I imagine what Rackspace gets out of this is, that if successful, they will at least have some sort of leverage with Amazon. Amazon is a machine. Amazon executes to perfection and they release new features at a relentless pace with no signs of slowing down. They don't leave much of a door open for others to get into the game. With a real open cloud alternative it might allow a lot of people to play in the cloud space that would have been squeezed out before.

What Amazon can't match is the open cloud's capability of simultaneous supporting applications that can run seamlessly in a private cloud hosted in a corporate datacenter, in local development and test clouds, and in a full featured public cloud.

OpenStack is the first development in the cloud space that hints at a future where there actually are more than half a dozen big platform / cloud providers (aka Hosting Apocalypse).

What does Rackspace get out of it? Well, they don't get obliterated and/or don't have to try and be a VAR on top of someone else's stack. This open source approach allows them a chance at controlling their own destiny.

What are other large hosting / data center providers doing? Nothing much - riding out the end of shared hosting and getting sold to by VMWare, from what I can see.

I recently wrote about Dropbox vs. Jungle Disk. I'm a happy user of both. In the last little while, people have also talked about Microsoft's LiveMesh, plus ZumoDrive.

Reactions to LiveMesh have been mixed - it's clear they're still working on the service, and it's not as smooth as some of the others.

ZumoDrive is very very very close to DropBox ... except it does some interesting things with not actually having to have all your files on disk. This is pretty amazing, since it delivers on the promise of an expandable, infinite drive. Ewan at Mobile Industry Review thinks that ZumoDrive "is going to change EVERYTHING" -- I disagree only in that I don't think a clear winner can be identified at this point: each separate startup brings new features and new business model tweaks to the table. The comments on Ewan's post are great: lots of people thinking that cloud storage / storing stuff in the cloud is complete bollocks, and say so loudly, or that it's been done for years. I single out Ewan's post because he's thinking about the mobile angle on things. Already we require our desktop apps to have a web component, or to be able to sync with our mobile devices. We should demand the same from our storage.

What I'm more interested in is the concept of sideloading and pre-fetching as they relate to these continued innovations in cloud storage. Keep in mind that I'm going to take the liberty to come up with my own definitions, so let's start with those.

Sideloading: data is transferred from one Internet location directly to another Internet-hosted storage space rather than having to be downloaded to the user's / requester's desktop and then re-uploaded to some other storage space.

When you put it like that, moving bits onto your desktop just so that you can move them back up to the Internet is clearly a collosal waste. First, you are using constrained bandwidth. The bandwidth from one server to another is going to be much higher and more reliable than down whatever access pipe you have to your computer. Second, you are using double the bandwidth. Download it, then upload it.

Much like I can use PayPal or other forms of payment to make purchases that go direct from my bank account to another's, I should be able to make digital content requests that go directly into "my" cloud storage. Who will be the first to implement this on a broad scale? I've already seen Wesabe do something a bit like this with their Firefox plugin and bank statement downloads.

By the way, I came upon this use case because I use Valve's Steam and Direct2Drive game purchase / downloading servicse. I semi-regularly do 6GB downloads, use them to install, and then have to backup the "originals", which I usually archive on Jungle Disk. What a pain! Steam does this a bit better, because a download is an install, rather than the Direct2Drive 2 step process of downloading the installer, then installing. But, Steam still has the "backup game files" option -- you want to uninstall (perhaps to put on another machine), but you don't want to have to pay the "download penalty" of fetching all 6GB of files from the source server again.

I'll continue to use the Steam example to illustrate my next concept, pre-fetching.

Pre-fetching: like TiVo, using a client / service to trickle downloads in the background of digital content that you are likely to be interested in. You can then immediately use / activate / purchase digital content without having to wait for a download.

XBox 360 already does this, to a degree. You can choose to have all new content downloaded to your console automatically. This isn't yet done on a widespread scale on PCs, and could be applied to many forms of content. There used to be plugins and services that did this for webpages, back in the days of dial up. It doesn't make sense for content that is considered so small, but 6GB games or perhaps raw video footage are examples of the type of content where without a pre-fetch step, you could be waiting days to actually interact with content locally.

If anyone has examples of services that implement some of these concepts, I'd be interested in hearing about them.

I wrote a bit about Jungle Disk in passing. I am using it for personal archive and backup. It's been working great, and I decided to try out the Workgroup edition: you add additional accounts and can set permissions on different buckets / folders for each person / account. At $2 / account / month for the workgroup functionality, it's quite good.

Except, you have to get people to install and setup Jungle Disk (the download link for Workgroup is a bit hidden). And ... it's not Dropbox. I tried it for a bit, and it works as advertised, but you a) have to keep paying on a monthly basis and b) you have to do a fair bit of handholding and account management.

Then I tried Dropbox today. Easy. Amazing. Amazingly easy. And it does shared files, too. Share a folder, add some email addresses to invite people, and you've got synced folders / documents on multiple computers. The public stuff is actually easier ... there is a default folder called Public, and files in there you can right click on and get a publicly accessible link directly to.

Update: CAUTION! -- I didn't realize this, but according to Michael Tsai, Dropbox doesn't support resource forks on Mac OS X -- "If you use Dropbox, resource forks disappear, packages turn into folders and can no longer be double-clicked, etc. ". What this means is that some files will have issues. Basic files like Word docs and binaries shouldn't run into issues, but for applications, potentially Keynote files and others, your files may not work correctly any more.

Currently, there is a 2GB storage limit to the accounts (free). This also sits on Amazon S3, although on their account, not yours like Jungle Disk. Dropbox is offering a paid upgrade to 50GB of space for $9.99 / month, or $99 / year. Hmmm....2GB still seems enough for now...

I'll stick with the Jungle Disk Desktop edition for my backups and long term archives. I've paid the $20 for the Desktop edition and I can backup and store as much as I want on my own Amazon S3 account.

For multi user sharing of documents, Dropbox is just so much simpler. The low end pricing is cheaper than Jungle Disk (free!) while the high end of 50GB is cheaper with Jungle Disk (0.15/GB/month with S3 x 50GB = $7.50).

I think we're going to continue to see great innovation in better ways to share / sync / collaborate on files, in part driven by cheap, reliable, API-driven storage options like S3. Epd.io is a local Vancouver startup to keep an eye on...

Buzz Bishop put a request for cloud computing experts. I'm not exactly an expert, but it is something that I've been looking into more deeply lately (see my cloud links on del.icio.us). And, of course, I'm advising TrevorO's startup, Layerboom, through Bootup Labs.

Anyway, I ended up writing a fairly lengthy set of answers to questions that Buzz sent across, some of which made their way into his article in today's 24 Hours -- Head in the Clouds. Thanks for the opportunity, Buzz!

I just got contacted by ComputerWorld Canada, asking for my reaction to the new MySQL release:

I came across your blog and was wondering if you wanted to share thoughts on Sun Microsystems’ announcement that it will release the next version of MySQL (v. 5.1) in Q2 of this year? Do you see the new version as helping further drive adoption of the open source database, and help promote open source technology in general?

Well, this is good timing. TrevorO and I went down to the Sun Labs Open House (here's Trevor's take on a few things we saw at Sun). We were down looking at a lot of the "cloud" and related technologies that are coming up hot these days.

But back to the MySQL release. I think Sun's acquisition and backing of MySQL is great. I like the fact that all across their product line, Sun is committing to open source. They have everything from services to hardware to back it up, which just makes it easier for large enterprises to adopt open source. Maybe I'm biased, because Sun has been supporting the Drupal community for some time now, and have shown a great willingness to learn from open source communities and get better. Open source databases in general (and perhaps MySQL in particular) still do struggle with marketing perception against Oracle and MS SQL, so anything that can help raise the profile is a good thing.

But all is not great with MySQL 5.1. I don't follow the development that closely, but found an interesting post pointing out that when 5.1 is released, it's only 6 months until 5.0 gets end of lifed (EOL).

Let me close by pointing out the three things that I have been consistently saying to any Sun people that I come across:

1. Improve your social media marketing strategy: my feedback to the Sun Startup Essentials system has been that they should a) start a blog and b) publish weekly architectures of cool Sun software and hardware combinations. Yes, there is http://blogs.sun.com, and lots of high profile individuals from Sun like Tim Bray that are doing a great job, but it seems like next to none of this has trickled into the actual marketing departments. Give me an RSS subscribe widget and kill the email harvesting, people!
2. Fix MySQL clustering: it's hard, it's cranky, it needs improvement so that regular people can snap this together.
3. Open an engineering office in Vancouver: does this need a comment? Sure, it may be entirely self serving, but Microsoft is in town now, and I think you'll find a great base here on the left coast to find great people. Our concentration of open source experience in town will help, as well.

Sun is by no means perfect (they are a big co with all that implies), but I'm still really interested in some of the technology they have coming out of the labs, as well as their move to increased openness.