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The guys at Vmops just changed their name to Cloud.com after buying the namesake domain. I’ve had the pleasure of working closely with the Vmops team over the past 9 months as we have built out our ReliaCloud platform. I was pretty surprised about this announcement because I didn’t know that the cloud.com domain name was even for sale! Apparently they bought the domain from the guy that started Meetup. Talk about cashing in on a domain at the right time. With $17MM in new funding the Cloud.com guys certainly had some cash available to spend. I think this is a home run from a marketing standpoint.
I just found out that I’ll be presenting at this year’s Gluecon conference in Boulder, CO. I’m co-presenting a session on IaaS cloud computing with Shannon Williams from Vmops. I’ve never been to Gluecon before and I’m pretty excited about this opportunity. The conference takes place in late May.
My company is sponsoring the upcoming CloudCamp on March 2nd and I am giving one of the “Lightning Talks” at the opening of the conference. The event is being hosted at the Microsoft office in Bloomington, MN. I encourage everyone who is interested in cloud computing in the Minneapolis/St. Paul region to attend.
I’m back after taking a few months off from the blog. Whew, what a busy time in my life — both at work and at home. I’ve now got two kids under the age of 2 at home and they definitely require much of my attention. Don’t get me wrong… I love spending time with my wife and kids but it definitely takes time away from other pursuits.
What’s going to happen with cloud computing in 2010? I think we will see a couple things:
- Greater adoption by enterprises as cloud providers deliver more features
- New cloud vendors trying to carve out market share
- The evolution and rise of PaaS
- Little movement towards a concrete set of cloud computing standards
- Increasing interest in private clouds
Now we’ll have to wait a year to see if I was right!
The Minnesota Society of Certified Public Accountants recently published an article that I wrote on the topic of cloud computing. The article provides an introduction to cloud computing, costs (time and labor), security concerns, and results from a nationwide survey conducted by VISI in which 150 upper-level management executives voiced their thoughts and concerns regarding cloud computing
Here’s a presentation I recently gave at a webinar sponsored by VISI. I covered some of the basic characteristics and use cases of cloud storage. We also announced some of the details of our upcoming cloud storage product.
Finance & Commerce magazine published an article covering my recent keynote at the Cloud VISION 2009 event in Minneapolis. I think the article does a nice job of presenting both the benefits and risks of cloud computing. And the writer correctly articulated many of the characteristics of the new ReliaCloud platform my team is working on. I was pleased to see quotes from great local technologists such as George Reese and Tom Kieffer. Well done!
Everybody and their grandmother has heard about the Sidekick fiasco over the past month. Apparently the storage servers for the Sidekick mobile service had a bad day and Microsoft had trouble restoring customer data. The whole episode became a lead-in for a series of stories detailing potential disasters in the cloud. You see, if Sidekick has a bad week then maybe this whole cloud computing thingy is dangerous.
The media hyped up the notion that the Sidekick service represents cloud computing. Let me get this straight. So any online service that stores customer data is now considered cloud computing? This hype makes me want to drink heavily and find the keys to the nearest backhoe. Are interesting news articles such a rarity these days that journalists have resorted to this level of desperation? We stored customer data on the Internet a generation ago. It wasn’t cloud computing back then and it isn’t cloud computing now. So what is it? It’s (drum roll please…) just simply storing and accessing data via the Internet. Yeah, kind of boring isn’t it? I guess that level of banality doesn’t generate clicks and advertising dollars.
I was fortunate enough to be a keynote presenter at the Cloud VISION 2009 event in Minneapolis this past Wednesday. My presentation, “Getting Ready for the VISI Cloud”, was focused on the new ReliaCloud service platform — and specifically Cloud Servers, the first product to be launched on this new platform.
We had a couple hundred people attend the morning seminars. That’s a pretty amazing turnout on a cold and rainy October morning. It is obvious to me that cloud computing services have gained traction in the hearts and minds of IT people across the Twin Cities region.
Chris Howard from the Burton Group gave the first keynote speech. He focused on cloud computing from a very strategic standpoint — explaining how the cloud was reshaping IT within enterprises. I thought Chris gave one of the best cloud computing presentations I have heard in the past year. His presentation was clear and insightful. He skillfully blended cloud computing and socioeconomic trends. Well done Chris!
I’ve spent the past nine months working on ReliaCloud and I’m excited to see all the hard come together in a very solid service offering. Of course none of this would have been possible without a great team of application developers, system and network admins, and product managers. VISI has never launched a product with this level of automation, self-service capability, and scalability. It represents the evolution of our business and the way customers buy infrastructure.
You can check out a great synopsis of the event at the Minnov8 website. You can also find the presentations online at the VISI Blog. Here are YouTube videos of the presentations from the event: videos.
Thank you to the hundreds of people that attended the event. I really enjoyed talking with you and hearing your feedback. VISI is still accepting beta testers for the new ReliaCloud platform. The beta testing will start in early November — probably the second week of the month.
I bumped into an entertaining video today, shot at last year’s Web 2.0 Expo, where participants were asked to define cloud computing. The simple question of “What is Cloud Computing?” elicited a wide variety of responses. And those responses made one thing clear: the vast majority of Web 2.0 people have no real understanding of cloud computing. It was like asking people “What is Nuclear Power?” and listening to them tell you how it allows them to watch movies on their 65″ plasma.
I’m not sure exactly when cloud computing first became synonymous with the Internet. But I think the problem stems from a couple of things:
- People confuse terms such as the “cloud” with “cloud computing”.
- Cloud services are selling and companies are trying to recast their products to ride the adoption wave.
- Marketing people are driving cloud computing hype and the resulting definition distortion.
Pretty much all of us Internet techs used the term “cloud” back in the day. We used to whiteboard diagrams for customers showing them how their 56k frame-relay connection was tied into the cloud. We would draw multiple office locations connected to a cloud in the middle. The cloud was just shorthand for the Internet. It was nothing special.
Somehow the notion of accessing websites and data on the Internet morphed into a distorted definition of cloud computing in some people’s minds. I blame businesses and their marketing teams that are trying to cash in on cloud computing adoption. They have no real understanding or concern for the misguided messages they are sending.
I think the most interesting part of the video starts at 3:50. The gentleman at this point of the video relates that “cloud computing is being able to sleep at night knowing that your servers won’t go down. Being able to know that your operations person can go on vacation”. And that’s the problem in a nutshell: marketers and vendors making claims that cloud computing magically automates business operations, scales infinitely, never fails, and cures world hunger. Now you know why old school IT people roll their eyes when they hear about cloud computing.
The promise of cloud computing is cheap, easily accessible, generally reliable, elastic computing power when you need it. Cloud computing does not ensure that your applications are designed properly, that your systems lack security holes, or that your staff know how to manage your online business. Cloud computing provides you with raw power but you have to know what to do with it.
