Oracle’s bazaar and the cathedral of Clouds

Summary

Oracle can help itself and developers immensely by creating a strong API for distributed systems programming within Java EE/SE through the JCP, along with a great reference implementation. This will strike a powerful blow against increasing monopoly and lock-in by a handful of Cloud providers. The timing is right as developers are stuck between migrating to the Cloud, or battling a wide array of incompatible Open Source packages on their own without support from executive staff. Creation of standard API’s might allow for new cloud vendors to emerge. It seems like many of the building blocks for composable distributed systems are already available, as witnessed by the large — and growing — number of Apache Projects in this space. Doug Lea’s java.util.concurrent did similar yeoman service for concurrency 10 years ago.

Detailed explanation

I have been a professional Java programmer for many years and have benefited from the stewardship of the Java Platform from Oracle (and Sun, prior to that). In recent years, we are being adversely affected by the growing monopoly of all server software by a handful of cloud providers. While the Java framework continues to be the workhorse powering much of this ecosystem, it has lagged behind in creating abstractions and standards for problems that cloud providers claim to solve, like elastic scaling, fault tolerance, and distributed consensus.

However none of these problems are brand new and have been discussed in research literature for at least a decade or two. Therefore, what we lack are strong API’s within Java that address these and open up the possibility of selecting from multiple implementations. Google’s sponsoring of Apache Beam is pointing in that direction: http://beam.incubator.apache.org/. Once a semblance of a standard is achieved and a direction set, it may become possible for new cloud providers to emerge and compete in this space.

Smaller companies that do offer on premise solutions in this space (Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR) are battling hard for survival leading to wasted effort and incompatibility. New entrants like Databricks, DataStax or Confluent sell one framework exclusively, to the detriment of overall integrity of the data processing platform within Java.

Oracle is uniquely poised to shape the evolution of Cloud computing today. As owner of the Java Platform it has undeniable reach and mindshare among developers and vendors of all kinds of cloud related software. Java 8 has received widespread acclaim and new releases are eagerly awaited. I believe the entire ecosystem will sit up and take notice even if Oracle just signals its intent through a public proclamation to bring the best Distributed Systems API’s and a reference implementation to Java of the building blocks that the Cloud providers are claiming, and appoints some distinguished engineers to drive this effort.

Many years ago, Professor Edgar Codd’s ideas were seized upon with great zeal by Larry Ellison and that led to empowering millions of customers through the elegance of relational calculus. I hope Oracle is willing to seize the moment again and democratize cloud computing by providing equally elegant, powerful API’s to millions of developers through its stewardship of the Java Platform.