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.

Yesterday, we opened up the Delivery Strategies track at Enterprise 2.0 with a session called, “apps don’t deploy themselves.” The basic idea was that IT managers have many more options to consider when deploying applications, from the platforms on which things run to the economics of building versus buying.

Here’s the deck in Slideshare.

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.

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.

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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.

Clouds are transforming IT; that’s not news. But regardless of your cloud computing agenda, clouds are already affecting your IT plans, because they give you a cudgel with which to bludgeon traditional software and infrastructure providers.

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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.)

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Just finished a one-hour dash through web monitoring from a community manager’s point of view. The slides are available as a PDF; while this deck deals somewhat with the business of monitoring communities, it also looks at how to tie those communities back to business outcomes in analytics and how to take a more holistic approach.

Plus, it has my new favorite image of a community gardener in it. It’ll get me yelled at.  Here’s the deck.

We’ll have more stuff like this over at www.watchingwebsites.com.

We presented at Enterprise 2.0 today in Boston. It was an interesting day, with a three-hour session on the fundamentals of clouds and where they’ll be going, followed by three panels:

• End users from Linden Labs, Brainpark, Vertica, and Gilt
• Cloud operators from Joyent, Xcalibre, Intuit, and Terremark
• Next-gen platform and tool builders from Smart (Joyent), rPath, and Sonoa (unfortunately, Woody from Eucalyptus wasn’t able to join us)

The morning session was around 200 slides, with lots of new images and diagrams. We’ve posted it here (it’s around 80 MBytes.) As always, if you’re going to use some of this content, please provide attribution and a link back to Bitcurrent.

You’ve seen bad metaphors for the Internet. Pop culture is filled with films where special effects show computer networks as highways, with towering servers encroaching on light-filled roads. These scenes try to represent the Internet as, well, a series of tubes (Play this clip from Hackers to jog your memory.)*

This happens a lot in Hollywood, and in too many cyberpunk novels (like one I’m finishing now just to spite myself.) I forgive William Gibson’s “collective hallucination” and Neil Stephenson’s Metaverse because, well, they’re good books.

But maybe the UI of the future will look like this after all, at least for certain applications. Check out Britain from Above by way of the folks at Flowing Data. Warning: clicking this video may make your browser lock up for a minute for some reason. Be patient, or go to the Youtube playlist.

There are clips for telecommunications, air traffic, and even shipping on the site itself, which is well worth the visit.

I’m a huge believer in visualizing information and making the world more understandable, and the convergence of things like geomapping and GPS are making understanding even easier. These clips resemble nothing if not an RTS for the real world. It makes me want to click and drag routes for cars and boats.

I used to think Tron was a great movie, but not really a UI. Now I’m starting to wonder how these flying-through-data approaches, first conceived as a network metaphor for the non nerd, can become user interfaces.

This is how the prescient visuals of Minority Report slowly become reality.

We’re about to drink from a firehose of positional data as location-aware personal devices replace traditional cellphones and we move towards a sensor-driven world. We have the cloud computing infrastructure to handle massive computing and fast data retrieval. How long until Britain From Above becomes a live Google Earth overlay?

Oh, wait. It already is. Here’s the site’s Google Earth layer. When will web analytics catch up with this?

(*For real fun, check out the eighties-era Mac copy dialog at 8:18 in that Hackers clip. Anachronisms, FTW!)