Posted at 04:24 PM in Cisco, Cloud, Microsoft | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Posted at 12:40 AM in Cloud, Virtualization, VMWare | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
John and I have done a lot of interviews with Cloud "experts" over the last few months (this is the fun part of our business, hunting down and talking to really bright people). On the one hand, a lot of the analysis bandied about is malarkey (to be polite). Enterprises won't jump into public clouds to save buckets of money any more than we've all given up our cars to drive Hertz Rent-a-Cars instead (shouldn't they be a lot cheaper for the same reasons, huh?). On the other hand, we've been talking to many of the most successful ventures using Amazon (primarily, and other Cloud providers) and the stories are very interesting. There seem to be two important takeaways for me: (1) The cloud is software gurosity unleashed. A team of brilliant programmers and system architects can make incredible things quickly when unfettered from the nasty bits of buying and running the hardware infrastructure; (2) For speculative ventures, it's hard to beat the economics of pay-as-you-go. VC's like the Cloud because they don't have to by capital equipment with great impact during the early stages of the venture in terms of getting real product development bang for the buck. But it's also clear from these stories that the same benefits carry forward into real service operation especially if the success of the service is unpredictable, especially on the upside. One more time, we seem to be collectively overestimating the short term impact but probably underestimating the long term impact.
Posted at 03:26 PM in Cloud | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
The announcement at Google I/O that made the biggest waves was Wave — a provocatively interesting collaboration tool. Wave consists of a Cloud component — the distributed infrastructure that enables a worldwide set of collaborators to share a structured document (the "Wave") and a client component that actually provides the collaboration tool. It's really important to understand that Wave is not a demonstration why the Cloud obviates the need for a PC. The Wave client is implemented as a "browser" application (part of the Windows/HTML5 debate discussed briefly in the last issue). Wave wouldn't be interesting without the part that runs on your laptop. The most interesting criticism of Wave has come from Ray Ozzie. His comments at the Churchill Club were very thoughtful — if anyone appreciates a clever collaboration application it's Ray since he's been building them since college. His point is for most purposes Wave is overkill and much more complex than needed, comparing Wave to Live Mesh and its precursors Groove and Lotus Notes. We run our business on Groove, and Ray is right — for 99% of what we do Groove is sufficient. In Live Mesh, Ray has pared down the complexity of Groove enormously because it assumes that the heavy lifting is done by Cloud services (permitting the client footprint to be smaller). To implement Microsoft's desktop/phone/Cloud integrated vision Live Mesh is much more suitable than Wave, no doubt. And there is every reason to believe that the Cloud part of Wave could be implemented in Azure and the client component in Windows far easier than in HTML5. This does not distract from the fact that Wave is one of the best examples of a "killer" Cloud app — something that will deliver real value (Ozzie's question is the breadth of the use cases compared to those that Groove or Live Mesh enable) and that absolutely could not have been developed without the integrating Cloud collaboration services.
Posted at 05:03 PM in Cloud, Cloud applications, Google, Google Wave | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
The Structure 09 panel of successful Cloud practitioners (all the right places and people) had some real insight. Last year the key takeaway was scalability — if you didn't know how you were going to scale it would certainly kill you if you started to succeed. The wisdom this year was at a higher level, and the first part might be summarized by (a) think at the system level, (b) think probabilistically (bad things happen rarely but frequency with large numbers) and (c) it's really useful to own your own stack and be able to make everything work well together (this all speaks well to the Cisco UCS value proposition but that's a longer story). The second part was that humans are still the key to effective solutions and the ultimate cause of most problems (that was the Google perspective after 10 years and maniacal focus on tools and automation!). The broader wisdom at the meeting was that it really is mostly about virtualization (as a key enabler of pre-existing concepts) and utility computing, and it all makes sense if we stop elevating "Cloud" to something new and magical (as we here at IRG have concluded as well).
Posted at 05:00 PM in Cloud, Cloud applications, Structure 09 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
One of the most interesting talks at Structure 09 was by our old IBM friend Willy Chiu. We first met Willy when he did performance work related to WebSphere and then talked to him as he built their high-performance test labs to help customers with large Web applications. For the last few years he has been driving the construction and use of large Cloud labs around the world. What Willy talked about at S09 was some of the really interesting use cases he's discovered "elsewhere" (not the high-tech, geeky focus that dominates much of the Cloud dialog). These are really interesting. Suppose you are a country like Vietnam that wants to invest in industry development. The Cloud (and we would add wireless communication) is complete game changing. A government or economic development agency can put in a modest (by Google or Amazon comparison for sure) Cloud data center and quickly create on-demand infrastructure to use (this is analogous to the use of Amazon by startups today except startups are a very small part of the US IT economy but could be the dominating part of a development economy). This not only provides a lot of painless infrastructure, removing from entrepreneurs the task of buying, installing, connecting and running their own computers, but also lets the government provide standard solutions or stacks further reducing the IT knowledge needed to use IT. Maybe we've all been looking in the wrong place for where the Cloud will take off. The implications are broad. If this vision is right then the issue isn't the trickiness needed to enable the construction of the next Twitter, Facebook or Wave — the focus is how to make the basics really easy to use for what we would think of as completely boring (but certainly green field) applications.
Posted at 04:59 PM in Cloud, Cloud applications, Data Center , Structure 09 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
As long time CDN followers we're fascinated by the question of how to get the best performance out of Cloud applications. This certainly includes incorporating traditional CDN capabilities (such as edge caching) but the more interesting question to us is what a higher level platform (Azure for example) can do to achieve the performance without requiring the programmer to understand the issues or CDN's. We know the Azure team is thinking about this (MS has built out an internal CDN for many separate reasons) but so far they haven't given many details. At Structure 09, CDN's were often discussed, but in a somewhat confusing way. Paul Sagan, President and CEO of Akamai, gave one of the more coherent business presentations focusing on the high level benefits of Cloud computing (e.g., energy efficiency) and then the role CDN's must play making Cloud applications high performance. Many of the big Cloud guys talked about CDN's too, but what they said was that CDN's had become commodity technology, and although they all believed in the value of edge caching (and internal caching for that matter) most just rolled their own and/or happily played the leading vendors off against each other. We think that the question becomes simpler and clearer if one views "private Clouds" as what people are doing with virtualization in private, consolidated data centers. For these many customers rolling your own CDN isn't an option, and we think that these utility data centers will be more important than public clouds (economically) for a long time to come.
Posted at 04:56 PM in CDN, Cloud | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
