Telruptive

Universities are starting to explore the future of the cloud. This future starts by getting rid of the many layers that separate software from physical hardware or bare metal. Currently you need a hypervisor (e.g. Xen, KVM, VMWare), an operating system (e.g. Linux, Windows, Mac OS), a language virtual machine (e.g. JVM), an application server (e.g. Tomcat, JBoss, etc.) and then the application.

In this article, researchers and academics are arguing that there is too much abstractions going on that could be removed in benefit of unseen performance. Projects like Open Mirage, Exokernel and Apache Mesos are examples.

If telecom operators want to offer IaaS and PaaS then they should focus on having a competitive edge that is not currently offered by established providers like Amazon and Rackspace. This competitive edge could be to build a new Cloud OS that has storage and processing nodes that run as close as possible to the bare metal. Building data storage solutions like Hadoop or Cassandra close to bare metal hardware and using the latest solid state drives would offer unseen performance. The cost per user would be substantially lower then less optimized set-ups. Ideally PaaS platforms can be delivered that allow “cloud application servers” to run on base metal. The model would be Heroku on bare metal instead of on Xen+Linux+JVM+App Server+Java App.