I'm a cloud architect (a person who assembles cloud computing systems from components). I haven't used OpenStack; I've looked at it and while the concept is fine, the implementation is pretty underwhelming. Corps just want it because if widely adopted, it will reduce their cost and increase their profit margins.
Don't forget the SOAP era; it also resembles CORBA. There was a whole region of time (~2002-2005) where Microsoft and IBM jumped on SOAP. They promoted the hell out of their stacks, and then, after everybody realized SOAP was a turd, put the projects in deprecated mode.
The next step in evolution was JSON payloads over HTTP, with methods defined using REST. This model has more or less survived for 10 years now, and is a community-created (rather than top-down-imposed by a corporation) system that has lots of experience under its belt. I expect only marginal changes at this point: move towards a more compact encoding (like BSON) and a bit more standardization on where the RPC method is defined. I expect REST itself, being so hard to understand, will only be used by people who really insist on getting their API surfaces really RESTy.
SOAP itself was Microsoft's attempt to wrest momentum away from Java, and get people to pay attention to .NET, which modestly succeeded.
It also was a the final turd that broke bullshit mountain's forces: ultimately, developers had to figure out what mattered more to the Web's success: was it tagged data (HTML/XML), and we could preserve this distributed component/object conceptual model? Or was it the combination of URI+HTTP with its uniform interface and hypermedia? The REST debate took a long time (through 2007) to answer that, even though in practice with JSON we just pretend to adopt the full architecture.
I think the next revolution in REST would be if a new media type and associated toolkits/libraries come out that helps people build simpler and evolvable systems than JSON does. There are a variety of experiments out there, but as you imply, it's hard work.
I too am a "self-declared" cloud architect...mainly Azure and Windows-based platforms for Fortune 500 companies that want MS-based cloud architectures for Exchange, SharePoint, MSSQL, and Dynamics. Sorry, but other than setting it up in a lab for my own interest and tinkering, I have not had a Client request OpenStack or any OSS if they are implementing a Microsoft technology-based cloud or hybrid-cloud architecture. Not to say F-500 companies don't use Open Source, but OSS is typically not utilized in every cloud or on-prem environment.
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I'm a cloud architect (a person who assembles cloud computing systems from components). I haven't used OpenStack; I've looked at it and while the concept is fine, the implementation is pretty underwhelming. Corps just want it because if widely adopted, it will reduce their cost and increase their profit margins.
Don't forget the SOAP era; it also resembles CORBA. There was a whole region of time (~2002-2005) where Microsoft and IBM jumped on SOAP. They promoted the hell out of their stacks, and then, after everybody realized SOAP was a turd, put the projects in deprecated mode.
http://www.ianfoster.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/0... (page 23).
The next step in evolution was JSON payloads over HTTP, with methods defined using REST. This model has more or less survived for 10 years now, and is a community-created (rather than top-down-imposed by a corporation) system that has lots of experience under its belt. I expect only marginal changes at this point: move towards a more compact encoding (like BSON) and a bit more standardization on where the RPC method is defined. I expect REST itself, being so hard to understand, will only be used by people who really insist on getting their API surfaces really RESTy.
I concur.
SOAP itself was Microsoft's attempt to wrest momentum away from Java, and get people to pay attention to .NET, which modestly succeeded.
It also was a the final turd that broke bullshit mountain's forces: ultimately, developers had to figure out what mattered more to the Web's success: was it tagged data (HTML/XML), and we could preserve this distributed component/object conceptual model? Or was it the combination of URI+HTTP with its uniform interface and hypermedia? The REST debate took a long time (through 2007) to answer that, even though in practice with JSON we just pretend to adopt the full architecture.
I think the next revolution in REST would be if a new media type and associated toolkits/libraries come out that helps people build simpler and evolvable systems than JSON does. There are a variety of experiments out there, but as you imply, it's hard work.
"concept is fine, the implementation is pretty underwhelming", care to expand?
I find it odd that a self-declared cloud architect hasn't used what is easily the largest growing IAAS project, free or commercial.
I have access to other clouds which provide the openstack functionality, without me having to adopt openstack.
I don't think we have accurate visibiliy into EC2 to compare its rate of growth compared to OpenStack.
OpenStack isn't IaaS. It's a PaaS middleware that abstracts the underlying IaaS.
I too am a "self-declared" cloud architect...mainly Azure and Windows-based platforms for Fortune 500 companies that want MS-based cloud architectures for Exchange, SharePoint, MSSQL, and Dynamics. Sorry, but other than setting it up in a lab for my own interest and tinkering, I have not had a Client request OpenStack or any OSS if they are implementing a Microsoft technology-based cloud or hybrid-cloud architecture. Not to say F-500 companies don't use Open Source, but OSS is typically not utilized in every cloud or on-prem environment.
Edit: a bit more clarity