ReadWriteWeb

Today's links include some thoughts from Bruce Schneier on surveillance, the latest update from OpenStack on community work and a post from Neelie Kroes (vice president of the European Commission) about cloud computing and data protection reform. Also, an easy blackout plugin for WordPress for sites participating in the SOPA/PIPA protest on January 18th.

One of the nice things about following cloud technologies and virtualization? It's never boring, especially given how new cloud technologies are. That means that there's plenty of room for change, and ample speculation about where the industry is going. While we usually spend time reporting on what's just happened and the impact it will have in the near future, the end of the year gives us an opportunity to pull out the crystal ball and think about what's coming in the year ahead. In short, my forecast for 2012 calls for consolidation, continued domination of Amazon Web Services and scattered patent suits.

The main functions for services like Dropbox and Box.net are simple sharing and, to a limited degree, collaboration. Multiple parties can share access to a cloud-based storage device that's easier to set up than a networked drive. That helps small and medium-sized businesses as much as it helps consumers. But businesses, including even smaller ones, are encountering a need far outside the realm of consumer desire: They're starting to utilize big databases that go way beyond the size or scope of individual files.

This is where an object storage system could come into play. It's a way for data to be symmetrically clustered across multiple devices, utilizing a self-optimizing storage map that keeps data replicated, but never bottled up in the same place. We've seen such a system in OpenStack. One commercial alternative is from a company called Caringo, and is called CAstor. This month, an Israel-based company called CTERA Networks, Ltd. has adapted its appliance-based "Dropbox for SMBs" to support CAStor, in an effort to make object storage and backup more of a turnkey process.

OpenStack release manager Thierry Carrez examines OpenStack Nova's current privilege model and how it's being improved with the root_helper option.

Right now, OpenStack uses sudo to escalate privileges when it needs to run a root command. The problem with this, says Thierry, is that sudo doesn't provide a way to efficiently filter commands, which could be used to exploit systems.

Eucalyptus was once "the" open source cloud computing project. It was the core of Ubuntu's cloud strategy, and more or less the only game in town. Unfortunately, it was not a particularly open project. While most of the code was available under an open source license, it wasn't developed in the open and failed to develop much of a community. Eucalyptus Systems is hoping Greg DeKoenigsberg can fix that.

If customers won't come to Rackspace, then Rackspace will simply have to go to the customers. Rackspace announced today that it's going to be offering a "private edition" of OpenStack to companies looking to manage a private cloud.

Rackspace has long been known for its "fanatical support" of customers inside its datacenter, but is it ready to provide support outside its walls? Is OpenStack really ready for production use? I talked to Rackspace's Mark Collier today to try to find out.

The big story in the open source cloud these days is OpenStack. Rackspace's baby is sucking all the oxygen out of the room when it comes to attention, but what about the first, and production-ready, open source cloud computing platform? You might think that Eucalyptus is in dire straits with companies joining OpenStack en masse, but that's not the case. I spoke with Eucalyptus CEO Mårten Mickos at length yesterday, and he seems very sanguine about its prospects.

This week, SUSE announced that it had joined OpenStack and today the company announced a development preview of SUSE Cloud which is powered by OpenStack. With the green team at SUSE behind OpenStack, along with Canonical, does that make OpenStack the de facto open source cloud? Not so fast – I wouldn't count Red Hat out just yet.

Last March, a new company called Gemini Mobile Technologies initiated an innovative, cloud-hosted database platform service, where objects are stored in Gemini's cloud and customers pay only for the space consumed. That service is now called Cloudian; and earlier this week, Gemini took the second step toward achieving competitive par with big names like Oracle Database Cloud Service.

Thanks to a new partnership between Gemini and the community supporting OpenStack, the open source cloud operating system, developers building applications for OpenStack can utilize the existing API for Amazon S3, the cloud storage access platform, to connect those applications with Cloudian multi-tenant NoSQL databases.

OpenStack is going to be taking another major step in open governance next year. According to Rackspace, the time has come to form an OpenStack Foundation. Rackspace president Lew Moorman will be discussing an OpenStack Founation during the "state of the union talk" tomorrow at the OpenStack Conference in Boston.

Why now? Today I spoke with Rackspace's Mark Collier and Jonathan Bryce, and their response was that now is the time given the level of contributions from other companies.