AMD Outlines The Developing Web Hosting And Cloud Computing Ecosystem

While attending an AMD meeting a couple of weeks ago we had a very interesting presentation from Margaret Lewis (Director, Software Solutions). She covered three themes. In particular:

• The extremes to which AMD’s new server processors will support Microsoft Windows Hyper-V R2 and VMWare ESX 4.0u1 virtualisation
• The evolution of AMD’s approach to workloads (database and virtualisation for the high-end, High Performance Computing and email/collaboration for the low-end and Web/Cloud and Infrastructure for both)
• The concept of the developing ecosystem for Web Hosting and Cloud Computing.

Notes: * Lamp stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and php

AMD see three broad camps of development, split into Lamp, Windows Azure, and JAVA-based software stacks. It also splits software products and projects into three horizontal layers – OS and/or Hypervisor (Infrastructure as a Service), Middleware (Platform as a Service) and Application (Software as a Service). For me there were a number of new names. In particular:

• Hulu is a Web-based TV and Movie on demand service popular in USA
• Memcached is a ‘free & open source, high-performance, distributed memory object caching system’, useful for speeding up Web applications and alleviating database loads
• Hadoop is an Apache project which develops ‘open-source software for reliable, scalable, distributed computing’

Aside from AMD’s own support for supporting developments in this area, it makes me think about the ownership of various components. Oracle’s acquisition of Sun makes it a player in the Lamp ecosystem with MySQL in addition to the JAVA stream. The dominance of RedHat Linux also gives it a foot in both camps. Microsoft’s stack is proprietary in comparison.

It will be interesting to see whether other (hybrid or proprietary) stacks develop over time and how systems companies such as IBM, HP, Oracle, Fujitsu and others decide to work with their large companies as they develop their own private Clouds.

Do you agree with AMD’s analysis of the Cloud Computing ecosystem? Do you use a different stack in your organisation’s service and software developments? Let me know by commenting on this article.