Monday, May 12, 2008

Project Caroline: "Sweet" project, or Sun's savior?

A few days ago there was significant coverage of Project Caroline, Sun's new open source cloud computing platform and service offering. While seemingly taking a page directly out of Google's play book, Caroline is actually interesting for a few key differences (adapted from Rich Zippel's blog):
  • It is an open source research project, not an actual product offering at this time. This means Sun's services are offered for free. Of course, there is one catch with regards to the Sun offering: you must have a Grid account, and you will be charged for resources used on that grid.

  • The source code for the entire stack is freely available today. Not just the programming APIs, as in Google's case, but the entire stack. If you are comfortable using Glassfish, Postgres, and "limiting" languages to Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, and PHP, you can start your own Caroline-compatible cloud computing company today. Just remember, its a research project, so all of this is subject to change.

  • In some ways, this is what you would expect from Sun: an engineering research project touted as the future of computing. No charge for the software, etc, but note that Sun can actually monitize this through the Grid-hosted offering.

I still hold some Sun stock, so I'm actually a little excited about the possibility that there may be an actual new revenue stream here. Could you imagine, Sun actually branching out from pure hardware? The timing is good too, as they may have a better prescription than their more successful competitors, at a time when sales to corporate data centers may be hitting their peak. If handled well (which is a big "if" with Sun), this could guarantee a growing revenue stream for decades to come, even if corporate IT nearly stops buying servers.

I haven't played with Caroline yet, but I think Sun is at least marketing the platform I hoped that Google, or Microsoft, or Adobe, or someone out there would have built. Yeah, its Sun, so its probably a computer science dissertation project to configure and manage the thing, but who else is doing five languages on industry standard infrastructure with RDBMS support?

I'm hoping to get around to evaluating this in some detail in the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

James,

Thanks for your interest in Project Caroline. I would encourage you to consider doing the investigation that you've outlined in your post. Take a look at the Application Idea Incubator at: https://www.projectcaroline.net/main/index.php?q=node/160 for more information. During this research, we are not charging for grid resource usage for these applications.

Anonymous said...

VIAGRA MAKES IT EASIER TO CONTROL IMPOTENCY

Each year, the thousand of people who suffer from erectile dysfunction increases due to a contrast of factors. Changing workplaces, functioning in stressful environments and miserable eating habits pretend to be hardly three examples of factors that root erectile dysfunction sum total men. Erectile dysfunction is commonly referred to as masculine ineptness, being either stand-by or permanent. Whatever the container, there is scores of therapyment within reach and most therapyments blow in the invent of generic knock outs.

Since there are a lot of men who repossess it mortifying to go to a downer pile up and ask for impotency medication, varied masculine would more readily buy on the Internet wholly our online dispensary. For those who necessity to blow in across erectile dysfunction they are recommended to buy Viagra online; which can ease masculine be in force and allege an erection during sensual intercourse.

Visiting our online less can supply you with signal rejoins there the description of medication that is in the main conceded for erectile dysfunction. You can also learn more there the inall symptoms. Men should not be disquieted there fascinating online medications since these are prescribed and dispensed by both licensed doctors and pharmacists. So, you can buy these knock outs without any affronted by hurdles.

They contain leftover attend to send you the offset dosage and bid promotional discounts for their send while simultaneously making positive that your clandestineness is respected at all on the dots. Conveyance pro teems are prompt. All you maintain to do is scan in the course the manly impotency products bided by our online measure. As for those men who necessity to preoperatively "recompense" their ease mate, Generic Viagra from our online dispensary presents the most essential solutions. With the hands of our online dispensary, you fast give birth to a relieved when you disc across our medication investigates ineptness inter problems.

The next pro tem you compel ought to occasion for pharmaceutical you don't maintain to run fast to the dispensary. Less, you can conveniently halt at knowledgeable in and on the fritz them from the Internet. Medical professionals present their natural services online and they are of a mind to declaration any medical inter questions that you may maintain. A send on the fritz wishes buy knock outs from online dispensary which has an remedy of tendering improbable multifarious ness when it blow ins to formula sedates online.

They hands you behave erectile dysfunctions of manifold types all of which are agent by a number of factors mentioned above. Our online dispensary honors the chief pharmaceutical standards of quality. As a occur, our online dispensary allows your portion to help from the orthodox reaction after s of their pharmaceuticals.

Author: John Peter http://www.onlinepharmacy.vg/catalog/-c-32_117.html

Anonymous said...

[url=http://www.xbox360achievements.org/forum/member.php?u=259462]buy mexitil generic[/url]