Topic: Clouds for business? (Maybe for the home too?)

[Nemesis]

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Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu project, has christened the next iteration of its Linux distro. It's called the Karmic Koala, and he says that the future release, due in October as Ubuntu 9.10, will have features that allow companies to build their own compute clouds.

AMI is short for Amazon Machine Image, and it is basically a rev of an operating system and software stack that can be deployed atop the Xen hypervisor used by Amazon for the EC2 cloud and its related storage services.

Ubuntu 9.10 is not only going to make it easier to deploy Ubuntu on the Amazon EC2 cloud, but will also tap a set of open source cloud management tools, appropriately called Eucalyptus, that are being developed at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Shuttleworth admitted to that his cloud speak sounded "open" and "nebulous," and he said that the feature set for clouding computing for Ubuntu 9.10 would be hammered out the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Barcelona, which runs from May 25 through 29.

The Eucalyptus project is actually an acronym that stands for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems, which explains why UCSB should be banned from naming anything for at least five years.

With the way talk has been about "cloud computing" being linked to online providers I haven't been a big fan of it.   I dislike the idea of ceding control of your data and programs to a 3rd party and relying on an internet connection to access them.  One of the problems is how can you be sure you can migrate your data to a new service if the old one goes out of business, does not offer the services you want or just gets too expensive?

With your own cloud you can avoid that while still having the centralized control of things and centralized backup of your applications and data.  With an open system like this the data formats will be open too allowing migration to new platforms without data loss.  Also you can add programs that the original developer may not have thought of or have the inclination to build.