The Wisdom of the Clouds

IBM stakes its claim in the cloud with Cloud Labs

First, a mea culpa. Last night I commented on Gordon Haff's analysis of the Tivoli announcements from IBM Pulse, the company's big service management conference in Las Vegas this week. I wrote the bulk of that post much earlier in the day, and stand by its contents as it applies to those specific items. However, I should have looked one more time at my Google Reader, as there was much, much more to the IBM announcement. This post is a review of that announcement as a whole.

Oh, and all comments on any of my posts are my own opinion. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of my employer, Cisco Systems.

IBM greatly strengthened its position in the world of cloud computing this week. What IBM announced, if you haven't seen it already, is a laundry list of product and service enhancements and extensions aimed at meeting the needs of cloud computing customers. Most of the announcement was more of the same point products and global services offerings we have come to know and love from IBM, and I commented on them last night.

The heart of the announcement, however, was a partnership with Juniper Networks to "demonstrate how a hybrid cloud could allow enterprises to seamlessly extend their private clouds to remote servers in a secure public cloud..." This is the announcement I have been looking for from IBM.… Read more

IBM cloud announcement disappoints...again

Update: This post covers the Tivoli specific announcements that Gordon Haff covered in the post referred below. IBM made significant, additional announcements after this post was written, which I cover in a separate post.

I looked forward with great anticipation to Gordon Haff's post on Monday covering the Tivoli announcements at IBM's Pulse conference.

Specifically, I was especially interested in what Tivoli was going to offer to support dynamic infrastructure, in part because IBM's cloud DNA holds so much promise, and I have yet to see any magic from them.

As would be expected from Pulse, the bulk of the announcements are geared toward service management. From Gordon's post:

IBM service management software and services from IBM Global Business Services, IBM Global Technology Services, and specialized IBM Business Partner capabilities. Together, they enable organizations to design and implement IT systems that centrally manage and monitor an entire industry infrastructure, enabling greater performance of both traditional assets, such as manufacturing robotic equipment, as well as emerging technologies like "smart meters" and RFID (radio frequency identification). A new governance-consulting practice. Through the practice, IBM works with clients to design governance systems to help mitigate risks related to business changes, changing market conditions, and regulatory requirements. New Tivoli Service Automation Manager software, which automates the design, deployment, and management of services such as middleware, applications, hardware, and networks, tasks that today are largely done manually and thus are subject to error, time constraints, and other human limitations. New Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager software, which helps organizations simplify the life cycle of encryption keys by enabling them to centralize, automate, and strengthen security through key management processes, with an increasing number of IT infrastructure elements having built in encryption to protect them.

Ugh.… Read more

Mosso challenges Amazon on cloud storage

On their blog today, Rackspace's cloud division, Mosso, shows off a study they did where they compared the costs and performance of Amazon Web Service's S3 storage service and CloudFront Content Delivery Network (CDN) against Mosso's combination of CloudFiles and their partnership with CDN provider, Limelight Networks. The blog post presents five common use cases, and compares the cost of CloudFiles/Limelight with the Amazon offerings, both with and without Amazon's support option.

I spent some time on the phone yesterday with Mosso co-founder, Jonathan Bryce, and Senior Cloud Architect for Rackspace's cloud division, Erik Carlin, discussing what they found. The short-short version is that, for the five use cases they analyzed, they claim (not surprisingly) that Mosso beats Amazon's offerings in simplicity, cost and performance, especially when support is taken into account.… Read more

Small business: A cloud-computing opportunity?

There has been much ado about Rackspace's recent "cloud hosting" survey (PDF), in which it finds that small businesses are essentially unaware of services that fit that description.

Specifically, the survey found that more than two-thirds of small businesses (not defined in the survey, unfortunately) have never heard of "cloud hosting."

Several prominent bloggers, the CNET Blog Network's Dave Rosenberg and CloudAve's Krishnan Subramanian among them, have pointed out that the question asked may have courted the response received. To quote Rosenberg:

Not too surprisingly, the majority of SMBs were not aware nor terribly interested in "cloud hosting." I suspect that some of this had to do with the use of the term "cloud hosting" rather than an interest in moving toward hosted applications and infrastructure. I would argue that questions about using "the cloud" versus "cloud hosting" would have come up with a different set of answers.

Good point, but I think that there is more to this story.… Read more

Web site created for semantic cloud API

John Willis of the IT Management blog is reporting that Reuven Cohen has created a new web site in support of the development and promotion of a Universal Cloud Interface. The concept, as Reuven reported today, revolves around some of the good work being done to address cloud taxonomy and ontology:

We are in a sense defining what cloud computing is by describing it's "components" and their relationships to one another. One that is capable of expressing cloud computing and its subsequent parts in terms of a consensus data model.

So in this effort we may actually be defining a dynamic computing model that can, under certain conditions, be 'trained' to appropriately 'learn' the meaning of related cloud & infrastructure resources based on an common ontology / taxonomy. In a sense, we are talking about the Semantic Web applied to API's or more broadly, a unified cloud interface.

The web site, created on the Google Code infrastructure, provides a central point for the definition and development of the UCI. Remember all that Simon Wardley has been saying about the need for open sourced standards? This is probably as good an example of a community supported effort as there is to date.… Read more

A better way to understand cloud computing

Earlier Wednesday, I wrote about the consensus on the need for a cloud taxonomy that was reached by the participants of the Cloud Interoperability meeting prior to Cloud Connect last week. But a couple of cloud ontologies have come to light that provide a great starting point for taxonomy discussions.

They are very similar, yet they differ in some noticeable ways. Nevertheless, both serve their purpose admirably and are required reading for those considering common understanding in the language of the cloud.… Read more

The need for a standard cloud taxonomy

The Cloud Interoperability meeting prior to Cloud Connect in Mountain View, Calif., last week was a very interesting petri dish of some of the best and brightest in the cloud-computing marketplace.

There certainly was a quorum of companies represented (though Amazon.com couldn't make it at the last minute, and Microsoft never replied to the invitation). There also, as you might imagine, was no shortage of opinion on how to proceed.

As you might imagine in such a situation, most of the day was taken by attendees expressing their personal visions of cloud interoperability and standards building, only to boil next steps down to developing a taxonomy and sorting out a small list of the most pressing concepts to be explored. A wiki was proposed, and I will share the URL when I get it.

Here is the whiteboard at the end of the day (artistry courtesy of David Berlind, one of the founders of the event):… Read more

Is Google App Engine successful?

The original title of this post was going to be "Why isn't Google App Engine successful?" You see, I've been frustrated of late at the lack of followup press about the PaaS offering since Google's announcement about it last April. I was beginning to think that no one but a few Facebook application providers were using it, which makes it kind of irrelevant for the enterprise.

Compare Google's coverage to that of Amazon Web Services. Since its announcement in July 2002, the various services contained under the AWS umbrella have received a steady stream of press and accolades. Much of that is due to marketing (and the phenomenal technology evangelism program Amazon put into place), but part of it is also that successful start-ups are passing on their own success stories independent of Amazon.

Two quick examples of this are SmugMug and Animoto. Both are stories that were originally broadcast by the customers themselves, and then evangalized by Amazon. Almost everyone in the "cloud-o-sphere" knows about these guys as a result. In fact, Animoto's story is the most prevalent case study of the value of elasticity in Web applications today.

So, where is the Google equivalent? I've heard about a few Facebook widgets being developed on App Engine (and that is sort of cool), but I certainly haven't heard any other type of start-up trumpet the importance of App Engine to their success. Furthermore, there are zero examples of non-Web businesses using App Engine to change the nature of their IT processes. (See Eli Lilly's story for an AWS counterpoint.)

So, all of this might lead you to believe I'm anti-App Engine, or at least not confident that it is important except as a PaaS example. And until yesterday, you would be right. However, I spent the day yesterday at the Cloud Connect conference, hosted at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. Google was much more visible here (in part because they were a "platinum sponsor"), and perhaps more importantly, the "how to" sessions they hosted Wednesday afternoon were packed by interested developers and technologists.… Read more

The argument for private clouds

Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge noted an excellent response by my former Cassatt colleague, Jay Fry, to Andrew Conry-Murray of InformationWeek and Eric Knorr of InfoWorld, who contend that there is no such thing as a private cloud.

Jay's response is excellent, and I absolutely concur. However, I get so frustrated with these "its gotta be off-premises" arguments that for some time now, I've been trying to figure out a quick and dirty response I can fire off whenever such "puritanism" comes into play.

On Monday, in response to Rich's tweet about his post, I came up with a tweet that sums up my position as succinctly as I think I can put it. Here's the tweet:… Read more