We (other members of the 3tera team and I) had the pleasure of talking to John Foley this week. John is writing for InformationWeek and is focusing on Cloud Computing. This is a knowledgeable guy who has thoroughly researched the space.

During the chat, something very important dawned on me. This space is getting noisier and noisier – rightfully so – Cloud Computing is hotter than Hades and better than sliced bread! And we are making it even noisier with our semantics.

People do not define terms in this space consistently. I think it’s ironic that the semantics of Cloud Computing are, er, uh …, well, cloudy.

I’ll paraphrase:

IW – You talk about internal Clouds behind firewalls. How can a Cloud be private and internal?

3tera – We think of Cloud Computing in terms of how, not where?

IW – I disagree. Cloud Computing is running on IT infrastructure that you don’t own – someone else is the datacenter operator.

3tera – Maybe this is just semantics. We could call private Clouds “internal utilities” instead of private “Clouds”. If an enterprise were to run an app in an external Cloud and wants to connect that to their systems of record in their own datacenters, they might want to consider the same platform in their data centers.”

…. and so on.

After wrangling about that for several minutes, the subject changed. All we accomplished though was an addition to the confusion.

The epiphany for me during that conversation is that whatever I call Cloud Computing and whatever someone else calls Cloud Computing is kind of irrelevant. A couple of years from now, someone will obsolete the term Cloud Computing with something more trendy and we’ll debate what THAT is.

For me, the future holds computing services on demand – Information Technology as a Service – MASSIVELY scalable IT as a Service. ITaaS – the sound of that tickles my funny bone. ITaaS will use the Internet and, I think, intranets as well. End users will need no regard for the underlying technologies that support their services. They will only need to know that the services are available and perform at any scale on demand.

If someone installs a generator in their home instead of using the power utility, they get electricity on demand, the same as if they plug into a public utility.

I concede though, at face value, the economics of Cloud Computing seem to favor Clouds as external entities. After all, the hallmark of anything on demand is that you only pay for what you consume. External Clouds can accomplish this by making the same hardware available, at different times, to different users, thus, eliminating idle time and getting the most bang for the buck. But looking deeper, the economics favor internal, private Clouds as well. If a data center manager wants to be provisioned only for average usage rather than peak usage, he/she can do that if he/she is on a Cloud infrastructure that can grab resources from external Clouds only occasionally, when needed. If you add to that, with a Cloud done right, the data center manager manages applications rather than servers, decreasing administration costs; and, time to market is greatly reduced due to the lack of need for tedious provisioning, configuring, etc., the economics of the private Cloud become quite compelling.

To me, the bottom line is this. This is the 21^st century. It has been almost forty years since a man walked on the moon. For most of those forty years, almost all businesses have relied to some degree on Information Technology. It’s about time that IT is available on demand – really on demand – and everyone can have access to world class technology, only paying for what they consume.

So, call it Cloud, call it Utility, call it Platform as a Service, call it ITaas, call it whatever you want to call it. But please, don’t call me late to dinner … and, pretty please, don’t call me late to the on demand computing revolution!

Alistair Croll’s written another thought provoking piece on Gigaom, this time discussing how the cloud will force networking vendors to change over the next few years. Having spent more than a decade building networking companies this is a subject near to my heart and I think Alistair did a good job identifying the pressure points and two potential change vectors for networking providers; building virtual appliances and selling to the cloud vendors.

Virtual Appliances - Intelligent networking functions like firewalls, load balancers, traffic shapers, caches and intrusion detection won’t be purchased as physical devices by cloud computing users. Instead, they’ll adopt this functionality as virtual appliances and pay by the hour. Thus vendors can participate in the growth of cloud computing by repackaging their products and adjusting their pricing model.

Selling to Cloud Operators - IMHO, this shift will actually be harder for many vendors. Alistair identified a couple of issues, including commoditization caused by the purchasing power of large data center operators. However, there’s a more fundamental issue - cloud computing has very different networking requirements than traditional data centers. Traditional data centers have purpose built deployments for specific applications. You can literally walk through the data center, point at racks, and identify the application. Many of these applications have local networks within the rack and uplink into the data center backbone. In contrast, cloud data centers are built for scale from homogeneous resources. Rack after rack of servers. Any application has to be able to run anywhere. Thus, while traditional data center purchasing decisions have been based primarily on features,  cloud computing favors large, high performance, switches with relatively few features.

The shift won’t happen overnight, of course, but vendors that recognize the trend early will have the opportunity to build market share.

our CEO, Barry, is fond of saying that google isn’t just about search, it’s about scale. As if to punctuate his point for him, today google published a post about the 1 trillionth URL on the web, ” . . . our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!”

Xseed’s recent announcement offering AppLogic in Japan means cloud computing is now truly global.

OK, you can call me a geek, but I really like CLI’s. It could be that they so seldom have serious UI issues the way GUI’s do. Or it could simply be nostalgia for the days when screen savers actually had a purpose. Either way, I had to smile when I first came across goosh, a shell like interface for google.

Now if google would just put the database on a floppy . . .

Willy Chiu, VP of High Performance Computing at IBM, wrote a cio.com article identifying five business trends propelling cloud computing. Among his observations is this gem “Cloud computing is tailor-made for bringing order out of chaos.” I couldn’t possibly have said it any better myself!

Alistair Croll recently posted an excellent writeup on Gigaom that attempts to segment our somewhat noisy market into 9 vendor sectors that IMHO many prospective users may find helpful in understanding vendor positioning. Alistair put 3tera’s AppLogic alone in his “cloud building” sector, but like most of Alistair’s work the whole piece is worth a read so I won’t repost it all here.

Sys-con ran a three page piece today with 20 experts trying to define cloud computing. The results run the gamut from the uselessly broad “internet centric software” to the only somewhat more pragmatic ”infrastructural paradigm shift that enables the ascension of SaaS” to the disbelieving “Clouds are the next hype-term for the next year or two.” So, why are folks having so much trouble defining cloud computing?

IMHO there are two reasons. First, cloud computing really is still being defined as those of us developing the technology work closely with early adopters putting the new technology to work. In other words, whatever cloud computing is today, it will evolve before it stabilizes. Don’t fret this as a bad thing, though, because it’s quite the opporiste. A little competition will benefit all as more vendors produce useful technology and elevate user expectations of cloud computing. Second, as most readers will already have noticed, a great deal of the noise in the space is being propagated by companies with no new technology; they simply want to share in the attention. While this creates noise, it’s actually normal in developing spaces. So, rather than provide yet another definition, let me provide a use case to show just how real and different cloud computing makes infrastructure.

About four months ago one of our customers was having an issue; a small percentage of page requests were getting dropped. The application involved was a search engine, and ran on around 100 servers in production. The problem wasn’t severe, but was evident to customers. After investigating the issue on their own, they requested our assistance along with a couple other vendors. A two hour Webex trial and error session ensued, but the problem persisted. If you’ve ever had to hunt for intermitant errors then you know what we were going through. At this point, though, the story diverts from your typical experience. The customer application was running on AppLogic after all, so it was a packaged system, literally scalable and portable as a unit.

Rather than proceed with tests on the production system, the customer agreed to send us a copy of their application! Yes, that’s right, a complete copy of the search engine - ready to run in our labs. Just as easily as you exchange Word documents with coworkers, they sent us a complete 100 server application. We then made several copies, each of which ran on just a few servers, and started destructive testing. We failed servers, dropped connections, deleted volumes - anything we could think of to exacerbate the error and make it repeatable. A few hours later the problem was solved - a simple misconfiguration in a third party piece of software.

Had this application been running on standard infrastructure, no doubt this story would have had a completely different ending. In all likelihood the error would have persisted for days or even weeks, because the type of troubleshooting we did wouldn’t have been possible. Cloud computing provided this customer a new way to deal with errors in production resulting in a better user experience, reduced manpower, and of course lower cost. 

So yes, there is a very real difference provided by cloud computing technology and its impact will be felt across our industry. Just don’t expect anyone to agree on exactly what it is for a while.

Just found this one via slashdot. Enjoy!

Twenty Experts Define Cloud Computing (with source links)

http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/read/612375_p.htm

Poll: should we add our own?

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Update, 7:30pm: Bert adds his view on why we shouldn’t try to make our own definition

I’m packing my bags to return home, having spent the past week in Japan at a private show hosted by our new partners at NetOne Systems. Attendance was excellent and the event was very impressive, even having its own tradeshow floor featuring dozens of booths complete with fully operational demonstration equipment, including an IBM mainframe.  Our sessions for press interviews and customer demonstrations or AppLogic were packed to standing room only thanks to the excellent organization and customer relations of NetOne. Xseed, the first Japanese service provider to begin offering commercial AppLogic services, used the event as a venue for making their service announcement as well. If you read Japanese, you can see some of the press coverage on Atmarkit.

More than two years ago, when we first came out of stealth mode, some of our first inquiries came from Japan. Unfortunately, at that time we weren’t ready to service customers here. My visit with customers this week has shown that the Japanese market is ready to embrace cloud technology. They respond to the efficiency, the scalability and the energy savings. And today, in conjunction with NetOne, 3tera can provide the service needed. Cloud computing is on the horizon in the land of the rising sun.