Template talk:Cloud computing

Template Purpose

This template was created for use on the cloud computing article as an illustration by example of the top level taxonomy or "layers" of same. It was not intended to advertise specific products nor be extended with arbitrary categories, rather to give a small number (5-10) of the best examples available. Documentation updated accordingly. -- samj _in^out 16:43, 24 February 2010 (UTC)

The template purpose should not be dictated by one person. We can and should have a discussion about this. As I've written below, the guiding principle, IMHO should be utility (e.g., an extended "see also" table for related articles) rather than illustration (e.g., layers in the "cloud computing" stack). Besides, I don't believe a logically-consistent layering structure is possible yet with something as amorphous and poorly defined as cloud computing. If you do your job well you'll just end up describing networking layers.LirazSiri (talk) 07:54, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

It is well accepted that there are three layers (infrastructure, platform, application) and the other two (clients, servers) are there to provide a functional taxonomy - that is, one that can cater for everything we need to classify - without polluting the application and infrastructure layers. This came about by necessity following persistent injection and reinjection of inappropriate articles (not unlike your "advertising" of the TurnKey article, no offense). It appears that you are angling to change the rules so as to be able to include the TurnKey article, in which case I would ask that you consider the well-being of the project (in terms of creating the most useful article possible) rather than the well-being of your project. -- samj _in^out 22:00, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

• Regarding the layering scheme: All models are wrong but some models are useful. Where appliances fits depends on what you mean by cloud computing but in any case at some point you need a preconfigured system automatically deployed for handling the job at hand without manual installation/setup. None of the cloud computing server platforms (e.g., Amazon EC2, RackSpace Clouds) can actually do anything of value without them. Sure you don't necessarily need a vendor and you could setup your own appliances, but that's inefficient. Better to have systems experts collaborate in the setting of an open source project to figure out the best integrations and then make it easy to deploy that on a range of platforms. That's what TurnKey is about. It's not about me personally. If somebody saves a few hours of work I don't benefit from that in any way except for some goodwill if they know I'm involved. Most users don't know and don't care who the developers are. Heck I don't know who contributes to most of the open source projects I use, though I would buy them a beer if I ever met them.
• Also there's no need to keep parading my involvement with TurnKey in every single response. I've always been open about that so it's not useful to "out me" on it. Yes, I started and actively contribute to an open source appliances project that is closely related to cloud computing (at least in the sense of cloud computing with virtual servers) and I believe we should have a category for that along with the other vendors in this space. TurnKey just happens to be the only open source appliance vendor (there are a few other proprietary ones). I think that's significant not just in the value it can provide users right now but also in that it's a nice platform for further development by others in the community who are interested in this stuff. Since we've introduced TKLPatch an encouraging number of new appliances have been built by the community. I'm just happy to have bootstrapped an open source project others are interested in. Before I always felt a bit guilty for taking so much from open source and not giving back. Cheers. LirazSiri (talk) 23:20, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

• Speaking of WP:OUTING, was this really necessary? We digress. 1. You don't need to sell appliances to me, I know what they are and what [small] part of cloud computing they comprise. Many users won't touch appliances and in any case keeping the operating system around when you could target a platform is a huge waste of resources. 2. Understand that a project does not have to be commercial for there to be a WP:COI. As far as TurnKey goes, it looks good as a product but it is my contention that it is not necessary/helpful to have it here. In any case very few know what TurnKey is so if we need an example I'd be more inclined to use something like the VMware appliance marketplace to illustrate the point. Remember, this is not so much a directory (that's what the categories are for) as a tool to help people understand cloud computing. -- samj _in^out 00:21, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

Templates shouldn't be used to campaign for any particular article structure.Wtsao (talk) 02:05, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

What goes in?

I've just purged a couple of non-notable entries in the template. Anything that goes into the template pops up across many pages, so we should be much stricter about what goes in here than anything else.

• Things should be discussed here before being added, especially whole new groups
• Only highly notable examples should go in.
• Stuff that goes in without discussion ought to be pulled and discussed, especially if there is any sign of CoI issues.

Thoughts? SteveLoughran (talk) 13:41, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

The point is to help people understand what each layer is/does, not to advertise solutions. Examples should be household names and there should only be a few (5-10) at each layer. For a start you can rip out anything without its own Wikipedia article, and even then check to see whether the article shouldn't be prodded or AfD'd. -- samj _in^out 20:42, 22 February 2010 (UTC)

IMHO, the purpose should be to provide readers with a quick overview of the different aspects associated closely with cloud computing plus links of further interest. Agree with Steve that new groups should be discussed first and we should include only the most notable in each category rather than an exhaustive list of every vendor under the sun. Currently some of the sections are getting too bloated with not very notable examples. Disagree with Sam that we should try to punish new entries we don't like with AfD or prod for deletion. That's too aggressive and violates WP:AGF. Also it's likely to foster unnecessary animosity between editors. Let's keep editorial control in-band. LirazSiri (talk) 08:05, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

How do you suppose articles are discovered for AfD if not by being injected into articles that others care about (like this one)? I have no obligation whatsoever to file an AfD even if I happen to fat finger my way to patent nonsense, but if said patent nonsense keeps being put under my nose then I have every right to call into question its suitability. -- samj _in^out 19:51, 7 March 2010 (UTC)

I tend to agree with SteveLoughran and LirazSiri. Templates aren't meant to be table of contents for articles and there is no consensus on the one true taxonomy for cloud computing. We should strive to maximize usefulness in the encyclopedic sense. Wtsao (talk) 02:10, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Maybe, but client-side stuff needs coverage too. I am actually most neutral on the standards bit, especially XMPP, Atom and BitTorrent. I also think that the server list is danger as its a place that anyone who will sell you a datacenter worth of intel servers each with 6-12 HDDs is providing "cloud" server infrastructure. Just cos Cisco have PPTs saying "we do cloud" doesn't mean their vision makes sense.

Proposed Group: Appliances

Earlier I attempted to add an Appliances section which SteveLoughran removed with the following rational: "Templates may be part of the EC2 world, but not in other stacks.". Regardless of what you call them (or how they're implemented), pre-integrated software stacks are an important part of on-demand server provisioning. There's little point in provisioning a server that isn't configured for the role you need it. That's true whether you are provisioning a server in EC2, GoGrid, or on a private cloud (e.g., running VMWare infrastructure or Xen). Cloud computing users are just like everyone else in the IT world in that they want stuff to just work.LirazSiri (talk) 21:49, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

I felt it was over biased towards EC2-as Cloud Computing to have a whole row of appliances in there. If we had a technology row on virtualisation it could be something that includes appliances as one entry, alongside PXE/Kickstart driven VM instantiation on demand from a list of RPM/deb files. SteveLoughran (talk) 09:13, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

No no there's nothing EC2 specific about appliances. How you implement an appliance is not that important. What's important is that you're pre-integrating a system to align with a particular narrow usage scenario into some kind of package which can then reproduce the result on scale. How you distribute the result is a relatively minor practical detail. The result can be packaged as an ISO, a VMDK HD image, AMI, or a set of interpreted instructions such as a list of RPM packages and preseeded configuration variables. It's still an appliance. Cloud computing is mainly about economics, and cloud computing and appliances go hand in hand because the economics work out. Instead of integrating over and over again and having to test each inconsistent result separately you are leveraging economies of scale and put more resources into creating the very best integration of components and then "mass producing" it with minimum marginal cost. That's especially important when you are provisioning servers on the fly. LirazSiri (talk) 03:18, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

I'm returning to this topic as I'm watching the conflict between Liraz and SamJ. I propose that we create the technologies section, create a "Cloud Appliances" page that can contain technology-neutral coverage of this area. Just listing various people who have tooling or appliance VMs misses the point, and will end up being a WP:EL troublespot on the category listing itself. Similarly, we need something for Cloud Infrastructure APIs that looks at the various APIs, lists some requirements (long haul, security), problems: politics, notifications, etc, and it can be somewhere the various APIs can be looked at. Let's resolve this conflict by giving VM appliances a name and a place, and index that under Cloud Technologies. SteveLoughran (talk) 23:23, 26 February 2010 (UTC)

I agree that "technologies" is a good section to have but unless we further edit the cloud computing template substantially the template will be unbalanced. In other words there's an inconsistency with the way cloud appliances entries are handled vs other areas of the cloud computing stack such as "platforms" and "infrastructure" which do list specific projects and vendors. For example, why do specific infrastructure vendors such as FlexiScale and GoGrid or even an open source project such as Nimbus deserve as much weight as an entire group of appliance vendors? LirazSiri (talk) 03:37, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

Wherever they go, they definitely don't belong here. -- samj _in^out 23:40, 26 February 2010 (UTC)

Oh and by the way - there's a perfectly good place already to discuss these: software appliances. -- samj _in^out 19:48, 7 March 2010 (UTC)

Most true cloud hosting platforms (not SaaS in disguise) have the concept of an image you can choose when creating a new instance. Cloud platforms (e.g., Amazon, GoGrid) and virtualization vendors such as VMWare are working to create marketplaces for them, because it takes the abstract value provided by this "cloud" and puts it to work with useful workloads. I agree that templates belong here because the main advantage of a "cloud" server unlike a "conventional" server is that it's transient and can be provisioned automatically to serve specific roles. You need server templates/appliances to do that because manual integration is not feasible in these circumstances. If we're listing virtualization infrastructure providers such as Eucalyptus and Nimbus I think it's useful to list template vendors as well. Wtsao (talk) 02:40, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

-1 to template vendors, list gets too big. AWS and GoGrid are only pushing some architectures, MS Azure is very different. But I do think a technologies section is better, and VM images fits in there. SteveLoughran (talk) 18:00, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Proposal: remove Servers

I have to agree with LirazShiri's actions at rm-ing the server line. We could have a datacenter hardware corner that looks at the hardware issues -and if you don't think there are problems in building power-efficient high availability datacentre hardware then you don't even know what the problems are, what PUE stands for or what limitations DNS encounters in this world. You may see things like AWS banning multicast IP but not understand why that is, or why vendor costs are the way they are. But having a row listing HW vendors is just doomed, everyone will end up battling over what goes in. SteveLoughran (talk) 00:11, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

The source of the "Servers" and "Clients" layers is to capture the physical devices and operating systems that power and consume cloud computing services respectively. Without it you end up with things like CloudRack and Cisco UCS as well as virtualisation platforms like VMware trying to creep into the Infrastructure layer as well as mobiles, browsers, operating systems etc. creeping into Applications from above. Remember, this template should reflect/illustrate what is in the cloud computing article. -- samj _in^out 02:25, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

First, I disagree with the notion that the cloud computing template has to be some kind of table of contents for the cloud computing article. Rather than try to capture the one true taxonomy of cloud computing we should strive to maximize utility for our readers. In practice the template which is included on many cloud computing related articles serves as a resource for providing further links of interest to other related articles on Wikipedia. It's telling that the Server section doesn't even link to proper articles but rather to vendors. Also I stand by my original assertion that cloud computing has nothing to do with the hardware vendors listed. Cloud is a software/economic paradigm. You can implement "a cloud" with any hardware. Where do we draw the line? I bet the vendors listed only account for a tiny insignificant portion of the actual hardware used in actual cloud computing deployments. Conversely you could use the hardware marketed for "Cloud computing" in a software/economic configuration that nobody would genuinely identify with cloud computing. The Servers category is a poor fit for this template. LirazSiri (talk) 03:49, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

OK, but's not really "server" so much as "datacenter technologies and infrastructure". SteveLoughran (talk) 17:25, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

• Like it or not, this template is attached to the cloud computing article in order to illustrate the various layers. If you persist in hijacking it then I shall simply remove it from the articles to which it is attached and create another in its place which serves the purpose for which it was intended. It is stunning to me that you are, even at this late stage, continuing to argue your position given that you have an absolutely blatant conflict of interest and have already proven yourself incapable of acting reasonably. -- samj _in^out 04:30, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

• Sorry, but I don't get it. What does my involvement with TurnKey have to do with removing the servers section from the cloud computing template? Also, other editors can have a say in what the template is/should be used for. None of us own it. Am I really being so unreasonable? LirazSiri (talk) 07:42, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

Who says a cloud has to be built on "data center technologies and infrastructure"? There has to be "servers" somewhere", but it doesn't matter whether they're the guy next door's PC, a single rack in a telco's exchange or one of a handful of next generation data centers. This definition is more precise, sure, but less accurate. Examples of the sort of stuff I'm talking about are:

• Cloud-specific hardware like Intel's cloud chips: Intel puts cloud on single megachip
• Cloud-specific software like Microsoft Azure: Microsoft Plans ‘Cloud’ Operating System (not to mention the myriad "cloud in a box" offerings)
• Combined offerings like Cisco's Unified Computing System: Cisco unveils cloud computing platform for service providers

All of these things obviously belong in the cloud computing articles somewhere, and without a layer below they pollute the infrastructure layer which really should be reserved for services like Amazon's EC2. -- samj _in^out 19:46, 7 March 2010 (UTC)

Yes. They all belong in the datacentre. Which is different from your own collection of boxes as they have 1 or 10 or higher gigabit links, predictable latencies, and are therefore suitable to running protocols like Gossip, supporting filesystems like Google GFS, Hadoop HDFS. Datacentres > servers as the networking and cooling matter too. So yes, we need something, I am just not sure that the name "server" is adequate. SteveLoughran (talk) 22:37, 8 March 2010 (UTC)

How about Skype then, which delivers its service using almost exclusively PC-based software (the central services are just for PSTN gateway and billing), or volunteer computing in general for that matter: Volunteer Computing and Desktop Cloud: The Cloud@Home Paradigm. Hence "servers" (in whatever form) and not "datacenter". For cloud we don't care how the service is delivered... it could be from a black box at the kerb for all we care (and no, this is not far-fetched). -- samj _in^out 21:26, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

In consensus with SteveLoughran and LirazSiri, I've deleted the servers layer.Wtsao (talk) 02:42, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Proposal: removing that silly graphic

That silly cloud graphic in the template is as about non-descriptive as it gets. What value does the word "cloud" encompassed by a squiggly line add to the template? LirazSiri (talk) 07:58, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

The cloud image was a placeholder that I had intended to replace when something better comes along. So far nothing has but I have some ideas. -- samj _in^out 21:47, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

OK, I'd like to hear more about those ideas but in the meantime that image isn't contributing anything. There's no need for a placeholder in a template. Think about it like this: if I made that image would you still advocate keeping it there? LirazSiri (talk) 23:01, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

Yes. It may not be contributing much but it's better than nothing. -- samj _in^out 19:38, 7 March 2010 (UTC)

Agree that there is no meaningful information conveyed in the image and that it is just a distraction.Wtsao (talk) 02:14, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

bad behavior by SamJohnston

To whom it may concern, I've warned SamJohnston for his behavior:

1. reverts all my changes in bulk - hours worth of edits
2. ignores discussion
3. makes hypocritical accusations on my talk page

All while having a major COI. I hope the warning was enough. Wtsao (talk) 09:52, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

You said "You have obvious COI with regards to the cloud computing articles. I suggest you stay away from them.". That's not only uncivil - it's not at all how WP:COI works. Invasive changes like removing the majority of the content of an article need consensus which you didn't even attempt to obtain. -- samj _in^out 10:13, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

And then you were blocked... when you're back we can discuss any changes you suggest. -- samj _in^out 14:02, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Apparently it's easy for an experienced editor such as yourself to manipulate the powers that be with bogus accusations and alphabet soup hand-waving. Don't worry I spent the time I was blocked reading up on Wikipedia policies so as not to give a WP:LAWYER such as yourself any excuses. We'll play this out by the book. Wtsao (talk) 03:02, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

Summary of consensus on "template purpose"

Since there seems to be disagreement regarding what is the consensus on various issues regarding the template I am making a summary.

Summary of discussion in the "template purpose" and "what goes in" sections

• SamJohnston suggests the templates purpose is to illustrate taxonomy for the cloud computing article.
• LirazSiri objects, proposes that the template serve to reference other articles on the basis of utility / usefulness to readers of the many articles to which the template is attached.
• SteveLoughran suggests to include articles on the basis of notability.
• Wtsao objects to SamJohnston's taxonomy proposal and summarizes: "Templates aren't meant to be table of contents for articles and there is no consensus on the one true taxonomy for cloud computing. We should strive to maximize usefulness in the encyclopedic sense."

Consensus: References to notable articles related to cloud computing on the basis of maximizing encyclopedic utility. The template is NOT for promoting a taxonomy or layering scheme.Wtsao (talk) 03:11, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

Summary of "proposal: removing that silly graphic"

• SamJohnston who is the author of the image thinks it should stay "as a placeholder".
• LirazSiri objects because "it isn't contributing anything"
• Wtsao agrees: "no meaningful information conveyed in the image, just a distraction"

Consensus: Remove image Wtsao (talk) 03:15, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

Summary of "Proposal: remove Servers"

• SamJohnston: thinks the server category is appropriate because "Like it or not, this template is attached to the cloud computing article in order to illustrate the various layers."
• LirazSiri: deleted the servers category. Thinks it should be removed.
• SteveLoughran: agrees with LirazSiri's deletion and thinks servers are part of the datacenter in the technologies section.

Consensus: Remove servers category. Wtsao (talk) 03:20, 4 May 2010 (UTC)