A few months ago, the folks at Webmetrics asked us if we’d like to work with them on some industry research (more on this below.)

Today, we’re publishing that research. It’s an extensive study of cloud performance, involving hundreds of tests from many locations across Amazon, Google, Salesforce, Rackspace, and Terremark. We built and deployed custom test agents on each cloud, and crunched hundreds of megabytes of log data. The report measures service response, network performance, CPU, and internal I/O.

Here’s a quick summary of the results; you can download the full study — complete with detailed conclusions, test methodology, and even agent code –for free from Webmetrics.

At Bitcurrent, we try to remain nonpartisan. We want to contribute to the industry’s growth and understanding. So we were thrilled at Webmetrics/Neustar’s approach here: they financed the research into cloud performance, and let us use their monitoring tool to collect the data from our agents. They were supportive, and enthusiastic, but exercised no editorial control whatsoever over the content of the report. This kind of altruistic, good-for-the-market contribution is, in our opinion, the best kind of marketing, and we commend them for adopting it.

On Tuesday, I had a chance to talk with government cloud users in DC about clouds. Rather than the usual “echo chamber” of clouds and IT, this was a more introductory session, and it gave me a chance to cover the broader trends in IT — the shift from a monopoly model to a free market, and the cultural changes it entails.

Here’s the slide deck, with speakers’ notes.

Over the coming weeks we will be transforming Bitcurrent from a blog into a site that represents more what we do – produce events, content and research.

The first step of this transition is that from now on, all Cloud Computing related blog entries will appear on our new cloud-centric blog.

We call it Rented Metal. Head on over and read about what’s happening at Cloud Connect.

Hashtags are the standard way of adding meaning and context to online content, providing explicit context and making it easier for computers to understand what’s being said. And emoticons are a de facto standard for expressing sentiment that work across cultures and languages. Why haven’t we combined the two?

[Read more]

In a few weeks, we’ll hold the inaugural Cloud Connect in Santa Clara, California. It’s actually the continuation of a series of events David Berlind launched around cloud computing, plus a spinoff of last year’s Enterprise Cloud Summit, plus a bunch of new content.

We’re pretty excited, because this is the first time Bitcurrent has helped build an event from scratch (unless you count Bitnorth, that is, but Cloud Connect is a beast of a different magnitude.) There are four days of content, built around three audiences: those who buy and finance cloud decisions; those who build cloud applications, and those who have to run the cloud platforms.

Getting here has been an interesting experience. Here’s what we did, plus an easter egg for reading all the way to the end. [Read more]

There’s hidden plumbing behind our online lives. As we link our online accounts to one another, it’s easy to lose track of what’s connected to what. Social sites make it easy to inadvertently share content with an audience you didn’t know you had. Social sites that want to quickly generate the appearance of traffic mine all our online accounts in search of things to include in status updates.

Which can have some awkward consequences.

Syndication is a land grab

Every online platform I use is desperate to pull in data from elsewhere. In the land grab for social media, each site wants to be the consolidator of my digital life. To do this, it needs content. So Facebook pulls in activity from all over the web; Linkedin, Friendfeed, and dozens of other sites all syndicate one another.

When I first enroll in a social platform, I link it to other sources of data. Initially, that system may be something personal; but online applications have a habit of changing, and something I once thought was just for me may one day become a shared system, dragging with it all of the links between systems that I once set up.

Inadvertent sharing

These forgotten social links show up in unexpected places. I was reminded of this–somewhat forcefully–when, a few months ago, I left myself logged into Flickr at a friend’s house. He thought it would be funny to upload something inappropriate (Really, really inappropriate. Don’t try to find this. Trust me.) to my account, not realizing it was linked to other social services: [Read more]

Have you ever found yourself using your computer and thinking “No! That’s not what I meant. Isn’t it obvious what I’m trying to do?”

Today you can use your computer for an ever-increasing number of activities – planning a holiday, reading the news, creating music, chatting, shopping, budgeting or just satisfying an idle curiosity.

But there is a problem; your computer is fundamentally stupid. You have to tell it exactly what you want. Often you have to enter information many times in different ways. The computer has no understanding of you as an individual, so it must ask for your address and billing information for every online purchase. It has no understanding of the context of your request, so it can’t know when you type “Java” into a search engine whether you are at that moment interested in the programming language, the island, or the coffee.

The only way for computers to get smarter at this is for them to learn more about you. Fortunately, a number of companies are now building software that shows that if you allow your computer to watch and learn from you, it can become far more helpful.

Social agents

[Read more]

Recently, some journalism students from the American University in DC asked if they could interview me about cloud computing. As I wrote back to them, I realized that the discussion was different from what I usually talk about when it comes for clouds. These are journalism students, and they likely have a different view of “cloud computing” from the technobabble we technologists enjoy. It’s also about how schools will use on-demand applications. So I figured I’d re-post the thread here.

One of the biggest things I realized was that “clouds” can mean “elastic, on-demand compute platforms” or just “stuff that runs on the web” depending on who you’re talking to. And while these seem like two separate definitions, ultimately, they’re the same thing.

The Q&A, below the fold.

[Read more]

In an effort to force users of its HTC Dream to do a software update that fixes a 911 call bug, Rogers has disconnected Internet from all its Android customers. Here’s the full text I just received on my phone:

Rogers/Fido Safety Message: URGENT Reminder 911 Calls HTC Dream software update: Mandatory software update is now available to help ensure 911 calls are completed from your phone. Please go immediately to rogers.com/dreamsoftwareupdate on your PC to download.

In order to help ensure 911 calls are completed internet access was temporarily disabled on your phone at 01/24/10 6:00AM EST. To reactivate internet service, please complete your software update immediately. Upon completion, internet access will be re enabled within 24 hours.

For users of Macintosh and Windows 7, please call 1- 888-764-3771(1-888-ROGERS1) for update instructions.

We apologize for the inconvenience but we prioritize customer safety above all.

The issue stems from a requirement that 911 services have access to GPS data, but it’s worsened by the fact that Rogers insists on using its own version of Google’s Android OS, with its own restrictions and application icons, rather than staying in step with a more broadly tested operating system.

Other carriers, such as T-Mobile, unlock handsets that are purchased outright, leaving the choice of operating system and upgrades to the user. Two weeks ago, for example, I bought a Nokia handset at a T-Mobile store for the full $50 price, and within 24 hours of asking, T-Mobile had sent me the unlock code. Canadian carriers don’t buy this; in fact, they claim that unlocking a phone constitutes copyright infringement.

[Read more]

I’m in San Diego today with Lenny Rachitsky of Webmetrics, talking about possibilities for cloud research. We were discussing App Engine penetration, and fired off some searches to try and see how much attention the Google Platform-as-a-Service is getting. This is speculative at best, and fairly imprecise; but we did see some surprising things.

The trick here is that every Google App Engine site has a name that ends in appspot.com. You can call your new site whatever you want (mysite.com), but there’s a default name for it (mysite.appspot.com). And that makes it searchable.

First of all — how many are there? Well, according to Google’s own search, around 221,000. But what’s most interesting is that the top-ranked ones aren’t in North America. Many of them are Chinese, or Indian. Some of them are phishing sites (such as this one that is a pixel-for-pixel copy of Twitter — don’t log in.) Looks like the free trial and easy enrolment in the service make it appealing for certain markets.

Where’s the word “Appspot” being searched for? Once again, we turn to Google — this time their Insight for Search service — and see that China and Japan are where most of the discussion’s going on about “appspot”; for “appspot.com”, however, it looks like it’s North America.

It’s not clear that App Engine is getting the broad adoption of other cloud platforms, like Amazon. For one thing, it’s a Platform, not Infrastructure, model, which makes it less attractive for enterprises. There are concerns over portability, particularly for people who code to Google’s APIs for storage. But if these searches are anything to go by, it’s getting attention in some parts of the world.