Stateless computing to become core to cloud computing?

As cloud computing gathers like thunderheads on the horizon, stateless computing will be a core tenant, predicts Merrill Lynch's chief technology architect Jeffrey Birnbaum.




"Stateless computing isn't about having no state. It's kind of a misnomer. It's about where that state is stored. Since the emergence of the PC in the early '80s, we have stored the state on the physical computer and that has presented a myriad of challenges that has driven IT costs through the roof," Birnbaum said.


--Jeffrey Birnbaum, chief technology architect, Merrill Lynch

Birnbaum noted that in stateless computing, as in cloud computing, companies need to ask themselves what they seek to achieve, how much capacity they expect they'll need, and whether those needs will change and when. And from there, a placement engine goes out and searches for capacity within a physical server or through a virtual machine (verses, for example, filling the need by buying an additional 20 dedicated servers on a network.)

But key to accessing the information and applications via stateless computing is placing them all in an organized name space file system. For example, is a name space, in which Gmail is the application and Google is the domain, which aids users in how to navigate to the site.

A similar method can be use with applications, said Birnbaum, who noted Merrill Lynch is in the process of building a name space, with a file system behind it and a set of tools to manage that name space.

Whether companies are using Windows or Linux, there is a root of a file system, a meta project, and version number.

"The key to this is the version. The idea is to put everything you view, whether it's an application or library, you put it into this file system. So, therefore, you never have this problem of an IT industry created problem of the software stack," Birnbaum said. "If you placed every little thing that you had, a config file, everything, into a version name space, and then you were able to build your applications against that and all the dependencies for applications were referable in this file system, there would be no need to ever build a stack because every application would inherently know what it's dependents were and would all be (retrievable) through this global file system."

He added that the advent of 10GB Ethernet will aid the move to cloudless computing, and also stateless computing.

As for cost savings via stateless computing, Birnbaum noted that the use of stateless computing will remove a lot of IT redundancies for companies. He added that 61 percent of computing systems are underutilized, because of these redundancies.



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