Storage and Computing "on the cloud"
"Cloud services" such as online storage and computing resources have become a popular topic recently, with major players like Microsoft, Google and Amazon offering the use of fractions of their respective server farms to users. Amazon's Web Services (
http://www.amazon.com/webservices ) appears to be the heavyweight so far, offering unlimited computing and storage capacity and no monthly minimum service charges – you pay for what you actually use. However, it is oriented toward developers, not the regular consumer. Amazon's service is divided into a number of different functions developers might need, such as virtual computing environments, simple database querying, storage and a message queue service. These services are fully operational, not limited beta programs. Google's App Engine (
http://code.google.com/appengine/) is also available to developers, making Google's computing infrastructure available to them using Google's development tools. Google's App Engine is available only on a limited basis at this time.
A small sub-industry is developing around making developer-oriented resources like Amazon's available to consumers. Developers of products such as JungleDisk (
http://jungledisk.com/ ) an online backup and storage application, and DropBox ( currently in beta,
http://www.getdropbox.com/ ), a content sharing and collaboration tool, write consumer-friendly front-ends to interface with Amazon's underlying cloud infrastructure.
Consumer-oriented storage services are also available. Microsoft's SkyDrive (
http://skydrive.live.com/ ), Microsoft's Live Mesh (coming soon -
http://mesh.com), AOL's Xdrive (
http://www.xdrive.com/ ) and Yahoo's Briefcase (
http://briefcase.yahoo.com/ ) are four examples from major players. These services are free, though storage space is limited (SkyDrive - 5GB, Live Mesh - 5GB, Xdrive - 5GB, Briefcase - 30MB) and allow users to upload files directly to the service, almost as if the service were an additional hard drive available to the user.
It will be interesting to see to what extent users and developers are willing to allow a third party store and manage their data and computing processes. One huge benefit to doing so is that users and developers have access to virtually unlimited computing and storage resources, available on-demand, which is paid for as it is used. No need to invest in your own server farm. It is unclear at this point whether any FOSS licensing issues will arise as a result of a user's local application interfacing with a cloud-based computing resource. For pure storage-type applications there doesn't appear to be any potential for FOSS licensing conflicts, but it is possible that a cloud-based infrastructure resource that plays a significant role in a tightly integrated computing process including local computing resources may warrant consideration of such licensing issues.
-Kevin Howard
References:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/15...res-my-gdrive/
http://blog.jungledisk.com/2008/05/0...ters-the-fray/
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/..._and_glassfish
Απο:
http://gpl3.blogspot.com/