Thursday, February 26, 2009

A Good Vision For School IT, Too

Simon Wardley

At Canonical, the company that sponsors and supports Ubuntu, we intend to provide our users with the ability to build their own clouds whilst promoting standards for the cloud computing space. We want to encourage the formation of competitive marketplaces for cloud services with users having choice, freedom, and portability between providers. In a nutshell, and with all due apologies to Isaac Asimov, our aim is to enable our users with 'Three Rules Happy' cloud computing. That is to say:

  • Rule 1: I want to run the service on my own infrastructure.

  • Rule 2: I want to easily migrate the service from my infrastructure to a cloud provider and vice versa with a few clicks of a button.

  • Rule 3: I want to easily migrate the service from one cloud provider to another with a few clicks of a button.

I would note that this model makes a lot of sense for school administration apps that could be run 90% of the time on locally hosted servers, with commercial "cloud" instances deployed only as necessary at peak times (enrollment, report cards, etc.).

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