Archive for January 2009

Friday, January 30th, 2009

Who owns cloud metadata?

After Cloud Connect in Mountain View, Barton George asked me some questions on cloud computing and some 2009 predictions. Here’s the clip; his writeup is available on his blog.

I’d like to compliment Barton on his ability to pick exactly the worst moment in the entire video clip to use as a thumbnail. And yes, I am this dorky looking.

I’m never big on predictions; they’re an easy way to look dumb in retrospect and few people keep score on accuracy after the fact. But it does seem to be a January ritual.

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Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

Will Azure win? They have Dave Cutler, for starters

Recent US politics aside, it’s unwise to pin your hopes on a single person. But I’m going to do so, because that person is Dave Cutler. Dave is a lead developer for Windows Azure. That means it won’t suck.

Dave is legend: For starters, he built VMS, then built a compartmentalized OS that could run both VMS and UNIX called Mica. This was years ahead of its time.

I had a great conversation about the birth of operating systems with Peter Christy recently, who explained that early on, Digital was very supportive of VMS, forcing engineers to use it instead of older machines. But then they lost their nerve, and weren’t willing to do the same thing for Mica.

So Dave headed to Microsoft.

Read More→

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Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

1H2009: Events, events everywhere

The first half of 2009 is shaping up to be a very busy time for the Bitcurrent team. We have  events that we’re going to be attending, participating in, coordinating, or otherwise making noise at. We’ll post more details on each event–along with discount codes–shortly. Here’s a quick overview.

Cloud Connect: [January 20-22, Mountain View, CA] I’m speaking on a panel called “Is Lock-In Inevitable? Or Can the Cloud Learn From the Lessons of the Past?” with Redmonk’s Stephen O’Grady, Appistry’s Sam Charrington, and IBM’s Bob Sutor. Cloud Connect is the brainchild of David Berlind, and it’s a dose of reality to conferences.

Green:Net09: [March 24, San Francisco, CA] GigaOm’s tech conference, tied to Earth2Tech, promises to do for green what Structure did for IT infrastructure. One day, good speakers, in San Francisco.

SIIA Netgain and CODiEs: [May 3-5, San Francisco, CA] This conference is focusing on the business of software, including issues like the impact of mobility, funding in a lousy economy, and dealing with the impact of free software. It’s our first time working with the SIIA guys but the content and speakers are already amazing.

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Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

The Enterprise Cloud (part 1.5)

There was a question from the audience: “Gee, Steve, what’s the difference between what you’re proposing and straight up virtualization?”

Good question. Glad you asked. Good enough question in fact to insert part 1.5 inbetween parts 1 and 2.

The definition of cloud computing remains nebulous at best. We’re entering a phase where everything is claiming to be a cloud — if you offer something hosted, it’s a cloud. By such a loose definition, the tech biz has been selling clouds since we’ve been renting mainframe time. To offer a little contrast, Amazon EC2 is a huge cluster of virtual machines that you rent a-la cheap dedicated virtual servers. Read More→

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Monday, January 12th, 2009

The Enterprise Cloud (part 1)

I was hassled by Alistair last year about the infrastructure choices at my company because I chose not to leverage the capacity and cost benefits of EC2. The reason, I explained, had everything to do with SLAs. My servers dish up content and application flow for phone calls. Jitter and delay are everything in that scenario because unlike web browsers that give visual cues to show they’re working, a phone call just gives dead air. And dead air is dangerous. Read More→

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