Technologies over 10 years old have been re-branded “cloud computing”, blurring the lines of what cloud computing actually is. Is it new or innovative? Is it just re-branding of existing technologies?
These are the questions posed by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison during his first keynote at his company's 2010 OpenWorld event, held in San Francisco this week.
Ellison says there are several ways that cloud computing is perceived. Some see it as an application program that runs on the Internet, some see cloud computing as a platform for building applications.
According to Ellison, this is like looking at Salesforce.com, which he says is an application that is accessed over the Internet, and Amazon EC2, a platform upon which applications are built, and a very different proposition altogether.
He said Amazon popularised the term cloud computing. “Its technology is virtualised. When you utilise the cloud, you have a number of virtual machines to do the job for you. Faults are isolated. Different customers run on different virtual environments. As you need more resources, you get them. Capacity can be added by means of additional servers, and customers only pay for what they use.”
On the other hand, Ellison says, Salesforce.com is essentially two applications that run on the Internet. It is not virtualised. “Thousands of customers mingle their data on the same database. It is certainly not a platform, and is a weak security model.
“There is no isolation by virtualisation. There is no virtualisation at all. It is not secure, it is not elastic. It cannot be dynamically added to. It is priced not based on usage, but by the number of users. Please understand that it is very different from the elastic compute cloud from Amazon. If you want to call it cloud computing though, please do.
“Needless to say,” said Ellison, “Oracle agrees with Amazon.com. We believe cloud computing is a platform. On that platform you run software, databases, application development tools, it's a comprehensive development and execution environment. It must be elastic, it must be virtualised.”
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