Lots of good conclusions from the Hybrid Cloud panel at Interop; too many to see on one slide, so here they are.

• Hybrid isn’t one app in two places; it’s internal and external apps talking to one another
• Migrating for new apps is easy; for already deployed ones, it’s much harder
• In the new world, the developers are the admins and ops toolsets are changing
• The 2010 platform will be
  • Infrastructure-aware; parallel; split between dev and ops
  • Not really PaaS; but not IaaS either
  • Runs both in-house and externally
• Increased focus on making it easy for developers to transition to on-demand environments
• Portability becomes a bigger concern (in/out and between clouds)
• Where enterprises will initially embrace it:
  • Collaboration, messaging, things “just above” infrastructure
  • Areas that don’t add strategic value
  • Leverage utility model of what’s there now (apps with inherent burstability)
• Ideological battle in infrastructure
  • Bottoms-up focus on primitives (storage, queue, compute); we build things from easy-to-connect, RESTful functions
  • Top-down modelled approach, which we reduce down to the underlying patterns and can generate code from them (policies, etc.)
• Growth of 2 kinds of technologies
  • That make this easier for developers (Ruby on Rails) ➜ This will win
  • That help to migrate legacy systems into cloud-compatible containers
• Enterprises about 5-7 years behind consumer/public Internet (Web tech, Hadoop, enterprise mashups)
• Let us not forget: All big web businesses use a ton of Oracle
• Huge $ to be made solving enterprise migration: Discrete components or specific apps
• Standardization is 15% of the problem; standards bodies are still arguing taxonomies
• Internet standards are built on rough consensus and running code; whoever produces a useful product that is available to many people quickly will win

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.

This five-day conference bills itself as the IT industry’s largest event, and that’s no exaggeration — it brings together networking, computer, storage, security, and a variety of other disciplines under one roof. We’ve worked with Interop over the years on a wide range of topics, from performance to data centers to clouds. This time, Bitcurrent is coordinating the cloud content, including a one-day reprise of May’s Enterprise Cloud Summit and two days of cloud computing content in the general conference track.

One of the changes we’ll be seeing is a shift from the theoretical to the practical. Last year, clouds were still largely a “what if?” discussion; now, they’re real. There are lots of case studies and lessons learned — both real and painful.

Interesting fact: Interop’s the only event with its own Class A netblock (45.0.0.0 – 45.255.255.255). Hard to argue with that.

Since the dawn of Cloud Computing, there’s been a lot of talk about interoperability. Much of this has included discussions around working groups on interoperability and plans for open cloud standards. While this is well-intentioned, and portability across clouds is a noble goal, but practical demonstrations of cloud interoperability have been few and far between.

Many vendors have demonstrated their individual cloud’s capabilities, but for the 2009 Enterprise Cloud Summit we wanted to do something different.

For the last few months, Syntenic and Bitcurrent have been working on a sample cloud application designed to showcase the power (and limitations) of cloud computing. The resulting application, based on the Panda open source project, lets users upload and label video content that is then transcoded into a variety of formats. Put simply, it’s like Twitter with video.

[Read more]

One of the things I’m most excited about at Interop this year is CloudCamp. Dave Nielsen, Sam Charrington, and some of the other folks behind the CloudCamp events are bringing it to Sin City!

These fast-based, organized-on-the-spot events are always entertaining. And with over fifty cloud computing experts in town for the Enterprise Cloud Summit, it’s going to be a great discussion.

The event is open to attendees of Interop, so just register for a free expo pass and you’re in. You can also come if you’re attending any of the Interop content, such as the general conference or the workshops. And you can of course sign up directly with CloudCamp.

Our hats are way, way off to the folks at Interop for providing us the floorspace and some food and drink to make this event possible. It’s a great contribution to the cloud computing community.

Interop Vegas is turning into cloud week. I put together a quick schedule of the event, spanning four days in Las Vegas.

The week includes:

• The Enterprise Cloud Summit, a 2-day paid workshop on how enterprises can use cloud computing.
• The Interop General Conference, which includes a Cloud Computing and a SaaS track–the latter being run by Jeff Kaplan and Scott and Chris at Tripletree.
• A CloudCamp event that Interop and Bitcurrent are sponsoring which will bring in Dave Nielsen and some of the other CloudCamp creators.
• An Unconference event open to all attendees, which has become an Interop tradition.

If you want to attend Interop, we’ve got a $100 discount code for the general conference. Expo passes, which will get you into CloudCamp and Unconference too, are free.

Enterprise Cloud Summit is getting ready to launch. We’ve listed some of the speakers, panelists, and participants for the event, and I’m pleased to say they include some of the most interesting thinkers in cloud computing: Werner Vogels from Amazon, Ben Black from Opscode, Mike Repass from Google, Lew Moorman from Rackspace, and lots of others. We also have folks from Forrester and Booz Allen Hamilton joining us.

One of the things I’m most excited about, however, is the demos. Dan Koffler of Syntenic is coordinating six live demos over the two days, showing how to build, run, and scale cloud-based applications. It’s always dangerous to do a live demo at an event, so we figured we’d get on the bleeding edge and run six of them, back to back.

ECS is a paid event that’s happening in conjunction with Interop Las Vegas. Since Bitcurrent is running the event for the folks at Interop, they gave us a $100 discount that you can use by following this link this link.

I was on a panel in the Bay Area a couple of weeks ago at Cloudconnect. As always, the topic of cloud taxonomies came up. It’s hard to discuss clouds without having a framework about which to discuss them. But taxonomies abound (with good ones from James Urquhart, Peter Laird, David Chappell, John M. Willis, Christopher Hoff, and Sam Charrington) and there’s no clear winner.

I came up with a new way to look at them, which didn’t immediately embarrass me. So here it is, for you to tear apart.

The problem with clouds, you see, is that  criticism levelled at one kind of cloud is a strength of another. For example, infrastructure-centric clouds where IT operators still need to add machines to grow aren’t inherently scaleable; whereas service-oriented clouds that “just work” aren’t as open.

So this model — which I’ll call the “cloud migration taxonomy” for want of a better label, looks at the issue in a way that matters to enterprises: How do I migrate to the cloud?

Here’s how to read the diagram:

• If you have an existing data center application (say a Wordpress instance, or a JBoss server) you can migrate to an infrastructure-centric cloud such as EC2 by simply building a machine image in the cloud. There are companies like rPath that can help with this, and Amazon has a payment system that lets firms like Red Hat get a share of the proceeds from your cloud usage.
• If you have app code you like, and want to simply “paste” it into a form, you can do so with a service-centric cloud. If you wrote something in Python, you can take that code, tweak it (to remove cloud-incompatible functions such as RDBMS joins) and paste it into App Engine. Microsoft is betting that legions of Windows developers will take the server code they’re familiar with and port it to Azure. This is also why Joyent bought Reasonablysmart, so it has a service-centric cloud offering.
• The next level of cloud use is to rewrite the process. If you have an in-house process — say, trouble ticketing — that was written on a legacy system (Fortran on a mainframe) you can’t just move it to the cloud. Instead, you’re going to map the business process, and then use a tool to recreate that process in the cloud. This is where Platform-as-a-Service companies like Coghead, Quickbase, Longjump, and many others can play. The app won’t be sexy; but then, neither was your legacy one.
• At the highest level is Software-as-a-Service. Here, you’re simply copying your content to the cloud app. You might be saving your directory full of Word documents to Zoho, or Google Apps, or Microsoft Office Live. The only thing you’re migrating is the content itself.

When you’re trying to figure out how to embrace the cloud, these are your four options. The lower down you go, the more control you have (and the more work and testing you need to do); the higher up you go, the more turnkey (but the less flexibility and customization you get.) It’s that simple.

There are vendors who blur these lines, of course. Salesforce has SaaS, PaaS, and (arguably) a Service-centric cloud. Google certainly offers Apps, App Engine, and a number of tools like Googlebase that sit in the middle.

Anyway, I’m kinda sick of taxonomies, but what I like about this perspective is that it’s oriented to the issue of enterprise cloud migration that we’re all going to deal with in 2009. It’s going to be front and center at the Enterprise Cloud Summit (ECS) in Vegas (where, amazingly enough, most of the people who’ve been driving the taxonomy debate will all be gathering.)

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.

[Read more]

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.