This is potentially a lawsuit waiting to happen: the team that did it for Amazon leaves to do it again on their own, and are marketing themselves as such. I can't see how Amazon will be happily quiet with this situation.
As a user though, I welcome the competition in this market.
Unless/until Amazon objects with a legal basis, it's unfair to the team to assume this is a problem. Grant them the presumption they know what they're doing.
That was my first thought as well. From Amazon's point of view, this is very much "Not cool, dude." I'm not sure at what point it becomes a legal issue, but it is definitely a dickish move.
1. Deployment - basically, boot a seed node, then turn on machines. New nodes automatically install and come online, and are as easy to remove. This eases management when you're dealing with hundreds or thousands of machines.
2. Permissions - we've got a much finer-grained permissions system which comes in useful if you're deploying a massive cloud for use across, for example, a multi-site and multi-department organization.
3. Self-healing - we've got a lot of monitoring stuff which watches running services and migrates them around the cloud as things (inevitably) break or become unavailable.
4. Layer 2 networking - we're providing virtual layer 2 networks amongst instances, which allows dynamic creation and re-organization.
5. Multi-tenancy - there's a full multi-customer, multi-user model in the system, which allows you to easily re-sell capacity.
6. Federation - using the same user and permission framework, you can pull up instances either in the local private cloud, other people's Nimbula clouds, or in public clouds like EC2 or Rackspace (or, I guess, even accessible Ubuntu clouds).
Basically, UEC is a good choice for running a local EC2 clone, but falls down a bit when you require very large clusters or strong security. We've had the opportunity to rethink and design our own system, rather than clone an existing one, which allows us to offer a greater range of possibilities.
I'd love to hear someone frank legal input on the risk of a team leaving a company to start a similar competitive product, and marketing themselves in reference to the previous company. If I work at GE, learn how to make light bulbs, then start a light bulb company leveraging all that expensive R&D but with no costs, do I have a problem?
That already happened. The company is called Venture Lighting:
Venture CEO Wayne Hellman began the development of the company after a 16-year career with General Electric, during which he pioneered innovations for metal halide lighting. Fifteen years of developing metal halide for GE convinced Mr. Hellman that a tremendous opportunity existed for a specialty metal halide lighting company. Mr. Hellman, along with a small core group of marketing and engineering managers from GE, formed Venture Lighting, literally beginning from scratch.
What kind of problem can you possibly have? Unless your work contract had anti-competitive clause or you're using something patented by the company you're trouble free.
[+] [-] pierrefar|15 years ago|reply
As a user though, I welcome the competition in this market.
[+] [-] gojomo|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hga|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amock|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] subwindow|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] borisk|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dotBen|15 years ago|reply
...which is also FOSS.
http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud
[+] [-] bryn|15 years ago|reply
1. Deployment - basically, boot a seed node, then turn on machines. New nodes automatically install and come online, and are as easy to remove. This eases management when you're dealing with hundreds or thousands of machines.
2. Permissions - we've got a much finer-grained permissions system which comes in useful if you're deploying a massive cloud for use across, for example, a multi-site and multi-department organization.
3. Self-healing - we've got a lot of monitoring stuff which watches running services and migrates them around the cloud as things (inevitably) break or become unavailable.
4. Layer 2 networking - we're providing virtual layer 2 networks amongst instances, which allows dynamic creation and re-organization.
5. Multi-tenancy - there's a full multi-customer, multi-user model in the system, which allows you to easily re-sell capacity.
6. Federation - using the same user and permission framework, you can pull up instances either in the local private cloud, other people's Nimbula clouds, or in public clouds like EC2 or Rackspace (or, I guess, even accessible Ubuntu clouds).
Basically, UEC is a good choice for running a local EC2 clone, but falls down a bit when you require very large clusters or strong security. We've had the opportunity to rethink and design our own system, rather than clone an existing one, which allows us to offer a greater range of possibilities.
[+] [-] risotto|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aneth|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imp|15 years ago|reply
Venture CEO Wayne Hellman began the development of the company after a 16-year career with General Electric, during which he pioneered innovations for metal halide lighting. Fifteen years of developing metal halide for GE convinced Mr. Hellman that a tremendous opportunity existed for a specialty metal halide lighting company. Mr. Hellman, along with a small core group of marketing and engineering managers from GE, formed Venture Lighting, literally beginning from scratch.
http://www.venturelighting.com/About_V-History.html
I don't know what would be wrong with that. As long as you don't take any IP or equipment you can generally be free to do what you want.
[+] [-] borisk|15 years ago|reply