On Wed, 2013-03-20 at 21:50 +0000, Michael Dorrington wrote:
> SaaS is being discussed here and I do understand what all this is
> about.
The thread was more about IaaS, which is similar but slightly different
to PaaS/SaaS. The difference between IaaS and the other two is the
percentage of the parts of the service that you are in control of.
IaaS leaves a much greater proportion of this in your hands.
I like the buildings analogy for this stuff:
Having a private cloud is like owning a bunch of buildings on your own
land and keeping most of them empty most of the time.
Putting some servers into a data-centre is like owning a bunch of
buildings built on land rented from someone else.
Using IaaS (public cloud) is like renting an empty building with the
usual utilities; electricity, water, gas.
Using PaaS is like renting a pre-furnished room in a building.
Using SaaS is like visiting the library, post office or a restaurant.
Everyone makes a trade-off when they decide where in the spectrum they
feel comfortable with. It is all about asking yourself the question "am
I free enough?". Every choice is valid but some are more risky than
others and it all comes down to our trust in society. In this day and
age the majority of people choose proprietary CPU designs, prebuilt
computers, proprietary software, SaaS, renting a room and eating out.
Then society lets them down in various ways; CPU bugs, hardware
keyloggers, unfixable security bugs, vendor lock-in, cockroaches, food
poisoning and so on. We should remind people of the risks of their
choices and try to move them to better options. Use identica, not
twitter. Use Drupal hosting not proprietary CMSes. Use Debian on your
public cloud host, not Windows. Put ARM based computers in the
datacentre, not x86 (BIOS). Use hardware with open designs. Use
OpenRISC/LM32/OpenSPARC CPUs not ARM or x86.
In IaaS/PaaS/SaaS there is someone else in control of and owning the
hardware running the service, with all the freedom, privacy and security
issues that that entails. Personally, I find this the most scary part of
current trends in computing and have seen several instances of trust
violations by data-centre hosting providers even in the era before cloud
computing even became a buzzword.
On a related note, in all cases above, the building design is secret and
not modifiable, best you can do is replace the building with another
proprietary building. It makes me very sad that RMS and the FSF seem to
be OK with proprietary hardware designs. As said[1] by the Fabricatorz:
"The difficulty that hardware presents to our freedoms makes the issue
more important, not less." Also from Alan Kay: "People who are really
serious about software should make their own hardware."
1. http://fabricatorz.com/2012/03/wise-futures-and-shared-hardware-part-i/
--
bye,
pabs
http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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