A few months ago, the folks at Webmetrics asked us if we’d like to work with them on some industry research (more on this below.)

Today, we’re publishing that research. It’s an extensive study of cloud performance, involving hundreds of tests from many locations across Amazon, Google, Salesforce, Rackspace, and Terremark. We built and deployed custom test agents on each cloud, and crunched hundreds of megabytes of log data. The report measures service response, network performance, CPU, and internal I/O.

Here’s a quick summary of the results; you can download the full study — complete with detailed conclusions, test methodology, and even agent code –for free from Webmetrics.

At Bitcurrent, we try to remain nonpartisan. We want to contribute to the industry’s growth and understanding. So we were thrilled at Webmetrics/Neustar’s approach here: they financed the research into cloud performance, and let us use their monitoring tool to collect the data from our agents. They were supportive, and enthusiastic, but exercised no editorial control whatsoever over the content of the report. This kind of altruistic, good-for-the-market contribution is, in our opinion, the best kind of marketing, and we commend them for adopting it.

Yesterday, we opened up the Delivery Strategies track at Enterprise 2.0 with a session called, “apps don’t deploy themselves.” The basic idea was that IT managers have many more options to consider when deploying applications, from the platforms on which things run to the economics of building versus buying.

Here’s the deck in Slideshare.

We’ve been in Boston this week at the Enterprise 2.0 conference (which got a great writeup in the Wall Street Journal today.) It’s been an interesting series of discussions about next-generation IT applications. Here are some of the lessons we’ve learned over the week.

[Read more]

On Tuesday, I had a chance to talk with government cloud users in DC about clouds. Rather than the usual “echo chamber” of clouds and IT, this was a more introductory session, and it gave me a chance to cover the broader trends in IT — the shift from a monopoly model to a free market, and the cultural changes it entails.

Here’s the slide deck, with speakers’ notes.

We are continuing to transform Bitcurrent from a blog into a site that represents more what we do – produce events, content and research.

Having launched our cloud blog, Rented Metal, we are now launching Human 2.0, a new site where we explore the impacts of new technologys on us as humans and look at the ways it is transforming our society.

From now on, all of our blog posts will appear on Rented Metal or Human 2.0. You’ll also notice links to old Bitcurrent posts now get redirected to these two sites.

So, why not head over to Human 2.0 and start your journey into posthumanity or learn about ten superpowers the Internet has already given you?

Over the coming weeks we will be transforming Bitcurrent from a blog into a site that represents more what we do – produce events, content and research.

The first step of this transition is that from now on, all Cloud Computing related blog entries will appear on our new cloud-centric blog.

We call it Rented Metal. Head on over and read about what’s happening at Cloud Connect.

Hashtags are the standard way of adding meaning and context to online content, providing explicit context and making it easier for computers to understand what’s being said. And emoticons are a de facto standard for expressing sentiment that work across cultures and languages. Why haven’t we combined the two?

[Read more]

In a few weeks, we’ll hold the inaugural Cloud Connect in Santa Clara, California. It’s actually the continuation of a series of events David Berlind launched around cloud computing, plus a spinoff of last year’s Enterprise Cloud Summit, plus a bunch of new content.

We’re pretty excited, because this is the first time Bitcurrent has helped build an event from scratch (unless you count Bitnorth, that is, but Cloud Connect is a beast of a different magnitude.) There are four days of content, built around three audiences: those who buy and finance cloud decisions; those who build cloud applications, and those who have to run the cloud platforms.

Getting here has been an interesting experience. Here’s what we did, plus an easter egg for reading all the way to the end. [Read more]

There’s hidden plumbing behind our online lives. As we link our online accounts to one another, it’s easy to lose track of what’s connected to what. Social sites make it easy to inadvertently share content with an audience you didn’t know you had. Social sites that want to quickly generate the appearance of traffic mine all our online accounts in search of things to include in status updates.

Which can have some awkward consequences.

Syndication is a land grab

Every online platform I use is desperate to pull in data from elsewhere. In the land grab for social media, each site wants to be the consolidator of my digital life. To do this, it needs content. So Facebook pulls in activity from all over the web; Linkedin, Friendfeed, and dozens of other sites all syndicate one another.

When I first enroll in a social platform, I link it to other sources of data. Initially, that system may be something personal; but online applications have a habit of changing, and something I once thought was just for me may one day become a shared system, dragging with it all of the links between systems that I once set up.

Inadvertent sharing

These forgotten social links show up in unexpected places. I was reminded of this–somewhat forcefully–when, a few months ago, I left myself logged into Flickr at a friend’s house. He thought it would be funny to upload something inappropriate (Really, really inappropriate. Don’t try to find this. Trust me.) to my account, not realizing it was linked to other social services: [Read more]

Have you ever found yourself using your computer and thinking “No! That’s not what I meant. Isn’t it obvious what I’m trying to do?”

Today you can use your computer for an ever-increasing number of activities – planning a holiday, reading the news, creating music, chatting, shopping, budgeting or just satisfying an idle curiosity.

But there is a problem; your computer is fundamentally stupid. You have to tell it exactly what you want. Often you have to enter information many times in different ways. The computer has no understanding of you as an individual, so it must ask for your address and billing information for every online purchase. It has no understanding of the context of your request, so it can’t know when you type “Java” into a search engine whether you are at that moment interested in the programming language, the island, or the coffee.

The only way for computers to get smarter at this is for them to learn more about you. Fortunately, a number of companies are now building software that shows that if you allow your computer to watch and learn from you, it can become far more helpful.

Social agents

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