As I try to bring this series to a close, I want to look at what I would consider one of the final high level requirements in evaluating a cloud solution.  In the previous posts, we looked at the cloud as being application centric, self service, and open.  These are critical, but one of the more important parts of any technology is support.  This is something which has plagued linux for years.  For many of us, linux and unix are considered to be far superior to windows for many reasons.  The challenge has been the support.  Certainly Red Hat has done a fairly good job of providing support around their Fedora Based Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but that is one distro.  Canonical provides some support around Ubuntu, and there are others.

The major challenge with the opensource community is just that, it is open.  Open is good, but when we look at the broader opensource community, many of the best tools are written and maintained by one person or a small group.  They provide some support for their systems, but often times that is done as a favor to the community, or for a very small fee, they need to keep day jobs to make that work.

One challenge which seems to be better understood with the cloud, especially around openstack, is the need for enterprise support.  More and more companies are starting to jump on board and provide support for openstack, or their variant.  This works well, so long as you only use the core modules which are common.  In order to make money, all companies want you to use their addons.  This leads to some interesting issues for customers who want to add automation on top of the cloud or other features not in the core.

At the end of the day, a compromise must be struck.  It is unlikely that most companies will use a single vendor for all their cloud software, although that could make it less challenging in some regards.  It comes down to trade offs, but it is certain that we will continue to see further definition and development around the cloud, and around enterprise support for technologies which further abstract us from the hardware and enable us to be more connected, use the data which is already being collected, and the devices which are being and will be developed for this crazy new world.