Bret Piatt

I’m going to break this post up into two sections, the first will discuss public clouds and their features focused on advanced networking as an example.  The second portion will look at the future of cloud computing hardware — both networking and computing.

Public Clouds and Feature Selection

A discussion started on Twitter today after Werner Vogels (@Werner) tweeted about the future of networking through a blog post by James Hamilton entitled, “Networking: The Last Bastion of Mainframe Computing”.  Christopher Hoff hasn’t been thrilled (understatement of 2009) with the networking features provided by cloud computing platforms both public and private.  Unless I misunderstood his tweet he’d love to hear public cloud providers commit to a flexible API driven networking layer using technology such as OpenFlow.

I tossed back a question asking, “Are customers willing to pay for complex network customization in a cloud? If so, what percentage of them? Thoughts?” and he replied, “In terms of paying for parity in what I can do in even a basic enterprise today? No thanks. That’s on you as a provider in long term”.  I threw this question out because here-in lies the problem… Public clouds will only end up with the features that a broad market will pay for or a small market will pay a very significant premium for.  The reason behind this is when a cloud adds a core feature, it adds it everywhere.  This leads providers to only invest in new features that a enough of their customers are interested in to offset the cost of deployment and still yield a satisfactory return on capital.

Today at Rackspace customers that want advanced networking configurations are directed to our Private Cloud platform (I say our because I’m employed by Rackspace — the opinions expressed here however are mine alone).  They can then create security zones, use IPS/IDS, and enable enhanced DDoS defense services all behind dedicated firewalls and load balancers.  The private cloud environment can have bridged network segments that connect to a public Rackspace Cloud Servers(tm) configuration for workloads that do not require advanced networking.  The current addressable market interested in both public cloud as a primary platform and advanced networking is small.  The early adopter group of start-ups and SMBs doesn’t typically need or is not willing to pay for advanced networking and the enterprises that are willing generally aren’t first movers on new technology.

As the public cloud market matures the addressable market will grow and you’ll start to see public cloud providers adding advanced networking capabilities though the cloud definition of “advanced” won’t ever be truly “cutting edge” on a mass market cloud.  I expect we’ll see niche clouds emerge that will cater to specific application use cases that will have advanced features for their target customer.  Early examples of this are Force.com or the OpSource Cloud.

The Future of Cloud Computing Hardware

I’m now going to loop back to James’s post that kicked this whole thing off where he compared the current network device situation to mainframe and the vertical scale centralized systems.  He asserted that we’ll see a commoditization of the networking layer similar to what we’ve seen in the storage layer through technologies like RAID and through servers with x86.  The reason RAID and x86 have been successful is they are multi-purpose with the capabilities to serve a broad range of applications well with proper configuration.

Networking gear is very different because the workloads are all uniform and when you have a uniform workload an ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) or a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) that has is tailored to a specific type of workload will enable better performance per dollar.  The second core difference between the server/storage markets and networking is once you step into the “carrier/cloud class” networking equipment only a few hundred potential customers exist — markets with fewer stronger customers tend to be more consolidated.  Networking gear has also been “cloud like” for over a decade now.  Lets look at the NIST requirements for a cloud:

On-demand self-service - This requirement is for a cloud to user relationship.  I’ll translate this to a network cloud to network engineer relationship.  For them, all carrier class networking gear supports SNMP along with other potential programmable configuration methods through management systems with APIs such as the Cisco Configuration Engine [PDF].

Rapid elasticity – This dates back to frame-relay where the concepts of a CIR (Committed Information Rate) was introduced.  The space has continually evolved with QoS being introduced on ATM up through the advanced dynamic algorithmic traffic routing today over IP/MPLS networks.

Resource pooling - Doing this for computing is new outside of the HPC market — telecommunication networks have been multi-tenant since the point the 3rd phone was hooked up over 100 years ago.

Measured Service – Networking has been doing this for years as well, down to the minute or byte of data instead of the hour or GB (the smallest unit of measure any public cloud compute or storage platform bills in).

Sun Oracle Database Machine

Broad network access – Service provider IP networks are the ultimate in heterogeneous access through standards based communication.  They support connectivity over a number of layer 1 physical mediums using quite a few layer 2 communication protocols.

Cloud computing may actually end up bringing the server market closer to the current networking market than vice versa.  An IBM Z-series is capable of very efficiently Linux instances.  It also supports I/O virtualization for both networking and storage with granular controls — features we still don’t have at the same quality level from x86 virtualization solutions.  The Oracle Exadata V2 is another example, it supports 1 million I/O per second for non-sequential workloads on databases up to 140TB in size.  How many commodity x86 servers does it take to match either of those configurations and how do they compare in capex and TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) to the IBM or Oracle specialized platforms?  We see even specialized x86 platforms being developed and deployed by a number of players.  Some examples are the Cisco UCS, SGI Ice Cube, and the Sun Modular Datacenter.  These platforms are all designed to optimize spend for virtualization/cloud computing workloads and while they may be made up of x86 sub-components they are designed to function as a complete “mainframe” functional unit.

Conclusions

We’re still very early in the technology transition to a full utility style computing grid.  As the transition progresses we’ll see more use cases served by a broader range of features.  For the small verticals with complex configuration needs and a low willingness to pay a premium we’ll see niche providers.

Networking hardware has been cloud like for more than a decade and a few major players dominate the market because of the small number of strong buyers.  Technologies such as OpenFlow in combination with Moore’s law has the potential to disrupt the market but this isn’t a guarantee.  The current clouds being built using a massive number of commodity x86 systems is also not guaranteed to be the future — specialized computing platforms have the potential to deliver better unit economics and in a commodity business it will come down to the financials in the end.