There are quite a few issues with the transparency of costs in the cloud computing space. This includes no transparency into the cost of electricity, and where that electricity is coming from. To date, there is no public database of electricity markets, datacenters, and hosting providers which lists how much carbon per kWh of electricity is being output. In ICT this is a massive issue, because of the sheer amount of energy our industry consumes.

“Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is both a problem and a potential solution in the war against climate change. Currently, computers are responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than airlines. Greenhouse gas is growing exponentially and we expect that ICT will produce double the emissions of the airline industry within five years with no end in site. ICT can provide a solution to climate change by reducing carbon emmission in the world through telecommuting and other means.”

Here in British Columbia we get most of our electricity from renewable hydro-electric power. Hydro-Electric is one of the lowest forms of reliable low carbon output electricity generation available. It goes without saying that providing computing services using energy generated this way would mean less CO2 / kWh but also less CO2 per compute cycle.

We need several things to make this happen

1) Start measuring how much power ICT is using on a per server / component basis
2) Develop resources that track carbon output per kWh in different states & provinces and provide that information as a service
3) Determine where your computing resources are located and track on a per machine level the amount of carbon being output
4) Calculate how much carbon you’re using.

Those are pretty audacious goals, but I think we really need to start keeping track of carbon output for power. By tying that into the different services we use on a regular basis, we can make carbon part of the social and actual cost of using services. Hopefully that will help buy us enough time and money to develop the carbon neutral power solutions we desperately need.

These plants are both grown from seeds I got from the fruit. The one on the left is a Grapefruit, and the one on the right is Avocado. The Grapefruit is actually 1.5 years old and grows in spurts. At this rate, it will only be 20 years until I can eat a Grapefruit from the tree.

So does anyone in the storage space want to make some extra cash? Here’s a free idea.

All those SOHO storage platforms that exist out there, like Drobo and Buffalo – Integrate some cloud computing backup into your system. It goes a little something like this.

I have a terabyte of storage locally for all my music, movies and some other important documents, and its mounted from my computer over the network using regular AFS or CIFS sharing. All you do is setup the storage systems default layout so that it has a ‘protected’ folder. The protected folder will automatically sync and version all the files to the storage cloud of your choice (probably S3 or Nirvanix). Of course things get tricky as you wouldn’t want to drop in a 4gig movie, and have that eat up your network – so there would have to be format and size filters to setup as well. Depending on the % of free space you can also move unused files into the cloud only, but still display their availability locally.

There are a lot of companies and individuals that have these systems in their office for sharing files between users, and the more you synchronize, the more they effectively become SOHO caches.

Update: Jim Pick has told me there’s a company named Wua.la that does something similar to this. Wuala’s model seems more like a P2P distributed storage system – Similar to AllMyData‘s Tahoe storage system.

Take Amazon as an example. Amazon operates their environment as a bunch of different groups, each running different services within the same company. S3, EC2, Payment Services. They’re all independent, highly scalable functions, tied together in the application we call Amazon.com.

Companies and startups are starting to break this operational model open, and putting those individual functions online for everyone. They’re building services that do something really well – or rather that do one thing really really well. They’re companies that focus on a specific function or feature and are open enough so creative people can say “I’m going to take this, this, and this – mix it in a pot and voila!”.

Do you want to build your own Twitter? Find an SMS gateway, Cloud Computing Host and XMPP service provider.

Do you want to build an interesting RSS/ATOM service? Find an RSS aggregator service and pour on some glue – see what sticks.

It’s Feature as a Service world (to use an already overused description). Eventually cloud companies will realize that doing one thing really *really* well is tremendously valuable. Why does everyone have to build their own DNS service? Why does everyone have to build their own hosting system? What about Enterprise Storage, Authentication, SMS Gateways, Massively scalable XMPP services? How come I have to do that myself? Can 10,000 messages sent through a jabber server be worth a dollar? I think it can (maybe the math needs adjusting but you get my point). We’re all really just building a massive computer called the internet, only with each big trend we replace ‘The Internet’ with something else. First it was ‘The Web’, then it was ‘Web 2.0′, and now its ‘The Cloud’. The fact of the matter remains – the further along we go the more tightly knit the internet becomes, and that means that theres opportunity for programmable white label services to propel us further and faster.

The nice thing about RSS is that you can find the information that you may believe is relevant or of interest to you, then have that information centralized in one place. There are websites that do this for you, such as Google Reader, or Popurls (non-customizable but pretty), and there are systems that aggregate social newtorking sites such as FriendFeed, but there isn’t a single place I can go to ‘push the buttons’ for all the applications I interact with in my day to day life. At it’s simplest RSSI is a simple boolean question with a custom prompt and application identifier.

Would you like to accept a friend request? Yes

PayPal payment failed, resend? Yes

Your virtualization environment requires upgrading, okay ? No

Things can get more complicated with fields and text values being sent along with the response, or even images sent with the interaction. What if you need to sign up for 10 services at once? Send me all the CAPTCHA images then I’ll send you the proper values in text boxes associated with each image.

With regards to implementation, things quickly get heavy, with message bus architectures, authentication and authorization, and a standard framework for describing an interaction with a user and UUID’s for interactions. Prompts, type of responses, values of responses, further action, etc.

I think this would be really cool – We’ve eliminated a lot of the repetitive actions required to get the content, we just need to figure out how to reduce the amount of work required to make things happen.

The Open Virtual Machine Format, or OVF is a proposed universal format that aims to create a secure, extensible method of describing and packaging virtual containers. Because the standard is open, it means any environment supporting the standard can import and export those virtual machines between different hypervisor platforms. The current OVF specification includes definitions ranging from virtual machine metadata and disk format, all the way to detailed hardware specifications and logical network information. It also provides an ability for the virtual machine itself to get information from the hypervisor host, meaning that if you’re creative you could create some really nifty automated integration and deployment tools.

If that doesn’t mean much to you, then consider this: Industry heavy-weights like Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware, and XenSource all took part in drafting the specification. As far support tools go, VMware has published what appears to be the first OVF container creation tool, available here.

There IS a big problem with OVF right now, and a lot of bloggers and analysts out there are getting it wrong. OVF is not and does not define a new virtual disk format, simply a wrapper around them. This means that OVF support doesn’t enable you to drag and drop virtual machines between Xen and VMware. Some formats can be converted externally using tools, however most of the current techniques involve booting up a system, and running a migration tool to be able to convert the image – not exactly ideal. OVF does include the ability to describe your specification in an HREF, which means that you could publish your spec, and create a system that could modify containers on the fly.

If Vmware, Xen, and Parallels are technolgical islands, then OVF may one day be the bridge that will allow you to travel between them.

Update It looks like OVF will be announced formally at the Catalyst 2008 conference. More information here.