The container-cloud myth: We're not in Legoland anymore

Yikes, did we forget to connect the cloud?

But of course, Tableau is talking about connecting data sources for applications. Where firms find the real challenge now is in trying to evolve their existing apps and build new apps to take advantage of cloud architectures.

Cloud and the Big Data inside is networked via that thing we call the internet. So it should all connect together naturally, but that’s not what happens. While the connectivity engineering aspect of decoupled IT hasn’t exactly been overlooked, it now presents a significant pain point for anybody trying to make new cloud deployments look slick.

The whole point of Lego (and why it was successful in the first place) was its universal interface – the little “lugs”.

Looking at cloud and big data, the best universal portability standard we have at the moment is, of course, the Virtual Machine itself. And within this, the DMTF Open Virtualization Format (OVF) effort is a very good start – at least according to VMware, one of OVF’s primary backers, along with Microsoft, Dell and others.

But beyond that, splitting things up is a bit more complicated, as people are finding out.

The DMTF’s OVF standard provides a packaging format for software offerings based on virtual systems thereby – supposedly – solving the critical business needs for software vendors and cloud computing service providers.

Joe Baguley, VMware EMEA vice president and chief technology, said: “Looking at the stack very simplistically... you move from software-defined infrastructure in the shape of IaaS, on top of which you create VMs, and into which you then put a variety of things. Then you have containers, which are really just mini OS-dependent VMs built on top of an OS inside a VM. Then you have PaaS, which is what developers really want (e.g. CloudFoundry) which should be built on top of a set of standard VMs or containers – on which people build SaaS, which is what users want, arguably.”

Is this the rise of the APIs?

But when moving from tightly coupled to loosely-coupled architectures (which is what is happening here), the interactions between these components need to be well defined. It is the “rise of the APIs” if you will.

VM-sprawl happened because in the early days of data centre virtualisation, people got greedy on power and freedom and drank too much of it.

“If you imagine the NIST stack (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) then the job of IT going forward is to look at every service, deconstruct each service into its logical components and then look at those components and ask the question: ‘What is it about this element that is no different from any other, and what is it that makes this different from others.’"

“Different components will come to rest at different points in that stack, even within the same application or service. But without well-defined interfaces, splitting those components up or decoupling them is practically impossible,” said Baguley.

We’ll have to see whether OVF stands the test of time: whether it stands on the basis of its vendor-driven authority or falls to developer-driven alternative that achieves critical mass on the web, as has happened in the past on other fronts.

Whatever happens, the need to think about cloud Big Data interconnectivity, from APIs to containerisation, has come to the fore. ®