The Cuban Cloud Missile Crisis…Weapons Of Mass Abstraction.
English: Coat of arms of Cuba. Español: Escudo de Cuba. Русский: Герб Кубы. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In the midst of the Cold War in October of 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union stood periously on the brink of nuclear war as a small island some 90 miles off the coast of Florida became the focal point of intense foreign policy scrutiny, challenges to sovereignty and political arm wrestling the likes of which were never seen before.
Photographic evidence provided by a high altitude U.S. spy plane exposed the until-then secret construction of medium and intermediate ballistic nuclear missile silos, constructed by the Soviet Union, which were deliberately placed so as to be close enough to reach the continental United States.
The United States, alarmed by this unprecedented move by the Soviets and the already uneasy relations with communist Cuba, unsuccessfully attempted a CIA-led forceful invasion and overthrow of the Cuban regime at the Bay of Pigs.
This did not sit well with either the Cubans or Soviets. A nightmare scenario ensued as the Soviets responded with threats of its own to defend its ally (and strategic missile sites) at any cost, declaring the American’s actions as unprovoked and unacceptable.
During an incredibly tense standoff, the U.S. mulled over plans to again attack Cuba both by air and sea to ensure the disarmament of the weapons that posed a dire threat to the country.
As posturing and threats continued to escalate from the Soviets, President Kennedy elected to pursue a less direct military action; a naval blockade designed to prevent the shipment of supplies necessary for the completion and activation of launchable missiles. Using this as a lever, the U.S. continued to demand that Russia dismantle and remove all nuclear weapons as they prevented any and all naval traffic to and from Cuba.
Soviet premier Krustchev protested such acts of “direct aggression” and communicated to president Kennedy that his tactics were plunging the world into the depths of potential nuclear war.
While both countries publicly traded threats of war, the bravado, posturing and defiance were actually a cover for secret backchannel negotiations involving the United Nations. The Soviets promised they would dismantle and remove nuclear weapons, support infrastructure and transports from Cuba, and the United States promised not to invade Cuba while also removing nuclear weapons from Turkey and Italy.
The Soviets made good on their commitment two weeks later. Eleven months after the agreement, the United States complied and removed from service the weapons abroad.
The Cold War ultimately ended and the Soviet Union fell, but the political, economic and social impact remains even today — 40 years later we have uneasy relations with (now) Russia and the United States still enforces ridiculous economic and social embargoes on Cuba.
What does this have to do with Cloud?
Well, it’s a cute “movie of the week” analog desperately in need of a casting call for Nikita Khrushchev and JFK. I hear Gary Busey and Aston Kutcher are free…
As John Furrier, Dave Vellante and I were discussing on theCUBE recently at VMworld 2012, there exists an uneasy standoff — a cold war — between the so-called “super powers” staking a claim in Cloud. The posturing and threats currently in process don’t quite have the world-ending outcomes that nuclear war would bring, but it could have devastating technology outcomes nonetheless.
In this case, the characters of the Americans, Soviets, Cubans and the United Nations are played by networking vendors, SDN vendors, virtualization/abstraction vendors, cloud “stack” projects/efforts/products and underlying CPU/chipset vendors (not necessarily in that order…) The rest of the world stands by as their fate is determined on the world’s stage.
If we squint hard enough at Cloud, we might find out very own version of the “Bay of Pigs,” with what’s going on with OpenStack.
The “community” effort behind OpenStack is one largely based on “industry” and if we think of OpenStack as Cuba, it’s being played as pawn in the much larger battle for global domination. The munitions being stocked in this tiny little enclave threatens to disrupt relations of epic proportions. That’s why we now see so much strategic movement around an initiative and technology that many outside of the navel gazers haven’t really paid much attention to.
Then there are players like Amazon Web Services who, like China of today, quietly amass their weapons of mass abstraction as the industry-jockeying and distractions play on (but that’s a topic for another post)
Cutting to the chase…if we step back for a minute
Intel is natively bundling more and more networking and virtualization capabilities into their CPU/Chipsets and a $7B investment in security company McAfee makes them a serious player there. VMware is de-emphasizing the “hypervisor” and is instead positioning they are focused on end-to-end solutions which include everything from secure mobility, orchestration/provisioning and now, with Nicira, networking. Networking companies like Cisco and Juniper continue to move up-stack to deeper integrate networking and security along with service overlays in order to remain relevant in light of virtualization and SDN.
…and OpenStack’s threat of disrupting all of those plays makes it important enough to pay attention to. It’s a little island of technology that is causing huge behemoths to collide. A molehill that has become a mountain.
If today’s announcements of VMware and Intel joining OpenStack as Gold Members along with the existing membership by other “super powers” doesn’t make it clear that we’re in the middle of an enormous power struggle, I’ve got a small Island to sell you 😉
Me? I’m going to make some Lechon Asado, enjoy a mojito and a La Gloria Cubana.
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Hoff,
All these are valid arguments if the license wasn’t Apache. As I wrote during the “initial OpenStack crisis”, if any of the corporate interests have wrong intentions in the project, they will come back to regret the Apache licensing. If Oracle is facing so much difficulty with MySQL and Open Office, the corporates of OpenStack will face even more difficulty. I will bet on just Apache license alone as the savior of the project in the long run than any governance problems. #my2cents
As the old story goes, I think you are both right.
The ability for these vendors to control the project is probably in the same range of likelihood as (in retrospect) Castro pulling a Gorbachev; there’s a debate point for Krish.
That said, there is definitely a risk that one vendor or another will fork — most likely as a wrapper or some black-box packaging — and there are startups that have pursued this model as a latter-day echo of GPL.
However, I would tip this debate in favor of the Apache license. Not in terms of empowering the vendors, as Krish describes, but in terms of empowering those who run their infra on OpenStack. With this transparent and frictionless license model, there will always be a gold-standard of compatibility, free of prejudice. Smart buyers who recognize black-box packaging as stealth lock-in (aka openwashing) will use it to keep the vendors honest.