Assembly of tech giants convene to define future of computing

A flurry of the tech world’s great and good signed up the Cloud Native Computing Foundation yesterday, and kicked off a technical board to review submissions – which will be tested and fattened up on a vast Intel-based “computer farm”. Vendors declared their intent to form the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) earlier …

[Anonymous Coward]

+6

for the picture.

[ecofeco]

Re: +6

Be seeing you.

[allthecoolshortnamesweretaken]

Re: +6

Welcome to The Village!

[BitDr]

Intel gets mentioned twice?

Anyway, cloud/schmoud. I want my data on my server my way and I don't want to have to pay someone else to get at it.

BTW, the "tech giants" are not those who define the future. If that was the case Dec, Unisys, Sperry Rand, Data General, H/P, Xerox, and Burroughs would have lead the way. In a way Xerox was a leader, but only through Apple's *ahem* adoption of the GUI concept. Anyway, the real pioneer visionaries were companies like Altair (the IMSAI was an Altair clone), North Star, Apple (for the Apple I and ][), Microsoft (for MS BASIC on CP/M). Digital Research, Tandy (TRS-80), Commodore (Kim 1 & PET), KayPro, Osbourne and the like. None of which were tech giants at the time. IBM was late to the game but their reputation (no one ever got fired for buying IBM) saw their platform concept take hold in a way that S-100 never did. Microsoft rode the IBM wave, using a code base purchased from Seattle Computer Products (QDOS).

[Dadmin]

If you have a "smartphone" or use the Internet, you are already using data in the "schmoud" as well as paying to access it and other services. I see what you're saying though; keep your personal data on your own hardware because it's a more solid option than trusting a company, that may or may not be here in 5 years, with that data.

Also, it was Xerox who invited the Steves and their crew to see Star Office, and eventually Xerox employees migrated to Apple to work with a company going somewhere, rather than trying to con business people into paying US$50K for a desktop publishing system that was not well received. Even now that seems a ridiculous price for nothing more than an electronic typewriter. Thanks for mentioning them as being a "tech leader" but they are an example of why most all of those dinosaurs you mention are gone today. They failed to chart their course, or look where the world was going.

This reminds me of the chaps who claim they never used Unix. I would happily ask them if they ever used the phone and that was that. Every telephone exchange at the time was a AT&T 5ESS, or some such switch, and they all run Unix. Don't rewrite history around here, some of us lived it.

[BitDr]

Al late reply.. buuuut

We use an on-premises owncloud server for our smart phone data sync, keeping Google at arms length as much as possible. You see I too was there (albeit just entering IT) when it was all starting to happen in the mid '70s. Yes Xerox invited the Apple gang to see their stuff, and the Steves "got it"; in exactly the same way that the Xerox "business" guys didn't.

[BitDr]

Mmmmmm...

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Visionaries are not often those who are established, but those who seek to become established.

[Chuunen Baka]

More nebulous hype

Really, cloud this and that is just network and server hosting companies drumming up trade. Hype, hype, hype. There is no paradigm shift, just more marketing.

[Mage]

Future?

We've seen it. Nothing new here at all. Even the marketing buzz words are getting stale.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope

You tech giants can do as you please, I'm going to do it my way.

Media ownership, local storage, native software (not apps) and a healthy sense of "F.U. I won't do as you tell me!".

[Mikel]

Notably absent

A certain small Redmond software house specializing in malware. I guess it's now them against the whole world.

[Dadmin]

Re: Notably absent

They don't make proper cloud software, merely a virtual machine OS that lives in other people's bigger ideas.

Super funny to see you chaps all discount this technology, merely because the buzz word it too new for you. When you settle down, and read some big boy books, you may get a job other than low-rung network or desktop admin types. When you become a real admin, a server admin, and develop some chops in software as well, you'll have already built clouds of sorts in your career. Look back on your work, did you ever work on more than 100 physical hosts, and cobble them together in some interoperable fashion, and plop some control systems, or perhaps a fancy dashboard display and monitoring to view the lot? Perhaps some script or the like to quickly bring up new systems without fuss? You're already a Cloud Engineer then. Stop chatting about here, and fix your fucking resume, guy!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Notably absent

Re: Dad min

I can safely say most of us on El Reg have a lot of experience with the "Cloud", even when it was called the "dot-com" rush and mostrich thinges were run bare-metal.

We work with it in many guises.

Public, private, developement, testing, support, admin and a dozen other perifery roles related to, or just touching on, IT.

What we see is a race to the bottom in order to gouge the customer / end user of as much cash as possible in half-arsed rental schemes dressed up with buzz words.

In every respect we are also the end users. We have the skills and experience needed to truely see what is happening, what is coming without being blinded by the buzzwords.

We don't like what we see.

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: Notably absent

I can safely say most of us on El Reg have a lot of experience with the "Cloud", even when it was called the "dot-com" rush and mostrich thinges were run bare-metal.

"dot-com"? How about when it was called "service bureaus", a decade before the DNS was invented?

And at the time, most business computing ran on mainframes and select minis, and a good chunk of that was in virtual machines, courtesy of VM. Other workloads ran on platforms that were sufficiently insulated (e.g. the capability architectures of the S/38 and AS/400, or the tag/descriptor architectures of the Bx000 systems) that "bare metal" is at best wildly misleading.

Utility computing has been around since the 1960s, and virtualization since the 1970s. And while the Flavor of the Day may not be new, it's not going to go away either, however many greybeards¹ and coffee-mug-wielding sysadmins tut over it.

¹I'm clean-shaven.

[gz3zbz]

Re: Notably absent

Also absent is HPE, who recently signalled their intention to use Azure as their preferred provider of public cloud. Not sure if this has any significance.

[ecofeco]

The future of computing?

The future of computing? That's easy.

Break away from the mainframe terminal model we have gone back to and embracing the whole damn point of the PC that made it popular to begin with: inde-fucking-depedence.

Mark my words. Cloud computing is just one big disaster/catastrophe of the death and destruction kind from falling out of favor.

I sincerely hope I'm wrong but mankind's history says you can pretty much bank on it.

Now for today's daily hack: The Hello Kitty empire was hacked for about 3 million accounts. No joke. This is real news.

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: The future of computing?

We never left the centralized-computing model. We added personal computing to it - probably an inevitable step, as it became technologically and economically feasible - but there's no driver to eliminate it, or even really reduce it significantly in absolute numbers, even if its portion of the marketplace shifts back and forth.

People who talk about the "PC revolution" are merely being myopic. Nothing was overthrown. A vacuum was filled; that's all.

[Anonymous Coward]

Went to the foundation's site and couldn't find a mention of Amazon or AWS. Is this just a group of big wannabe's admitting that they missed the boat?