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I’ve often felt like a sports fan watching a great match from the sidelines as cloud computing developed over the past few years. I knew that cloud computing was changing the rules of the game for the teams in the hosting industry. And while my team was still winning games the competition was sporting sleek new jerseys. Well that is going to change.
I’m leading the charge at VISI to build the largest infrastructure cloud computing platform in Minnesota. Our cloud will provide enterprise-class features at near-commodity pricing. We will leverage new and old technology. We will support a wide range of infrastructure environments at a scale that is currently unheard of in our region. And we will launch before the end of the year.
I’ve had to answer so many questions over the past few months. What is cloud computing? Do you really want to compete with the big clouds? Why not just resell Amazon’s cloud? Which hypervisor will your cloud use? Do customers care which hypervisor you use in the cloud? Will our businesses pay for computing on an hourly basis? Each answer to these questions seems to bring up three more questions. Even though much of the cloud architectural planning is complete our work has only begun.
Let’s start at the beginning. Why is my organization building a cloud?
We are building a cloud because it is the most efficient way for a service provider to deliver hosted services. It is also the most efficient way for customers to buy hosting services. Our national competitors are launching cloud computing platforms on a weekly basis. Our customers are asking us about our future cloud strategy. We recognize that if we don’t change and adapt our hosting business model that segment of our business will eventually die. If we want to stay in the hosting business we have to invest in the cloud. It’s that simple.
The next question I hear is: why do you want to complete with big cloud providers like Amazon, Google, and Rackspace?
I don’t. I want to stay clear of the large cloud providers. I don’t want to get into cage matches with 800-lb gorillas. We’ve built our business in the gaps. Some service providers focus on the mass-market, commodity side of the business. Others focus on the largest global enterprises. We’ve been able to flourish and grow in the middle. If you are a small business with complex needs or a large business with price sensitivity then VISI is usually a good fit. I believe we can capitalize on the gaps in the clouds. We can build a cloud that competes with Amazon pricing. But we can also build a cloud that has the security, high-availability, and support of a Terremark. All clouds are trending towards the middle; so why not just start there.
One of the biggest questions I’ve had to face is the “buy vs. build” question. Should we design a cloud platform from scratch or buy a pre-packaged cloud solution and customize? The developer in me wants to build. The business guy says buy. The challenge with buying is that enterprise-class cloud computing platforms don’t exist on the market. (I’m sure some vendors would beg to differ.) Building a cloud platform from the ground up would take an experienced group of developers, some serious dough, and at least a year.
We’ve decided to use a combination of commercially developed components and VISI-developed components in our cloud platform. We will leverage both open-source and proprietary technologies. We will integrate with existing automation and support tools. The commercial components will speed up our platform delivery time while our in-house developed components will provide better service integration and differentiation in the marketplace.
Ultimately our customers will decide whether we are making the right decisions or not. I plan to give them a voice in the development and testing process. This blog is an open invitation for a front-row seat to watch the build.
I have tons more stuff to talk about. But I won’t pile everything into a single post. I’ll provide more insights on this blog in the coming weeks as my team progresses on our cloud platform design.
I was recently interviewed for an article on cloud computing in the Twin Cities Business Journal. The article specifically mentions that my company, VISI, is planning to launch a new cloud computing service. Did I mention that I was building a cloud? You didn’t think I was going to sit on the sidelines did you? More on my cloud building effort later…
Well VISI pulled off a solid VISION 2008 technology conference yesterday in downtown St. Paul. Kudos’s go out to the VISI marketing team for the event organization and the respectable attendance. I don’t know the final attendance count but my guess is it landed in the 150-200 range. The food was good and the networking opportunities were plentiful.
I attended two sessions: Jim Akers from NetApp talking about next generation storage and Misha Govshteyn from Alert Logic talking about security. I’ve known Jim almost my whole career starting back in the old ISP days when he worked at Cisco. I found his discussion of storage virtualization and clones particularly interesting. Misha is the CTO and Co-Founder of Alert Logic and I thought he gave a very high-level, strategic overview of current security threats and defense strategies. His presentation was particularly refreshing since I’m so used to hearing thinly veiled vendor pitches during these types of presentations. I was very interested to learn how worms are becoming more stealthy. A few years ago worms were used as a way to damage computers and now they are used to extract financially valuable information.
I also had the opportunity to meet up with several prominent local bloggers and entrepreneurs including Graeme Thickens, Steve Borsch and Steve Kickert. Steve’s company, Riverock Technologies, recently launched a new team collaboration and productivity solution called OnePlace. The SaaS-based solution is written in Ruby-on-Rails and hosted at Engine Yard.
UPDATE: Graeme Thickens wrote a wonderful blog article detailing Robert Steven’s keynote speech at VISION 2008.
UPDATE2: Steve Brosch wrote an article in Minnov8 describing his experience at VISION 2008.
My company’s new blog is now available at blog.visi.com. This is more of a marketing effort versus something that is organically grown. I’ll probably post there from time-to-time but keep the more cutting edge, non-work stuff on this blog.
