Sun gives a cloudier picture of its cloud platform

This week, the company that at one time led the way in developing grid computing -- purchasing processing time remotely from a massive system -- made it seem its people were very excited to have the opportunity to take it all down.

Yesterday was supposed to be a day when many prospective Sun Microsystems customers were expecting to hear a major announcement about the company's next step in the field of cloud computing. But on the same day that engineers and company representatives on yesterday's webcast told attendees there actually were no major announcements, and spent 90 minutes telling them essentially to "stay tuned," the company disengaged its marketing and some of its support pages for Network.com, Sun's front-end for its Grid Compute Utility that premiered in early 2005.

"Network.com is in transition as we add some exciting new options," reads the notice that now appears on that page, pasted on top of a fluffy, white cloud. "We're not ready to show off what we're working on just yet, but we'd like to hear from you, and we'd like to keep in touch."

The page goes on to effectively ask customers what they would like to see on that page instead.

Yesterday's webcast was not much more explicit about just what it is Sun expects to do at this point. "Obviously, Sun is a part of many cloud efforts already in various forms, and so we've got a lot of pieces that were there," said Dave Douglas, the director of Sun's cloud computing business unit, yesterday. "But we really didn't have a top-down strategy at [CEO] Jonathan's [Schwartz] level, and that was his goal of having me take over [the business unit."

Over the summer, Douglas continued, he assembled a team of veteran cloud engineers, including the unit's new CTO, Lou Tucker, who formerly contributed to efforts at Salesforce.com and, before that, Sun. A Cloud Advisory Group was formed, meetings were scheduled, plans were set forth...all of which would appear to be leading up to something, maybe even something big -- a new incarnation of Network.com perhaps.

But that was the focus of the very first question on the webcast, and Douglas' response was not particularly reassuring. Most notably, and perhaps unintentionally, Douglas spoke of Network.com in the past tense.

"Network.com...was a utility that Sun ran for the last few years," he said. "It was a compute-oriented, job -- kind of batch-style utility. That model is really kind of at the high end of the infrastructure, probably more accurately as a platform [and] as a service, it presents an abstract view of resources, with a very particular model on how they're used. So it's not as general as an Amazon.com. And that's a service that, at this point, we've got a number of customers that are still actively using, but it's not the center of a lot of our development focus at the moment."

One sensible explanation is that Sun may be preparing a kind of cloud computing service that's more approachable to the everyday customer -- the target market of Amazon EC2 or Windows Azure -- more so than, say, Sun's favorite Network.com customer to date, Brookhaven National Laboratory. But when pressed on that point, Douglas would only say that Sun will be "around" in places where cloud computing would tend to happen.

"A huge amount of resources now apply to this idea of many clouds, public and private, open and compatible, and powered by our technology," he explained. "We expect to play across a wide range of cloud offerings; in some market situations, the clouds that come out may have a very heavy Sun content; in others, you may see us partner with other large or small partners, and have something where Sun's playing kind of a medium role; and in some clouds, we may just be a technology provider behind the scenes. But we want those values of openness and compatibility to be coming through in every one of those cases."

At one point, CTO Tucker added that people may expect to see OpenSolaris play a contributing role to whatever clouds, small and large, happen to spring forth from development teams in the future. The 2008.11 edition of OpenSolaris was released just today.

Back in 2001, the company was very adamant about what was then being described as its grid computing model, and was one of the first to propose and implement a utility-based payment scheme for remote processing services (at $1 per CPU-hour). At that time, Amazon.com was basically known as a nice place to buy gifts online; now it's Sun's principal competitor in this field (at as little as 0.10 cents per CPU-hour), extending its EC2 service to Europe just today.