The Wisdom of Clouds

There were two conferences in the San Francisco Bay Area last week with content targeted at cloud-computing consumers. These two conferences, Cloud Expo and QCon, helped me to articulate a trend I've been noticing for some time; the cloud market may be sending very different messages to IT operations audiences than it is to software developers.

I attended Cloud Expo (while I simply tracked QCon through Twitter), and I agree with Jay Fry that this conference has gotten significantly better than its early days. It is important to note, however, that the content was most often geared to IT … Read more

Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie has written a memo that has generated tremendous buzz among the cloud-computing community. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced Ozzie's impending retirement from the company last week, and Ozzie took that opportunity to write "Dawn of a New Day," which outlines a future for computing that is both a challenge and opportunity for the software maker.

Don Reisinger has excellent analysis of that post, so I won't break it down in detail for you here. However, Ozzie's post is interesting to me because it highlights a key nuance of cloud … Read more

The adoption of cloud computing is happening today, or so say a wide variety of analysts, vendors, and even journalists. The surveys show greatly increased interest in cloud computing concepts, and even increased usage of both public and private cloud models by developers of new application systems.

But does your IT organization really understand its cloud journey?

Friend, colleague, and cloud blogger Chris Hoff wrote a really insightful post today that digs into the reality--worldwide--of where most companies are with cloud adoption today...at least in terms of internal "private cloud" infrastructure. In it, he describes the difficult … Read more

Cloud computing and data center virtualization are both changing the way IT operations are organized, and the toolsets sought to automate operations tasks. Recent conversations with a variety of cloud practitioners have reemphasized this for me, and I wanted to lay out what changes I see coming to the operations space, and why those changes are important when considering your future (or your product's future).

A few months ago, I wrote a series of five posts I dubbed the "Big Rethink" series. If you haven't read the series yet, I invite you to do so now. … Read more

While much of the global economy struggles with creating jobs, the high-tech industry has had a better record than most. Yes, there are conflicting reports about IT job growth overall. But in general, the market remains quite strong for technologists.

Within high tech itself, there is one standout opportunity for experienced, innovative people: cloud computing.

Even with the roar of VMworld-related cloud announcements--and counter-announcements--there have been a few really interesting data points that have come out this week with respect to cloud-related work.

For instance, Boto creator Mitch Garnaat, noted last week that there were 181 jobs listed … Read more

It is fascinating the ways in which the world of computing can be made easier, thus creating opportunity for new complexities--usually in the form of new computing technologies. It's happened with programming languages, software architectures, computer networks, data center design, and systems virtualization. However, nothing has raised the bar on that concept like IT automation.

You may have been expecting to hear the term "cloud computing," but cloud is just an outcome of good automation. It's an operations model--a business model to some--that was only made possible by a standardization of the core elements of … Read more

Debates flare up all the time about what is the "right" way to consume cloud computing. Public cloud providers push for ditching your data center in favor of pay-per-use services delivered over the network. Many hardware vendors claim that the enterprise's road to cloud computing is through the operation of private clouds. Still others argue that the whole concept is a crock of...well, you get the idea.

Which argument do you buy? How should you plan to deploy and operate your IT resources over the next 3, 5, even 10 years? In who's basket should … Read more

commentary Last month, as a part of the Structure conference in San Francisco, I had the privilege of moderating a panel on the subject of hybrid cloud computing. The panelists were some of the early pioneers of cloud computing, and included the likes of Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus; Michael Crandell, CEO of Rightscale; and Joe Weinman, vice president of Strategy and Business Development at AT&T.

At one point during the conversation, Mickos made a statement to the effect that Eucalyptus sees the Amazon Web Service APIs as a "candidate for a standard much like the PC … Read more

Cloud computing and open-source software have been intertwined since the early days of the cloud. Vendors such as Amazon.com, SugarCRM, Rackspace, and many, many others, utilized open-source choices for everything from virtualization to data stores to user interfaces.

Today, it is fair to say that much of the cloud was made possible by both the economics and malleability of open-source software. However, despite the widespread adoption of open-source software by the cloud community, the future of open-source software is greatly affected by the cloud operations model itself.

Take the interesting discussion about the future of the LAMP stack recently. … Read more