Interop’s in full swing in New York this week. Yesterday’s Enterprise Cloud Summit sold out, and the panelists and audience made it a joy to moderate — lots of good questions.
Let us know if you have questions or want to use the content somewhere.
The morning of day 2 at the Enterprise Cloud Summit wrapped up with a fireside chat with Lew Moorman, CSO of Rackspace (Mosso). Here are some of the more interesting quotes:
“We believe in the cloud. Sometimes people need to do certain things outside of the cloud (e.g. direct access to the physical drive for optimization). But you should go up as high in the stack as you can.”
“Sometimes you need your own house which you can decorate exactly how you like it”
“You have to decide if you’re going to build or use service providers. Running power & cooling are not core to any company.” [Read more]
Next up at ECS was a panel session led by Allan Leinwand, Venture Partner at Panorama Capital
The speakers were:
Allan opened with the example of MCI, who owed a lot of its success to the introduction of a “Friends & Family” scheme. No new technology, nothing new, just a new billing model. This is why clouds are exciting, they offer an opportunity to revolutionise the domain with new pricing models.
How do cloud computing models affect budgeting? [Read more]
Next up at ECS was a panel session moderated by Ian Rae, CEO of Syntenic.
The Speakers were:
Definitions of Elasticity
Day 2 of the Enterprise Cloud Summit kicked off with a panel session moderated by John Willis of Zabovo.
The speakers were:
What is the return on investment in the cloud?
About a year ago, Bitcurrent contributor Ian Rae wrote a blog post about cloud computing. It featured the following picture, which has been frequently used by others since then.
Well, we just saw a Microsoft slide about Azure at Cloudcamp Las Vegas, and I just gotta say…
Mike Repass, Product Manager of Google App Engine took part in a fireside chat with Alistair as the final session of Enterprise Cloud Summit today. A wide variety of topics were covered.
How can people trust their hardware needs to Google?
“The App Engine is a customer of raw Google services the same way Gmail or anything else is. We offer the same security as those raw Google services which are built to scale – e.g. BigTable”
Why did Google take a platform as a service approach?
This approach plays to Google’s strengths. Google’s success has been to build hardware to serve vast amounts of data to millions and millions of people. The value proposition is more about abstracting away the concerns with machines. No instances, no reservation – pay as you go based on usage.
Are you going to make people better developers?
Hopefully! The billing by usage definitely influences the way developers code. There were radical rewrites of code when we moved to the pay as you go model.
Is there a class of application you wouldn’t recommend to put on Google App Engine?
A session at ECS lead by
Quotes
Drew: “The profession of a cloudster is yet to be written.”
Bob: “Are you giving someone a threat that they are unable to handle? It’s like giving your 16 year old the keys to the Camaro”
Drew: “Developers are doing things that CEOs don’t know about. The costs are low. But just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. You need to set guidelines for your developers.”
Slides: “The original assumptions for business risk and liability are no longer valid. However, it appears that the upside outweighs the downside.”
Drew: “Where does contextual marketing stop and surveillance begin?”
Drew: Two words that came up a lot today – Uncertainty (12 times) and Aggregation (I lost count)
Drew: “There are eight examples of companies that were sued not for their lack of professional standards but for the lack of professional standards of their users. Companies need to be aware of this risk.”
Greg Ness, Marketing Executive, Infoblox led a panel of four speakers to explore the dark side of cloud computing.
The speakers are:
What types of cloud architectures are there and are they all alike?
Peter Coffee: “It would be a mistake to think that cloud computing is a whole new thing” It’s more useful to look at what they have in common with enterprise deployment.
Geva: Although there are some services such as Hadoop are uniquely tailored to take advantage of cloud architecture. ”
Peter (a bit later on): There are new skill sets, there is experimentation to be done and things to learn. It’s like replacing a horse pulling a horse drawn carriage with a big motor – you need to tailor to the environment you will be running in.
Are all cloud vendors offering the same thing?
This is the question Alistair Croll first asked Werner Vogels in the fireside chat session at ECS. Werner admitted he’d been caught off guard by the question but admitted that the future is automation for sure and scripts are powerful tools to achieve this.
An example of an enterprise use case for cloud computing
Werner related the case of the NASDAQ which had a lack of capital, which was restricting innovation and making it difficult for them to solve the technical problems around handling complex historical stock queries.
They solved this by having every ticker symbol for 10 minutes written to a text file in Amazon S3. An Adobe Air application was created which allowed you to specify a symbol and a date range. The app would download the text files for that time period – meaning you can do joins, queries etc. The computation is done by the customer’s desktop which means there is no resource investment. They were able to use cloud technology to keep things “nice and simple”
Cost savings can include people
Werner talked about the idea that when assessing the cost of cloud computing versus in-house infrastructure, you have to think about the total cost of ownership not just hardware. Werner talked about the example of the Indy 500. He said they have a very nice website which offers a flash environment with multiple video streams including views from the cockpits of drivers’ cars with audio feeds and telemetry. This is a high load application but it only runs three times a year. They found that they had to move a lot of engineers into data centers to keep their servers up. When they moved to cloud infrastructure they made 75% cost savings, the majority of which was on the people side; now they can manage everything from their armchair at home.
On Amazon direction and strategy
Events we'll be attending and covering in the coming months.
Content that has been recently added.
Bitcurrent is part blog, part analyst firm, and part resource site for web operations. We're a loose federation of pundits and entrepreneurs with experience in networking and technology.
@acroll
