Thinking Out Cloud

The Cloud of Things

I have said before that the cloud computing paradigm will not just enable us to do the things we do better, cheaper and fast, but will allow us to do things we couldn't have done at all without it.

Enter CloudFab.

I didn't know this until I spoke to Nick Pinkston the founder of CloudFab, but it turns out that there is a variety of what are known as 3D printers. These are essentially machines that can manufacture digital designs into physical objects -- even a single unit -- using various materials such as plastic, metal or resin.

 These 3D printers are highly specialized to particular kinds of materials and processes and are very expensive. They often sit idle -- making their use even more expensive. CloudFab created a marketplace of companies who own these 3D printers and matches them with people who need to create objects out of their STL files (a standard CAD file format for 3D designs).

So in essence, you load your design file to the cloud, request the process and material, and after getting and accepting a price quote, you can have the object manufactured and sent to you. Pretty cool stuff, especially for people who want to prototype products or have small projects.

CloudFab is now out of beta. If you want to try it out but don't have an STL file, you can download one from Thingiverse, a community web site with open source object designs (cool in its own right).

PS Do we have a new term? Manufacturing-as-a-Service? Facbrication-as-a-Service? 

Who Will Build the LAMP Cloud? And Who Cares?

On Saturday, GigaOm published a blog post I wrote entitled Who Will Build the LAMP Cloud? Please read the full post, but I basically ask in it the title question and speculate on potential candidates and players including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Heroku and Zend. 

But apparently there may be a more fundamental question: does anyone want a LAMP cloud? 

My rationale for asking the original question was as follows: There are platform-as-a-service plays for popular application stacks such as Java (VMForce.com and Google App Engine), .Net (Microsoft Azure) and Ruby-on-Rails (Heroku and Engine Yard), so why not the LAMP stack? After all, it is one of the most popular technology stacks on the web today.

But in the very first comment, Kiril Sheynkman questions the need for a LAMP cloud altogether, with the claim that LAMP is losing its relevance and being rapidly replaced by other components. For example, he lists MongoDB, CounchDB and Cassandra as alternatives to MySQL -- the M in LAMP.

James Urquhart picked up on this comment and posted Does cloud computing need LAMP? in which he writes:

I have to say that Kirill's sentiments resonated with me. First of all, the LA of LAMP are two elements that should be completely hidden from PaaS users, so does a developer even care if they are used anymore? (Perhaps for callouts for operating system functions, but in all earnestness, why would a cloud provider allow that?) 

Second, as he notes, the MP of LAMP were about handling the vagaries of operating code and data on systems you had to manage yourself. If there are alternatives that hide some significant percentage of the management concerns, and make it easy to get data into and out of the data store, write code to access and manipulate that data, and control how the application meets its service level agreements, is the "open sourceness" of a programming stack even that important anymore?

I agree with James that in a PaaS offering, the developer shouldn't care about the underlying infrastructure, and therefore, the L(inux) and A(pache) in the stack are less relevant. This brings me to something that may perhaps seem like a nuance, but may be important: perhaps my original question should have been: "Who is building the PHP cloud?" and not LAMP.

In fact, if you keep scrolling down in the comments to my GigaOm post, you'll see an interesting one from a fellow named Brian McConnell. Brian writes that he currently uses Google App Engine with Python. He goes on into some detail about the benefits of GAE, which are essentially the selling points of PaaS over IaaS. But he concludes with the following:

I’ll probably stick with App Engine and Python for a while since things are working well and it ain’t broke, so it don’t need fixing, but if I am required to migrate in the future, or start another project, I’d like to be able to use PHP with the same level of simplicity.

This anecdotal testimony gives some merit to the notion of a PHP-focused platform-as-a-service.

James' last question: "Is the 'open sourceness' of a programming stack even that important anymore?" is a good one, but orthogonal to the discussion about a LAMP/PHP cloud, in my mind.

Librato: Squeeze More Out of Your Cloud Instances

One of the complaints I've heard from users of public cloud users, and especially of those who use Amazon EC2, is that the instances available are not provided in a wide enough range of sizes and jump from one size to another in steps that are too large.

The problem with this is that the user ends up not utilizing all of the available resources of the machine they are paying for, which is somewhat ironic given that one of the biggest benefits touted for cloud computing is better utilization (as you are supposed to be paying only for what you use).

Librato (Twitter: librato) is a start-up attempting to attack this problem with their newly beta-released Silverline product. I spent some time with Fred van den Bosch (CEO) and John Wernke (VP Marketing) and was impressed.

Once you deploy Silverline (which takes a couple of minutes) on your Amazon instances (or any other instances in internal or external clouds), it "sponges up" unused cycles so that you can run apps that are non-time-sensitive such as analytics apps or various batch processes. And the beauty is that you are doing this on a resource you were paying for anyway.

Check out the video demo below. I'm curious to know what you think of this and what you think could be interesting use cases. They are now offering sign-up to a free beta. 

Please share your thoughts in the comments.

 

CloudChasers Podcast: Battle of the Public Clouds

A couple of weeks ago the good folks at Novell invited me to participate in a podcast they are sponsoring called CloudChasers.

You can listen to it here or on iTunes.

Here is the description:

Battle of the Public Clouds: Who is Winning? – April 22, 2010

Many prognostications about the public cloud focus on three key vendors: Amazon, Google and Microsoft. This week on cloudchasers, we’ll check out the numbers, platforms and competing visions as we look at each vendor’s place in the market today and in the future. Also, with so many companies jumping on the cloud bandwagon, are there others who are more appropriate for this list? Who do YOU think will be the winner? Will there be just one winner?

Host: 

• Matthew T. Grant

Guests:

• Geva Perry, cloud computing blogger, Thinking Out Cloud 
• Ross Chevalier, CTO, Novell Americas

Integration-as-a-Service: IBM+Cast Iron

In Integration-as-a-Service Heats Up I talked about the cloud integration space and mentioned three companies: SnapLogic, Cast Iron Systems and Boomi. Well, I guess I was right about it heating up because on May 3 IBM announced its plan to acquire Cast Iron. 

It's important to note the difference between the three companies. Among the three, Boomi is the only one that has taken a pure cloud approach and provides its product solely as a web service. Cast Iron had started as an on-premise appliance play (virtual or physical) and recently added Cloud2, which they describe as a "multi-tenant integration-as-a-service cloud offering." SnapLogic is a downloadable product that needs to be installed on-premise or deployed by the customer in a public cloud environment such as Amazon Web Services.

[For more on application delivery models see Software Delivery Models in the Era of Cloud Computing]. 

Besides writing this post to say "I told you so" :-), I wanted to call attention to the debate about the appliance versus the pure cloud service approaches. In a blog post entitled Why Integration Appliances Won't Scale for Cloud Computing, Boomi CEO Bob Moul essentially slams Cast Iron's approach (although he is very gracious about the acquisition). The title of the post pretty much says it all, but you can read the details on their blog.

To me this is part of a bigger debate that is going on, and that is the fate of the notion of internal clouds (infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service environments that run in the company's own data center).

Several of the large vendors, such as IBM -- as well as many startups such as Eucalyptus -- are pushing the notion of internal clouds. And they are gaining some traction. From the customer perspective the idea of internal clouds resonates because they want to provide their development teams with the flexibility of public clouds such as AWS, but without the huge headaches of governance, security, migration, lock-in and other problems associated today with external public clouds.

And then of course, there is the idea of a hybrid environment -- where some aspects of IT are run in-house and others in a public cloud or as software-as-a-service, which is where an offering such as Cast Iron's comes in.

But at the end of the day, Boomi's Moul has got it right. It is a model that won't scale. "Pure" cloud will win this war. Internal clouds will be a temporary stop-gap during the next 2-3 years, but will eventually settle as a small niche.

Gartner: By 2012, 20% of businesses will own no IT assets. Huh?

Back in January, Gartner announced its annual predictions for 2010 and beyond. One of the key predictions was that "by 2012 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets". Here's the excerpt from the press release, which has been widely quoted around the web:

By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets. Several interrelated trends are driving the movement toward decreased IT hardware assets, such as virtualization, cloud-enabled services, and employees running personal desktops and notebook systems on corporate networks. The need for computing hardware, either in a data center or on an employee's desk, will not go away. However, if the ownership of hardware shifts to third parties, then there will be major shifts throughout every facet of the IT hardware industry. For example, enterprise IT budgets will either be shrunk or reallocated to more-strategic projects; enterprise IT staff will either be reduced or reskilled to meet new requirements, and/or hardware distribution will have to change radically to meet the requirements of the new IT hardware buying points.

The more I thought about this one it strikes me as a very odd statement. Don't get me wrong -- I understand where they are coming from and agree with the explanation and the trend, but some things just don't make sense in their wording.

"20 percent" - compared to what percentage today?

"Businesses" - What businesses? The bodega on the corner of Broadway & 89th? The guy who works on my lawn?

"IT assets" - They probably mean IT assets in the data center because aren't personal desktops and notebooks also IT assets?

Although this prediction was widely quoted, no one seems to have questioned it in any way or asked for a clarification. 

Weird.