The Wisdom of Clouds

The clouds seem to be revolving around the Sun today.

As CNET reported earlier, Sun Microsystems has announced the Sun Cloud Compute Service to attendees of their CommunityOne developer event. In short, Sun is following through on its promise of delivering a cloud infrastructure service, initially targeting developers, students, and start-ups.

What I love about this announcement is how well it leverages Sun's extensive cloud-computing DNA. Open source/open APIs, a focus on developers, great use of Sun hardware and software assets--it's all there. In fact, I have to give Lew Tucker, Sun's CTO of cloud computing, … Read more

Ten years after the creation of Salesforce.com, the future of cloud computing is not in doubt; it is just being heavily debated. Two opposing views of how cloud computing will play out--especially enterprise cloud computing--are making the rounds among thought leaders and customer decision makers alike. Interestingly, there is enough to question about both approaches that a third option may, in fact, gain importance.

What all sides agree on, however, is that some form of cloud computing is coming your way. As always, the devil is in the details.

Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com's "pull no punches" … Read more

The news this week from retail giant Wal-Mart Stores is that its Sam's Club wholesale stores will be selling a health care electronic records management software bundle to medical and dental clinics.

The New York Times covered the details, but the short-short version is that doctors and dentists can purchase the software for an up-front license fee (on a per-physician basis), and will receive the software and a Dell tablet PC for each license.

Boosting the value of the offering is the availability of $19 billion in federal stimulus funds to support conversion of clinics to electronic records management. … Read more

I've had a few discussions with venture capitalists of late regarding the assignment of the "cloud" label to start-ups pitching everything from hardware to--believe it or not--downloadable software clients.

It seems that just about every pitch these days is for "cloud computing," and the folks with the money are getting a little weary of it.

Before a Strategy Series dinner on cloud computing I participated in a couple of weeks ago, Lars Leckie of early stage venture firm Hummer Winblad made a point about this. He noted that just about everyone was trying to relate their product or service to cloud computing, and that the label had begun to lose any meaning on its own.

A big part of the problem is the now almost unresolvable definition of cloud computing. How do you define the term? My own definition has shifted over the years, to where I use the term quite ambiguously. It's kind of like that famous old quote about pornography obscenity from the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart. The judge wisely noted: "I know it when I see it."

(Lorie MacVittie of F5 wrote a fabulous post about focusing on the "who and how" rather than "what and where" in "cloud-computing" definitions. I absolutely agree, though I have failed to find words that meet that objective to my satisfaction.)

If forced to give a written definition, I borrow a Cisco Systems' definition that bounds the problem, rather than defines it:

Cloud computing is IT resources and services that are abstracted from the underlying infrastructure and provided "on-demand" and "at scale" in a multi-tenant environment.

With this definition, I can at least say that content sites are almost never cloud computing. It is debatable whether or not something like World of Warcraft is an IT service, but your traditional enterprise and consumer-oriented SaaS applications, your PaaS offerings, and certainly your server and/or storage resources all very much count as cloud computing in this case.

At the very least, this definition is hard for anyone to find too specific.

What this definition fails to do, however, is give guidance to those trying to get at the heart of how a given "cloud" makes money. This is why it has become important to be specific about what kind of cloud service you are offering. Are you pitching Infrastructure as a service? Software as a Service? Cloud infrastructure management? … Read more

At CeBit, IBM and SAP today are announcing a ground-breaking technology demonstration in which SAP applications were moved live between IBM Power6 servers running in remote locations.

The technology, developed as a part of the European Union's Reservoir project, is targeted at service providers and enterprises that wish to use workload mobility to enhance performance and quality of service.

According to Yaron Wolfsthal, senior manager for system technologies at IBM's Research Lab in Haifa, Israel, this technology is aimed at providing the Reservoir participants with "energy-efficient, borderless delivery of IT services that are driven by actual demands&… Read more

There were two very interesting pieces of news to come out in the last week related to the availability of relational databases in the cloud. One involved a start-up you have almost certainly never heard of, and the other involves a major player in on-premise database products.

The first was an announcement to the crowd at "Whose Cloud is It Anyway?"--a "roundtable and meet-up" sponsored by TechCrunch, held Friday on Microsoft's Mountain View, Calif., campus.

(Charles Cooper has more on the "roundtable" portion of the program. My favorite part of the afternoon was the fun comment by Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff; he noted the irony of hosting a cloud-computing meeting at the facilities of the vendor most disrupted by the trend.)

During the "pitch" section of the afternoon, Justin Santa Barbara of start-up FathomDB announced that the company has released to beta testing a sort of virtual managed hosting service for "standard relational databases" running on Amazon.com's Elatic Compute Cloud, or EC2, service. (There is a video of the afternoon's pitches; FathomDB starts at about 49:30.)

The start-up's current service simply allows someone to get a basic relational database management system, or RDBMS, instance (initially MySQL) up and running in minutes under its management, with services including creation, monitoring, and backup.… Read more

If you begin with the premise that the abstraction of data center resources into software representations (such as virtual machines) decouples IT workloads from the physical systems they rely on, then it makes sense to reconsider the way you buy and build your data centers.

Simply having a uniform (or near-uniform) software layer between the physical infrastructure and your compute workloads means you can begin to assemble a homogeneous physical infrastructure to support a heterogeneous abstract IT environment.

No more custom-tailoring your systems for each application, only to find those systems difficult to alter to either meet the needs of a new workload or the changing needs of the existing one.

No more adding a unique network card to each server to support a shared management plane, just to find it locks you into that management architecture long after something better comes along.

No more trying to figure out which servers have storage area networking and which have local disk...they all can have both--making it much easier to reuse the physical system for workloads that require either one.

This is not a spiel for any one vendor or even for a group of competitive vendors. Instead, focus on what this evolution means to the way you will buy and operate enterprise computing equipment in the coming years. While the highly customized computing systems of our siloed past meant buying "pieces/parts" was the logical way to go, its been a little like buying a car by getting the engine from Honda, the chassis from Ford, and the wheels from Costco. You could probably build a pretty decent ride, assuming you could get it all to work together.… Read more

Ubuntu 9.10 will be code-named Karmic Koala, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth announced on a posting on the ubuntu-devel-announce list Friday. As usual, efforts surrounding the Linux distribution are divided between two target deployments, desktop and server. The desktop goals are primarily around "first impressions," with Shuttleworth indicating that "boot will be beautiful." He also promises that the appearance of Ubuntu will change significantly:

The desktop will have a designer's fingerprints all over it - we're now beginning the serious push to a new look. Brown has served us well but the Koala is considering other options.

I am sure others here at CNET will give the desktop portions of the announcement the serious treatment it deserves, but the server functionality that Shuttleworth announced is much more interesting to the cloud-computing community.… Read more

The University of California at Berkeley's RAD Lab, short for Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems, has been studying the technologies and logistics of on-demand computing at high scale for about three years.

According to a 2006 Wall Street Journal article, the lab is focused on studying large-scale utility-computing infrastructures. With the backing of many of the largest companies in enterprise computing, many have been waiting anxiously to see what advances they contribute to cloud computing.

On February 12, the lab published a paper titled "Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing" (PDF), authored by Michael Armbrust, Armando Fox, Rean Griffith, Anthony D. Joseph, Randy Katz, Andy Konwinski, Gunho Lee, David Patterson, Ariel Rabkin, Ion Stoica, and Matei Zaharia. Intended as a broad road map for the future of cloud computing, the paper makes recommendations about everything from business models to hardware design to required software infrastructure.

The paper begins by setting a definition of cloud computing that will be considered controversial by many, as it is firmly in the "there is no cloud computing inside enterprise data centers" camp:… Read more