Enomalism vapourware lands Enomaly in the cloud computing doghouse

Update: Refer to Boycott the Enomaly hoax and censored cloud-computing Google Group post.

Many of us have heard about the overhyped Enomalism "Elastic Computing Platform" vapourware; indeed I've even been enthusiastically monitoring its (extremely limited) progress since shortly after its "creation" (as in "inception" rather than "release") in 2005 by small Canadian outfit [An] Enomaly, during which time I was working with Xen at Citrix (pre-acquisition). These guys, specifically founder and 'Chief Technologist' Reuven Cohen (a web developer from the school of hard knocks, which would explain where all the pretty graphics and marketing-speak comes from) claim to have invented 'elastic computing' way back in 2004, despite not bothering using the term right up until Amazon popularised it with the 2006 EC2 beta. They also bought us gems like 'Virtual Private Cloud' (Update: since deleted as non-notable, unverifiable original reasearch), a long string of dead and dying start ups and 'alliances' and even claim to have a 'vibrant community' with 12,000 list members (when there's ~150), 40,000+ downloads (but not according to SourceForge, who apparently didn't do their research before declaring it project of the month last month) and 1,000 beta testers (of which only ~20 have bothered to download the latest release candidate archive - probably about half of which were me trying unsuccessfully to get the thing to run).

Anyway, depite my purist view of cloud computing as 'Internet ('Cloud') based development and use of computer technology ('Computing')' I appreciate that there is benefit to be derived from the next generation of virtualisation outside the cloud (which is something different altogether) and my interest in Enomalism (and other similar projects like Eucalyptus) was recently renewed following a flurry of announcements about a long awaited and severely overdue stable release. It was only after doing some more digging that I noticed some anomalies with Enomaly and I am disappointed to concede that in my opinion:

Enomaly's Enomalism vapourware is all smoke and mirrors; nothing more than an elaborate hoax.

Not one to make a bold statement without justification, Wikipedia defines vapourware as a product "announced by a developer well in advance of release, but which then fails to emerge after having well exceeded the period of development time that was initially claimed or would normally be expected for the development cycle of a similar product". I originally made the connection because Wikipedia's article on Enomalism was linked to the vaporware article shortly after its creation (Update: the article was since speedy deleted as non-notable spam following in the footsteps of the articles for Enomaly and its owner, but you might still catch it in Google's cache) but I'm not the first to accuse it of being a mockup or hoax.

How did Enomalism (now at 2.1 RC1 Release 3) even get past 1.0 without so much as a single stable release?

Enomalism 2.1 RC1 Release 3's arrival last week (inexplicable release numbering aside) begs this question. Given the 'beta' 1.0 release in May 2006, how is it that the 2.0 releases in March and April 2008 were alpha and "should be used at your own risk"? Since when is a major 'point zero' release [pre]-alpha or beta quality anyway? Even more disconcerting, why are new files and features being added and 'massive code cleanup and refactor[ing]' being done in a release candidate? And how can a release which doesn't even start be 'considered STABLE in terms of applicability to a production environment' (Update: since redacted, see cached copy)? Having a "quintissential professional" lead developer "decid[ing] to upgrade TurboGears on the eve of the release of two... TWO major projects" (after which "all hell broke loose" leaving them "with enterprise applications without SSL support, which is a non starter any way you look at it") certainly helps. Giving up on 1.x prior to release to rebuild from the ground goes a long way towards explaining this too, and the Wikipedia article (created by Enomaly themselves in a blatant conflict of interest) admits that "development has progressed through multiple proof of concepts, alpha releases and finally beta releases. Stable releases are expected to be completed by August 2008". So here we are, having patiently waited three years while being fed press releases, screenshots, videos, flash tutorials, mockups, keynotes, podcasts, alphas, betas, blogs, blogs, blogs, blogs, blogs, more blogs and all manner of other guff, but still with nothing concrete. All promises, no delivery; talk without action; bark without bite.

The last straw came last week when one of the most interesting features (Amazon EC2 support) was pulled...

...and they started talking about it in the context of defining a cloudbursting functional spec. That's right, starting a functional spec for a heavily advertised feature! If nothing else 'cloudburst' (real meaning: 'an extreme form of rainfall, sometimes mixed with hail and thunder') has to be one of the single most ridiculous pieces of technical jargon I've heard in years, and one that's far more appropriate in the context of acute overloaded cloud failures. More to the point, it's exactly this (now indefinitely missing) feature that has garnered a good deal of the (apparently unwarranted) buzz around the product; without it one may as well stick with a mature, proven solution like VMware Virtual Infrastructure or competitive projects like Eucalyptus which are actually producing results.

There's nothing to see here... move along... to Freenomalism? Eucalyptus?

Initially I thought the project could be saved by forking it as Freenomalism (and I may still do so if Enomalism ever sees the light of day) but as I still haven't managed to get even the most recent releases up and running properly even on clean installs of a number of different Linux releases it seems it would be easier to start from scratch. After all, a lot of the heavy lifting is done by TurboGears and libvirt anyway and calls for help have gone unanswered for years and even filing tickets hasn't worked for those who've bothered to try amongst the 500+ spams. In any case lots of work has been done on stabilising the packaging which is now available for inclusion Enomalism if they want. Furthermore, despite being 'open source' the source code logs are concealed, the sporadic pushes to the SourceForge tree are uselessly tagged 'SVN Autocommit' and trying to get their attention via the SourceForge project is futile too. Fortunately I'm not getting the kernel panics others reported but the first time I tried it was (foolishly) on a remote server which instantly dropped off the network for days after uttering its last words: 'Configuring Virtual Bridge on eth0 IP 192.168.10.180...'

It's worth mentioning that I had good reason to do some background research. My recent post (cached copy) to one of the larger cloud computing Google Groups announcing Cloud User Shell (cush) (a free, open source prototype and the first cloud computing shell) made it through the invisible moderation net but information about its mailing lists was silently redacted and an off-list invitation for "Moderator <cloudmoderator@gmail.com>" (later found to be Khazret Sapenov, Director of R&D at Enomaly) to participate in the list management rudely rejected. When I requested that he "please add a few of the other active community members to [help] administer it" citing that "long blackouts are extremely disruptive" he childishly and silently evicted me from the group, deleted me from the member list, updated the FAQ to read 'This group is moderated...at moderators personal discretion', and worst of all, silently and inexplicably deleted the announcement from the archives. Furthermore, in a stunning display of hubris they have hidden the member list even from members and infringed copyright by retrospectively relicensed the group posts under a Creative Commons license with neither notification nor permission!

Repeated requests to rejoin were denied and as the #3 poster at the time I reached out to Reuven, calling for "an unfettered communications channel which is open for anyone to join and post, and which is not dependent on (nor able to be held hostage by) any one person". Reuven conceded that Khazret was his employee and that this "rather fascist approach to its moderation" was a "recurring theme", adding that he "would love to have [me] involved in [his!?!] cloud book". He promised to take care of it the following week (but didn't) and repeated calls for them to open up the community have gone unanswered. Of course they claim this is an extracurricular activity but it's hardly a basket weaving group, rather a massive conflict of interest directly related to their core [in]competency. Did this heated debate about the private cloud oxymoron really end here for example? Your guess is as good as mine. I guess by now he knows where he can stick his cloud book (which completely misses the point of cloud computing and looks dead already anyway), but more on that later... I'm not one to talk about problems without offering solutions but in the mean time I need someone (ideally another original member) to forward the group mails (don't worry, we'll strip any identifiable headers) over to(Update: Position filled, thanks) there's a new, open community currently in development (which you can already join by mailing members-subscribe@cloudcommunity.org).

Anyway this is just my opinion... you've now got all the information you need to make up your own mind. I'm sure Reuven's a nice guy (I'm yet to meet him but will surely cross paths eventually) and he's clever enough to have made it this far. On the other hand it seems this reality check is apparently long overdue and they can't say this wasn't hard earned, nor that they weren't warned and given ample time to pull their heads in.

Here's a laundry list of how Enomaly can get themselves out of the doghouse (which they currently unsurprisingly share with their partner, Nirvanix) having gone to such great lengths to get into it:

• Stop engaging in conversations about things we don't need
• Stop wasting our time with blather about vapourware
• Stop announcing features which never materialise (like Google AppEngine support, announced within 24 hours of its release and never heard of again - we've been under NDA with Google since 2006 and we didn't even find out about it until everyone else)
  
• Stop trying to hijack cloud computing to sell "I can't believe it's not cloud" wares
• Stop bragging about meeting "completely clueless" VCs until one of them bites (and even then only so we can rib them for proving you right)
• Stop building robots, hacking your coffee machine, and reviving horror fiction search engines at the 11th hour when you should be writing code
  
• Secure your software (which currently wants to insecurely download and execute code from all over the place, among other things)
• Stop price gouging (eg by adding a web interface and charging 300% and 500% markups for Amazon Web Services storage and compute respectively - although this is marginally better than CPU scavenging I guess)
• Stop infringing copyrights (by treating others' IP as your own and releasing it under Creative Commons licenses, violating the GPL, etc.)
  
• Stop cybersquatting
• Stop trying to censor the community
  
• Quit with the underhanded, dirty tricks like deleting competitors' releases (especially those for free, open source software in the true sense)

Above all, prove your critics wrong by releasing secure, stable software in a timely fashion (this month perhaps?), particularly if you want to have any hope of being "the Apache of cloud computing, the preferred platform for anyone looking to create scalable, multi-tenant, hosted applications".

Otherwise who knows, maybe cloud computing will be powered by an army of monkeys after all...

Update: Removed photos at Reuven's behest.