Thinking Out Cloud

Overcast Show #3 Is Up

In podcast #3 of Overcast, James Urquhart and I join forces with John WIllis, a thought leader in cloud computing, to talk about some of the most fundmaental questions about cloud computing, such as "what is it?"

We also go over other topics including infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-services, software-as-a-service, cloud bursting and more.

Check it out on the Overcast blog.

Gaming: The Last Bastion of "Not for Cloud" Conquered?

In the various cloud computing events and discussions I participate in, gaming is often given as an example of what types of applications cloud computing is not suitable for. That never sat right with me. Although games such as World of Warcraft having very thick clients you need to install (I think 2 or 3 GBs), and much of their processsing is done in the local machine, even more of it is done in the remote servers run by Blizzard (the company that makes WoW). As I have written, however, WoW is in no way a cloud, unlike what some have argued.

But I just read a piece on VC Cafe, a blog that tracks Israeli start-ups and venture funds, about a company called Playce. The CEO and VP BD characterize their company in this interview as Gaming Infrastructure-as-a-Service, although I would say that Platform-as-a-Service is probably more accurate. IaaS refers to raw compute resources such as CPUs, memory and storage, while Playce actually provides a software platform for 3D high-end game development in the cloud.

At the heart of their technology, according to the company execs, is the ability to stream very rich high-bandwidth content to the client machine. Furthermore, they are opening the platform so that other developers can create their own games and provide them with ways to monetize their developments.

Is this an indication that cloud computing is overtaking the last bastion of resistance?

Check out the profile of the company on TechCrunch.

Could the Cloud Save Yahoo?

Om Malik posted a great blog about Yahoo following Jerry Yang's resignation and the search for a new CEO. Among other things, Om lists some of the things Yahoo should and shouldn't do now. Some of the items in Om's "should do" list are:

• Focus its energies on Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Flickr, Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Search, as well as Yahoo’s e-commerce platform.
• Keep building on its Mobile offerings, for this is one area where its independence can help it win friends amongst operators who are worried about Google, Microsoft and Apple. 
• Yahoo’s ad-serving platform needs to become more real-time, with a drastic improvement in customer service.

While all of the above (and the other things Om writes) seem like good advice, I think there is one thing missing: cloud computing.

For the past few months whenever I tried to speculate on who are the next major vendors that will go into cloud computing, Yaho always initially was high on the list. But after some further thought I had to move them down, because they first need to get their act together as a company.

As I wrote in a comment to Om's post, Yahoo is exceptionally well-positioned for cloud computing with technologies such as Hadoop and Pipes and in-house expertise in building and running extremely scalable infrastructure. In addition, the next phase in cloud computing is going to revolve around Platform-as-a-Service. This is where Yahoo can really shine, especially compared to Amazon.

Moreon that in a future post.

Big Cloud Week Coming Up

Next week is shaping up to be a big week for cloud computing (again). 

Monday

Microsoft will be making an announcement in San Francisco about the launch of Online Services. I've been invited to attend that as well as a Blogger Roundtable that Microsoft is hosting for cloud computing bloggers. Should be interesting.

In the evening, Joyent is hosting Enterprise Cloud Computing Seminar: Addressing the Practical Questions of CIOs and CTOs. I will be participating in a a panel entitled The Future of Cloud Computing for the Enterprise, moderated by Jason Hoffman, CTO at Joyent.

Tuesday

On Tuesday (10 AM PST), GigaSpaces and CohesiveFT are hosting a joint webinar entitled Cloud Enablement with Security and Control. The highlight of this webinar is a wicked cool live demo of running a web application across two public clouds (Amazon EC2 and Flexiscale) with the ability to scale out on demand based on SLAs, fail-over, self-healing -- all in a secure environment. So as the Cohesive guys wrote on their blog, make sure to brush up on your cloud computing buzzwords, because we will show it all: cloudbursting, cloud storming, cloud spanning, virtual private clouds, hybrid clouds, interclouds -- you name it.

You can read more details on Nati's blog and Dekel's blog. Sign up here.

Wednesday-Friday

Sys-con's Cloud Computing Expo will take place in San Jose. Seems like everyone is coming in to the Bay Area for this one, so I am looking forward to meet a lot of the folks active in cloud computing at this event. There is also talk of another Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum get together around this event as well as a Silicon Valley CloudCamp.

So it's going to a fun week. If anyone wants to get together at one of these events, just let me know in the comments or via twitter.

Cloud Computing on Twitter

Just thought it would be useful to list some of the folks I follow in Twitter who write about, talk about or practice cloud computing (in no particular order):

James Urquhart (jamesurquhart) - my fellow podcaster on Overcast and author of Wisdom of Clouds, now at the Cisco office of CTO doing cloud related stuff (congrats again, James!)

John Willis (botchagalupe)

Randy Bias (randybias)

Duncan Johnston Watt (duncanjw) - founder of Enigmatec and now CloudSoft

David Berlind (dberlind)

Alistair Croll (acroll)

Jian Zhen (onsaas) - stream of cloud computing related news

Michael Sheehan (hightechdad) - Evangelist for GoGrid

Lance Wicks (lancew)

Alexis Richardson (monadic) - Cohesive FT guy

Kent Langley (kentlangley) - Joyent guy and cloud blogger

Sam Charrington (samcharrington) - Appistry guy

Christine Gupta (mrsboogie) - marketing person at Flexiscale

Jeff Barr (jeffbarr) - Amazon web Services evangelist

Deepak Singh (mndoci) - Amazon Web Services BD guy

Werner Vogels (werner) - Amazon CTO

Simone Brunozzi (simon) - Amazon Web Services evangelist in Europe

Martin Buhr (tallmartin) - Amazon Web Services Biz dev guy in Europe

Paul Retherford (paulretherford)

Bob Lozano (boblozano) - Appistry founder

Rich Miller (datacenter) - Tech journalist from Data Center Knowledge

Christofer Hoff (beaker) - Security expert

Dekel Tankel (dekt) - Cloud guy at GigaSpaces

Ynema Mangum (ymangum) - Cloud Computing Product Line Manager at Sun

Paul Lancaster (paullancaster) - GoGrid guy

Daryl Plummer (darylplummer) - Gartner analyst

Cohesive FT (elasticserver)

GoGrid (gogrid)

GigaSpaces (gigaspaces)

Joyent (joyent)

Appistry (appistry)

On Demand (ondemand) -- SaaS news

Cloud Camp (cloudcamp)

And of course, please follow me.

Please recommend anyone that's not on the list in the comments to this post.

Scalable, Low Latency Web Tier on Amazon EC2

Shay Hassidim, deputy CTO at GigaSpaces, posted an impressive write-up of a benchmark the team ran on Amazon EC2. What's nice about it is that they took a standard web app, in this case the Spring PetClinic, and dropped it into the GigaSpaces container, achieving instant low-latency and scalability, with out-of-the-box load-balancing and fail-over. Extremely cool.

The other components in the app include standard and open source components: Jetty, MySQL, Apache load-balancer, JMeter and Ant.

Also, Shay posts a screen shot (I think it's the first-ever public one) of the new GigaSpaces cloud framework. Check it out:

See the full benchmark numbers on Shay's post. And you can sign up for a GigaSpaces pay-per-use EC2 license here.

Overcast Podcast #2 is Up

James and I released show #2 of Overcast. Here are the show notes with the topics discussed:

In this podcast we discuss two main cloud computing related announcements from recent days:

• Salesforce.com's Force.com Sites and the new relationship between Salesforce and Amazon Web Services. You can can read more about this on James's blog.
• The announcement of cooperation between RightScale and the open source EUCALYPTUS project from the University of California Santa Barbara. You can read more about this on Geva's blog here and here.
• Also mentions of CohesiveFT, Elastra, Google App Engine, Microsoft and more... 

Go to the show page to listen in your browser, download the MP3 or:

Enigmatec to Spin-Off Cloudsoft

I saw a LinkedIn network update today that Duncan Johnston-Watt is now Founder & CEO at Cloudsoft Corporation. I was intrigued as I've known Duncan for several years as founder & CTO of Enigmatec. According to Duncan's blog he is leaving his operational role at Enigmatec to lead a spin-off that leverages Enigmatec technology to provide "cloud services". The details are sketchy as the company is in stealth mode. Here's an excerpt from the Enigmatec press release:

“The goal of Cloudsoft will be to deliver enterprise class Cloud Services orchestrated by Enigmatec software,” explained Duncan Johnston-Watt, Founder and CEO, Cloudsoft Corporation. “The first of these will leverage IP acquired from Enigmatec to host electronic marketplaces in the Cloud.”

Enigmatec will continue to build on the success of its data center automation solutions such as Enigmatec Virtual Orchestrator (EVO) and Automated Disaster Recovery (ADR), which enable the dynamic allocation of IT resources in response to minute-by-minute operational changes.

“Having established our technological leadership, we felt that the timing was right for Enigmatec to create this spin out and that Duncan was the ideal person to lead this initiative,” added Kevin Lomax, Chairman, Enigmatec Corporation. “We are delighted that as Founder he has agreed to remain on the Board of Enigmatec and we look forward to working closely with Cloudsoft in 2009.”

Good luck, Duncan!

RIghtScale and Eucalyptus Team Up

Congratulations to the RightScale and EUCALYPTUS teams for joining forces. Both teams have extremely cool technology and smart people. It is going to be interesting to see how both technologies evolve with the cloud computing landscape so rapidly evolving and maturing.

Internal clouds are still in their infancy but both these technologies have the potential to play a role in them. See my earlier post on EUCALYPTUS and its potential for commercialization. But internal clouds start playing into the notion of data center management and automation, a crowded, complex space, and it seems that the two teams are positioning this only for evaluation purposes for enterprises (not so for universities and start-ups).

It would be great to see more and more of the tools and frameworks that support EC2 also support Eucalyptus, which should be fairly simple given that Eucalyptus has implemented the EC2 and S3 APIs.

In any case, good luck to Rich, Michael and their teams.

See the full press release on John Willis's blog.

Cloud Computing. Literally.

Last week we made a very exciting announcement about Miwok Airways selecting GigaSpaces as the application server for running their reservation and pricing engine which will run on EC2. This is a great case study for cloud computing.

For one thing, you have to love the fact that it is cloud computing used for a business that literally runs in the clouds (the actual meteorological kind). Second, it is an on-demand compute infrastructure for a business that has an on-demand business model in the real world. A perfect fit.

There is a great piece in the LA Times that describes Miwok, but let me give you a brief description from the software application angle. 

The idea is that for so-called ultra-short flights (typically, less than 250 miles), as a traveler you have a terrible dilemma: use commercial airlines or drive your car. I don't need to tell you the hassle and costs involved in both options these days.

Miwok overcomes the hassles of these options by providing you with an on-demand "air taxi" service. You book your flight when you need it. So, say, you want to fly from Santa Monica to Orange County or Palm Springs. You go to the Miwok web site and say when and where, you get pricing and you can book the flight on the spot. The flight you are booking is for a private Cirrus SR22. You can park 100 feet from the airplane itself (at a local airport, not just the major ones) and you don't need to go through security (imagine that!). All of this at the same cost of a commercial flight.

But here's the part I really like:You can connect to other people via Miwok's own social network, or through a Facebook app (and others to come). As the Cirrus can seat 3 passengers, you can split the costs with other passengers who need to make the same trip. So the flight could end up significantly cheaper than a commercial airline.

Think about it: This is the exact opposite pricing model of big airliners, where the more people go on a flight, the price goes up. From a marketing point of view, this has tremendous viral potential.

One of the biggest technology (technology as in software, not aviation) challenges Miwok was facing was developing an extremely sophisticated real-time pricing engine. It needs to take many parameters into account to offer you a price on the spot, including location, path, season, date, time of booking, number of passengers and several other criteria. It needs to be able to grow and shrink on-demand, especially because of the social networking and viral effect.

The architecture Miwok selected uses MySQL and Hibernate for the persistence layer, but the database is not used as the system of record for calculation and reservations. Instead they use GigaSpaces' in-memory data grid, which gives you in-memory speeds and can also grow and shrink dynamically in the EC2 environment. The benefit for Miwok is that having very little advance knowledge on the traffic they will get, and expecting extreme peaks and troughs in activity, they don't need to pre-plan and invest upfront in the infrastructure. They use GigaSpaces and EC2 and will only pay for hardware and software on a per-use basis -- when and if they actually need it.

They also use GigaSpaces XAP (which includes the in-memory data grid) as the container for the business logic, written in Java, and as a bus for integrating the various underlying services involved in generating pricing and booking reservations.

In short, on-demand application scalability for an on-demand air travel service.

Check out Miwok's web site.

Sign up for the GigaSpaces pay-per-use license for Amazon EC2.