My favorite thing on the Internets today (aside from Stallman’s tinfoil-hat rant about cloud computing being evil, which I’ll get to later) is this video of the Mythbusters crew researching sobering-up techniques.

When you’re done laughing, think about the first part of that. A member of the media (admittedly, a pretty irreverent one,) showed a roomful of people the illegal content on his hard drive. And they cracked up.

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Jennifer Bell and the folks at Visible Government took the covers off their much-needed I Believe In Open project. If you’re a Canadian, you should go sign up. Simply put: any elected official who isn’t willing to be transparent and accountable to their electorate has something to hide, and we now have the technology to track their record.

Which makes me wonder what Bitcurrent’s record is. Once upon a time, many of the folks behind Bitcurrent were part of Networkshop, a consulting firm that became Coradiant, a web performance company that helped create the end user experience management space.

Back then, Networkshop talked a lot of trash. We blew the whistle on SSL performance issues, and wrote a huge (250+ page) study on load balancing. We also prognosticated a lot.

Using the Internet Way-Back Machine, I decided to go scoop up some issues of Networkshop News and see how they stood up to scrutiny nine years later. Here’s one on how networks change if the PC is no longer the dominant client, from March, 2000.

How do you think it stacks up?

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Amazon’s rolling out an extension to its S3 storage offering that will help move content closer to users, reducing WAN latency. “Using a global network of edge locations this new service can deliver popular data stored in Amazon S3 to customers around the globe through local access,” announced Amazon CTO Werner Vogels on his blog. Om beat me to the punch on this one and has a great writeup, too.

The service gives Amazon a much-needed footprint in Asia, but also serves notice to CDN companies that the days of long-term, minimum-rate, negotiated contracts and favored pricing are nearing their end.
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Unfortunately, Martin Dubois, Chief Counsel of HR SaaS giant Taleo, wasn’t able to make it for his presentation yesterday on Compliance, Regulation and On-Demand Applications. Both SaaS co-chair Jeff Kaplan and I are sad that Martin’s great content didn’t see the light of day, so we’re arranging to have him record the material as a webinar we’ll distribute to attendees.

Stay tuned for links here and over at Thinkstrategies.

I’m presenting a free session tomorrow on the foundations of cloud computing. This probably loses something in the translation, because a lot of the content is in the speakers’ notes, but here goes.

By some sick twist of fate, Interop and VMworld are happening at the same time this week. That creates a real problem for those of us in the space where the application meets the network. Do we go to New York for Interop, which is conveniently next to the Web2Expo, or do we go to VMworld? Many companies, including Zeus Technology, split their executive teams, sending some to New York for stupidly expensive hotels and great food, and others to Las Vegas for slightly less expensive hotels and slightly inferior food, but better gambling. I ran into some of 3Tera’s execs at Accel’s reception at the Tao Opium Room, and they had the same problem.

Alistair made the call to go to Interop. I made the call to go to VMworld on my own nickel, since I have lots of friends in the virtualization business due to my time at Citrix, where I did strategic planning for their virtualization business pre-XenSource. Special thanks to Fortisphere for covering my show pass! I miss expense reports, or at least getting them paid.

But the real reason VMworld seemed a good idea is that, in addition to consulting, I’m working on a stealth mode cloud computing idea, and I guessed that VMworld would be the place for clouds. It sort of is, but not compared to Alistair’s cloud program at Interop. Sure, there is VMware’s Vclould announcement, and there are quite a few companies with the world “cloud” on their booth, and some real cloud companies like RightScale and SkyTap, but on Wednesday, there are more than 80 VMworld breakout sessions, and exactly one of them is about clouds specifically.

Why is this happening? It’s because VMware is focusing on virtualization in all its flavors, but the cloud computing guys see virtualization as only one of the enabling technologies that can make clouds work. So I guess it’s natural for the clouds to be attracted to Interop and Web2Expo more than VMworld.

Reading the buzz coming from VMWorld in Vegas toay, it’s clear that VMWare is finally embracing management tools. This has been an interesting road for the company, and I believe Microsoft is forcing their hand — something CEO Paul Maritz is painfully aware of.

A major problem with virtual machines is sprawl. They’re so easy to create, anyone can do it. And they do — leaving hundreds of orphaned virtual machines and thousands of license dollars in VMWare’s pockets. David Lynch of Embotics alluded to this when I spoke with him last week. Why would a company that sells licenses want to help people manage that sprawl?

The short answer is Microsoft. If you’re building a cloud, you’re going to use something that’s free and open for you to hack around with. In other words, Xen. And if you’re an enterprise, you’re going to use a VM that includes machine, OS, and application licensing. In other words, triple-threat Microsoft.
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It’s time to head to New York for the start of the fall conference season. This year, Interop and Web2Expo are side-by-side at the Javitz Center, and we’re holding the Interop Unconference event on Thursday night. Then there’s High Performance on Wall Street happening on Monday the 22nd.

At Interop this year, we’re helping to run the Software-as-a-Service track (in conjunction with Jeff Kaplan of Thinkstrategies) and the Cloud Computing track (helped by Peter Laird, who I first met when I saw his excellent Taxonomy of the Cloud, which he’s been hard at work revising for Interop.) I’m also doing a free session on cloud foundations at the show. The lineup of speakers and panelists is remarkable, and will hopefully lead to some great conversations. We also have folks from Google, Amazon, Joyent, 10Gen and Bungee on a Web2Expo panel.

Here’s a recap of the sessions and participants:
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VMware just announced some cool stuff at VMworld, and the show is just beginning. I will be there in Las Vegas Tuesday through Thursday this week to catch up with friends in the virtualization ecosystem, but it looks like I already missed the big announcements.

It’s a great idea to federate between on premise and off premise clouds, allowing enterprises to use compute capacity on site and then to use off-site clouds when capacity peaks. Some call this cloudbursting.

So why are the enterprises yawning? Right now, this architecture is mostly useful for scientific computing and number crunching, neither of which often sit on VMware in the first place. It’s not that useful for transactional web computing because the vast bulk of transactional computing requires back-end database and storage access. Sending your spike traffic off-site, to a cloud that doesn’t have an up to date copy of your database, isn’t going to be that productive for most types of web transactions.
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Just read an interesting article on Forbes.com by Dan Woods entitled “Parsing the Cloud“. Dan makes a similar argument to our own Ian Rae, suggesting that specialized clouds will be required to meet the privacy, regulatory, geographic latency and application architecture demands of cloud consumers.

This begs the question, who will build all these specialized clouds? Are there incumbents who simply need to evolve, or will we see the birth of dozens or hundreds of new cloud providers?

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