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 or blogging, he’s CTO of Blue Mountain Labs. Last Friday, Dave recorded show #200 for his...

(This post originally appeared at O’Reilly Radar.) 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) of Cloudscaling presented an alternative mechanism for OpenStack 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, 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.”  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. The details are sketchy, but apparently they are joining the Apache Software Foundation (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. 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...

Reposting is not something we do often, but this was too good to pass up. Jesse Robbins of Opscode gave an exceptional 20-minute keynote at Cloud Connect last month. Check out the video of his keynote on the Opscode blog. Also, the short video embedded below is a good summary about...

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 movement as striven to take automation to the next level.  One of the primary shakers and movers IMHO is the OpsCode...

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...