The Wisdom of Clouds

Can Sun rise to the cloud-computing challenge?

As a former employee of Sun Microsystems, I've been fascinated for some time about what the cloud can do for its troubled fortunes. The company has amazing cloud DNA, in terms of technology and talent.

Sun is a company of engineers founded by engineers to engineer for engineers. They've got the technology chops to do something great here, as can be evidenced by some of the interesting things to come out of Sun Labs in the last year or two.

In the last few weeks, Sun finally took direct action for the cloud, and it reorganized its software division to take the cloud challenge head-on. So it was with great anticipation that I listened on Tuesday to a discussion between Dave Douglas and Lew Tucker about Sun's interpretation of the cloud market, and Sun's potential place in it. (The slides are also available.)

This was more of a "placeholder" presentation--certainly not a major announcement--but Douglas and Tucker laid out a foundation of concepts, and then outlined how Sun can work to address the opportunities this market creates.

Comments fixed on The Wisdom of Clouds

Late last week I noticed that comments were not working on this blog. After alerting the crew at CNET, they quickly fixed the problem. Thanks to Jon and Bernie, and I apologize for any incovenience.

If you had wanted to comment on any of last week's posts, please take the time to go back and do so now. I am especially interested on your input on the following posts:

Oh, and the blog is officially more

GoGrid introduces Cloud Storage v0.7, a virtual NAS in the clouds

In an announcement that I feel the "cloud-o-sphere" has been strangely silent on, GoGrid on Thursday announced a new sharable file-level storage service for their cloud infrastructure, Cloud Storage v0.7. Michael Sheehan, GoGrid's technology evangalist explains: more

A maturity model for cloud computing

One of the really difficult aspects of cloud computing for most established IT organizations is the fact that the move to clouds, even private clouds, is not a simple, intuitive one. Replacing the bulk of both technology and process with a focus on capacity as a service--an automated, self-administered service--results in many organizations "experimenting" with the cloud, but few pushing any barriers. To make matters worse, we are in that wonderful "discovery" phase of a technology, where there are few if any guides to how to do it right, with minimal risk, and those that do exist are generally personal opinions, not "burned in" recipes for success.

This post does not pretend to be such a recipe. However, over the course of the last several months, culminating in some great conversations with some really smart people the last few weeks, I've come to realize that there is a basic maturity model for moving from data center consolidation architectures to true open market cloud architectures.

Remember maturity models? They've been around for some time, but a couple of years ago there was a small burst of creativity among system integrators and analysts alike, and maturity models were defined for a variety of IT subjects, ranging from business processes to technology architectures, such as SOA. The basic idea was to lay out some milestones, or even "gateways", to be achieved by IT as they worked towards achieving some idealized computing or process goal.

To that end, below is a simple five phase maturity model that I and others believe describes the stages of evolution for an enterprise data center trying to achieve cloud Nirvana:

Amazon Web service's European vocation

Amazon today used the Le Web 3 conference as an opportunity to announce the availability of EC2 in the European Union, along with several associated services. Details are available from the Amazon Web Services blog:

We've created a new region for Europe, separate and distinct from the existing region in the United States. For fault tolerance, data separation, and stability, each EC2 region is an entity unto itself; issues within one region won't affect the other one. This means that Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), security groups, and SSH keypairs must be created anew in each region. We're working on tools to make it easy to move this information between regions. Also, as we learn more about how customers use multiple regions, we will add APIs to make it even easier for them to do so.

With the exception of support for Microsoft Windows and for Amazon DevPay (both of which will be ready before too long), every feature of EC2 is available in the new region, including Elastic Block Storage and Elastic IP Addresses.

This announcement would actually be rather boring if it weren't for the importance of the EU's privacy regulations on cloud computing.

The wisdom of the clouds: an introduction

Welcome.

With that single word, an ongoing discussion makes its leap from the pages of a humble Blogger.com blog to the illustrious address of http://blogs.cnet.com. My name is James Urquhart, and I am the author of The Wisdom of Clouds ~~(now "The Wisdom of the Clouds")~~, an in depth look at cloud computing and its consequences for the enterprise and the individual. With a small but loyal following (that I hope actually makes the transition with me here), I'm proud of the influence that this blog has had on the cloud computing conversation.

For those that know me, rest assured that I will continue to look for the key insights into the technological, business and philosophical ideas that will drive cloud computing adoption, or even its resistance. I continue to be overwhelmed with both the challenges and opportunities surrounding cloud computing adoption. There is much to write about.

For those that don't know me, I hope to convince you that cloud computing is a revolutionary technology solution to some difficult business problems, and that while there is much to be excited about, a little skepticism is often in order here.

To give you a sense of what I write about, here is a list of the top 6 posts from the old incarnation of the blog: