The Wisdom of the Clouds

What is the core value proposition of cloud computing today? What is it that your public cloud provider is providing? What does your private cloud environment allow you to provide your own IT customers? Why are end users in the know so excited about the new capabilities they gain from using various cloud offerings?

I'll give you a hint. The three acronyms by which cloud fare is usually categorized all end in three letters: "aaS," short for "as a Service".

Service is the name of the game in cloud computing. It is at the heart … Read more

The good folks at Cloudiquity.com pointed me to a couple of Threat Level articles from last week that highlight yet another example of how public policy and the law are often at odds with running a business in the cloud.

The articles report that the FBI raided at least two Texas data centers last week, serving search-and-seizure warrants for computing equipment, including servers, routers and storage. The FBI was seeking equipment that may have been involved in fraudulent business practices by a handful of small VoIP vendors.

The problem is that they didn't just grab the systems belonging to the VoIP vendors, but also hundreds of servers that served a wide variety of businesses, the vast majority of which had never dealt with or even heard of the companies under investigation, according to Threat Level. Companies interviewed complained of losing millions of dollars in lost revenue and equipment with no warning whatsoever.

One company, auto vendor marketing and inventory management vendor Liquid Motors, filed suit in a U.S. district court seeking a restraining order against the FBI that would force the return of the company's servers.

In what has to be one of the most scary verdicts for cloud users everywhere, the district court sided with the FBI and supported its probable-cause argument for holding on to the servers. Although the FBI was kind enough to copy the disk drives for Liquid Motors (on drives Liquid Motors had to provide), the precedent set here sends a shiver down my spine.

The issue, I think, is one of how search and seizure laws are being interpreted for assets hosted in third-party facilities. If the court upholds that servers can be seized despite no direct warrants being served on the owners of those servers (or the owners of the software and data housed on those servers), then imagine what that means for hosting your business in a cloud shared by thousands or millions of other users.

As I noted in a blog post last fall, there are a series of legal issues that really need to be addressed before external cloud services can truly be trusted. Here is what I argue must happen:… Read more

I spent a little of Easter weekend preparing for Under the Radar, in which I will be one of several industry veterans judging some of the latest start-ups pitching their cloud-related businesses. (If you are interested, there are still VIP tickets available.) The conference organizers have told me that both the start-up and venture capitalist interest has been very high, and that registrations are actually higher this year than they were last year. Cloud computing remains an excellent draw, it seems.

In reviewing the companies I will be judging this year, it feels like the term "cloud" covers way too much ground to be useful in a venture pitch. In fact, a few weeks back I wrote a post that built on a conversation I had with venture capitalist Lars Leckie of Hummer-Winblad Venture Partners, in which I asked whether "cloud computing" has lost its VC luster.

It's possible I'm being a little too harsh on the term, however. Soon after writing that post, I exchanged e-mails with good friend and sometimes mentor Gamiel Gran, vice president of business development at Sierra Ventures. I asked Gamiel what he thought of the term "cloud computing" as it is applied to start-up pitches.

His response, frankly, surprised me. Far from being a confirmation that the use of the term has gotten out of control, Gamiel embraces "cloud" for all it's worth (and it's worth multiple trillions of dollars in Sierra's estimation). He is excited about the opportunities that cloud computing presents for new businesses, and wants to see more of it--lots more of it.… Read more

While cloud-computing news this spring has been dominated by the antics of individuals and small groups, a new class of services to support a new class of applications, and today the future of Java, there has been much less excitement about the advances being made in the world of data center hardware to support cloud computing.

This may be, quite possibly, for a very good reason: if you are a consumer of cloud-based resources, the mantra has long been that you can simply deploy or consume your applications/services without any regard to the infrastructure on which they are being … Read more

The debate about the validity of internal cloud implementations has raged on for some time now, with some claiming that cloud computing and wholly owned infrastructure don't mix, and others pointing out that applying "on demand," "at scale," and "multitennant" to enterprise IT data centers offers unique advantages to those who have already made that investment. It has been difficult, however, to do an objective comparison of the two approaches--until now.

The announcement on Thursday of Amazon's new Hadoop-based Elastic MapReduce service, combined with the introduction of a commercial Hadoop distribution from start-up Cloudera, … Read more

IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, the IEEE/ISTO, and key members of the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum met recently to address how they could work with the community to drive cloud computing markets and technologies forward. Jesse Silver, one of the CCIF's four co-creators, spoke to me after the meeting, and Reuven Cohen released a single paragraph of minutes on his blog Tuesday morning:

Yesterday representatives of CCIF, CloudCamp, Cisco, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and the IEEE-ISTO met while attending the Cloud Computing Expo in New York. Other companies were invited but were unable to attend, generally due to the short … Read more

Updated to include links to Opencloudmanifesto.org.

As widely discussed since Wednesday night's leak of its existence, the Open Cloud Manifesto--originally authored by IBM--has been released for public consumption.

This had been a difficult weekend for the document, first outed by Microsoft's Steven Martin and then leaked in its entirety by my Overcast co-host, Geva Perry, the next day.

The discussion of the document has been muted, in part because the document is not a standards declaration or contract attached to any action or entity. Instead, it serves as a simple statement of principles that … Read more

In a post to the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (copied in full below), the original organizers of that group--Reuven Cohen, Sam Charrington, Jesse Silver, and David Nielsen--have announced that the CCIF will no longer be a signatory of the controversial Open Cloud Manifesto to be presented Monday:

When the Open Cloud Manifesto is officially released on Monday, March 30, the CCIF's name will not appear as a signatory. This decision comes with great pain, as we fully endorse the document's contents and its principals of a truly open cloud.

However, this community has issued a mandate of openness … Read more

Cloud computing is the first major IT market disruption that has taken place in the world of open source software, "the wisdom of crowds" and the community collaboration revolution of Web 2.0. The concept of the cloud is trying to grow and evolve in an atmosphere in which technologists expect input on the technology they are being asked to rely on, and IT management expects input on the strategies they are being asked to adopt.

Never has that fact been more evident then in the events that have taken place over the last two days. The leaking of the Open Cloud Manifesto … Read more