While at Velocity in San Jose, Alistair gave a short presentation on “Why elasticity, performance, and analytics will change how Webops is judged“. [PDF here]
I got to Velocity this morning, and Jesse asked me if I wanted to get on stage for five minutes to talk before lunch. Given that I’m doing a session in the afternoon called What The Rest Of Your Company Knows About Your Website, I figured I should make something new.
One of the things that’s abundantly clear — echoed in presentations from Shopzilla, Google, and many other excellent speakers — is that performance matters. It affects your conversion rates; it even changes your Search Engine Marketing ranking (which was news to me.)
My friend Om Malik and the GigaOm crew have been hard at work on a few things. First, there’s the new GigaOm Pro, a paid offering that’s part analyst firm, part intrepid reporter, and part real-world clue-check. This is a good thing.
Done wrong, analyst firms can sometimes look like the protection rackets of the attention economy — a pay-to-play pact. This is a trap many traditional firms fall into; it’s inevitable that the biggest paying customers expect more love.
But a blog as an analyst firm has built-in honesty. The GigaOm crew has a pedigree of reporting that goes back to TV and print journalism, and anyone who reads Om knows he’s unflinchingly honest, even when that means breaking some glass. So GigaOm Pro looks like a refreshing change.
That’s not all GigaOm has been up to. Their Structure conference, now in its second year, is fast approaching. Last year, I helped with the conference and moderated some great panels — including one where Google was summarily attacked by a bunch of other cloud vendors for not being open. This was the first real debate on a subject that’s come to dominate cloud computing in the past year.
Which is typical GigaOm. Structure was ahead of its time last year — for example, while others were just talking about Green Computing, they brought in Jonathan Coomey to talk about his first-hand research.
So if you can make it to Structure 09, do so. The GigaOm folks passed along a discount code for Bitcurrent, so if you’re thinking of going, now you have no excuse; they sold out last year and likely will do so again.
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…
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.
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:
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.)
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.
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.
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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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.
