A telco as cloud powerhouse? CenturyLink might pull it off

A few years ago I asked Paul Maritz, who was CEO of VMware at the time, about the company’s plans to partner with telcos looking to become major public cloud services for the enterprise. I noted that such attempts did not have a great track record. Maritz joked in response: “It’s kind of like a third marriage; a triumph of hope over experience.”

Over the past few months I’ve been tracking the cloud ambitions of CenturyLink, the third largest U.S.-based telco. Thanks to a smart team, CenturyLink could break the curse — by targeting developers rather than simply offering compute and storage in the cloud. After all, by default developers often choose which cloud to use: Dev and test remains the top enterprise use for both private and public clouds, while PaaS (platform as a service) and MBaaS (mobile backend as a service) clouds compete hard to lock in Web and mobile developers.

[ Which freaking PaaS should you use? InfoWorld helps you decide. | Stay on top of the state of the cloud with InfoWorld’s Cloud Computing Report newsletter. ]

One important player in CenturyLink’s developer initiative is Lucas Carlson, founder of AppFog, a public cloud PaaS based on CloudFoundry that was acquired by the telco in June 2013. CenturyLink’s cloud aspirations go back further, though, to at least 2011 when it plunked down $3.2 billion for Savvis, an independent provider of managed hosting, collocation, and cloud services. In November 2013, CenturyLink kicked it up another notch and snagged Tier 3, an IaaS and PaaS provider with an open source fork of CloudFoundry that supports Microsoft .Net. Add it all up, Carlson tells me, and CenturyLink stands as one of the largest VMware hosts.

Carlson holds the title of chief innovation officer at CenturyLink and works with vice president of cloud strategy Jonathan King, who led the charge to acquire AppFog and was formerly a senior exec at IaaS provider Joyent, originator of Node.js. When I asked Carlson why he thought CenturyLink would succeed as a cloud provider where others had failed, he replied: “I don’t know if it will succeed, but I’m certainly hoping. Their attitude is a lot different, so at the very least I can tell you that we’re not ‘doing the Einstein’ — trying the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”

Instead, Carlson says, CenturyLink is approaching the cloud with a “West Coast” startup perspective. Rather than simply gobbling up companies like Savvis, Tier 3, and AppFog and “squeezing the technology out of them until they pop,” the telco is providing the resources necessary for key people from these acquisitions to develop new cloud solutions. Both Carlson and King (the latter in an earlier conversation) note that CenturyLink does not offer wireless — generally considered the big growth area for telcos — which helps free the company to go “all in” with cloud as the big value-add.

All this is easy to say, but where are the technology proof points? One authentic milestone is Panamax, the first open source project to emerge from CenturyLink Innovations Lab, the company’s research and development arm. The project aims to make it absurdly easy to build and share multicontainer applications based on Docker — the new lightweight, Linux-based application portability solution that’s taking the industry by storm. (Frankly, I have trouble wrapping my head around the idea that a telco would jump on an early-stage technology like Docker, let alone contribute a complementary open source solution.)

Carlson says that by default Panamax uses the new CoreOS Linux distribution, a slimmed-down distro tailor-made for Docker containers and designed for massive-scale deployments. CenturyLink is also “working with” other bleeding-edge technology from the Docker ecosystem, including Kubernetes and Mesos.

What’s Carlson’s view of the evolving relationship between PaaS and Docker, especially considering that the AppFog PaaS was his baby? Here’s his candid response:

PaaS has serious limitations. You can only deploy a certain kind of application. It has all this data — it takes your code and runs it for you, so you can never really have control of the architecture. For lots of applications, that’s fine. But especially for enterprise, large-scale private cloud applications, after talking to a bunch of customers I heard the same thing over and over: How can we build complex applications on our private cloud using PaaS?

PaaS is kind of philosophically restrictive. It’s like, don’t worry about anything else, we’ll take care of it. That’s great, except if you have to worry about something else, you don’t get options. With Panamax, you can stitch together different containers; what got my attention is realizing the devops community can curate on the Docker hub the best of the best. So the best Nginx devops people can make the best Nginx container and I can just pull it and they’ll make one better than I could ever make. And then I can go to the MySQL guys and Oracle can make the best MySQL container and Apache might make the best Apache container, much better than the one I can make, and they can fine-tune it. That was not possible before.

This potential to leap beyond PaaS accounts for a big helping of the excitement around Docker. The triumph of the Docker ecosystem is not inevitable, though, nor is rapid uptake of a sophisticated new platform from the No. 3 telco. For one thing, CenturyLink’s idea of a “private cloud” for customers is basically a bunch of managed servers in one of its 57 data centers. For another, VMware’s ESX is the only hypervisor currently supported on the CenturyLink cloud, although a company spokesperson advised me to “watch this space.”

What I like about CenturyLink’s approach is that it could dramatically accelerate large-scale enterprise application deployment in the cloud. In other words, as the Docker ecosystem matures and fortifies CenturyLink’s offering, enterprises could manage and orchestrate distributed applications easily across legions of Docker containers — and those apps would be inherently portable to other Linux hosts. That could take a while, and many things could go awry along the way. But thanks to CenturyLink’s sharp developer focus and embrace of open source, this particular telco has already demonstrated real thought leadership.

This article, “A telco as cloud powerhouse? CenturyLink might pull it off,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Eric Knorr’s Modernizing IT blog. And for the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld on Twitter.