I’ve long held that most of today’s cloud security solutions are woefully out of date, horribly static, and simply unsuited for the cloud age. That’s why when I learned about [Wallarm](https://www.wallarm.com), I decided to [jump on board as an advisor](https://lab.wallarm.com/randy-bias-joins-wallarm-board-of-advisers-9500bb05bf67) (with the blessing of Juniper Networks). Wallarm is a promising...

Semantics. You can’t get away from them. Any good argument worth having is full of nuance, articulated largely through differences in definitions. When there is no disagreement, like "alternative facts aren’t facts", semantics don’t matter, because we all know it is just spin. Real discussion comes through exploring the nuance...

Continuous response—or “CR”—is an overlooked link in the DevOps process chain. The two other major links—continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD)—are well understood, but CR is not. Yet, CR is the essential element of follow through required to make customers happy and to fulfill the promise of greater speed...

In the DevOps mythos or worldview, continuous delivery (“CD”) is considered one of the holy mantras. Unfortunately, many take CD to an extreme that is unwarranted and not even reflected in how the DevOps originators (e.g. Amazon, Google) operate. This is one of those situations where folks are extrapolating and...

This is my last day at Dell EMC. It was a privilege and an honor to found and lead Cloudscaling, one of the leaders in OpenStack, which was acquired by EMC on October 14th, 2014, exactly two years ago. Coincidentally, this is also my birthday. While working at EMC I...

I have been meaning to write this post for a long time, but one thing or another has gotten in the way. It's important to me to provide an accurate history, definition, and proper usage of the Pets vs Cattle meme so that everyone can understand why it was successful...

Ever wonder if EMC can bring the "wow"? We are this time at OpenStack Summit in Barcelona. I personally provided feedback and input into all of the EMC submissions this time around, helping increase the quality and the focus on solving problems and making OpenStack awesome instead of EMC products....

For the past few months an elite team of Cloudscalers (EMCers) have been working diligently on making [ScaleIO](https://www.emc.com/storage/scaleio/index.htm) great in OpenStack-land. ScaleIO "supported" OpenStack, but it might take a fair bit of time and energy to get it setup. No longer. As of last Friday, both Mirantis OpenStack and Canonical...

Last year, EMC announced the open sourcing of ViPR Controller, the world's leading SDS controller as [CoprHD](https://coprhd.github.io/) ("copperhead"). Since then we have made tremendous progress, with multiple releases, and operating the project [in the open](https://coprhd.atlassian.net/projects/COP/issues/COP-21849?filter=allopenissues). Recently we achieved another key milestone, the addition of support for RedHat's Ceph project. CoprHD...

After OpenStack, the number one topic that I get asked about these days is containers and their prospects for the enterprise and cloud-native applications. The prospect of containers replacing hypervisors such as VMware ESX or Linux KVM (the default for most OpenStack deployments) is of keen interest to many. Yet,...

You don't want lock-in? Great. Find another universe. In this universe everyone is locked in. Seriously, stop deluding yourself and trying to get something you can never have. Didn't your parents tell you? There is no Santa Claus. Nor Unicorns ([storage or otherwise](http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/killing-the-storage-unicorn-purpose-built-scaleio-spanks-multi-purpose-ceph-on-performance/)). Really, I am just trying to help...

When I first started promulgating the pets vs. cattle meme, it really helped me get through roadblocks of confusion. Many in IT couldn’t tell the difference between the old way and the new way. Explaining "cloud native" could take a long time, but this meme gave me a way to...

As you are probably aware, voting is open for the OpenStack 2016 Spring Summit. It is incredibly difficult to go through the entire list of abstract submissions. I've gotten wind of some of the more interesting submissions from EMC, WalmartLabs, Mirantis, and others. Following is an incomplete list of talks...

At the most recent [OpenStack SV 2015](http://www.openstacksv.com) event, I was invited to speak and provide a viewpoint on OpenStack's future.  The year before in 2014 I gave a talk entitled "[Lie of the Benevolent Dictator](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOAb6wfBYxU)" which spawned the Product Working Group for OpenStack.  A blog posting entitled [The Future of...

I’ve been doing “cloud” for about as long as it’s been a “thing”.  It is safe to say that I’ve talked about every conceivable topic related to cloud and cloud computing.  Unfortunately, I still run into a common problem, which is that the average enterprise looking to adopt cloud or...

Collectively it’s clear that we’ve all had it with the cost of storage, particularly the cost to maintain and operate storage systems.  The problem is that data requirements, both in terms of capacity and IOPS are exploding and growing exponentially, while the cost of storage operations and management is growing...

I wanted to provide you a big update on [Project CoprHD](http://coprhd.github.io) and a mea culpa.  As many of you know, EMC launched CoprHD during EMC World 2015 and made the code generally available on June 5th.  Unfortunately, we are learning the hard way about proper follow through when open sourcing...

Unless you had your head in the sand, you probably saw my [blog post talking about Project CoprHD (“copperhead”)](http://www.cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/introducing-coprhd-copperhead-the-cornerstone-of-a-software-defined-future/), EMC’s first open source product. Exciting times are ahead when one of the world’s largest enterprise vendors embraces open source in a big way. Does it get any bigger than picking...

[As you saw at last week’s OpenStack Summit](http://www.storagereview.com/emc_announces_two_new_openstack_solutions), EMC® is expanding its partnership with Canonical amongst others. I want to take a moment to talk specifically about our relationship with Canonical. We see it as a team up between the world’s #1 storage provider and the world’s #1 cloud Linux...

Yesterday I gave the seminal State of the Stack presentation at the OpenStack Summit.  This is the 4th major iteration of the deck.  This particular version took a very different direction for several reasons: 1. Most of the audience is well steeped in OpenStack and providing the normal "speeds and...

Want to help make OpenStack great?  I've put together a very quick survey to get some deeper feedback than is provided by the User Survey.  The intention is to provide some additional information around the State of the Stack v4 I'm giving next week at the summit. I will really...

You’ve probably been wondering what I’ve been working on post-acquisition and yesterday you saw some of the fruits of my (and many others) labor in the [CoprHD announcement](https://pulseblog.emc.com/2015/05/05/meet-project-coprhd-emc-delves-deeper-into-open-source/).  CoprHD, pronounced “copperhead” like the snake, is EMC’s first ever open source product.  That EMC would announce open sourcing a product is...

At the risk of sounding like “I told you so”, I wanted to comment on the recent Amazon 10-Q report.  If you were paying attention you likely saw it as it was the first time that AWS revenues were reported broken out from the rest of Amazon.com, ending years of...

I am super excited to announce that EMC is sponsoring a DevOps event at EMC World 2015.  As many of you guessed, with the acquisition of Cloudscaling, and the recent creation of the EMC{code} initiative, we are trying to become a company that engages more directly with developers and the...

I have had my doubts about converged and hyper-converged infrastructure since the Vblock launched, but I eventually came around to understanding why enterprises love the [VCE Vblock](http://www.vce.com/products/vblock/overview). I am now starting to think of converged infrastructure (CI) as really “enterprise computing 2.0”. CI dramatically reduces operational costs and allows for...

Voting for presentations at the Vancouver OpenStack Summit is now open.  Please help us by voting on the sessions submitted by EMC Federation speakers along with any other sessions that cover topics that might interest you.  Please vote at your earliest convenience since **each vote helps!** OpenStack community members are voting...

Recently, some more talk was had around the future of the EC2 APIs, beginning with some [comments on the openstack-operators](http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-operators/2015-January/006061.html) mailing list, followed by [threads on the dev and foundation](http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2015-February/055730.html) mailing list.  This ultimately resulted in a suggested [commit to officially “deprecate”](https://review.openstack.org/#/c/150929/) the EC2 APIs from Nova.  This commit was...

One of the biggest failures of OpenStack to date is expectation setting.  New potential OpenStack users and customers come into OpenStack and expect to find: * A uniform, monolithic cloud operating system (like Linux) * Set of well-integrated and interoperable components * Interoperability with their own vendors of choice in...

If you are voting this year in the individual director elections, and I sincerely hope you are, I would appreciate it if you would give special consideration to the following candidates and a super brief "why" * [Kavit Munshi](http://www.openstack.org/community/members/profile/139) - international and Indian representation * [Tim Bell](http://www.openstack.org/community/members/profile/88) - user representative...

This year will be a crucial year in OpenStack history.  This is the year we fix much of how OpenStack is structured or die trying.  By structure, I mean the vision, the project structure, the integrated release cycle, and the board and TC’s role in driving direction. First, **stop** and...

Last week a major set of milestones was reached for the [EMC Federation’s](http://emcfederation.com) involvement with OpenStack. First, EMC and it’s affiliated companies and brands (VMware, VCE, Pivotal, RSA, Cloudscaling) determined a cohesive strategy for engagement with the OpenStack Foundation Board. Second, EMC appointed a VMware employee, [Sean Roberts](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarob) ([@sarob](http://twitter.com/sarob)), as...

If you’re following the buzz surrounding the EMC acquisition of Cloudscaling, you might wonder: Is this a mismatch, or am I missing something? > Yes. You’re missing something. Let me explain. First, you’ll want to take a closer look at the [announcements by EMC today](http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/2014/20141028-02.htm) [1]. We will join the EMC...

As you no doubt heard this week, Rackspace has announced the intention to focus on managed cloud.  Inevitably this brought observations from many about RAX, and others, ability to compete effectively against the web scale public cloud giants: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. One of the commenters was [Mike Kavis](http://twitter.com/madgreek65) (twitter link),...

The Cloudscaling team has, once again, submitted an outstanding array of talks and we would all appreciate if you took the time to vote for our presentation submissions. We've taken the time to summarize our presentations for you below, as well as provide you with an easy link to cast...

In [part 1](http://cloudscaling.com/blog/openstack/the-6-requirements-of-enterprise-grade-openstack-part-1/) and [part 2](http://cloudscaling.com/blog/openstack/the-6-requirements-of-enterprise-grade-openstack-part-2/) of this series I introduced the core ideas around defining the requirements and then discussed the first four.  Today we'll discuss the final two requirements and tie it all together. Onwards and upwards! ## Requirement #5 – Scalable, Elastic, and Performant Enterprise-grade has to...

In [part 1](http://cloudscaling.com/blog/openstack/the-6-requirements-of-enterprise-grade-openstack-part-1/) of this series earlier this week, I introduced The 6 Requirements of Enterprise-grade OpenStack.  Today, I'm going to dig into the next two major requirements: Open Architectures and Hybrid Cloud Interoperability. Let's get started. ## Requirement #3 – Open Architectures & Reducing Vendor Lock-in We already covered...

## **Introduction** OpenStack is an amazing foundation for building an enterprise-grade private cloud. The great OpenStack promise is to be the cloud operating system kernel of a new generation. Unfortunately, OpenStack is not a complete cloud operating system, and while it might become one over time, it’s probably best to...

This week, Google hosted its [Cloud Platform Live](https://cloud.google.com/events/google-cloud-platform-live/) event. Some people were a little surprised at my enthusiastic [live twitter coverage](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23GCPLive%20from%3Arandybias&src=typd) for a number of Google’s announcements. I have been waiting for them to “go big or go home” for a while now. My biggest surprise was how long it...

Last night I presented at the Chicago DevOps Meetup along with [@mattokeefe](https://twitter.com/mattokeefe) and [@mfdii](http://twitter.com/mfdii).  The presentation went very well and was warmly received.  It's a bit of a revisit of some topics I have covered before, such as [Pets vs. Cattle](http://www.slideshare.net/randybias/architectures-for-open-and-scalable-clouds), the [new kind of elastic cloud](http://www.slideshare.net/randybias/enterprise-cloud-myths), and the architectural...

Fall of last year I wrote a controversial whitepaper detailing my concerns about how distributed storage was being marketed.  The blog introduction and the whitepaper were both entitled [Converged Storage, Wishful Thinking, and Reality.](http://www.cloudscaling.com/blog/company/you-cant-collapse-tiered-storage-in-private-clouds-built-on-openstack-whitepaper/)  There was a certain amount of expected blowback from folks at [RedHat](http://www.gluster.org/2013/09/san-stalwarts-and-wistful-thinking/) and [Ceph](http://ceph.com/openstack/distributed-storage-and-thinking-inside-the-box/) as well...

Voting is now open for the [Spring 2014 OpenStack Summit](http://www.openstack.org/summit/openstack-summit-atlanta-2014/) in Atlanta! Cloudscaling (and our friends at Mirantis) have submitted a variety of great session abstracts, from Randy Bias’ walkthrough of hybrid cloud landmines to avoid when architecting applications to Boris Renski’s discussion on updating the OpenStack mission statement to...

For Cloudscaling, the journey to the hybrid cloud begins (but does not end) with API compatibility between the OpenStack powered private cloud and leading public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). Cloudscaling customers run OCS, our OpenStack powered private cloud solution, because it enables them to burst to and...

Recently, Barb Darrow wrote a [note to Google Compute Platform](http://gigaom.com/2014/02/03/8-things-google-cloud-could-do-to-freak-amazon-out/), suggesting “8 Things it Could do to Freak Amazon out.” As long term readers know, I called out[ Google’s entry](https://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/rumor-mill-google-ec2-competitor-coming-in-2010/) into the public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) a while ago. My extensive experience at GoGrid and in the service provider and hosting business, provides...

It’s useful for all in the OpenStack community to remember that many believe OpenStack was not ready for prime time until Essex or possibly Folsom. Some might even claim Grizzly was the first true production release. My money is on Folsom for what it’s worth. What this means is that...

_(UPDATED: Video embedded below)_ Earlier this week, we hosted an OpenStack Meetup at the offices of our customer, EVault, here in San Francisco. Titled “[Neutron Networking and SDN in Production](http://www.meetup.com/openstack/events/152128692/),” the Meetup featured panelists from major contributors to Neutron and those offering open source plugins that leverage Neutron. ([SiliconANGLE](http://siliconangle.com/) covered...

If you want to know what’s new with OpenStack – new projects, code maturity, community growth, user stats and more – you’ll want to tune in for my live presentation of State of the (Open)Stack. I’ll will be broadcasting live from the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong on Wednesday, November...

The [OpenStack](http://openstack.org) train keeps rolling, picking up steam. Today’s Havana release is a remarkable achievement for the Foundation which [only recently had its first birthday](http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Cloud-Computing/OpenStack-Foundation-Launches-With-10M-in-Funding-5600-Members-312854/). Some stats from the Havana release, launching today: * More Developers: Havana has code contributions from 910 developers, up 60+% from Grizzly, which was itself...

Today’s launch of [OpenContrail](http://www.opencontrail.org) by [Juniper Networks](http://www.juniper.net/us/en/) is a sign of the times. As we have seen with the OpenStack project, some of the largest enterprise vendors have been embracing open source with a vengeance. Most notable in the open sourcing of OpenContrail is that Juniper acquired Contrail as a...

Fantastical thinking by private cloud builders has led to a deep misunderstanding of cloud storage technologies. If you are building a private cloud, you MUST understand the realities of cloud storage and not just think in terms of buying a single simple solution to what is ultimately a very complex...

I can’t think of anyone who has had a more epic impact on the history of open source software than [Brian Behlendorf](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Behlendorf). He’s the co-founder and/or board member of a raft of open source communities, including: * Apache Group, which became the Apache Foundation * Mozilla * CollabNet * Benetech...

Last week I published an [open letter](http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/openstack-aws/) to the OpenStack community calling for more focus on Amazon Web Services (AWS) compatibility. I feel strongly about this, as do others. However, in retrospect, I could have gone about elevating this issue in a different manner. I realize now that it might...

OpenStack is taking off at a pace that has defied almost everyone’s initial assumptions, and buying patterns are beginning to emerge. That’s a good thing, and it inevitably means change. Smart companies iterate fast and respond to market changes. Startups are held to a higher standard than established entities. That’s...

## An Open Letter to the OpenStack Community: ## Our Future Depends on Embracing Amazon <**UPDATE**: Please see [the follow up response](http://cloudscaling.com/blog/openstack/looking-in-the-mirror-a-response-to-my-open-letter/) to this letter .> Dear Stackers,  For three years, elements of the OpenStack community have arbitrarily and unfairly positioned OpenStack against incumbents, especially Amazon Web Services (AWS) and...

 If winning derives from [rapid iteration](http://hbr.org/2013/05/why-the-lean-start-up-changes-everything) of a [minimum viable product](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product), then all indications are that the momentum driving OpenStack will only continue. Consider three facts that demonstrate the rapid iterations driving OpenStack skyward: **1. Technology is Keeping Up With Hype** There’s no shortage of hype in the OpenStack...

At the recent [Structure](http://event.gigaom.com/structure/) event in San Francisco, I watched Werner Vogels’ presentation, along with about 500 others in a packed auditorium. Werner is the CTO of Amazon Web Services and one of the industry’s more prophetic voices. (I was honored to share [the keynote stage](http://go.cloudscaling.com/randy-bias-keynote.html) with him at Cloud Connect a...

Earlier this week, I gave the keynote address at the [Storage Plumbing and Data Engineering Conference](http://snia.org/spdecon) in Santa Clara (it’s abbreviated SPDEcon and pronounced, “Speedy-con,” by the way). [](http://snia.org/spdecon)Sponsored by the SNIA, the event is targeted for hardcore storage development and data engineers who configure,...

Historically, we’ve kept quiet about the details of our approach to building software and architecting elastic cloud infrastructure, but that changes now. [Our new blog](http://engineering.cloudscaling.com)'s mission is to engage the OpenStack development community and non-OpenStack cloud architects everywhere in a discussion about the variety of technologies and approaches we can...

Two and a half years ago I wrote about the inevitable throwdown between VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS), but recently VMware’s senior leadership appeared to [outright admit defeat](http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/240149626/vmware-top-execs-lash-out-at-amazon-public-cloud.htm).  The message to VMware’s partners was simple: "We want to own corporate workload," said Pat Gelsinger, VMware’s CEO. "We all lose...

_(Note: Deadline is Monday, February 25.)_ On April 15, a record crowd of as many as 2,500 people will descend on the Oregon Convention Center in Portland for what will be the largest gathering of OpenStack developers, users, media and analysts in the project’s three year history. Cloudscaling will be...

I want to try an experiment.  Hopefully it won't bite me... I am trying to understand if we are close to a consensus on the new apps driving all of the cloud growth. Cloud-native is a term positioned by the folks at [MessageBus](http://www.messagebus.com), cloud-ready is what we at Cloudscaling have...

Sometimes, when you see something sufficiently off-track, you need to respond, even when the person in question may be a personal hero of yours.  Geoffrey Moore (yes *that* one), recently [wrote an article about Cloud Computing](http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20121015205517-110300724-cloud-computing-hey-hey-you-you-get-off-of-my-cloud) that made me very sad.  Besides being off-track, it felt to me as if...

Come and get it!  Love to see your feedback and/or contributions. Cloudscaling Github GCE APIs repo: [nova-gce](https://github.com/cloudscaling/nova-gce) Come visit our booth at the OpenStack Design Summit to ask questions if you have them.

In February, we announced Open Cloud System (OCS). That moment marked our transition to  a product company. Since then, a lot has happened. We have talked and engaged with a lot of customers, and they’ve told us in direct and unambiguous terms what they want from a cloud infrastructure system....

We [announced](http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/10/prweb10007992.htm) on Thursday the availability of a new compute API set for [OpenStack](http://www.openstack.org) that is compatible with [Google Compute Engine](https://cloud.google.com/products/compute-engine) (GCE).  GCE is Google's Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) compute service that competes with Amazon Web Services EC2.  The announcement was picked up by [TechCrunch](http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/12/cloudscaling-opens-google-compute-engine-apis-to-openstack-provides-alternative-to-amazon-web-services/).  _**This makes OpenStack the first IaaS software...

As many of you know the OpenStack Design Summit for Grizzly, the next release in spring 2013 is only a handful of weeks away. Cloudscaling and some of our friends have submitted a number of fresh talks mostly centered around making OpenStack production-grade. We would love to have your votes...

We spend a lot of time in this blog talking about the architecture of elastic infrastructure clouds (EIC) like AWS and our own [Open Cloud System](http://www.cloudscaling.com/opencloud/). We contrast this against the architecture of enterprise virtualization clouds (EVC) like VCE’s Vblock. Nowhere are these differences more obvious than when you look...

Bloggers who consistently provide clarity, useful information and opinions backed by knowledge can be hard to find in the cloud space. One who consistently delivers is Dave Linthicum. When he’s not writing for [InfoWorld](http://www.infoworld.com/blogs/david-linthicum) or [blogging](http://bluemountainlabs.com/blogs), he’s CTO of [Blue Mountain Labs](http://bluemountainlabs.com/). Last Friday, Dave recorded [show #200 for his...

_(This post originally appeared at [O'Reilly Radar](http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/04/complexity-vs-simplicity.html).)_ The default approach to most complex problems is to engineer a complex solution. We see this in IT, generally, and in cloud computing specifically. Experience has taught us, however, that large-scale systems belie this tendency: Simpler solutions are best for solving complex problems....

Earlier this week, Eric Windisch ([@ewindisch](http://twitter.com/ewindisch)) of Cloudscaling presented an alternative mechanism for [OpenStack](http://openstack.org) Compute (Nova) RPC. For those who are new to OpenStack or simply haven't had time to delve into it's innards, Nova uses a core asynchronous RPC/messaging system to communicate between components.  Asynchronous message passing systems are...

When we [first began supporting the OpenStack project](http://www.cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/does-openstack-change-the-cloud-game/), we saw in it something that other open source cloud software projects did not have. OpenStack offered a path forward for companies that wanted to launch open cloud infrastructures in the model of AWS and Google. That was in July of 2010....

On Saturday morning, an article I wrote went out on GigaOm entitled "[True or false: Citrix is more compatible with AWS](http://gigaom.com/2012/04/07/true-or-false-citrix-is-more-compatible-with-aws/)."  Reactions were generally very positive, with only a a small minority reaction, mostly from Citrix or Citrix fans. Some of those negative reactions deserve a response that is greater...

**UPDATED**: link added to actual Citrix announcement; clarification re: story sources added at end; clarification of "contributor community" in 8th paragraph. As I write this, Citrix is preparing a [big announcement tomorrow](http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/news/news.asp?newsID=2323072). The details are sketchy, but apparently they are joining the [Apache Software Foundation](http://www.apache.org) (ASF) and contributing back Cloud.com’s...

**UPDATED:** to provide clarity on key sections and fix poor wording choices I applaud Joshua McKenty’s recent [Open Letter](http://www.pistoncloud.com/blog/). Cloudscaling has had similar concerns about the OpenStack Foundation governance model. We participated in a variety of discussions including the recent governance meetup during Cloud Connect, discussions with other community members, and...

Automation is one of the more tricky disciplines.  If it were as easy as it looks, then we would have had cloud years ago.  In recent years the [DevOps](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DevOps) movement as striven to take automation to the next level.  One of the primary shakers and movers IMHO is the [OpsCode](http://www.opscode.com)...

All cloud systems are inherently complex, and complexity is inherently evil. You can’t avoid complexity, since the size and scale that drives efficiency also adds complexity.  However, you can choose how complex to make your basic system.  A winning strategy for any team of cloud builders is to start simple...

Below is the presentation I gave at this year's 2012 [Cloud Connect](http://www.cloudconnectevent.com/) in Santa Clara.  It was extremely well received.  Better than I expected really, given it's last minute nature.  For some, I think a lot of the architectural and design patterns aren't new, but perhaps they haven't been portrayed...

This weeks’ re-launch of Cloudscaling was amazing. It was all we could have expected and more. My only regret was not being able to walk the halls at Cloud Connect as much as I would have liked, but I think I made up for that during our reception, which was...

Over the past two years, I’ve talked at length about the emerging success gap between ‘enterprise cloud’ and the AWS model. In the past, I’ve [asserted](http://www.slideshare.net/randybias/enterprise-cloud-myths) that these two different approaches to cloud service very different kinds of applications: legacy apps vs. greenfield apps. Or more appropriately: enterprise applications vs....

Happy New Year! I hope you are all having a fantastic holiday. This is a year end posting that I think you will find particularly compelling. Rather than predicting the future I thought I would take a look back at five long years of ‘cloud computing’. The Cloudscaling blog has...

I was just informed anonymously about AWS scheduling reboots across hundreds or even thousands of AWS EC2 instances. This is to "receive some patch updates". As some in the twitterverse have speculated, this is likely a security issue and most likely related to the hypervisor. A copy of...

I've made the argument on [numerous occasions](http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/cloudscaling-presentation-roundup) that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is essentially the quintessential cloud computing offering, particular for infrastructure.  To boil down my argument again, it's essentially: * Cloud computing is an entirely new model for IT * This model displaces 'enterprise computing' (or 'client/server') just as...

I had meant to put more content together around these numbers, but due to time constraints I won't be able to.  Regardless, the picture speaks for itself.  Here's my AMZN 'Other' revenue numbers with the blue bar representing my estimates of AWS revenue with the green bar representing the rest...

After the NIST presentation I gave last week in Washington, D.C., there were a large number of requests for the presentation itself.  Rather than reply to all of the individual requests, I thought I would direct folks to the NIST presentation while also providing a quick roundup of key talks...

I just returned from the [Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit](http://opencompute.org/summit/) in NYC. It was an eye opening experience. I thought I would share my take aways plus talk about what I perceive as a core issue: can the Open Compute Project (OCP) grow beyond Facebook? By that, I mean there...

We can all see it Amazon's continued growth. The 'Other' line in their revenue reports is now the #1 area of growth for Amazon, even above consumer electronics. Their [latest 10-Q](http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/financials/secfilings.asp?ticker=AMZN:US) reported 87% year-over-year growth, well over their consumer electronics business. Per predictions from [myself](http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/amazons-ec2-generating-220m-annually), [UBS](http://www.crn.com/news/applications-os/226500204/amazon-cloud-revenue-could-exceed-500-million-in-2010-report.htm), and others, AWS is staying...

I've talked about this idea many times and it's been picked up and echoed by many in the mainstream media.  The idea is this: Cloud computing is a new paradigm for IT that displaces the current dominant paradigm, enterprise computing.  This is in the same way that enterprise computing (or...

When you don't hear from a well known blog and startup for a long while you have to wonder what's up.  Usually this means one of two things: 1. the blog/startup is folding OR 2. the folks behind it are really busy, usually with factors related to success Well, Cloudscaling...

I recently did a [podcast interview](http://www.redmonk.com/cote/2011/04/04/there-is-no-half-steppin-in-cloud-guest-randy-bias-of-cloudscaling-it-management-and-cloud-podcast-087/) with Michael Coté of Redmonk. We've posted a [PDF transcript](http://cloudscaling.com/pdf/CRN-20-Cool-Cloud-Infrastructure-Vendors.pdf) on our website. It's a lengthy conversation, so we thought we'd post a text version here, with key comments underlined and bolded. It's an hour long interview, but with a lot of high quality...

We don't usually link to vendor material, but in this case, the material in question is a video with yours truly.  Not only that, it's not just any vendor, but Arista Networks, who have been an incredible change agent for cloud computing.  Most of the successful commodity clouds I am...

Great [podcast](http://www.bluemountainlabs.com/podcast/2446) this morning with David Linthicum and Bill Russell o[f Blue Mountain Labs](http://www.bluemountainlabs.com/).  Dave kept it lively and fast-paced as usual, so it won't take you long to listen. We covered: * The recent AWS outage * Why you need two cloud providers * The Federal Government's inability to...

There has been a little bit of confusion on the schedule for the upcoming OpenStack Design Summit.  It is running Tuesday through Friday this week in Santa Clara.  The complete schedule can be found at this [link](http://openstack-spring2011.sched.org/).  You can register [here](http://www.cvent.com/events/openstack-design-summit-spring-2011/event-summary-51c521e3af73406dbc548746c25423c4.aspx), although there is now apparently a wait list. I...

_NOTE: This posting will make a lot more sense if you read my previous posting on **[Enterprise Cloud Myths](http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/salesforce-com-shows-us-enterprise-clouds-will-fail)**._ The success of Salesforce.com (SFDC) can teach us a lot about cloud and the emergence of new disruptive business models.  In fact, SFDC can also educate us about why the notion of...

[Randy Bias, Cloudscaling Co-Founder and CTO chats about cloud](http://www.redmonk.com/cote/2011/04/04/there-is-no-half-steppin-in-cloud-guest-randy-bias-of-cloudscaling-it-management-and-cloud-podcast-087/) with [Redmonk's Michael Coté](http://www.redmonk.com/cote/). Randy and Michael walk through the history and future of Cloudscaling, throwing out insights and musings along the way. Cloud market segments, rogue IT, Starving the Beast, the trough of disillusionment... this one has a little something...

Many of you have undoubtedly been watching the unfortunate events unfold in Japan post-earthquake.  Many of the Cloudscaling team are sympathetic, both because many of us live here in earthquake-prone SF Bay Area and also because some of us were here during the [1989 Loma Prieta](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Loma_Prieta_earthquake) earthquake.  Frankly, we're also...

Most everyone in the blog ecosystem has missed both the point and some of the economics of [AWS Dedicated Instances](http://aws.amazon.com/dedicated-instances/) that were recently announced.  Folks like The Register focus on how a single virtual instance can cost [$109,324 for a year](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/29/amazon_dedicated_ec2_instances/) without really understanding the positioning and value proposition of this...

A couple of weeks ago I posted about Amazon's continued [rapid release cycle](http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/amazon-web-services-rapid-release-cycle) and tallied up their releases by year. I think it's even more interesting to look at where these feature releases are happening by service. The stacked graph by service is as follows (click through for full size...

**Cloud Connect 2011 - The Defining Event in Cloud** [Cloud Connect](http://www.cloudconnectevent.com/) billed itself as the "Defining Event" in cloud computing this year and I have to say that it seemed to largely prove itself in this regard.  It's one of the highest value cloud computing conferences out there to date....

Last year I asked: "[Is Amazon Web Services Winning the Cloud Race?](http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/is-amazon-winning-the-cloud-race)" And during the [Cloud Connect 2011](http://www.cloudconnectevent.com/) keynote this week I made some assertions that AWS is indeed running away with the ball and backed it up with actual numbers[1]. In addition to the keynote, I provided some updated information...

Long overdue, we’re pleased to announce the release of the next chapter of the [Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Builder’s Guide](http://cloudscaling.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/iaas-building-guide-v1.pdf). At the time we released the initial guide (December ‘09), there was very little information out there about building scalable and cost effective infrastructure clouds. In particular, the level of documentation at...

The OpenStack community got a shot in the arm reciently when news of [Rackspace acquiring Anso Labs](http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/20110209/exclusive-rackspace-to-acquire-anso-labs/) broke. The leading open source project in cloud computing stands to make big strides as a result of the combination. The folks at Anso Labs created Nova, the project that led to the...

Just a brief note to highlight a fairly obvious misconception, so please excuse if I am preaching to the choir. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is not virtualization-on-demand.  I realize that there is a certain amount of terminology hijacking by marketers, but when you say 'IaaS', I don't think 'virtual servers on demand',...

As many of you know, we were exceptionally busy in 2010, building Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds in South Korea.  This culminated in the launch of KT's public cloud and the [Cloud Frontier 2011 conference](http://www.cloudfrontier.co.kr/eng/english.asp) in early December.  I provided a keynote speech there that I thought was pretty good and brought...

Greetings and Happy New Year. Apologies that things have been silent around here. I can assure you the entire Cloudscaling team has been extremely busy. We have a bunch of great new content coming along for the blog that should be interesting to discuss, particularly around public IaaS cloud growth...

Welcome to a new interview series we’re trying on at Cloudscaling. This series is meant to highlight not just cloud adoption stories, but stories about how businesses, particularly enterprise businesses, are changing the way they provide Information Technology (IT). As long time followers of the Cloudscaling blog know, our view...

It's always nice when another piece of the puzzle comes into focus.  In this case, my time speaking at the first ever International Super Computer (ISC) Cloud Conference the week before last was well spent.  The conference was heavily attended by those out of the [grid computing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing) space and I...

In my [keynote presentation](http://www.interop.com/newyork/2010/presentations/enterprise-cloud-summit.php) (free registration required to download) on Day 1 of the Enterprise Cloud Summit at Interop NYC last week some interesting comments followed up in person and [on twitter](http://twitter.com/acroll/status/27733665801).  I think one particular notion that surprised people was the assertion that elasticity, a property commonly associated with 'cloud'...

During my most recent trip I was speaking at both [VMworld Europe 2010](http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/europe2010/) and [Interop NYC 2010 - Enterprise Cloud Summit](http://www.interop.com/newyork/conference/overview.php). This update attempts to provide a candid look at some of the trends, thoughts, and insights that occurred to me while engaging with customers, vendors, and the greater cloud...

[We commissioned CloudHarmony to benchmark the private cloud we built for KT](http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/10/cloudscaling-kt-private-cloud.html) (Korea's largest landline operator and second largest mobile operator). KT's Senior Vice President of the Cloud Services Business Unit, Mr. Jung-sik Suh, had a clear vision for this infrastructure cloud. His intention was to build 'at scale' like Amazon...

I'm off on a whirl-wind speaking tour this October.  Would be great to meet more cloud folks and I would definitely appreciate your support at these venues.  If you want to connect, please reach out via [Twitter](http://twitter.com/randybias), [LinkedIn](http://www.linkedin.com/in/randybias), or [TripIt](http://www.tripit.com/people/randybias). Here's my list of upcoming speaking engagements this month: *...

The Cloudscaling team is proud to announce that [KT](http://www.kt.com/eng/main.jsp) (Korea’s largest landline operator and second largest mobile operator) has officially launched Korea’s first large-scale private cloud. Back in August, [KT announced their intention](http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2924254) to launch a complete set of cloud services to address the explosion of data emerging from the...

Last week, amidst the din of VMWorld and people up in arms that OpenStack is implementing Rackspace's APIs, Amazon's Web Services Blog [announced a significant price reduction](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/09/amazon-ec2-price-reduction.html) on High-Memory Double Extra Large and High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large instances. This reduction is indicative of Amazon's efforts to drive down cost (and...

John Furrier interviewed the following members of the SF Cloud Computing Club today at [VMWorld 2010](http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/) for an episode of [SiliconAngle.tv](http://www.siliconangle.tv)'s TheCube series. * Rich Miller, Managing Director & Principal, Cumulati * Bernard Golden, CEO, Hyperstratus * Randy Bias, CEO, Cloudscaling The link is here:[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOiNL7bmsts](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOiNL7bmsts) The video clip is...

_**"People don't realize that lock-in actually occurs at the architectural level, not at the API- or hypervisor-level"**_ Randy Bias [discusses the impact of OpenStack on the cloud computing ecosystem](http://sandhill.com/opinion/daily_blog.php?id=71) with sandhill.com's Kamesh Pemmaraju. Kamesh outlines the current state of cloud adoption, OpenStack and looks ahead.

At Cloudscaling, we're getting closer to putting OpenStack into production services. This is the first installment chronicling that journey and opening some of the tools that we are developing along the way. [](http://openstack.org) [OpenStack](http://openstack.org/) is a cloud computing framework for building infrastructure as a service, and [Swift](https://launchpad.net/~swift) is a subproject...

This week Rackspace Cloud, in conjunction with the NASA Nebula project, open sourced some of their Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud software. This initiative, dubbed ['OpenStack'](http://www.openstack.org/), should have a dramatic impact on the current dynamics for building cloud computing infrastructure. Previously there have been two major camps: Amazon API and architecture compatible...

I've heard from a somewhat reliable source that Google is working on their Amazon EC2 competitor. Yes, some kind of on-demand virtual servers. I would have been the last person to guess that Google would take this direction[1], but you have to admit it makes a certain sense from their...

Just a quick post to note a [recent blog post](http://chucksblog.emc.com/service_provider_insider/2010/06/my-discussions-with-a-cloud-builder.html) by Chuck Hollis ([@chuckhollis](http://twitter.com/chuckhollis)) that discusses some of the issues related to using EMC for commodity clouds.  The posting hubs around a conversation I have been having with Chuck trying to understand the EMC product line better and seeing if...

Our own [Andrew Shafer](http://stochasticresonance.wordpress.com/), killed it today at the [Velocity Conference](http://en.oreilly.com/velocity2010).  His presentation is a must read for webops, devops, and those aspiring to build 100% uptime cloud services. It's hard for folks to internalize how things are changing in Internet-land, but I think you'll get closer through this presentation....

A recent interview I did with [Alex Bewley](http://www.uptimesoftware.com/uptimeblog/the-uptime-bloggers/) of Uptime Software is [finally available](http://www.uptimesoftware.com/uptimeblog/it-operations/interview-with-randy-bias-ceo-of-cloudscaling/). Although the podcast is nominally about cloud computing for mid-tier enterprises, we actually cover much broader ground. Alex's blog posting lists the core topics as: * what kinds of businesses are using cloud * how you...

James Hamilton's recent [MIX'10 presentation](http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/EX01) on economies of scale for large cloud providers was quite impressive. James "gets it" like few others in the industry. If you haven't watched his hour-long presentation, I suggest you do. I also recommend this excellent response from [James Urquhart](http://news.cnet.com/8301-19413_3-20003591-240.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=TheWisdomofClouds). My goal in this posting...

From our perspective, it looks like Amazon is winning the cloud race. Amazon and Google pioneered the notion of '[devops](http://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2010/03/03/devops-mixing-dev-ops-agile-cloud-open-source-and-business/)', where agile practices are applied to [merging the disciplines of development and operations](http://somic.org/2010/03/02/the-rise-of-devops/). Devops teams are inherent to cloud computing. They are the only way to scale and compete. For...

I recently did a very long podcast and interview with Chip Ramsey, CEO of [Intellum](http://www.intellum.com/working.html), on cloud computing.  Intellum is an up and comer in the e-learning space and are doing a new series of interviews with thought leaders in different spaces.  They started with [Karl Kapp on e-learning](http://karlkapp.blogspot.com/2010/01/discussion-with-chip-ramsey-ceo-of.html) and...

I wanted to follow up from yesterday's post on the upcoming Cloud Connect event.  In particular, I want to talk a bit about the track I'm leading: [Cloud Migrations](http://www.cloudconnectevent.com/cloud-computing-conference/migration-strategies.php).  The focus of the track is to talk about: * How to adopt cloud now * Choosing between clouds: internal, external, or...

If you're not aware of it, [CloudConnect](http://www.cloudconnectevent.com/) 2010 is coming up on March 15-18th in Santa Clara, CA.  Our team is running the [Cloud Migrations](http://www.cloudconnectevent.com/cloud-computing-conference/migration-strategies.php) track and a special breakout session on building Private Clouds.  We managed to get some really great panelists for the Migrations track and we're going...

It's difficult to throw a stone these days without hitting a so-called 'hybrid cloud.' The problem is that the term hybrid, used in this context, appears to mean: "Put any two kinds of clouds together." In fact, that's how NIST defines it in their [cloud definition document](http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/cloud-computing/cloud-def-v15.doc) [1]. The problem...

* * * _Once upon a time, a network engineer scrawled an amorphous shape upon a whiteboard and wrote "Internet" thereon.  The amorphous circle, a 'cloud', soon became the de facto way that we represent "not my problem", or outsourcing.  Hence, the "cloud" in cloud computing means that cloud is...

Some exciting [news](http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2010/01/18/xen-cloud-platform-code-update/) on the open cloud front.  [Nicira's](http://www.nicira.com) [openvswitch](http://openvswitch.org/) (think: open source Cisco Nexus 1000V) made it in as the default vSwitch in the latest release of the Xen Cloud Platform.  For those who aren't aware, the [Xen Cloud Platform](http://www.xen.org/products/cloudxen.html) is an open source provider/cloud-focused management framework for clouds....

We're a little late in posting this due to the holidays, but I have some exciting stats to share with you.  In 2009 the Cloudscaling blog became one of the hottest destinations for cloud knowhow.  A big part of that success was our unique perspective on cloud computing.  We aren't...

Over a year and a half ago, I mentioned that there were four key aspects to cloud computing: scalability, leverage, speed, and [reach](http://cloudscaling.com/blog/technology/cloud-values).  All of these still hold true today.  In particular, the one area that was underdeveloped was the notion of using clouds for global reach. As you know,...

Just in time for the New Year, we're releasing a short 12 page whitepaper on building Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds.  This whitepaper is targeted at folks building public or private clouds who want to understand our general take on clouds, cloud computing, and Infrastructure-as-a-Service.  In particular, we highlight some of the...

It's important to understand the potential differences between virtual server disk drives and physical disk drives, so I wanted to post a very brief blog on the topic.  For this article I've chosen to compare the performance of an iSCSI SAN on Gigabit Ethernet to a single SATA disk drive....

Amazon hasn't been forthcoming since my [last post](http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/why-amazons-sas70-is-bogus) on their control and control objectives, which is disappointing, but expected.  I still believe that transparency here is more important than [security through obscurity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity).  Hiding the controls and control objectives doesn't provide much in the way of particular security benefits, although I'm...

At first glance it seems like Amazon's [recent announcement](http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2009/11/11/aws-completes-sas70-type-ii-audit/) of a successful [SAS70](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS70) audit is grounds for celebration[1]. Certainly it has met with fanfare on [Twitter](http://search.twitter.com/search?q=&ands=SAS70+AWS&phrase=&ors=¬s=&tag=&lang=all&from=&to=&ref=&near=&within=15&units=mi&since=&until=&rpp=15) and [blogs](http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?client=safari&rls=en&q=sas70%20amazon%20web%20services&oe=UTF-8&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wb). Unfortunately, a SAS70 audit isn't what most people think it is. Worse yet, Amazon's reluctance to provide details of the audit provides...

I recently gave a short, 5-minute 'lightning talk' at [Cloud Camp in the Clouds](http://www.cloudcamp.com/?page_id=1429).  This is the first 'virtual' (online) event for the [Cloud Camp](http://www.cloudcamp.com) folks.  I want to particularly thank the organizers [Reuven Cohen](http://www.elasticvapor.com), [Dave Nielsen](http://www.platformd.com/), and [Sam Charrington](http://cloudpulseblog.com/) for allowing me to give our perspective and also to let us...

Today I'm going to tell you how much revenue Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is generating. After all, you, my regular readers, come to this blog for its insight, original thinking, and gems of wisdom. Today I have something particularly juicy for you: _real-world numbers on Amazon's EC2 size and...

Create them now and stifle innovation or create them later when it's too late? That seems to be the breadth of the discussion on cloud standards today. Fortunately, the situation with cloud computing standards is not actually this muddy. In spite of the passionate arguments, the reality is that we...

More and more it's becoming apparent that [VMware](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware) and [Amazon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMZN) are headed for a serious collision.  Amazon is eager to capture more of the enterprise business market, VMware's bread and butter.  Meanwhile, VMware is actively supporting a new crop of Amazon competitors with its recent [vCloud Express](http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-applications/vmwares-vcloud-api-forces-cloud-standards) release.  More importantly, what...

We're in the midst of a monumental transformation of the IT space, namely cloud computing, and the transformation _is stalled_.  Or, it was, until today when VMware released their [vCloud API](http://communities.vmware.com/community/developer/forums/vcloudapi) at [VMworld](http://www.vmworld.com/index.jspa) under an extremely [permissive license](http://communities.vmware.com/static/vcloudapi/vCloud_API_Specification_v0.8.pdf).  A FAQ is [here](http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-10659). So what's the big deal you say? **What's...

An infrequently talked about, but very important aspect of cloud computing performance is 'oversubscription'.  Oversubscribing is the act of selling more resources than you actually have to customers on the assumption that the **average** usage will be equal to or less than the actual resources on hand.  This is the...

 Spectrum of Cloud Computing Providers There will soon be two major paths for cloud computing providers: commodity and premium.  If you read my series, [Cloud Futures](http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/cloud-futures-pt-4-the-culling), you'll know that I broke down cloud service providers into three major old_categories: [service clouds](http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/cloud-futures-pt-1-service-clouds), [consumer clouds](http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/cloud-futures-pt-2-commodity-clouds) (previously 'commodity')[1],...

There was recently a small brouhaha on twitter regarding whether a 'private' or 'internal' cloud is really a 'cloud'.  There was a very high level of chatter including a ton of the clouderati such as [@jamesurquhart](http://twitter.com/jamesurquhart), [@samcharrington](http://twitter.com/samcharrington), [@boblozano](http://twitter.com/boblozano), [@jesserobbins](http://twitter.com/jesserobbins), [@ITKLcameron](http://twitter.com/ITKLcameron), [@samj](http://twitter.com/samj), and many more.  The argument of the folks who...

Frequently new readers are curious about this blog. It helps when I periodically summarize the most popular blog postings. So, without further ado, here's the top 5 posts in the first half of '09. Be sure to also check out my [top blog post summary of 2008](http://cloudscaling.com/blog/technology/top-posts-in-2008) if you haven't...

It can be confusing to understand how to scale computing systems, but it's not rocket science.  There are really only two main axes of scale: out and up.  Closely related to the axis of scale is the general type of architecture: centralized or decentralized.  In this article I'm going to...

Today [SOASTA](http://www.soasta.com) announced their [performance certification program](http://www.soasta.com/company/news/pr20090721.html) for websites.  This is a pretty interesting development as far as I am concerned.  I've watched SOASTA from afar since their inception and I have always though it was a particularly clever use of cloud computing.  Their approach is essentially to use someone...

The vast majority of web applications have what I call _The Secret Sauce Problem_.  Every commercial web service of any kind needs to be differentiated in order to be interesting and attractive to customers.  There isn't any kind of differentiation in a typical 3-tier or N-tier[1] web application stack. This...

Like the advent of the commercial Internet before it, cloud computing is likely to have a similar 'bust'.  In parts 1 ([Service Clouds](http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/cloud-futures-pt-1-service-clouds)), 2 ([Commodity Clouds](http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/cloud-futures-pt-2-commodity-clouds)), and 3 ([Focused Clouds](http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/cloud-futures-pt-3-focused-clouds)), I covered the types of clouds most likely to survive.  In this post I'll talk about those who will be...

One of the more overlooked aspects of the cloud computing market is the imminent threat to the [Virtual Private Server](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_private_server) (VPS) market.  Many look to the stardom success of Web 2.0 startups like [Animoto](http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/04/23/animoto-facebook-scale-up/) and [SmugMug](http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2008/06/03/skynet-lives-aka-ec2-smugmug/), who clearly derive tremendous value from Amazon Web Services ([AWS](http://aws.amazon.com)), as a measure of...

If you're into cloud and Internet/web operations this past few weeks saw several very important conferences, including [Open Source Bridge](http://opensourcebridge.org/), [Velocity Conference](http://en.oreilly.com/velocity2009), and [Structure '09](http://events.gigaom.com/structure/09/).  I'm not going to review either of these since I wasn't at Structure and only spent a day at Velocity, but suffice it to say...

(http://whatconsumesme.com/2009/what-im-writing/how-to-be-happy-in-business-venn-diagram/) Happiness in Business If you can't be '[best](http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/cloud-futures-pt-1-service-clouds)' or '[cheapest](http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/cloud-futures-pt-2-commodity-clouds)', that only leaves being 'first' (see [Pt. 1: Service Clouds](http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/cloud-futures-pt-1-service-clouds) and [Pt. 2: Commodity Clouds](http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/cloud-futures-pt-2-commodity-clouds)).  Since Amazon Web Services (AWS) clinched the 'first' and 'best' titles for the general marketplace, your best bet is to pick a subset...

Ever wonder where the other big guys are in the cloud computing space?  If Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are general purpose [service clouds](http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/cloud-futures-pt-1-service-clouds) set to dominate as ecosystem plays, then what about those big companies that can't deliver an ecosystem, but have the size to play ball?  (See [Pt. 1:...

Some folks think that there is no such thing as a 'private' cloud. By definition all clouds are public. Unfortunately, some times the confusion is around whether a cloud exists internally or externally rather than if it's public or private. Yet, even in the case where this confusion doesn't exist,...

Please help me make the Cloudscaling blog better.  If you would take a moment of your time to fill out the following survey I would really appreciate it.  It's extremely short.  Just three questions.  Your input is valued highly. **UPDATE**:  Had a great response.  Closed the survey.  Here were the...

With cloud computing rapidly accelerating it can be hard to see the road ahead.  I hope to help with this in my own way through this short four part series where I'll outline how I think this is all going to play out.  It's clear that the marketplace will continue...

Interview with the 'suave and intelligent Randy Bias'  at 2009 Interop by [John M. Willis](http://www.johnmwillis.com/), who writes one of the more widely read cloud computing blogs and news sites. Original post is [here](http://www.johnmwillis.com/cloud-computing/cloud-cafe-interop-2009-discussions-3/). I've embedded the video below. I think it went pretty well even though I was a bit exhausted. We briefly covered...

This is something I say a lot in person, but wanted to actually say outright somewhere.  My primary defining business characteristic of 'cloud computing' is that it's 'self-service'.  And by self-service I mean: * On-demand * Pay-as-you-go * Use-only-what-you-need * Visibility and transparency * Automated * No humans necessary (until...

The rhetoric from open source pundits about the 'closed' cloud has already started.  From [Richard Stallman](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.computing.richard.stallman) to [others](http://www.geek.com/articles/news/fourteen-universities-to-study-cloud-computing-with-5m-grant-20090427/) there has been [nay-saying](http://www.maya.com/the-feed/the-wrong-cloud) related to the cloud being ultimately closed and proprietary.  This is a fundamentally misguided understanding. Where ever you stand on 'free markets', there is no doubt that market...

 [George Reese](http://twitter.com/GeorgeReese)'s new book, [Cloud Application Architectures](http://www.amazon.com/Cloud-Application-Architectures-Applications-Infrastructure/dp/0596156367), is finally out.  I'm probably biased, but I think it's pretty good as a handbook for building web applications on Amazon's EC2. I contributed an appendix that describes GoGrid and it's differences to EC2.  There is also a good...

Great deck from [Ezra Zygmuntowicz](http://brainspl.at/) of [EngineYard](http://www.engineyard.com) and [Adam Jacob](http://twitter.com/adamhjk) of [OpsCode](http://www.opscode.com) giving a high level overview of how to manage infrastructure for clouds.  The mantra of "program your infrastructure" continues to gain momentum.  There isn't going to be a place for systems admins and operators who cannot write code...

One of my favorite and very opinionated folks is [Benjamin Black](http://blog.b3k.us/).  He just posted a [presentation](http://blog.b3k.us/internet_history_and_clouds.html) he gave last year that mirrors some of my earlier [thoughts](http://neotactics.com/blog/technology/cloud-hype-cloud-boom-cloud-bust) about the parallels between the advent and standardization of Internet+TCP/IP and Cloud Computing. On a related note George Reese has a well thought...

In doing some research for a new GoGrid whitepaper I needed a list of references and resources for folks to get more information on building scalable web applications and infrastructure.  Reached out to my twitter network and got a lot of great responses.  Thought I should share.  Here's the list:...

Great new cloud computing podcast, [Overcast](http://overcast.typepad.com), interviews myself and [Michael Sheehan](http://blog.techdad.net/).  In this latest episode, #6, we cover [cloudcenters](http://blog.gogrid.com/2009/01/08/cloudcenters-are-datacenters-in-the-sky/) in detail.  Lots of good talk about why standards matter if done right.  I really enjoyed it, although I think there are a couple of editing errors in the beginning.  I...

Great interview by [Robert Scoble](http://scobleizer.com/) with myself and John Keagy, CEO of [GoGrid](http://www.gogrid.com).  We get a good opportunity to explain why GoGrid is different and about cloudcenters in particular, which are an [interest](http://blog.gogrid.com/2009/01/08/cloudcenters-are-datacenters-in-the-sky/) of mine.

Unsurprisingly there is still a lot of confusion around 'cloud computing' and it's definition. This even trickles down into attempts by the cloud community to create standards and/or a '[cloud taxonomy](http://news.cnet.com/8301-19413_3-10148806-240.html)'. The fundamental problem is that we're still trying to 'boil the ocean' when pursuing these exercises.  'Cloud' covers so...

Last week two pretty interesting things happened in cloud land. The first was the release by [Opscode](http://www.opscode.com) of [Chef](http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Home) a new open source alternative to [Puppet](http://puppet.reductivelabs.com). Both are terrific tools for configuration management setting the bar progressively higher in an area that has been woefully neglected by open source software....

I had a great time presenting on the challenges for cloud storage today at the SNIA Winter Symposium '09 event. It was my first GoGrid-related presentation and it went very well. A very technical audience though, so there is actually quite a bit of content that was given orally in...

More fantastic news besides the inauguration of Barack Obama this morning? Hard to believe, but yes. Today GoGrid allows all of it's competitors to copy it's API by open licensing it's API specification! Read more in the [press release](http://www.prweb.com/releases/GoGrid/OpenSpec/prweb1889224.htm). * * * Tidbit: The source code for the new cloudcontrol...

A while back, [Geva Perry](http://gevaperry.typepad.com/) and I were chatting about the issue of [virtual machine image sprawl](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls=en-us&q=virtual+machine+image+sprawl&btnG=Search) (Google Search), which is really little more than an extension of [not-so-new](http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2844412,00.html) traditional physical server sprawl problem. It's hard to get really hard data on how bad the vm sprawl problem is since...

Greetings. I hope you are having a fantastic holiday. This is my last post of 2008 and I wanted to recap the year. This is the first time I've attempted this, so hope you'll bear with me. This is not the typical 2009 predictions. I already [gave at the office](http://blog.gogrid.com/2008/12/18/8-more-cloud-computing-predictions-for-2009/)...

Earlier I posted asking [What Happened to Vertebra?](http://neotactics.com/blog/technology/what-happened-to-vertebra/), the sysadmin cloud management tool that [EngineYard](http://www.engineyard.com/) had promised for 'end of summer'. Pleased to see that the EY folks soft released an early BETA of the code today. You can see more at their [github repo](http://github.com/engineyard/vertebra/tree/master). To be fair, this is...

There is a myth going around about virtualization and cloud computing. It's expressed in a variety of ways, but the takeaway is always the same: "Public clouds are big virtual server clouds." Sounds good, but untrue once you look under the covers. For good reason, since virtualization isn't a panacea....

I don't often post simple links or even lists of interesting links. I prefer to try and provide more infrequent, but original content. I'm going to make an exception today because I want to point you to a really fantastic article by MasterMark: [The Enterprise Cloud](http://jroller.com/MasterMark/entry/the_enterprise_cloud) Fair warning, this is...

Cloud-Oriented Architectures (COA) mentioned briefly [before](http://neotactics.com/blog/uncategorized/clouds-are-not-datacenters/) by me look to be coming of age with this [latest announcement](http://www.techcrunchit.com/2008/12/07/forcecom-google-app-engine-cloud-relationship-management/) from Force.com and Google App Engine. Hopefully this will help get the message across. Building your entire application stack is soooo 1999...

Word on the street is that Sun is exploring the option of going GPL at the [CEO](http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/) level. They have been chatting with customer council(s) about whether they should do this. The answer is simple: _Do it. Do it now._ ZFS has inspired many. There are a number of up...

Operating and administrating Internet infrastructure is not the same. For the uninitiated it may seem that 'operators' and 'administrators' (systems **or** network) are not different, but there is one important distinction: The primary job of an operator is "risk aversion", while that of an administrator is to "control, manage, or...

Please update your RSS feed to point to: [http://feeds.feedburner.com/neoTactics](http://feeds.feedburner.com/neoTactics) At some point in the near future, I'll be switching over to new blogging/CMS software and this will keep your feeds from breaking.

The notion that an Amazon or Google has an inherent cost advantage in building infrastructure is plain wrong. This notion comes up over and over again in cloud computing discussions. Most recently on a thread where I responded in some [detail](http://groups.google.ca/group/cloud-computing/browse_thread/thread/1eb745f527e2c8da/b3b0f11c5c4e3df7?lnk=gst&q=Are+economies+of+scale+a+red+herring%3F#b3b0f11c5c4e3df7). Recommend you start there and then as soon as...

This [article](http://blogs.sun.com/mrbenchmark/entry/scaling_mysql_on_a_256) shows how easy it is to throw hardware at a problem and 'scale up' and part of why I think it's clear that using virtual machines in a cloud alone isn't sufficient. Some times you can solve problems by throwing hardware at it. Yes... That's 79,000 SQL queries...

Every once in a while you see this crop up in discussions about the cloud. It's easy to see why. It feels like there is something ground breaking going on, but clearly the technology that came before set the stage. [Grid computing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing), [utility computing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_computing), [SaaS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SaaS), [network 1.0](http://neotactics.com/blog/technology/cloud-hype-cloud-boom-cloud-bust/), and [ubiquitous virtualization](http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/servers/2007/0101server1.html)...

It's been busy here. I'll announce why soon, but one thing that caught my eye recently that just can't go by is the imminent [open sourcing of DRBD+](http://fghaas.wordpress.com/2008/11/17/drbd-plus-is-going-open-source/). DRBD+ is the commercial version of DRBD. This has serious implications for anyone who is serious about building real world cloud applications....

There was a [flurry of EC2 announcements](http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/) from Amazon today including: * [Windows availability](http://aws.amazon.com/windows/) * Removing [EC2 BETA status](http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2008/10/23/amazon-ec2-exits-beta-and-now-offers-a-service-level-agreement/) & providing a real SLA Perhaps most interesting is this [pre-announcement](http://aws.amazon.com/contact-us/new-features-for-amazon-ec2/) of 2009 functionality, which will squarely put them in direct competition with many of the startups depending on them, such...

A [thoughtful blog posting](http://www.subtraction.com/2008/10/15/a-cloud-and-a-prayer) from Khoi Vinh asks whether we can trust clouds given the current financial climate. It's good to be cautious about trusting all of your data to 'the cloud', but you **should** already be evaluating your cloud providers based on their ability to give you a backup...

There is ongoing confusion about the relationship between clouds and datacenters. You can see this with the term 'virtual datacenter' in reference to servers in the cloud or the lengths to which some folks go to bring datacenter-centric methodologies to the cloud[1]. Unfortunately, clouds are not datacenters. They ride on...

As I mentioned, last week had a very robust spate of cloud computing and infrastructure related conferences. All three of the conferences were new and I thought I would quickly recap and review them for folks who wanted to consider attending them next year. The three events can be summarized...

While there is still a lot of discussion about defining '[cloud computing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing)' there seems to be a [general consensus that it's a burgeoning market](http://news.cnet.com/8301-13953_3-9978153-80.html), which will, at some unknown point in the future, hit the requisite 'bust'. This was my sense this past week after attending not just one, but...

[Finally](http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-9978569-62.html?part=rss&subj=NegativeApproach). More competition is good.

There is a little [here](http://www.cioupdate.com/article.php/10761_3752881_1) on CIOupdate about CIO concerns with cloud security. The article is short and a little overblown in how both sides are represented. I'm currently talking to CIOs and CISOs at large enterprises and I'm not hearing any 'panic' so much as pragmatic concerns about securing...

If you haven't noticed, the cloud computing conversation is in full swing. There has been a [vigorous discussion](http://groups.google.com/group/cloud-computing/browse_thread/thread/2387c02a883ae612) recently on both blogs and the [Cloud Computing Group](http://groups.google.com/group/cloud-computing) around defining 'cloud computing' and everyone is taking a swag at it; usually with their own bias. Of course, I already have my...

I just found an interesting PowerPoint presentation on Cloud Services from Forrester that seems pretty complete, especially as it relates to the enterprise. You can find it [here](http://www.forrester.com/rb/download?t=1&&c=nch&o=2128&ft=1) (PPT). Also, James Urquhart has a [nice wrap-up](http://blog.jamesurquhart.com/2008/05/it-just-keeps-getting-cloudier-and.html) of some of the recent discussion over 'cloud computing' terminology.

There seems to be a group myopia around so-called 'cloud computing' and it's definitions. What we're really talking about are 'cloud services' of which, 'computing', is only a subset. It gets worse when you have people talking about Software as a Service ([SaaS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SaaS)) as a 'cloud' service. Things continue to...

I'm quite pleased to see that you can now get [OpenSolaris with Amazon's EC2](http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=643950011). OpenSolaris on EC2 means that you can now run your storage and/or databases in the cloud on top of the [ZFS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS) filesystem. Among the number of truly outstanding capabilities of ZFS are, snapshots, cloning, compression and...

[Rails doesn't scale](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22rails+doesn%27t+scale%22&btnG=Google+Search), [Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud](http://ec2.amazonaws.com) [does](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=EC2+scale&btnG=Search), but wait you need [Scalr ](http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/03/scalr-the-auto-scaling-open-source-amazon-ec2-effort/) to _actually_ scale. So... What is '[scaling](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalability)'? Everyone's an expert on it these days it seems. It's talked about in terms of languages, cloud computing grids, databases, and more. Just today, Ola Bini provides a [humorous](http://ola-bini.blogspot.com/2008/05/just-add-scaling.html)...

Storage requirements are exploding causing more and more small and medium businesses to employ creative solutions to stem the tide. In December, Hu Yoshida, CTO of Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), posted a [blog entry](http://blogs.hds.com/hu/2007/12/the_changing_enterprise_data_profile-_idc.html) about projected enterprise data growth. The entire posting is worth a read, but the included chart...

Amazon Web Services just rolled out [new support services](http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=566801011). Very interesting. Between this, the [new EC2 updates](http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/ann.jspa?annID=295), and the [private beta for persistent storage](http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-us&q=amazon+persistent+storage&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8) there seem to be a lot of valuable AWS enhancements in the hopper of late.

Great roundup of postings on App Engine [here](http://www.juixe.com/techknow/index.php/2008/04/08/google-app-engine-analysis/).

I missed the announcement of [Google's App Engine](http://code.google.com/appengine/)[1] by a few hours, but it was quickly brought to my attention. Initially, it looked like a direct competitor to technology [we have been working on](http://www.cloudscale.net/). Fortunately, it's not. CloudScale made a decision in January to move away from building a commodity...

I have a number of blog posts in the hopper, but we've also been growing quite a bit around here, so I'm afraid that they are all rather delayed. In the interests of keeping things alive, I thought I would share some older work that is still relevant. I've really...

I hate to be the contrarian, but we're so close to getting to the ultimate conclusion on virtualization, but keep missing the point. It's about more than just increasing datacenter utilization. It's about a **lot** more in fact. In a recent [new interview](http://gigaom.com/2007/12/26/vmware-mendel-roseblum-interview/) by the GigaOM with Chief Scientist Mendel...

Myself and the rest of the neoTactics and CloudScale crews are off for the rest of the holidays. We'll see you again early next year. As a parting gift, the CloudScale team [posted some pics](http://www.cloudscale.net/2007/12/22/xmas-sneak-a-peek) of the latest ALPHA UI for their automated EC2 Ruby-on-Rails stack. Great stuff. See you...

Great [new work](http://nutrun.com/weblog/rubyworks-production-stack-on-amazon-ec2/) from NutRun. If you need to get a single system up and running [Ruby-on-Rails](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_on_Rails) quickly on EC2, this is definitely the way to go. Of course, if you need a full production cluster with a clustered database and all of the trimmings, the best options are [CloudScale...

Our beloved [GigaOm](http://gigaom.com/) [ponders on pizza box servers](http://gigaom.com/2007/12/18/pizza-boxes-are-power-hogs/) and their possible replacement by Big IronTM in a new article. After perusing the article and comments I thought it was worth weighing in. So called [pizza box servers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1U_server) (1U or 2U form factor systems) are definitely the king in any datacenter...

Greg Borenstein, principal behind [Music for Dozens](http://mfdz.com/) and [out loud thinker](http://www.urbanhonking.com/ideasfordozens) sums up the potential [long term impact of Amazon's successful cloud computing model](http://www.urbanhonking.com/ideasfordozens/archives/2007/12/what_happens_wh.html). It's an insightful article and I think worthy of a close read, including the comments. First Greg correctly sums up the obvious: With the announcement of...

[A VC](http://avc.blogs.com) thinks Amazon is a [good portfolio investment](http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/AVc/~3/201178672/why-i-just-boug.html) even at 55x next year's revenue. With the heat increasing I don't see how we can't start seeing some competition with Amazon soon. Should be interesting. Cloud computing is here. I'm [betting on it.](http://www.cloudscale.net)

Dave Winer [breaks it down](http://www.scripting.com/stories/2007/12/15/amazonRemovesTheDatabaseSc.html) on why AWS matters, asking why Google and Microsoft seem to be missing the boat. Of course, insiders are aware that Google is almost certainly going to launch MapReduce as a service, or similar, inside the next year. Still, the real news here, to me,...

Wow, virtualization, organization, and management of systems are not only on the rise, but continue to converge, as I thought they would. The [latest announcement](http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2007/prod_072407.html?Referring_site=Networkers2007PressKit&Position=PressRelease2&Event=Networkers2007) is Cisco's foray into managing and orchestrating network and datacenter resources. Not to mention [Opsware was acquired by HP](http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2161695,00.asp) (a big backer of [virtualization](http://h20331.www2.hp.com/enterprise/cache/454414-0-0-0-121.aspx)) for...

Lots to report on various fronts soon, but thought I would point to a [new blog](http://aleinwand.blogspot.com/) that I discovered by Allan Leinwand, one of the partners at [Panorama Capital](http://www.panoramacapital.com/). Some great posts on [Vyatta](http://www.vyatta.com/), an open source IP router player. Allan clearly knows his stuff and has some great perspectives....

I read a number of blogs on a regular basis. One category I watch fairly closely is storage, largely because it has a direct impact on the future of virtualization, but also because it is also going through some radical changes in terms of _[storage virtualization](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_Virtualization)_ and [commoditization](http://www.techworld.com/storage/features/index.cfm?featureid=2744). Storage virtualization...

Very cool, one of [our](http://www.cloudscale.net/) competitors, [RightScale](http://www.rightscale.com), launched their new product, [RightGrid](http://info.rightscale.com/2007/7/12/rightgrid-intro). It's an interesting solution they are advocating, although it doesn't feel much different from a standard batch processing system. But if you are looking for this kind of solution, I would strongly suggest you check them out. Our...

This entry is partly a rebuttal to Billy Marshall's recent blog entry [Amazon and the CIO Nightmare](http://billyonopensource.blogspot.com/2007/06/amazon-and-cio-nightmare.html) and also partly an opportunity to transition this blog to a place to expound a bit on what interests me in technology and IT. **Quick Background** One of the things I did in...

Apologies for the radio silence. We have been rapidly evolving the Virtual Server Room product over the past several months. The result has been the decision to morph into a service that leverages [Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)](http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=201590011) and to roll that service into a new company and organization, [CloudScale...

A 4-minute [video](http://news.zdnet.com/2036-2_22-6167254.html) by David Berlind on ZDnet that explains Amazon's EC2, including breaking down the costs versus a dedicated hosting provider.

As a proof of concept, we've released a new Amazon EC2 'AMI' (ami-34ba5f5d) that uses filesystem encryption ([dm-crypt](http://www.saout.de/misc/dm-crypt/)) for the 'ephemeral store'. This image is available to the general public and we hope you get some good use from it. If you were holding back testing because of concerns around...

We use, almost exclusively, [64-bit](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit) operating systems, for both Linux and Windows in our own virtualization systems and are convinced that 32-bit OSes are dead except for specialty purposes (e.g. mobile computing, embedded devices). There are a number of contributing factors to this conclusion, but most important are processors and...

What are 'Virtual Machines' and why should you care? This article explores that question with an eye to the impact on startups in particular. **Background** Machine virtualization technology has existed for a very long time. From the days of IBM's VM/CMS operating system, created in 1996, in fact. Although treated...