Cloudcamp San Francisco, the first in a series of events centered on cloud computing, took place on June 24. If the roughly 300 attendees at this informal industry meet-up are any indication, cloud computing is a popular and rapidly growing subject.
“Based on attendance at recent Amazon cloud conferences I was expecting maybe 100 people”, said CloudCamp instigator and Enomalism co-founder Reuven Cohen, “this is an amazing turnout after only 3 weeks of planning.”
Don Clark of the Wall Street Journal wrote about Finding a Friendly Cloud. And Richard Martin at Informationweek wrote about escaping from locked-in clouds.
Sounds like the big cloud panel got a lot of attention! Here’s a video of the controversial bits:
GigaOm’s Structure08 event is a wrap. It was an amazing turnout of people in the next-generation infrastructure world, and a packed day of panels and discussions.
I had my computer and phone off most of the time, since I was announcing speakers and moderating panels for much of the day. So I’m now scouring the net to see how we did.
I was incredibly lucky to have great panelists for panels on cloud platforms. While most of the discussions were fairly pragmatic, we did of course invent some new terms:
I wish I’d known that Facebook was hiccuping while I was talking with the scaling panel, particularly since we had Jonathan Heiliger with us.
Then a dozen of us headed to an excellent pub on Haight and stayed up until far too late. Great end to a great couple of weeks in the Bay Area. Now, as the Spirit of the West say, it’s home for a rest. But I leave you with this.
I just finished watching a presentation on Eucalyptus, an open source layer for cloud computing that emulates Amazon’s EC2.
The Eucalyptus team replicated nearly all of EC2. They know this because they pulled down Amazon’s Web Services Description Language (WSDL), which describes the various function calls someone can make to Amazon, and made sure Eucalyptus could do the same thing. It’s not a secret; in fact, you can check it out here.
This raises an interesting point. For a traditional desktop developer, if two interfaces are identical, then writing code to one means it will work on the other just fine. But there are two other things to consider if you’re choosing a cloud platform: Operational reliability, and network effects.
The first one’s pretty basic: Don’t use someone who can’t keep their cloud running.
The second one is less obvious: The value of a cloud service isn’t just what it does; it’s also how many people use it.
For example:
In other words, when considering a cloud’s services, we can’t just look at the richness of the APIs it offers. We have to also consider the network effects it enjoys.
I’m in San Francisco this week for Velocity, CloudCamp and Structure’08 and the valley buzz du’jour is definitely Cloud Computing. Tomorrow evening is the inaugural CloudCamp and I’m bracing myself for more argument over the rules of membership in the Clouderati.
It strikes me that for the business minded, the question is not who’s in and who’s out, rather, who’s going to be able to stay in. Cloud is simply an IT delivery model. It comes with high customer expectations that few companies are tooled up to meet. 24×7 availability, self-service provisioning, pay-per-use billing and internet scale, all for $1.78 a month.
I’m hoping for good debate about Cloud adopters, their expectations, and how we can implement Clouds to meet them… without going broke. See you there.
…cross posted to duncanhill.com
Web2Expo New York is happening in September. We’ll be moderating a panel on Big Cloud platforms.
From the session description:
Cloud computing is self-serve outsourcing for web companies. Clouds give even the smallest startup access to world-class infrastructure that can grow as needed. And developers build apps faster, because they start with the building blocks of online applications: Authentication, storage, messaging, and the social graph.
Can’t get into specifics on panelists yet, but they’re good; April’s session on databases of the future brought together senior folks from Microsoft, MySQL, and Amazon SimpleDB.
Cloudcamp SFO is the inaugural event in a series on cloud computing. Launched by the irrepressible Reuven Cohen, it’s a free mashup of smart people from all over the cloud computing landscape.
It’s free to attend, and if you’re in town for Structure 08, it’s a great way to get in the cloud mood.
Cloud computing is the hottest Internet insider buzzword since the technologies to which it owes its existence: Virtualization and Grid Computing.
In May’s Interop Unconference, we explored their intersection in an informal jam session with enthusiastic audience participation starring Jinesh Varia (Amazon), Kirill Sheynkman (Elastra), Rueven Cohen (Enomaly), Jacob Farmer (Cambridge Computer), and Louis DiMeglio (ScienceLogic).
It’s taken some time to fully digest the results.
To many of us, the cloud is that amorphous blob of semicircular squiggles the IT crowd has been using on whiteboards to represent the internet since the mid-nineties. Clouds mean we don’t care what’s in them.
Once upon a time, that cloud in the middle of the whiteboard used to just represent the network — how to get from here to there. All the interesting stuff happened outside its borders. More recently, however, we’ve started moving the rest of the shapes on the whiteboard into the cloud. Applications and infrastructure are now drawn within the borders of that formerly ill-defined and anarchic etherspace.
If you listen to some overzealous cloudnuts, you’ll will hear that pretty much everything is rushing headlong into the Internet’s troposphere. But the truth is much more complex, and rational opinions seem to favor a hybrid future of rich clients, hardware, and software. We’ll have a hugely diverse mix of private and public cloud-based services providing both a back-end and a matrix for device interaction.
Aside: I’ll leave defining cloud computing ad nauseam to other bloggers. For our purpose it is the trend of outsourcing what you would normally run in your datacenter to an indefinitely flexible computing platform which is billed to you as a utility. Traditional hosters don’t count (for me) as cloud providers, but newer managed service hosters might, depending on the level of automation and scalability they employ.
So what did the Interop crowd conclude?
Cloud concepts can be pretty confusing. But when you tell a small business owner or early-stage startup it means not having to spend a lot of money, it gets simple fast.
Denise Deveau wrote about this recently in the Globe and Mail (and I got quoted a bunch, which was nice.) But defining what “cloud” really means is a contentious subject. At the upcoming Cloudcamp in San Francisco (running before Structure, and organized by the energetic Reuven Cohen) this is sure to be a subject of debate.
My overly simple soundbite for the Globe article was that cloud computing was “having computing resources available to you when you don’t own the machines.” But that might get me into trouble: There’s a taxonomy of on-demand services, from platform-as-a-service to hardware-as-a-service. And then there’s grid computing. And of course SaaS gets lumped in with this.
So I’m going to try a more detailed description:
Cloud computing means having a set of abstracted resources available to you, and not worrying about what’s below that abstraction.
