Most purveyors of Cloud Computing claim that one of its great benefits is that it can turn capital expense into operational expense.  3tera’s AppLogic Cloud Computing Without Compromise, though, reduces all expenses, both CapEx and OpEx.

AppLogic encapsulates entire applications and everything those applications need to run – code, data, OS, middleware, DBMS, infrastructure, configuration, policies, etc. -  into a single, easy to manage entity that is abstracted from the hardware.  These encapsulated applications are “superimposed” on a server farm and dynamically allocate the resources they need to run.  Therefore, specific hardware is no longer assigned to specific functions – any idle hardware can be used by any active application.  Thus, hardware becomes much more densely populated, ergo, much less hardware is needed.  This results in greatly reduced CapEx.

As such, all servers in the farm can be commodity servers all configured the same way.  So there is no need for intensive server administration.  In most enterprises and at most data center operators, one administrator can manage approximately 50 servers.  With AppLogic, because the administrators are managing application instances each of which can consume any number – up to hundreds – of servers, the applications one administrator manages can be consuming hundreds of servers, thus, increasing administration efficiency by an order of magnitude.  This results in greatly reduced OpEx.

And, as great as this is, it is only icing on the cake.  The “cake” is this.  Because applications can be run on arrays of existing commodity servers, the time it normally takes to provision and configure hardware for specific applications is virtually, pardon the pun, eliminated.   Time to market is dramatically decreased creating huge revenue opportunity.

So, the next time someone proclaims, “You get what you pay for.”, tell them when you pay up for information technology infrastructure, you don’t have to pay more to get more.  With Cloud Computing Without Compromise, you get an awful lot for what you DON’T pay for!

This one’s been eating at me since September 17 at 10:09 AM.   That was when a speaker from Tier 1 Research concluded a presentation at the 4th Annual Hosting Transportation Summit (HTS) at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas.

HTS is a great event for anyone involved in the hosting industry.  It was attended this year by about 400 people representing everything that’s anything in the U.S. hosting industry.  Attendees, for the most part, have profit and loss responsibilities and were there to find new weapons for their arsenals to increase revenues.   I love these focused conferences.  Having them in Las Vegas is really smart.  That makes it easy to gauge attendees’ interest by seeing how much of the audiences at the various sessions are lost to the casino.  The sessions at HTS were well attended!

By contrast, that week was VM World, right across the street (which in Vegas means only a 15 minute stroll) at The Venetian.  VM World was impressive – close to 15,000 attendees, I am told.  My sense walking around there, though, was that the majority of the attendees were more technology oriented – looking for cool new technology – but were not the people in their organizations responsible for P&L, who make spending decisions, and, most importantly, who make strategic business decisions.

So, what happened at 10:09 AM Las Vegas time on 9/17?  I just finished watching and listening to a very well researched and prepared presentation by a Senior Analyst at Tier 1, who organizes the event.  He very thoroughly described how the Cloud people, the compute on demand people – people like Amazon and Google, were kicking the hosting providers’ butts as they remain a commodity whose ability to compete with these Cloud giants is starting to wane.

What he didn’t do, though (and this is no criticism of him – he did his job), was talk about what the hosting providers can and should do to combat this.

So, why now?  If it’s been eating at me 7 weeks, why am I writing about it now?

Well, for the last couple of months, enterprise interest in Cloud Computing seems to have emerged in spades (pardon the Las Vegas pun).  VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and others have all made announcements readying themselves for enterprise Cloud Computing.  Our own marketing efforts have been focused around the enterprise as, though we are largely used by hosting providers and our customers are largely hosted, we have a full Cloud Computing platform that can run behind a corporate firewall, and our number of customers who do that, particularly enterprise customers, are definitely growing.

So, let’s not forget our hosting providers.  They are not only the salt of the Cloud, but they will be an integral part of Cloud Computing’s future.  In fact, as Clouds begin to interoperate globally, it will be the hosting providers who jump on that bandwagon who will fuel it with much of its resources.

Note to Hosting Providers:

If you are worried about how you are going to cope with this new competition, there is something you can do about it.  This advice might sound like an “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” mentality, but it is far from it.  The mentality is more of the nature that you should join a movement that they, too, will eventually have to join.

Whatever people think, there will not be a single dominant Cloud from any of these guys.  Cloud Computing, like any other utility, will evolve into a series of Clouds that can interoperate among themselves and are connected globally.  These interoperating Clouds will be run by hosting providers, will be proprietary Clouds like EC2, AppEngine, etc. and will be corporate data centers.

So, how does a hosting provider get on board?

Hosting providers need to implement Cloud Computing platforms in their data centers (of course, I think that platform needs to be 3tera’s AppLogic – plug, plug – surprise, surprise).  They need to build product offerings on these Cloud platforms.  Once there is a critical mass of applications hosted in all of these Clouds, the leaders will start interoperating with one another as people will want to share and reuse technology components, and, more importantly, companies will want to effect business to business transactions with companies running in other Clouds.

It will be inevitable that businesses running applications in proprietary Clouds will want to have the same capabilities, and in order to do so, their Clouds are going to have to start interoperating in the same ecosystem that yours do.

And guess what.  Many of the new enterprise customers we are attracting are and are wanting to run their web applications in external Clouds - HOSTED BY YOU.  So, there’s a whole new customer base here ripe for the picking.

So, hosting providers unite.  Get on board the Cloud train and in time, and not a real long time, the Amazons, Googles, Microsofts, Akamis, Salesforces, etc, of the world will have to join you or be beaten by you!

With the recent flurry of everything-as-a-service blog posts, it was good to read Frank Dzubeck’s pragmatic article on The Industry Standard outlining five issues that should be considered upfront by anyone pondering using cloud computing to run their apps. Frank list covers the basics of security, performance and financial ROI, but he adds management and governance which most folks fail to realize are at least as important.

I would add one more question to Frank’s list, though. Potential users should also ensure that service is available in multiple data centers and preferably from multiple providers as well. This makes it easier to build for business continuity and to provide a responsive rich user interface to wide spread audiences.

John Foley wrote a short piece on InformationWeek covering 3tera as their Startup of the Week that’s worth a read.

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!”

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!

Nicholas Carr has an article in The Atlantic titled Is Google Making Us Stupid? that got me thinking over the weekend. I’ve noted before how Google’s ubiquitous nature can have unintended consequences, such as the de facto standardization of spelling and grammar. In his article Nick notes that the nature of searching for information is having profound impact on the way in which he and others read:

“. . . what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

I’ve noticed this myself as well, a feeling that the Internet is condensing all information into Cliff’s Notes. In particular, this has been quite concerning in the blogosphere, where it often seems folks expect hard issues to be discussed and resolved as quickly as they can post. In a previous post on standards for cloud computing I cited a few threads where folks expected publication of specifications and standards as easily as posts to a blog. Of course, that simple isn’t possible, but I believe that the speed with which we access information online builds that expectation.

It appears that one unintended consequence of unhindered access to information is a sort of commoditization of thought. Information is simply so easy to come by that we tend to value it less. Worse, ideas and the effort to communicate them are discounted by the sheer volume of information that floods our senses at every waking moment.

As an example, when I was an undergrad some 25 years ago at CSUF, research was painful. I might spend hours scouring through microfiche, racks of books or the dreaded manual stack for the CDC Cyber mainframe trying to find information. Having unearthed what I was looking for, I was certain to write it down or copy it.  Today, however, I write down as little as possible. Written information is the first thing I lose. I also almost never copy of print information. Rather, I rely on my ability to search for it again. Google has become an integral part of my process for consuming information.

I can’t share Nick’s more pessimistic view of the situation though. Humans are resilient and have a way to adapting technology to their needs even if at first it appears the other way around. I, for instance, picked up an Amazon Kindle a couple months ago. Using the same technologies that can commoditize thought, the Kindle places entire books at my disposal even when I’m unconnected at 30,000 feet. Since getting it I’ve read two novels, three business books, a science book, and numerous magazines and newspapers. That would have been more than a year’s reading before. Plus, I’ve noted more young kids carrying books with them recently than laptops. They’ve got their phone for texting, and their iPod, but no laptop. Perhaps, the market is already pushing back.

Alex Handy at System Management News writes about Digg’s Kevin Rose and Ron Gorodetzky and how they are scaling Digg — see Digging His Way to Web Success.

With all the havoc about Twitter (if you spent the last few months on Mars, Google for it — there was even a post by Twitter’s founder describing what happened), it is refreshing to see someone who did it right and simple. The key point, I think, is that you have to start it simple — especially if you are a startup, you cannot and should not attempt to create the ultimate scalable system in version 1. Aside from this being impractical, it is also impossible for any system that’s actually interesting, because you don’t know which way your system will grow (trying to predict the future and plan for all possible cases is the surest way to never release anything).

Check out what Nati Shalom and Todd Hoff wrote about Twitter and scalability in a larger scope. Also, Todd Hoff’s excellent high scalability blog has a lot of useful info on how various big sites scaled, including Digg.

So how is this related to cloud computing: well, no matter how your application is deployed and operated, you still have do the architecture right for scaling: and not only in a static sense (a one time scalability design) but also in time, as your system grows and takes on different, usually unexpected directions to success. A good utility and/or cloud computing solution will help you in this: from offering ready made “best practices” stacks and solutions, to helping you build, debug, tune, monitor and operate your own particular architecture.

Onward and upward (or, for scalability freaks, outward!)