Comments on: RightScale supports Ubuntu on Amazon EC2 http://blog.rightscale.com/2009/03/17/rightscale-supports-ubuntu-on-amazon-ec2/ Cloud Computing. Delivered. Thu, 18 Mar 2010 18:16:54 +0000 http://wordpress.com/ hourly 1 By: George Moschovitis http://blog.rightscale.com/2009/03/17/rightscale-supports-ubuntu-on-amazon-ec2/#comment-893 George Moschovitis Sun, 12 Apr 2009 18:49:19 +0000 http://blog.rightscale.com/?p=303#comment-893 Ubuntu on RightScale is a great idea, thanks! Ubuntu on RightScale is a great idea, thanks!

]]> By: Jef Spaleta http://blog.rightscale.com/2009/03/17/rightscale-supports-ubuntu-on-amazon-ec2/#comment-864 Jef Spaleta Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:36:34 +0000 http://blog.rightscale.com/?p=303#comment-864 Correction, Ubuntu has been leaking unofficial 1.5 codebase for months in tarballs associated with its packages. So while Rich may have wanted to keep the code private, by giving Canonical preferential access it was made publicly available as a tarball the moment Canonical pushed a binary package into Ubuntu over a month ago. That is just one of the problems with preferential access. I've talked to Rich, trying to make sure it was okay from his POV to take the tarballs that Canonical leaked and use them to build competing packages. The development tree is open now for other packaging work and contributors. I have no reason to doubt Rich's sincerity that he didn't see it as a competitive advantage. But clearly it was. You described it as such in your blog post. And that's another problem. Preferential access to a for-profit is a competitive advantage...it doesn't matter if it was intended or not... it is what it is. And that sort of preferential treatment is not good for the larger open ecosystem. It would not be good for the kernel, its not be good for X, its not be good for GNOME or KDE, and its not going to be good for cloud technologies either. Preferential access is the wrong cultural norm to develop and nurture. And luckily for Canonical, the Debian community probably agrees with me. Oh and since you brought it up, what is Canonical doing for the cloud exactly? They don't hack on Eucalyptus, and they certainly aren't major contributors on the underlying components that Eucalyptus makes us of like libvirt or the open java stack. What exactly is Canonical doing in terms of open development work to build cloud oriented technologies? It's not like they were the trailblazers on ec2. I'm sure the no cost acquisition model they push for Ubuntu is very attractive, especially for start up businesses like your company or TurnKey or CohesiveFT who are taking Ubuntu and molding it into useful server appliance as a for-profit service model. But other than giving your business a blank canvas to work with, what are they doing to develop open cloud technologies? If there is money in servicing the cloud by providing virtual appliance services based on Ubuntu, I would imagine Canonical is going to want a piece of the action for itself. In fact Canonical needs a piece of the action or they won't be able to sustain manpower behind the effort. Is your company a Canonical services customer? Do you pay for landscape services or have you purchased ongoing support contracts from Canonical? What about your customers? Do they get Canonical support services as part of your Ubuntu platform offering? The most high profile instances of Ubuntu deployments I can find in the press involve Canonical gifting support services. Have they done that for you as well? Gifted support services to help you get Ubuntu integrated into your platform offering? -jef Correction,
Ubuntu has been leaking unofficial 1.5 codebase for months in tarballs associated with its packages. So while Rich may have wanted to keep the code private, by giving Canonical preferential access it was made publicly available as a tarball the moment Canonical pushed a binary package into Ubuntu over a month ago. That is just one of the problems with preferential access. I’ve talked to Rich, trying to make sure it was okay from his POV to take the tarballs that Canonical leaked and use them to build competing packages. The development tree is open now for other packaging work and contributors. I have no reason to doubt Rich’s sincerity that he didn’t see it as a competitive advantage. But clearly it was. You described it as such in your blog post. And that’s another problem. Preferential access to a for-profit is a competitive advantage…it doesn’t matter if it was intended or not… it is what it is. And that sort of preferential treatment is not good for the larger open ecosystem. It would not be good for the kernel, its not be good for X, its not be good for GNOME or KDE, and its not going to be good for cloud technologies either. Preferential access is the wrong cultural norm to develop and nurture. And luckily for Canonical, the Debian community probably agrees with me.

Oh and since you brought it up, what is Canonical doing for the cloud exactly? They don’t hack on Eucalyptus, and they certainly aren’t major contributors on the underlying components that Eucalyptus makes us of like libvirt or the open java stack. What exactly is Canonical doing in terms of open development work to build cloud oriented technologies? It’s not like they were the trailblazers on ec2.

I’m sure the no cost acquisition model they push for Ubuntu is very attractive, especially for start up businesses like your company or TurnKey or CohesiveFT who are taking Ubuntu and molding it into useful server appliance as a for-profit service model. But other than giving your business a blank canvas to work with, what are they doing to develop open cloud technologies?

If there is money in servicing the cloud by providing virtual appliance services based on Ubuntu, I would imagine Canonical is going to want a piece of the action for itself. In fact Canonical needs a piece of the action or they won’t be able to sustain manpower behind the effort. Is your company a Canonical services customer? Do you pay for landscape services or have you purchased ongoing support contracts from Canonical? What about your customers? Do they get Canonical support services as part of your Ubuntu platform offering? The most high profile instances of Ubuntu deployments I can find in the press involve Canonical gifting support services. Have they done that for you as well? Gifted support services to help you get Ubuntu integrated into your platform offering?

-jef

]]> By: Thorsten http://blog.rightscale.com/2009/03/17/rightscale-supports-ubuntu-on-amazon-ec2/#comment-862 Thorsten Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:53:35 +0000 http://blog.rightscale.com/?p=303#comment-862 Jef, interesting points. You obviously have a redhat vs. canonical thing going on and I'm actually not that interested in fueling the fire. We work happily with both parties, just that lately canonical has been more active in the cloud space and, imho, "gets it" better. Couple of notes: Eucalyptus is no longer just an academic project. Whether Canonical is helping with direct funding or not, I don't know for sure, but they are certainly helping a lot in other ways. Best I can tell, Rich is keeping the source code closed until it's ready for release to protect his developers and his sanity, not to give someone a competitive advantage. And I know of other commercial entities who have gotten early access. You seem to think that working on an open source public funded project means that anyone should be able to see what you just did at any point in time. That makes no sense (sorry). Thanks for your thoughts nevertheless! Thorsten Jef, interesting points. You obviously have a redhat vs. canonical thing going on and I’m actually not that interested in fueling the fire. We work happily with both parties, just that lately canonical has been more active in the cloud space and, imho, “gets it” better.
Couple of notes: Eucalyptus is no longer just an academic project. Whether Canonical is helping with direct funding or not, I don’t know for sure, but they are certainly helping a lot in other ways. Best I can tell, Rich is keeping the source code closed until it’s ready for release to protect his developers and his sanity, not to give someone a competitive advantage. And I know of other commercial entities who have gotten early access. You seem to think that working on an open source public funded project means that anyone should be able to see what you just did at any point in time. That makes no sense (sorry).
Thanks for your thoughts nevertheless!
Thorsten

]]> By: Jef Spaleta http://blog.rightscale.com/2009/03/17/rightscale-supports-ubuntu-on-amazon-ec2/#comment-860 Jef Spaleta Mon, 23 Mar 2009 17:32:54 +0000 http://blog.rightscale.com/?p=303#comment-860 Correction, Eucalyptus is an academic project which is sustained by public funding from the NSF. Canonical received preferential access to kvm enabled version of the 1.5 Eucalyptus codebase several months before the Eucalyptus project was prepared to release it to the public. It's quite difficult to say that Canonical is materially supporting Eucalyptus, when its development is being done on the United States tax payer's dime. If Eucalyptus had released its kvm enabled code publicly to everyone, then Debian and rpath and other integrators would have had fair and equitable access to compete with Canonical to bring Eucalyptus implementations to market. But that's not what happened. Canonical recieved unfair competitive advantage to a codebase it did not pay for. The public paid for it, and Canonical reaps a competitive advantage in the market by having access to that codebase several months before anyone else did. By winning preferential code access, to publicly funded code, Canonical obtained a competitive advantage in the market. Is that the sort of anti-competitive behavior you want to encourage in the software ecosystem? As a small company, does Rightside benefit from a pervasive culture where software companies feel its appropriate to gain preferential access to publicly funded works in order to get an advantage to market? As a small business will you be able to compete against larger companies who engage in this sort of behavior in order to gain access to new publicly funded technologies before you can? -jef Correction,

Eucalyptus is an academic project which is sustained by public funding from the NSF. Canonical received preferential access to kvm enabled version of the 1.5 Eucalyptus codebase several months before the Eucalyptus project was prepared to release it to the public.

It’s quite difficult to say that Canonical is materially supporting Eucalyptus, when its development is being done on the United States tax payer’s dime. If Eucalyptus had released its kvm enabled code publicly to everyone, then Debian and rpath and other integrators would have had fair and equitable access to compete with Canonical to bring Eucalyptus implementations to market. But that’s not what happened. Canonical recieved unfair competitive advantage to a codebase it did not pay for. The public paid for it, and Canonical reaps a competitive advantage in the market by having access to that codebase several months before anyone else did.

By winning preferential code access, to publicly funded code, Canonical obtained a competitive advantage in the market. Is that the sort of anti-competitive behavior you want to encourage in the software ecosystem? As a small company, does Rightside benefit from a pervasive culture where software companies feel its appropriate to gain preferential access to publicly funded works in order to get an advantage to market? As a small business will you be able to compete against larger companies who engage in this sort of behavior in order to gain access to new publicly funded technologies before you can?

-jef

]]> By: Thorsten http://blog.rightscale.com/2009/03/17/rightscale-supports-ubuntu-on-amazon-ec2/#comment-858 Thorsten Sat, 21 Mar 2009 08:38:23 +0000 http://blog.rightscale.com/?p=303#comment-858 Jayme: thanks for the positive feedback! Jayme: thanks for the positive feedback!

]]> By: Jayme http://blog.rightscale.com/2009/03/17/rightscale-supports-ubuntu-on-amazon-ec2/#comment-857 Jayme Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:43:25 +0000 http://blog.rightscale.com/?p=303#comment-857 I applaud RightScale for stepping up and giving customers a choice in which distro they want to use. I've been using (non-supported) Ubuntu images on RightScale since day one and it's nice to see all the RightScale scripts that are now available for Ubuntu images... to say nothing of the images themselves. Keep chugging along! I applaud RightScale for stepping up and giving customers a choice in which distro they want to use.
I’ve been using (non-supported) Ubuntu images on RightScale since day one and it’s nice to see all the RightScale scripts that are now available for Ubuntu images… to say nothing of the images themselves.
Keep chugging along!

]]> By: Thorsten http://blog.rightscale.com/2009/03/17/rightscale-supports-ubuntu-on-amazon-ec2/#comment-854 Thorsten Fri, 20 Mar 2009 01:45:10 +0000 http://blog.rightscale.com/?p=303#comment-854 Brett, thanks for the comment! If you encounter any issues, please let our support folks know so we can fix 'em! Brett, thanks for the comment! If you encounter any issues, please let our support folks know so we can fix ‘em!

]]> By: Brett http://blog.rightscale.com/2009/03/17/rightscale-supports-ubuntu-on-amazon-ec2/#comment-853 Brett Wed, 18 Mar 2009 23:20:34 +0000 http://blog.rightscale.com/?p=303#comment-853 Interesting because I just installed your Ubuntu AMI! Thanks Rightscale. I am migrating over from centos to ubuntu server mainly because ubuntu server has a more recent kernel version. For me, speed is everything and usually speed improvements are found in newer kernels. Centos and ubuntu server are basically the same, instead of using rpm, you use apt-get. Instead of /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg*, it's /etc/network/interfaces, etc. Ubuntu offers up a competing linux distribution that people may find interesting, I don't see anything wrong with that. Perhaps this will nudge redhat to update their kernel or perhaps they aren't interested in that thus ubuntu server would be for people like me who want a newer kernel version. I'm not sure, but more choice is a good thing. Interesting because I just installed your Ubuntu AMI! Thanks Rightscale. I am migrating over from centos to ubuntu server mainly because ubuntu server has a more recent kernel version. For me, speed is everything and usually speed improvements are found in newer kernels. Centos and ubuntu server are basically the same, instead of using rpm, you use apt-get. Instead of /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg*, it’s /etc/network/interfaces, etc.

Ubuntu offers up a competing linux distribution that people may find interesting, I don’t see anything wrong with that. Perhaps this will nudge redhat to update their kernel or perhaps they aren’t interested in that thus ubuntu server would be for people like me who want a newer kernel version. I’m not sure, but more choice is a good thing.

]]> By: Francois http://blog.rightscale.com/2009/03/17/rightscale-supports-ubuntu-on-amazon-ec2/#comment-852 Francois Wed, 18 Mar 2009 07:37:32 +0000 http://blog.rightscale.com/?p=303#comment-852 Ubuntu is the most overrated distro ever put out. It’s not nearly as good as its fanbois portray it to be — certainly not moreso than many other distros. Its “success” is all the result hype and fanboi “marketing”. Ubuntu is the most overrated distro ever put out. It’s not nearly as good as its fanbois portray it to be — certainly not moreso than many other distros. Its “success” is all the result hype and fanboi “marketing”.

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