense, says Citrix chief cloud advocate Reuven Cohen.
We within the technology sector love analogies. We like to explain the newest trends via historical parallels to transfer meaning from one subject to a different via this linguistic crutch. It’s long been the central method we’ve used to teach the uninformed concerning the benefits of a brand new or possibly hyped technology. The approach generally starts with something like “The tech is like something else, only better.” Commonly, it is not anything like what it’s being in comparison to. My proposal is understated. It is time for us to forestall using analogies to market technology.
Cloud computing, which itself is an analogy or possibly a metaphor wrapped in a euphemism, has seen greater than its fair proportion of linguistic tricks applied to it over time. Many of the more frequent is the so-called “power grid” analogy. It goes like this, “Cloud computing is like plugging right into a central power grid rather than generating your individual power.” OK, don’t love that one? There’s always the thermostat analogy, “Cloud computing is like giving your IT department thermostats that they may activate, up, down, or off in keeping with their needs. Need extra processing power to hide your peak period? Crank it up — after which turn it down if you end up finished.”
Except, it’s not.
The latest during this long line of analogies is the thought of treating your infrastructure components like cattle, against pets. Recently, the thought have been promoted on various blogs and was first described by Joshua McKenty, CTO and co-founding father of Piston Cloud. “The servers in today’s data center are like puppies — they have got names, and once they get ill, everything grinds to a halt when you nurse them back to health,” said McKenty.
He goes directly to describe his OpenStack distro, among the many, as “a system for managing your servers like cattle. You number them, and after they get ill and you have got to shoot them within the head, the herd can keep moving. It takes a family of 3 to take care of a single puppy, but a number of cowboys can drive tens of thousands of cows over great distances, all while drinking whiskey.”
[Desire to learn more about misused cloud terms? See Cutting Throughout the Hype On PaaS.]
So let me get this straight. We’re purported to be capable of shoot our servers within the head while drinking whiskey and still effectively manage our infrastructure? Or are we speculated to slaughter them within the datacenter for a major cut of beef? I’m so confused.
Arguably the OpenStack community was the worst at generating a large number of analogies to explain the framework. Among them is the concept OpenStack is somehow the “Linux” of the cloud-computing world. Except, again, it’s not.
In a blog post, SUSE community marketing manager Brian Proffitt explained a number of the differences. “The origins of Linux are grounded inside the rather organic growth of the free software Linux kernel, which was plugged along side compilers and other pieces of software to form the Linux operating system. This was an excessively grassroots movement, which might only later attract the interest and resources of bigger corporate players,” said Proffitt.
“The origins of OpenStack, that have been firmly rooted in open source licenses, are very different: Also, there’s really no ‘core’ OpenStack — the platform is a conglomeration of tools that handle tasks like compute and storage. OpenStack has also been very heavily involved with larger corporate interests almost from the very start.”
If we’re to believe that projects together with OpenStack are the “Linux” of cloud, what does that make the opposite players like CloudStack or Eucalyptus? The BSD of cloud? Berkeley Standard Distribution has quietly become many of the most used, yet least hyped open-source operating systems. Among its many uses, it forms the core of Apple’s OS X operating system, making it some of the most profitable, albeit indirectly, of the open-source operating systems.
Many of you’ll likely say that my newfound disdain for technology analogies is the pot calling the kettle black. I admit, i have been some of the worst at propagating baseless analogies. Among others, I once described a musical notation application as “Google Translate for music.” (Editor’s note: Good analogy, Reuven.)
I once saw someone else’s analogy — “online surge protectors” for stopping user panics online — and adopted it: “In case you consider the weight balancer as an analogy for a standard electrical surge protector, you truly begin to see the chance for cloud bursting… utilized in much the identical way you’d use a backup power supply or perhaps a circuit breaker.”
And for that, all i will say is, I’m sorry.
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