Cloud Pulse

Cloud Forecast 2009: Replay Now Available

sam — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 19:40:09 +0000

Two weeks ago Appistry announced our cloud computing market predictions for 2009. The predictions were well received, save a few haters over at Oracle :-).

To elaborate on our predictions we held a Webinar last week called “Forecast for 2009: Cloudy!” We wanted to try something new-and-different for the Webinar so we decided to run it like a panel discussion. The format not only turned out great, but was a lot of fun to do. In fact, it was such a good time that we’re planning to make it a tradition!

I moderated the panel of Appistry executives, which consisted of:

Kevin Haar, CEO
Bob Lozano, Chief Strategist
Michael Groner, Chief Architect

Each of them discussed one of the predictions and I peppered them with my own questions and audience questions throughout.

The recording has been posted and I encourage you to take a look to learn more about our thoughts on the quickly-evolving cloud computing market. There is an on-line version, pdf slides, an mp3 podcast, and even an iPhone version for you to download.

BONUS LINK: In a separate but related note, I was quoted in a recent article in the San Jose Mercury News entitled “Forecast for computing: cloudy.” Much of the nuance in my assessment of the market was not captured in that quote, but I stand behind the statement: SaaS aside, the real cloud opportunity for the enterprise is in private clouds.

Cloud Taxonomy: Applications, Platform, Infrastructure

sam — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 17:49:03 +0000

This has come up a lot recently, most recently when Coté tweeted:

@cote: Is the cloud categorization getting down to "apps, platform, and infrastructure"? I keep hearing that divide-up: http://tinyurl.com/4ghj7x

This taxonomy is far from perfect, but I think it does a good job of separating out the different types of clouds out there. Michael Sheehan from GoGrid was one of the first to publicly illustrate the cloud taxonomy with a pyramid (and I think he’s trying to apply for a trademark on it :-). (Image to the right stolen from Michael!)

As provider of a cloud platform, I am frequently called on to differentiate between cloud platforms and cloud infrastructure. Anyone who has used both Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine groks the difference between these two concepts, so I tend to use those offerings to illustrate the difference.

It’s really all about level of abstraction. And this translates directly to the end-user experience. With cloud infrastructure like Amazon EC2, the central theme is the virtual server. The user is (sometimes painfully) aware of the number and type of servers/virtual machines that they have running and management is done by individually logging in to each server, e.g. via SSH. Note that the user doesn’t know things like the brand and physical location of the servers, nor does the user expect complete or exclusive control of the machine. Those are all things that contribute to making the relationship cloud-like.

On the other hand, consider the end-user experience with App Engine. The central theme is really the application itself. The user develops their application and with a single invocation of a command-line tool, packages and deploys the application to the cloud. The platform takes care of actually deploying the application to the right machines, based on policy, utilization or whatever. The user never logs into an individual server. The don’t even know at a given point in time how many machines their application is deployed out to. The platform takes care of all of that, plus provides APIs and services to the applications themselves. (Much of this is true for Appistry EAF as well, but the model is very different from App Engine.)

I’ve got some slides I use to elaborate on the distinction between the layers. Please take a look and let me know what you think:

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: cloud computing)

Stephen O’Grady wrote up a nice post back in November called Cloud Types: Fabric vs Instance, where he described the Platform and Infrastructure layers as Fabric and Instance respectively. (Fabric has a nice ring to it, for obvious reasons :-) He has a nice description of each that is worth checking out.

The Forecast for 2009: Cloudy with a Chance of Jack Bauer

sam — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 18:16:17 +0000

As a wild 2008 comes to a close, we thought it appropriate to see what might be on tap for what promises to be a rather unpredictable 2009. So, earlier this morning we released Appistry's predictions for 2009 based on what we see swirling in our snow globe/crystal ball.

And what we see is a cloudy forecast. And cloudy is good! 2008 saw cloud computing emerge as perhaps the most discussed enterprise technology of the year. We saw industry behemoths like Google, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft lay down some serious stakes in the cloud market. We saw others, such as Oracle, dismiss the evolution that is occurring in the market. We saw companies like GoGrid and SkyTap make moves to improve the experience enterprises have in public clouds. And, I'd be remiss in not mentioning, a seven-year-old company called Appistry took bold steps to build out a platform that lets enterprises develop and move apps to both public and private clouds. Exciting times indeed.

So, what do we see coming up in 2009? Let's take a look at what we predicted in the press release:

2009 Will Herald the "Year of the Cloud" for Enterprises

Virtualization has matured; the economy is sinking while business costs are rising; and private clouds have already captured enterprise attention for their inherent security and reliability. These factors and more have created an ideal environment for enterprise cloud computing to thrive in 2009.

Cloud Platforms Will Begin to Overtake the App Server in 2009

Oracle and others will continue to fight a losing battle to keep their legacy application server cash cows alive. Oracle will do everything it can to protect its Oracle Application Server and BEA WebLogic franchises. In no way should they be counted out of the market, but newer, cloud-specific platforms are poised to further erode aging middleware options.

HP Finally Works Its Way into Middleware

While competitors scramble to save the app server, companies such as HP will be presented with an opportunity to capitalize on their competitors’ app server weaknesses. Without the constraints of older middleware that must be retrofitted for the cloud, HP is poised to use cloud computing to take market share from IBM's traditionally reliable middleware business. In the past, these two behemoths have battled it out around hardware and services, but HP could smell blood in '09 and look to take advantage of a rare IBM weakness in software.

Several Organizations Will Offer Standards for Cloud Computing – Standards Debate Rages On

Historically, technologies have evolved and succeeded because of standards. The process of getting to these standards is often a dirty, political and hard-fought mess. 2009 will see this same evolution take shape around the cloud. Already we're seeing several attempts at standardization, including IBM's RCC. The year ahead is just the beginning; we don't expect true standards to emerge until well into 2010. The question is: Who will win the battle and drive the process?

Amazon Will Release Tools to Enter the Platform Arena

While most eyes are on Google and Microsoft, Amazon has emerged as the company doing the heaviest lifting to advance cloud computing. Look for Amazon to move up the stack by offering additional tools for cloud developers in 2009, putting them at odds with the partner ecosystem they’ve built around companies such as RightScale, Elastra, 3tera and Appistry.

Oh, and there's one more I think will happen, but the lawyers yanked it out of the release for "copyright" reasons:

Jack Bauer Will Take Advantage of Cloud Computing during Episode of 24; The Cloud Will Never be the Same

Jack Bauer – the only man to win a game of Connect4 in 3 moves – will take advantage of cloud computing during this season of 24. In an attempt to stop a global threat of epic proportions, Jack Bauer will deploy himself into a public cloud effectively saving all of mankind

I encourage you to contribute your own predictions in the comment section of this post (and send these around to your friends and colleagues to see what they predict). I also invite you to participate in an interactive webinar we are hosting next Thursday, December 18, 2008, from 2:00 PM (EST) to 3:00 PM (EST), where a panel of Appistry executives -- Kevin Haar, our CEO; Bob Lozano, our co-founder and chief strategist, Michael Groner, co-founder and chief architect, moderated by yours truly -- will take an in-depth look into each of these predictions (even the Jack Bauer one). Those interested can register for the webinar at: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/580758866

Here's to a very cloudy and prosperous 2009!

Is Amazon the Wal-Mart of Cloud Computing?

sam — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 22:05:49 +0000

John Pescatore, information security analyst at Gartner, recently reflected on an analogy he used to illustrate the different security options available with cloud computing.

You see, if I want a tomato I can go to Wal-Mart and buy a really cheap tomato that was grown God knows where. If I need a tomato that is a bit tastier, I can go to my local grocery store that has a decent produce shop and the tomatoes are still fairly inexpensive. If I want a really good tasty tomato and am willing to pay a good bit more, I can go to a local farm stand - yum…

Or if I want the best tomatoes possible, I can grow them myself in my home garden…

In his analogy, John identifies all the players in what I call the cloud computing ecosystem: public cloud infrastructure providers, virtual private cloud providers, and the enterprise itself as a private cloud provider.

John makes the connection between tomatoes and cloud computing a bit more explicit further down in his post, but I was still left wondering who is the ‘Wal-Mart’ of cloud computing in his mind.

For my money it would have to be Amazon.

As I started thinking about it, I found interesting parallels between the two and their roles in their respective industries. And, just as with Wal-Mart, there are both good and bad effects to Amazon’s dominant role in the cloud:

Accessibility: Just as Wal-Mart has brought discount retail goods to many, Amazon has made public cloud infrastructure readily accessible to the masses.
Innovation: Wal-Mart has used its heft to motivate its industry and supply chain to adopt more efficient practices such as RFID and supplier-managed inventory. Amazon has delivered innovation in the cloud realm with technologies such as Dynamo.
Low Prices (Commoditization): The effect here on the cloud-side is best characterized by the words of a CloudCamp San Francisco attendee: Amazon’s hourly pricing model has created a “race to zero” for cloud CPU-hours.
Competition: Wal-Mart has long been maligned for forcing smaller retailers out of business. At this point in time I think Amazon has done more to create the cloud market than to stifle it. One possible area of long-term impact is with traditional Web hosting. Hosting is an extremely fragmented market with lots of small players and it will be interesting to see how that market responds. Over time these markets must converge.
Supplier Power: I think there’s an analogy here but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Any thoughts on how Amazon has driven changes at Dell, Rackspace and other suppliers?
Sweat-Shop Labor: Ok, this one’s mostly a stretch, but there is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. :-)

What do you think? Is Amazon the Wal-Mart of cloud computing?

BONUS LINKS: In researching this post I found an interesting series of articles by the LA Times on the Wal-Mart effect (2003), and a more recent book with the same name by Charles Fishman who is (or was) a writer at Fast Company.

Update: James Urquhart called this one way back in October in a very nice blog post.

Video: Appistry and Cloud Platforms in Under 5 Minutes

sam — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 17:03:41 +0000

Our partners over at Apptis were kind enough to post video footage from the recent CloudCamp Federal event. At the beginning of the event, each of the sponsors was given the opportunity to present a five-minute “Lightening Talk” on some aspect of cloud computing and where they fit in the big picture. My session is posted below. At the end of the video you’ll have the opportunity to review the other presentations from the event.

The slides are a bit difficult to make out, so I’ve included them below as well.

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: application cloud)

Unlocking the Power of the Cloud for Application Development

sam — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:19:21 +0000

We talk to a lot of developers and architects about cloud computing, and one of the things that we run across from time-to-time is an element of skepticism due simply to the incredible amount of hype out there in the marketplace. I know it’s hard for you to believe that software engineers are a skeptical bunch, and maybe it’s just that we talk to so many in the “Show Me” state, but it’s true.

Fortunately, once we get beyond all the buzzwords and hype, the substance behind cloud shines through and we’re able to have great conversations about the implications of cloud on software development.

There are many implications… By making infrastructure more readily available, cloud can streamline a process that is frustrating for many organizations. (It seems like there are never enough boxes around!) And certainly cloud changes what users expect of our applications (e.g. QoS characterstics), impacting the choices we make during application architecture and development.

These are some of the issues we’ll be addressing, along with our partner Skytap, in an upcoming webinar called “Unlocking the Power of Cloud for Application Development.” I invite you to join us for for the hour-long session, to be held on Wednesday, December 17th at 11 AM Eastern Time (2 PM Pacific).

Some of the topics we’re planning to discuss include:

* Benefits of a cloud-based development environments to build, test and deploy your applications

* Best practices for building cloud-ready applications, and retrofitting legacy applications for the cloud

* Case studies featuring end-user successes with enterprise cloud computing

but I’d love to hear your feedback. What else would you like us to address on this topic?

Please do join us for the event. You can register here.

Appistry to Host First "Lambda Lounge" Meeting; Stop By for Lively Discussion on Functional and Dynamic Languages

sam — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 02:55:04 +0000

Tomorrow evening, Appistry will host the first meeting of a new group “Lambda Lounge,” spearheaded by Alex Miller (of Terracotta). The group is an open forum for exploring various topics related to programming in dynamic and functional languages.

The agenda for the first meeting has shaped up nicely:

[Alex is] planning on kicking off the meeting with an open discussion about what functional and dynamic languages are and we can maybe arm wrestle about whether the two have anything to do with each other.

Next, Matt Taylor of ~~G2One~~ SpringSource will talk about Groovy MetaProgramming with Categories and Mixins.

Finally, Ryan Senior of Ferguson Consulting is going to do an overview of OCaml, of which I know not much, other than that it is a mixture of object and functional styles, dervied from a ML-style static type system (but with type inference).

More details are available on the Lambda Lounge site. If you’re in St. Louis we encourage you to stop by Appistry HQ at 6 pm for the meeting.

Built Cloud Tough

sam — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:08:15 +0000

Appistry recently announced a cloud provider partnership initiative, which allows leading cloud infrastructure providers to offer the Community Edition of Appistry's cloud application platform to their customers at no cost. One of our launch partners was GoGrid, and a little over a week ago I co-hosted a webinar with Michael Sheehan, the company's technology evangelist. More than 100 attendees joined us to learn about how we are integrating our products to make for a better cloud experience. Michael wrote a nice recap of the webinar in this blog post.

Taking Michael's recap a step further, one of the things I think we did a good job of in the Webinar — you can watch it on-line, download a PDF of the slides, or listen to the audio/podcast was to explain and highlight the importance of cloud application platforms.

Cloud application platforms allow organizations to more easily develop and deliver cloud applications, and portably host them on either public or private cloud, and I can say without hesitation that they are going to drive the future of cloud computing. (I said without hesitation, not without bias :-)

Traditional application servers — e.g., the WebSpheres of the world — simply weren't built to meet the requirements of applications deployed to cloud environments. They weren't designed to abstract applications across individual cloud servers (akin to server virtualization, but at a higher level... more on the distinction between cloud platforms and cloud infrastructure in a future post). Nor were they designed to provide the run-time services that for the foundation of modern, highly-distributed, cloud-based applications.

Platforms constructed for the cloud — like Appistry Enterprise Application Fabric — provide the simplification developers and architects need to build, deploy and manage applications in the cloud. (I'm using the generic cloud, although the benefits of cloud platforms apply to both public and private environments). They enable applications to scale and recover from unexpected failures in the underlying infrastructure, ensuring the quality-of-service that enterprises demand.

A recent quote on CIO.com hammers home the rationale behind the developer interest we've seen lately in cloud platforms:

"While it [the cloud] may cut some of the time they would have otherwise spent managing infrastructure, the bulk will still be spent where it always is — writing code."

What we're doing with Appistry EAF and partners like GoGrid is removing the complexity and fear of developing and deploying apps to the cloud.

The Results Are In: First-Ever Appistry/CloudCamp Cloud Community Survey

sam — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:33:46 +0000

With the U.S. presidential elections in the not-too-distant past, I thought it would be a timely opportunity to highlight a few of the results of a survey we conducted at the recent CloudCamp Silicon Valley. The survey is part of a series dubbed “Inside the Cloud” and is an effort to gauge the impact of cloud computing on the cloud community in general, and those attending CloudCamp particular, as well as uncover the issues and opportunities cloud presents.

We had 61 CloudCampers respond to the Silicon Valley survey, representing a mix of providers and consultants (and the ever elusive "other"). Through the survey, they provided feedback on cloud leadership, market conditions, innovation, challenges to cloud adoption, critical cloud attributes, and relevant cloud applications.

Some of the key findings include:

Amazon is perceived as leading the race for cloud king, besting Google by a 2-1 margin.
Respondents expect an uptick in cloud interest as a result of the current state of the economy.
Infrastructure is currently seen as the source of the most innovation in cloud computing right now.
Cloud computing's "Big Three" -- security, reliability and scalability -- continue to haunt developers' dreams.
There remains a considerable amount of uncertainty around what applications will win the cloud race.

The full survey report was released today complete with deeper analysis and statistics. You can read the press release here.

Have a question you'd like to submit for consideration in the next "Inside the Cloud" survey? Post a comment to let me know.

P.S. We're tallying the results of a similar survey conducted at CloudCamp Federal in Washington, DC, which focused on the unique challenges and opportunities for cloud computing in the federal market (more to follow in a future post).

Application Development in the Cloud and More: CloudCamp Silicon Valley in Review

sam — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 17:43:57 +0000

I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to post about the amazing CloudCamp Silicon Valley event we held a couple of weeks ago. But there’s no better time than the present, especially since it gives me a chance to plug next week’s CloudCamp Chicago.

CloudCamp Silicon Valley was held at Sun’s executive briefing center in Menlo Park on September 30th. The EBC is an amazing facility; thanks again to Sun for hosting us. We had more than 10 rooms filled to capacity with more than 150 people discussing various aspects of cloud computing. In fact, due to strong interest in the event a good number of walk-ins we found ourselves pushing the limits of the Menlo Park fire code. We may need to pony up for a door man/bouncer at the next event. :-)

The event took on the traditional CloudCamp “un-conference” approach, with attendees driving the discussion by posting topics to the board. We had really strong participation and the board filled up quickly. There were a handful of slots open at the end, so I volunteered to facilitate two topics I thought would be of interest. The first was a session on “What is Cloud Computing?” targeted at those new to the field. The second was a more advanced topic on cloud application development: what it means, how it’s different, and what enterprise developers – Java and .Net – need to do to fully leverage cloud environments.

Defining the Cloud

About 25 CloudCampers joined me to explore what cloud computing really is. It was a highly interactive session (as most camp discussions are) where we talked about different approaches to cloud computing. In the end, the group consensus lined-up very well with the approach I’ve been advocating here on my blog (see especially the Blind Men and the Cloud post), that is, that trying to define cloud based on the technologies used to enable it doesn’t capture the full promise of cloud, and that the best way to define cloud computing is in terms of the set of characteristics each of us is trying to achieve with it. Some of the essential cloud characteristics we came up with in the session were:

A Heated Debate on Cloud Application Development

The second session I led was around cloud application development. There were about 20 or so very technical participants crammed into a relatively small room, many standing, and we ended up having a very lively discussion about software development in the age of the cloud. I took a show-of-hands survey at the start of the session and the group’s primary focus was on achieving scalability for their cloud applications, as opposed to simply trying to outsource the ownership and management of servers to a third party. (Not a surprising finding for a group of developers.)

There was a bit of a split in the group between whether cloud application development was, in fact, different than traditional application development at all, or if it was just more of the same. Many of those in the room felt that developing for the cloud required a different approach so that applications could take advantage of the resources the cloud made available. A couple of folks took the position that cloud development wasn’t really any different. (Chris Richardson did a great job of challenging the notion that a new approach was needed). I think the unifying idea between both positions is that cloud development necessitates the best practices that people have been talking about for a long time. Developing applications that can truly scale in the cloud depends on writing loosely coupled, highly modular code and being careful about the way state is managed. For more on this topic see the Guerry’s great series of posts on “Is your code cloud-ready and multi-core friendly?” (Part 1: Introduction, Part 2: Atomicity, Part 3: Statelessness, Part 4: Idempotence, with more to come)

Finally, the exceptional turnout also gave us the opportunity to more formally ask about the industry issues on the minds of CloudCamp participants. Appistry partnered with Cloud Camp to sponsor the first-ever Cloud Camp attendee survey. We’re in the process of tabulating the responses and will highlight some of them in upcoming posts. We’ll continue to sponsor these surveys to help the community enhance its understanding of cloud computing in the market.