The diagram shows what we agreed we mean by Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (right hand side) and the areas encompassed by the individual terms infrastructure / platform / software on the left. A better term than “software” might be “application” since the platform part is also really just software, but SaaS has already gained wide acceptance.

It is assumed that “as a service” means all services within the definition are fully integrated up to and including the respective level, thus incorporating any sub-levels. Therefore, SaaS providers could either sub-contract to a PaaS provider, or would incorporate the PaaS themselves and provide it as part of the SaaS “stack”. In turn the IaaS could be sub-contracted or incorporated. The customer would see an integrated service.

It is also worth explaining the overlap between ‘platform’ and ‘software’; that is because some advanced platforms are built on complex software solutions which go well beyond just operating systems and a bit of infrastructure software.

For example, one could consider bare operating system as the platform, with the bespoke software application incorporating its own software infrastructure elements (eg. a bespoke CRM solution). One might also consider a Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP stack as the platform in its entirety, with only the PHP code itself being the software/application layer. The key differentiator between ‘platform’ and ‘software’ is that a platform is standardised and to an extent commoditised, with the software being the bespoke / custom element. A platform would also often, but not always, be highly scalable across multiple servers.

Standardised / commoditised software (hosted application) services, as opposed to bespoke / custom deployments, would most likely be considered to be SaaS.

Virtual differences

Until this point many experienced readers might be saying, “Yes, that that is just hardware, middleware and software renamed!”. To a large extent you would be right, with one small exception being subtle differences between modern platform/middleware, but there is an important difference between the old concept of “hardware” and ours of “infrastructure”: virtualisation.

It was agreed among the G-Cloud team that the virtualisation should now be considered as part of the hardware layer since it has become such an integral method of dividing and provisioning hardware resources. It is important to note that we drew the line precisely between the virtualisation layer (ie. the hypervisor) and operating system, viewing a bare-bones virtual machine without operating system or kernel as the unit(s) of hardware.

Of course, virtualisation is not ubiquitous. Indeed for many systems including highly scalable ones upon which PaaS and SaaS stacks are built do not use any virtualisation (Google App Engine does not, for example). In such cases one would simply view the stack without the virtualisation layer with the boundary between infrastructure and platform being between the physical hardware and operating system layers.

Network

Another critique of this model could be that the “interconnecting network” appears to link directly from the software layer through to the client device. In reality, of course, all network traffic has to sink back down through the layers from the software to via the networking & firewalling layer, then on to the client device. To keep the stack looking like a stack, however (which is correct from a logical perspective), it is better to stick the client device on top rather than off to one side. In the full postulated functional of the G-Cloud logical architecture the connections are more explicitly shown in a 2D rather than linear model. Hopefully that will be in the public domain soon!

Working on the project has given me a very clear insight into what the benefits of Cloud Computing to government and business really are, and also what a government Cloud would need to look like. That was essentially what we were describing (in broad terms) in our technical architecture strategy paper, which will be published soon. Therefore, I’m updating my definition of Cloud Computing in line with that work, and also incorporating the NIST definition, which has recently become something of a de-facto standard (although I don’t entirely agree with it).

Cloud != Utility

First off I wish to be clear: Cloud Computing is not the same thing as Utility Computing (aka. Infrastructure as a Service). Nor is Cloud the same thing as Grid Computing. Both terms are well-defined and there is no need to invent a new name for these decades-old concepts (my Dad was providing Utility Computing services from his computer bureau service before I was born!):

• Grid Computing: The combination of computer resources from multiple administrative domains applied to a common task.
• Utility Computing: The packaging of computing resources (computation, storage etc.) as a metered service similar to a traditional public utility.

Cloud is often confused with Platform or Software as a Service too, but they are just extensions of the Utility Computing concept, and again are nothing terribly new. I see Cloud Computing as the combination of those old concepts of utility and grid:

Cloud Computing = Grid Computing + (Utility Computing * N)
…or…
Cloud Computing is a Grid of Compute Utilities

I shall explain. The real power of the Cloud Computing concept comes about when one views it as the mass-market for Utility Computing resources, and that is what the G-Cloud programme essentially asked the technical work stream to come up with; an architecture that would allow a number of different, but standardised, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform-aaS (PaaS) and Software-aaS (SaaS) services to be make available in one central competitive market place (the App Store).

The clear desire was also for those services to be interoperable, especially at the infrastructure level. Additionally, and this is where the “Cloudiness” comes in, the desire was such that one could request computing resources to a specified service level agreement (SLA) and at a specific security impact level, and have a pre-certified range of options which could then be chosen based on price, or other factor.

That fits with what I believe most people mean when they say “host it in the Cloud” – referencing an amorphous, distributed collection of compute resource used in a way that you don’t really care where your application resides, so long as your requirements are met.

Therefore, I maintain that when we refer to “Cloud Computing” we should be talking about an open market for computing resources, created when you combine multiple interoperable compute utilities into one massive grid, hence Grid + (Utility * N).

NIST definition

I really like the new Cloud Computing definition from the US’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for the most part. They define three service models, five essential characteristics, and four deployment models. I have represented their model on a cube, as below:

A well-managed data centre is not “a Cloud”!

The only part I take issue with is their “private Cloud” concept; something being conveyed with gay abandon by technology analysts the world over unfortunately. In most usage, “private Cloud” just refers to a partitioned off chunk of infrastructure within one utility computing provider in most cases, or worse-still just a well managed data centre with a bit of virtualisation if you ask some people!

The UK government, for example, wants a private Cloud for some higher-security requirements, but that would be a pool of resources from a number of utility computing facilities (probably partitioned off super-secure areas of providers’ data centres); an open market again, albeit one with specific requirements. As it stands, the “essential characteristic” of resource pooling is at-odds with the analyst-speak concept of a private Cloud; if it is private and dedicated to one organisation, you will only be pooling the resources of one organisation.

There are very few organisations that will have a sufficiently diverse usage profile to gain additional benefit from such an approach, however there are several with similar requirements that could club together as one private community, like UK government. Also, only NIST’s “Hybrid Cloud” encapsulates the full vision of what I believe Cloud Computing is about (interoperability etc). Therefore I would change the NIST deployment models as follows:

• Private Compute Utility: An infrastructure physically dedicated to one organisation.
• Private Community Cloud: An infrastructure spanning multiple administrative domains that is physically dedicated to a specific community with shared concerns.
• Public Cloud: An infrastructure spanning multiple administrative domains that is made available to the general public / businesses, without physical partitioning of resource allocations. (There is arguably only one public Cloud – hence the phrase “host it in The Cloud”.)
• Hybrid Cloud: A combination of public public and private compute utilities in order to allow “cloud bursting” for some requirements, or to allow a private compute utility owner to sell their spare capacity into The Cloud.

It’s all Amazon’s fault; misnaming their Plastic Compute Utility

The origin of the term “Cloud” comes from the diagrams we used to draw of the Internet back in the ’90′s; typically the automatically-routed internetwork was depicted by a big fluffy cloud in the middle of a network map, and it was just accepted that it would route things sensibly between the data centre and client (or other end points). The term then gained further traction with people using phrases like, “I’ll just host it in the Cloud”, now referring to the generally available computing / hosting resources connected to the ‘net.

Then, along came Amazon with their “Elastic Compute Cloud” (EC2), applying the term to something that (when considered on its own) is really just a massive plastic compute utility. ‘Plastic’ since you have to request more or less instances (resources do not elastically shrink) – the elasticity is a function of how you write your application to interface with their API. A ‘Compute Utility’ because it is really just one very large compute grid being sold as a utility service; why apply a new term when we have a perfectly good one?

I see Cloud Computing as the result of having multiple utility computing providers at your behest, with standardised APIs to allow provisioning from competing suppliers. That is pretty much here now, although the grid middleware to allow smooth interoperability is not quite industrial-strength.

IaaS vs. PaaS vs. SaaS

One of the nicely encapsulated outputs from the G-Cloud project to-date has been an agreement on what we actually mean by infrastructure, platform and software, and how they do differ a little from the old terms hardware, middleware and application, but that can wait for my next posting (here).

An impressive amount for a technology startup with no clear means of generating revenue, so I thought I would do some calculations of my own:

Twitter has about 18-20 million users in the US, according to Mashable

Earnings, earnings, earnings

There are 300m people in the US and 750m in Europe. Let’s assume that the ratios are the same for Twitter users. Therefore, the total number of Western Twitter users (ie. people who would potentially pay for anything) in 2010 is:

(20m / 300 ) * (750 + 300) = 70m users

To justify a $1bn (£625m) valuation they need to be able to realistically generate at least 5% of that as profit (20x earnings multiple, which is basically unheard of outside blue chip corporates) ie. at least $50m/year.

Therefore, in round numbers, they need to be able to realistically expect (in future) to generate earnings (profits) of $0.70/year from each user.

So far, perhaps not unreasonable; once micro-payment systems start working properly one could imagine users paying a notional $0.10/month to use Twitter, or advertisers paying that per user, at least so long as Twitter is the only one of its kind.

Twitter ain’t so special

That is where we realise the valuation’s big flaw: Twitter is not doing anything special. To build another system that replicates their functionality would, in my opinion, take 2 good coders, 2 good system administrators and one good web designer 6 months, tops. Add in some management and marketing capability for operational running and if you are a generous employer your wage bill might be £500k/year ($800k).

What about hosting costs? Well what it boils down to is a large and very active database:

Assuming 100m users
100 reads & 10 writes per user per day
= 10 billion reads & 1 billion writes per day

Squeeze into 16 active hours (just looking at the West)
= 120,000 read & 12,000 write transactions per second

To host a system which is capable of those transaction levels you would need at most 100 1U quad-core machines loaded with RAM (eg 24GB), costing £200/month each, or £240k/year ($385k).

So, I reckon that Twitter’s operational costs should be under $1m/year. But what do I know, right? I’ve only been designing, building and hosting massively automated online business systems for a decade, not to mention being one of the UK’s leading tech entrepreneurs.

A more rational valuation

So why are Twitter’s investors valuing such an easily-and-cheaply replicable business so highly? I suppose that they are banking on a land-grab effect and user stickiness, but we have seen what is happening to MySpace’s diluted popularity faced by new competitors.

When faced with such valuations I fall back on common sense and base the valuation on a cost-plus revenue model, ie. “what would it cost to provide the service, plus a modest profit margin”? All businesses and markets eventually commoditise down to that price point after all, and such commoditisation can happen very rapidly in the online world.

Viewed from that perspective I estimate that Twitter’s services are probably worth about 1.4 cents per user per year at present (estimated $1m/y running costs divided by 70m users). Lets be really generous and assume that they are able to generate 50% profits on that (first-mover advantage etc), so we get $500k/year profit, which at our mentalistic 20x valuation ration would give a valuation of a whopping $10m (£6.25). Hmm.

But that can’t be right?

I admit, I am taking an extremist point of view, and commoditisation of this very new and innovative sort of service is almost certainly several years away. However, defaulting to a cost-plus business model does demonstrate the likely value of such services when the competition have all caught up, and in Twitter’s case it is not a terribly exciting outlook.

Further, the valuation is being extrapolated from a $50 million purchase for a minority share holding. That investment was possibly more about getting a seat on the board than about a real valuation of the company.

Finally, and call me a cynic, but most investors are in the business of making a large return on a high-risk investment with a short time-horizon. One of the ways that happens all-too-often in the technology sector is less about yields and more about a business’s price getting hyped as high as possible before the savvy investors get out. Some some poor sap is then left holding the baby when commoditisation or better-competition comes to bite, exposing the lack of substance behind the valuation and causing the valuation to tumble.

Eye of Google

That is Twitter’s fundamental problem, to repeat myself: It is nothing special. Google (for example) deserves its outrageous share capitalisations because they have a unique technology which gives them an indomitable lead in the market place. Twitter is little more than a non-realtime Web-based chat room, and its technology would be trivial to replicate. Expectedly, the behemoth that is Google has indeed turned its lidless eye on chat-like status-updates in the form of Buzz.

To my eyes, their strangle-hold on the consumer Web-services market remains unchallenged by the likes of Twitter. The only interesting thing I’ve seen, however, is that their master-plan to crush Microsoft by making the browser the new platform was perhaps hiccoughed by Twitter in the form of software like TweetDeck – an example of Web services reverting to local software clients. Perhaps the browser is not quite ready for everything we want to do just yet after all, but I doubt that will save Twitter from eventual relegation to the Web-stars twilight world along with the likes of friends reunited.

The panel session was lively, and I raised a few eyebrows with my predictions that the Big Corps in software & broadcast were under major threat. I was particularly pleased when I managed to astound Mr. Paxman with some stats on women in technology – here is an excerpt from the Intellect blog on the conference:

In the final panel session, Jeremy Paxman (probably for the first time in his career) was stuck for words when Kate Craig-Wood, MD of Memset, indicated that there was a 23% gender pay gap in the IT industry. Paxman expressed a little scepticism over the statistic, but rest assured the figure is one oft quoted by Intellect and comes from an equalities and human rights commission report.

http://google.co.uk/search?q=the+definition+of+cloud+computing

Lets face it, Google is near omniscient (and probably already has a band of worshipers preparing for the birth of its sentience) so I must know my stuff! </gloat>

Ahem, anyway, when you get down to it, there are only really three differences between Cloud Computing and traditional IT infrastructure outsourcing:

1. Shorter contracts: Hours, days or weeks (at most one month) rather than months or years (usually at least 6 months for traditional outsourcing).
2. On demand: Near-instant scaling / adding of resources.
3. No up-front costs: The CapEx and installation is absorbed into the rental charges.

Modern “managed hosting” providers like my company are largely synonymous with “Cloud Computing” or “Utility Computing” providers; companies like mine will give customers anything from a virtual machine to a large dedicated cluster with a contract of one month and no setup fees. We are blurring the line between traditional IT infrastructure outsourcing (eg. EDS / HP at the big end, Rackspace at the small end) and “pure” Cloud providers like Amazon EC2.

Cloud Computing has been enabled by the ubiquity of Internet connectivity, since companies are no longer tied to owning their own data centre with hard-lines back to offices. Instead, the infrastructure can be pretty much anywhere, although usually you want it in the same country as your main operations.

So what becomes of the old-school big-corp IT outsourcers?

As for the impact on IT outsourcing businesses, that is simple: Cloud Computing is exposing the true cost of computer / server resources, which thanks to Moore’s Law is tiny. Cloud / Utility Computing providers are driving the comoditisation of compute & storage resource, thus eviscerating the outrageous profit margins enjoyed by the old-guard of IT outsourcing providers.

The Cloud movement has the potential to finally deliver on IT’s long-oversold promise of shared services and cheap, highly scalable process automation. In doing so, Cloud also threatens the livelihoods of the big IT consultancies / Systems Intergrators who have become better at selling their highly-paid peoples’ time than actual IT services.

The proof are the likes of Google, Xero online accounting and Zimbra Desktop (Outlook- & Google docs-like functionality, but open source and Web-based): They are delivering most of the IT services that businesses need at an extremely low price, thus demonstrating that:

1. Most of us want the same, simple things in terms of IT services.
2. IT resources are actually really, really cheap.

Sorry chaps, but it looks like the jig is up.

They announced it as a “Small Settings Update” – pasted below:

Small Settings Update

We’ve updated the Notices section of Settings to better reflect how folks are using Twitter regarding replies. Based on usage patterns and feedback, we’ve learned most people want to see when someone they follow replies to another person they follow—it’s a good way to stay in the loop. However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable. Today’s update removes this undesirable and confusing option.

The Importance of Discovery

Spotting new folks in tweets is an interesting way to check out new profiles and find new people to follow. Despite this update, you’ll still see mentions or references linking to people you don’t follow. For example, you’ll continue to see, “Ev meeting with @biz about work stuff” even if you don’t follow @biz. We’ll be introducing better ways to discover and follow interesting accounts as we release more features in this space.

The beauty of Twitter has always been that it is like a chat room where you are not necessarily listening to the same people who you are talking to. That may seem a bit odd at first, but when you think about it it can be rather cool. Take me for instance; without sounding too egotistical, I have time to follow about 100 people, but more than that are interested in what I have to say. Some of those people might mainly use Twitter to talk about personal issues that are not relevant to me, so I don’t follow them.

Equally, I like hearing replies from people I do follow to people that I do not. That way I can “listen in” to conversations of the people I follow and if it sounds interesting I can link through and look at the other side of the convo, but I don;t have to have the other person in my feed / timeline.

@monkchips is a good example; he is a great Twitterer and a strong voice in the IT community. He follows about 800 people, and is followed by >5,000. I like hearing his side of conversations directed at people I do not follow, since then I can cherry-pick interesting sounding ones. I follow him because he is interesting, not because he is a personal friend or we share friends.

In effect, this change is turning Twitter into a ‘normal’ chat room just like the ones I was using 13 years ago at University. We used a system called Internet Relay Chat.. or IRC as it is commonly known. Such a shame to see a great innovation in online comms take a massive leap backwards.

In other words, utility computing is the provision of computing resources as a utility, in the same way that the familiar utilities (electricity, water, gas) are provided; on a pay-as-you-use basis. Sometimes utility computing it is called “on-demand computing” – the terms are synonymous. In a utility computing model the following resources would be available “on tap”:

• CPU time
  • Cores
  • Clock cycles per second
  • Floating point processing vs. integer processing (MIPS vs. FLOPS)
• Data storage (RAM, disk etc)
  • Data space (bytes)
  • Maximum I/O throughput (bytes per second)
  • Maximum transactions per second (I/O operations per second)
  • Error correction level
  • Redundancy (eg. RAID level)
• Bandwidth / connectivity
  • Throughput (bytes per second)
  • Latency to specific locations
  • Network redundancy

Grid -> Utility -> Cloud

So, how does utility computing relate to grid & cloud computing? Those terms are often used in the same breath as utility computing, or the three are confused with each other. While interconnected, though, they are different concepts:

• Grid computing is a technical approach spanning an application across multiple computers within one administrative domain (one provider, not necessarily one location).
• A compute grid is a collection of computers within one administrative domain capable of hosting a distributed application.
• Grid is about infrastructure.
• Utility computing is a sales approach, treating computing resources as a utility in the way we treat the familiar utilities (water,gas,electricity etc.). A utility computing provider would sell resources on their own grid(s).
• Utility is about business relationships.
• Cloud computing means an open market for computing resources; utility computing applied to multiple grids.
• A compute cloud is a grid spanning multiple administrative domains with applications able to move between domains in response to cost and SLA requirements.
• Cloud is about scale and the computing resource market.

Is Cloud Computing already here?

Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud is actually rather mis-named, and is really just a very large utility computing facility that spans multiple data centre locations, all of which are within one administrative domain (ie. Amazon’s massive grid).

Google’s App Engine is also not “cloud computing”, but instead a somewhat constrained sort of utility computing (you can only run applications specifically coded for the app engine). Some might call it “IT as a service”, but that term is rather too vague also.

Arguably there is only really one “cloud”, which is the mass-market for utility computing resource. To state “I am going to host this in the Cloud” would mean that you are going to run your app on one (or many) of the available utility computing providers.

Globe-trotting applications (aka. ‘Follow the moon’)

The ultimate vision of cloud computing is where you do not actually know where your application is being run at any one time. You would specify your SLA (eg. uptime, latency to a certain location) requirements and certain financial limits, and then give it with those specifications to some sort of broker. The application would then be able roam between administrative domains (eg. a data centre, a collection of PCs like Seti@Home, a super computer, your neighbours’ home appliances, etc), automatically seeking out the most cost effective resources that fit within the SLA requirements.

We are far from achieving true “cloud computing” at the moment, but we do have a number of utility computing providers coming online. As business slowly learns to let go of their attachment to tin and the concept that “this application run on that box” or even “this application runs in that data centre” then we shall see a massive commoditisation of the marketplace. This in turn will most likely result in the centralisation of compute resource into a small number of very large data centres in geographically strategic locations, and will enable much “greener” computing.

Cloud is not the most efficient form of computing purely because of optimal usage of IT resources, either. In the ultimate vision of cloud, one can envisage applications roaming the planet East-West, following the night time to take advantage of cheaper electricity prices (there is a surplus of power generation at night, and it is inefficient to transport electricity long distances at present), and lower temperatures (meaning less power for cooling).

Update: But isn’t Cloud also about IT services / SaaS?

Here I am merely trying to pin down one aspect of the poorly defined mess that is “Cloud”. In this article I am specifically talking about compute & storage resources (hence ‘Cloud Computing’) and am not attempting to define our contain the other areas to which many apply the same term.

I believe that when most people talk about “Cloud” they are referring to the phenomenon of increasing centralisation and commoditisation of ICT services – “everything over the wire”.

We need more terms; what I describe here is the mass-market for utility compute resources – the “power grid” of computing, if you will. What you are talking about could be called “Cloud Services” perhaps – services run on a compute utility and themselves delivered as a utility in a standardised manner. The problem I have with that is that while compute resources are interoperable, services are generally not (my compute and storage is directly comparable/interchangeable with Amazon’s, but Kashflow.co.uk is not so easily interchangeable with Xero.com).

Materials, manufacture and distribution of an average PC currently in use today is is between 750 kilo Watt hours (kWh) for the most modern “green” PCs, and 1,300 kWh for machines of a few years go. You then have to add on about 300kWh for a LED screen (500kWh for a CRT screen). Even if we take the best case scenario we are still looking at a minimum of 1,000kWh for a desktop system, and laptops will only be a little less (most of the energy in PC manufacture goes into making the small, complex components such as chips).

An average PC made within the last few years, with its screen, uses about 100W when powered up and 3W when in hibernate mode. If we assume that the PC is on for 8 hours per day, 5 days per week, and is hibernating overnight we get 200kWh/year “on” usage and 20kWh/year standby usage.

So, a 3-4 year old PC probably used 1,200kWh to make and uses 220kWh/year to run, whereas a modern super-green PC might use 1,000kWh to make and burn 150kWh/year. To look at it financially, you will save about £7/year by switching to a super-green PC. Therefore it makes neither financial nor environmental sense to swap out old PCs before about 6 years. If you need to update the software, then switch to some sort of virtual desktop infrastructure instead and use the PCs as thin clients.

The same sums applied to servers on 24/7 are quite different though. An average £1,000 1U rack-mount server bought 3-4 years ago probably “cost” about 1,000-1,500kWh to make and uses 120W at moderate load, which over a year is 1,050kWh, or at least 1,500kWh when data centre cooling is taken into account. The latest equivalent “green” servers use as little as 80W, so swapping to energy efficient servers will save 400kWh/year in electricity and get you 2-4 times more performance.

With good use of virtualisation to consolidate existing applications onto a smaller number of machines (thus taking advantage of the performance improvements) it makes clear environmental and economic sense to replace machines after 2-3 years. Alternatively, if IT is not your core business activity then you could always consider outsourcing your server infrastructure to a carbon neutral IT host such as Memset of course.

As for the old servers, why not give them away to Africa via Computer Aid International, where our “outdated” hardware is much needed and will be put to good & efficient use (ie. it will only be on when they need it).

Addendum June 2009: There are some very cool technologies like Very PC’s Greenhive (a hybrid between PCs and thin client) which are changing the argument around replacing desktop PCs.

Thin client is also reaching maturity now that you can get a decent amount of bandwidth from ADSL and that Windows Server 2008 includes most of the functionality of Citrix at no extra charge. Thin client is definitely the future I think.

Admittedly, we didn’t shout about it until late October since our PR machine is considerably less “fanatical” than RackSpace’s, but enough of the sniping.

Is this “carbon neutral” craze just a PR thing, or is there merit in it? Well, for most companies it is mainly just about offsetting their effective carbon usage. In our case we are funding a project called Plan Vivo to plant trees in Uganda, so for every tonne of carbon (in the form of CO2) we “produce” by using electricity, we pay something like £10 and wash our consciences clear in the knowledge that some trees are going to hoover it up again and we are not contributing to the greenhouse effect. All well and good, but to be honest it is treating the symptom and not the cause.

Our real focus is not offsetting, but rather a commitment to energy efficiency, and that primarily comes from our UK-leading development of virtual dedicated server technology. Despite the conceptual proof that computations can be done with zero power (one of Richard Feynman’s if memory serves), modern computers are hungry beasties. Even the new Sun Fire X2100 boxes, much vaunted for their eco-friendlieness, use around 80 watts when idling, so 100 watts when you factor in the cooling requirements. While many online apps need they own dedicated machine, they do not need a whole physical server and could just as well be on one of our Miniserver™ virtual machines burning just 10 watts. The majority of servers idle most the time, so if server virtualisation was widely adopted the potential power saving could be enormous – maybe hundreds of megawatts.

Sadly though, when you take a step back even things like that start to pale into insignificance. I read recently that even if we shut down all power generation in the UK, China’s current rate of building power stations would have filled the gap within 3 years. In fact, almost all popular greenhouse-gas fighting measures are at best rather feeble.

Personally I think we are taking utterly the wrong approach, again treating the symptoms and not finding a cure. What we should be doing is stopping burning fossil fuels and start taking nuclear power seriously again; modern day fission reactors are very safe and very efficient, and we should stop acting like frightened children every time someone dares say the “N” word. If having to cordon-off a few square miles of some scrub-land to dump the fission-waste is still too much for you to stomach, then fine – lets really stop messing about and start putting some serious money into the thing that will probably by the ultimate savior of our environment: Nuclear fusion.

The Joint European Torus (JET, see left) has already managed to sustain a reaction, proving at least part of the theory of a Tokamak reactor, and the new ITER (planned to be operational in in 2015) should be able to sustain a continuous 500 Megawatt output. We really do seem to have fusion almost within our grasp, so why are we faffing about building ugly, inefficient wind turbines and planting trees to replace the million-year-old dead sea-critters we are burning when focusing on technology can give us a source of almost unlimited, clean power, perhaps within three decades?

So the first thing to address had better be “what is it?”. Well it is actually a somewhat complex concept with lots of (I think) good stuff about free redistribution and openness, but from a users perspective it all boils down to this: open source applications are free software which is built, maintained and supported by a community of developers and users. It is, in my limited awareness, the only functional example of communism at work. If you want a fuller definition have a look at the open source initiative’s official version.

At one end of the spectrum, most small businesses could save quite a lot of money per-head by switching to some open source solutions. I’m not advocating going totally Linux at a user-level; I think that is still only appropriate for hard-core techies and large scale installations where the users are not allowed much flexibility – the Munich city council recently “went Linux” for example. Personally, I think that it is important for users, especially valued employees, to be able to customise and fiddle with their working environments. You would not expect people to have a pre-defined desk layout after all, would you? That is changing, but for now I think the retraining burden for small businesses would eliminate the benefits of going totally Linux in any event.

I am a case in point, and bear in mind that I am a serious professional and my laptop’s environment is critical to my work. To the right is a piccy of my desktop – I am running Windows XP which means things like Nokia PC suite, various games and all Sony’s strange hardware “just work”, but that is where my payments for software end. I do not have Microsoft Office, instead I use Mozilla Thunderbird for e-mail, calendar and contacts management (Evolution is even-more like Outlook if you prefer), OpenOffice for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations, and I use Opera* instead of Internet Explorer to name just a few of my favorite free applications.

My and others’ choice of an alternative Web browser to Internet Explorer is not about always cost (IE comes with Windows after all). The huge rise in popularity (usage share now at roughly 12%) of the open source browser Mozilla Firebird is an example of why open source software can be better; people use it on Windows because of improved functionality and usability rather than cost, after all it is built and developed by the users for the users.

At the other end of the spectrum, enterprise-level applications can benefit from open source software, and this is one area where I certainly would advocate the use of a Linux operating system. Take hosting an e-commerce site for example; why use Windows server software, IIS and MS SQL (perhaps costing £130/server/month extra) when Linux, Apache and MySQL will be cheaper and, in our experience, more reliable? Not only do we tend to find Linux operating systems (Debian for example) to be more resilient, but also easier to administer. Windows is a very opaque operating system for all users, expert or otherwise, whereas Linux gives systems administrators the option to “poke around under the bonnet”, often making troubleshooting and general admin a great deal easier. The upshot is that the administrators can spend less time managing the system (which saves even more money) and if there is an issue it can be resolved more swiftly.

I have no vested interest in promoting Linux & open source over Windows (as a company we offer both – we do not restrict customer choice), but in our experience it is cheaper, better and it makes our lives’ easier, and I think that improving awareness of open source solutions could save UK businesses a lot of money and consequently make us more competitive. After all, the UK government thinks its good enough for them, so why shouldn’t you?

* Opera is not open source, as pointed out in the comment below – it is free but proprietary software and there is an important distinction.