On February 23rd, Infoworld blogger and cloud expert David Linthicum posted an article that, until today, I had been studiously trying to prevent from playing over and over like the proverbial stuck record in my rather inquisitive mind.
My inquisition, and subsequently my inability to let this escape my attention, was not necessarily raised the screaming headline “Yahoo’s open source IaaS could up the ante in cloud services” (which in itself takes a couple of minutes to sink in – you can’t mean that Yahoo! surely ?) but more by a section toward the end of the short copy that offers this rather mind-bending punch line:
So should you care about Yahoo’s new offering?
What really matters is not that there’s a new open source cloud computing software stack but that Yahoo is providing its cloud computing software stack as open source software. This may change the expectations you have for the larger providers, such as Amazon.com and Google. And it could push them to open-source their engines.
I read the last sentence of that excerpt time and time again. Confused, I read on:
The core value to Yahoo’s move is one of protection. If you deploy your infrastructure via IaaS, you’re putting some of your IT infrastructure at risk. The cloud provider could go out of business, be mean to you and make you leave, or just become too costly. By having an open source stack as an option, some of that risk goes away, and cloud computing becomes an easier sell within the enterprise or government agency.”
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