Our own Andrew Shafer, killed it today at the Velocity Conference.  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 of Uptime Software is finally available. 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 should go...

Last time, I implied that scale alone doesn’t always lead to the operational efficiency in the datacenter There is no class someone can take that will teach them everything they need to know to run a datacenter, and the applications it ostensibly exists for, efficiently. Training exists for some of...

James Hamilton’s presentation at Mix 10 illuminated cloud computing economics that few others have direct experience with, but I also believe that this presentation raises interesting questions that didn’t get addressed. (If you haven’t seen James Hamilton’s Mix10 presentation, go watch it now. You should probably also go through Randy’s follow up, and...

James Hamilton’s recent MIX’10 presentation 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. 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’, where agile practices are applied to merging the disciplines of development and operations. 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, 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 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.  The focus of the track is to talk about: How to adopt cloud now Choosing between clouds: internal, external, or both? Real...

If you’re not aware of it, CloudConnect 2010 is coming up on March 15-18th in Santa Clara, CA.  Our team is running the Cloud Migrations 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 [1]. The problem...