Multi-cloud computing

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Permalink Reply by Archis Gore on December 17, 2010 at 1:44am

This is the first time I'm hearing of this term. I guess that's to be expected though - everyone wants differentiation and with cloud being used by so many people, I'm sure such a term must have come up. I was glad to find out with a quick search that I'm not alone. Apparently there's only one URL that goes to multicloudcomputing.com and all other results just return cloud computing. :-)

 

What I believe (and correct me if I'm mistaken) this refers to is when an app or a service uses multiple services from different vendors. I had mentioned this once before - Cloud Computing is a design philosophy, not a technology solution, though due to commercial interests vendors want you to think it is. Just because someone's in a datacenter doesn't mean it's cloud, and just because something's on my phone doesn't mean it is not a cloud. You see, when we say "cloud" we refer to services provided behind a well-known interface, regardless of what vendor or what locality it came from (it could come from next-door, or from across the world.) The way I visualize this is, imagine you're standing outside on a cloudy day, and a voice is speaking to you from beyond the clouds. You don't know who the actors are, and you don't need to know. The difference between conventional client-server models, and the cloud models is the "you don't need to know" part which, believe it or not, makes a hell lot of a difference.

 

However, when using multiple services provided by different vendors, you do have some design issues to take care of though.

 

The biggest issue is Identity. How does anyone authenticate to anyone else, and how do I get authorization for actions across multiple services? We've not reached an ideal design pattern on this one yet, but we're trying. OpenID was quite big a couple of years ago, but even with big backing, the user experiences were less-than-desirable, and it fails to catch momentum with users. Facebook Connect is the best solution I've seen so far. You notice how you signed into Peepaal using Facebook? That's two clouds for you. Unfortunately though, Facebook is not a directory provider, and hence isn't designed for generic multi-party authentication scenarios - authenticating multiple services, users, devices to each other, and does not support federation. Then came the OAuth protocol for auth, but was too cumbersome, so we came up with OAuth WRAP. Then there is something called Federation. Say you have your auth server and I have mine. We can make an agreement, that our servers will honour each other's users, so that if your users every connected to my server, I would still authenticate them. What this enables is, if I had an app that runs partly on-premise and largely off-premise, the same auth token I obtain from my directory server can be used seamlessly with both services.

 

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