I am joining Red Hat on July 8th as Director, OpenShift Strategy.

From here, I want to shift gears and take a Q&A approach:

1) So, you sold out?

Nope. I am not denying that I will be part of Red Hat and I will do everything to help their financial bottom-line. I am not delusional about it. However, what defined me in the industry was my “independent” opinions. While I don the Red Hat, I will also have an independent persona talking about various aspect of technology and industry in an “unbiased” way. I am not the first one to wear two different hats. We have J. P. Rangaswami at Salesforce, Robert Scoble at Rackspace, Matt Asay at 10Gen, James Urquhart and Bernard Golden at Dell (formerly enStratius), David Linthicum at CloudTP, etc. doing the same thing I am trying to do now. We even have other pundits like Ben Kepes who is an advisor to ActiveState and an investor in many other startups. I am just following the footsteps of other people in the industry. What finally matters is whether you are independent enough to maintain the credibility or lose it fast. I am keenly aware that the trust layer between me and my readers is an unfollow button. While I wear the Red Hat, I will also maintain my independent persona to a reasonable extent.

2) Why Red Hat?

Ever since I started Rishidot Research to focus on the services world, I have been getting offers from various vendors to join their team. I never gave any serious thought to it because of two things, One, I liked what I was doing with Rishidot Research. Second, and most importantly, I have advocated so many ideas vociferously in the blogs, twitter and various fora, I was worried about hurting my credibility by joining a vendor and advocating against my own words. Thatz why I spurned some job offers from some of the biggest public cloud vendors in the beginning stage itself. When Red Hat gave me a call sometime back, my initial thinking was the same concerns I had for other offers but when I thought about the offer, I realized that Red Hat’s philosophy matched perfectly well with my own and my public advocacy. More importantly, the way Red Hat approached me and made me comfortable with the idea of considering the opportunity, I felt really comfortable with them as an organization. Here, I have to specifically thank Ashesh Badani (GM, Cloud Business Unit, Red Hat) and Don Farr (Director of Recruiting, Red Hat) for the way they broached the topic and took me through all my concerns. From then on, it was an easy decision for me. We spoke and found each other interesting and here I am, getting ready to join the OpenShift team and rock the PaaS world.

3) But, why Red Hat?

People who know me very well can clearly see how I fit well with Red Hat. I have long advocated open source. My first date with Open Source goes to 1996 when I first installed Slackware Linux on a 486 machine using 50+ floppy disks. In fact, when Red Hat launched Fedora more than a decade back, I was the second member to get on the FedoraNews.org editorial team (a fedora advocacy group at that time) to promote Fedora. In fact till Fedora 9, it was my desktop operating system. So when I was thinking about starting a company offering support services for open source software at a time when many vendors except Red Hat and few others were not aware of business opportunities in open source, the first book I reached out was Under the Radar by Robert Young (then CEO of Red Hat). I have been influenced by Red Hat for a long time.

4) But, again, why Red Hat?

To put it bluntly, Red Hat is the ONLY Billion+ dollar business in open source. They have shown the world how to make money in open source. It could have stayed in history books as an exception in the market economy driven by the economics of scarcity. However, recent progress in technology is pushing us to a world of abundance. Any entrepreneur who is gonna be successful in the market driven by economics of abundance is gonna learn from Red Hat’s playbook. Like Wright Brothers who showed the world that “humans can fly”, Red Hat showed the world that you can make more than billion dollars from open source and stay successful. By joining Red Hat, I am getting an opportunity to be part of a fantastic team that has enlightened millions of future entrepreneurs.

Editor’s Note: This is the answer the questioner was looking for

5) Why OpenShift?

I have been bullish on PaaS as the Future of Cloud Services from April of 2010 onwards. To make it happen, I even ran a conference focussed exclusively on PaaS by name Deploycon. It makes sense to be part of the OpenShift team and push PaaS into enterprises as a right way to do IT. The fact that OpenShift team is luring many in the PaaS community including my colleague from the PaaS advocacy days, Diane Mueller, made it easy for me to hop on.

6) What are you going to do at Red Hat?

I will be part of the OpenShift team, Red Hat’s PaaS offering. I will be helping the awesome engineers who are building a robust platform in whatever way I can help with their strategy. I will also be helping them on their messaging. Recently, we all came to know from Paypal that they are using OpenShift to build an agile IT that helps them compete in the services world. Paypal is a financial organization and OpenShift powers the platform on the customer facing side. We all know that financial industry is a heavily regulated industry. If Paypal trusts OpenShift for their underlying platform, it talks volumes about the OpenShift platform. In the coming weeks, months and years, we are going to hear more and more stories from OpenShift customers. It is going to emerge as one of the competitive players in the industry and I am excited to be part of the team.

7) What happens to Rishidot Research, Deploycon and CloudAve?

Rishidot Research ceases to be an analyst firm and will turn into a research community. We will be publishing research reports, blog posts, etc.. I won’t be taking any clients anymore. However, if anyone is interested in engaging other analysts who contribute research to Rishidot Research, they can do so by contacting them directly. You can also contact us to reach any analyst in the team. We will try to get more analysts to contribute to the research community. The limited paywall we have will be removed completely. Vendors are free to use any of our reports for publications as long as they comply with CC by SA 3.0 license. Rishidot Research will remain “vendor neutral” (to the best of my conscience) and all my OpenShift related writings will be published on OpenShift properties.

I will run Deploycon next year. I will try to rally the PaaS community to support me in this attempt. If you had attended or watched Deploycon in 2012 or 2013, you might have noticed that I go to stage mostly for welcoming the audience and thanking them later. All the panels were moderated by industry colleagues and I had my “PaaS conscience” and friend, James Urquhart, to MC the event. We even had analysts from competing firms moderate our panel. My aim then was vendor neutral PaaS advocacy and it is going to be the same in 2014. The content, speakers, etc.. will be decided by a completely vendor neutral team and I am planning to ask Alex Williams and other industry colleagues to help me on this. I will continue to run vendor neutral Deploycon as long as my industry colleagues trust me and support me. Let us see how it goes.

I will still continue to write on CloudAve on industry topics. It is going to continue till Zoli Erdos, publisher of CloudAve, kicks me out

8) What about AR and PR wanting to contact you?

The fact that I am not an analyst takes AR out of the equation. I cannot be bound by NDA and hence I am pretty sure AR teams are not interested in contacting me any more. I perfectly understand the dynamics there and actively discourage AR from contacting me. However, I am open to PR sending me the press release as I am going to continue with my independent writing at Rishidot Research and CloudAve. I do respect embargoes but if you are sending NDA material, I am not responsible. I do not encourage you to send any material that requires even frieNDA. I won’t be taking any briefings on any news but if I am interested in talking to any vendor on any news, I will contact the respective PR/marketing person for setting up a briefing after the news is public. Rarely, I might need such briefing for my analysis of the industry.

I am pretty excited to join the OpenShift team and pretty excited to continue engaging with cloud community going forward. Please ping me if you have any questions or clarification.

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

After their initial security bungling, Dropbox was putting their house in order to target enterprise market. Dropbox is one of the few cloud storage vendors targeting enterprises from the consumer market. In a way Google Drive is in similar position. With Google Apps gaining traction, the Google Drive integration with Gmail is a blow to Dropbox’s SMB & enterprise plans. My guess is that the Mailbox acquisition is a desperate attempt to change the discussion and position themselves as someone with a plan.

I might be totally wrong with this but I am fairly confident that this is the case. I would love to hear your opinion on this.

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

I was recently watching one of Clay Shirky’s talks at the Singularity University and he was trying to highlight the example of cell phone towers to explain the difference between robustness and resiliency in the crowdsourced world. He was trying to highlight the difference between the robustness needed for the survival of Encyclopedia Britannica and the resiliency needed in the case of Wikipedia. It got me excited to make another attempt at explain the enterprise community on the need to shift their thinking from robustness to resiliency. In short, I want to argue that this mental shift is not a new paradigm which cloud forces upon the enterprise IT but, instead, it is an old well tested idea for dealing with scale.

The example which I am going to pick is the cell phone tower example Clay Shirky used in his talk. When you look at the construction of cell phone towers, its base is broad and built with the idea of robustness but, after a certain height, the tower is not built for robustness. Instead, it is built for resiliency against heavy winds. It is not just expensive to ensure robustness at such great heights but also practically impossible. Once the construction engineers understood this difficulty, they relied on the idea of resiliency for building tall towers that has become the backbone for mission critical networks. They didn’t give up on the idea of tall towers because they are faced with a mission critical problem. Rather, they figured out a way to make these towers resilient for winds.. It is no brainer to know that construction industry were trained to focus on robustness while building smaller towers/buildings. But when it came to taller towers or building (scale), they figured that it makes sense to focus on resiliency than robustness. In short, it not only helped save tons of money (economics) but also helped to innovate faster (agility) than waiting for technology to improve so that they can achieve robustness at such heights.

The point I am trying to highlight is that it doesn’t make sense to be married to the traditional IT paradigm of robustness. It worked well when it came to legacy applications. However, for applications at scale, it doesn’t make sense to wait for infrastructure at scale that also offers the robustness of the traditional world. I am not saying we can never achieve success building robust infrastructure at scale. I am just arguing that it doesn’t make sense to wait for such an infrastructure when designing applications for resiliency can help any organization innovate faster. I am also not advocating that one should rely on hardware or data centers that fail every other hour. I am only emphasizing on the need to make the mental shift as history has already shown us that one can trust resiliency over robustness for mission critical needs.

Again, I make it a point to emphasize that it is perfectly ok to shop around for service providers who offer some level of robustness through SLAs. Even then, it is important to understand and accept the fact that servers fail and designing the apps for failure is the right approach for building modern applications. Whether we like it or not, legacy applications are on their way out. Globalized nature of the economy, mobile and social are pushing organizations to slowly (eventually) move away from legacy applications to modern applications. It is important for the enterprise IT managers to understand and accept this fact, change the mindset quickly and start embracing “modernity” in their IT. Organizations waiting patiently for robust infrastructure at scale will eventually end up getting disrupted.

Cross posted at Rishidot Research

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Picture Credit: rwconnect.esomar.org

For the past two years, I have been advocating PaaS as the future of cloud services and how developers are the face of the IT in the PaaS era. I have long argued that as PaaS takes over the IT infrastructure in the organizations, we will see a shift in who holds the key to the kingdom. In the traditional IT shops, Ops people were the face of the IT and business users and developers were “at their mercy” for getting things done. In the new PaaS era, Ops people will still exist but they will be in the background enabling the services that are needed to help developers build apps. The developers will be the new face of the new IT managing all their needs by interacting directly with the APIs. Whenever I mentioned about developers being the face of the IT, this is the point I was highlighting. Now many analysts firms have woken up to the fact that PaaS is gaining credibility and developers are getting empowered. Since many analysts have started lending voice to the developers are the face of IT theme, I think it is time for me to chase the next meme. This post is about how business users are the IT in the services driven world.

We are moving into an era where everything from infrastructure to platforms to applications will be consumed as services. In fact, at the application level, we have already moved from a world of monolithic applications to consumption of different features on different apps using different devices. As we slowly evolve into the services model (which at Rishidot Research, we call as Services Ocean Model), organizations will start adopting the Amazon’s service oriented architecture model of consumption. When this shift happens inside the organizations, we will also slowly see a shift where the entire IT will be exposed as services for the end users to consume based on their needs.

In such a world, IT will undergo a complete makeover. The Ops people will enable the infrastructure as services and their role will be about maintaining and monitoring these services in the background. Developers, who by then will go into the background (just like the Ops people in the “PaaS world”), will also expose their “applications” as services and they will be responsible for the performance and reliability of these services. They will coordinate with the Ops people responsible for infrastructure and platform services to achieve this goal. I have used double quotes for applications because the end product of tomorrow’s developers is not going to resemble the monolithic applications of today. It will be more like fine grained set of web services which will be consumed by the business users in any way they want.

The natural question is: when a business user is presented with a set of services like this, how will he/she use it effectively? I see it happening in the following way. There will be “application architects” (replace this with whatever name you want to use) who will build templates or recipes needed for different business functions and expose it as services. The business users will use a dashboard to build services either by using these templates or by putting together one on their own based on their need to achieve a specific business function. In short, the role of IT and developers will move into the background and stop with enabling, monitoring and maintaining various services. Ops will be responsible for enabling and maintaining infrastructure and platform services needed for the entire organization. Developers will take advantage of these infrastructure and platform services to build higher order services (especially, services around big data) and they are also responsible for ensuring the availability of these services. You will also have folks like “application architects” (or whatever term you want to use here) who will build templates or recipes for business users. They will also be playing their role in the background just like Ops and Devs. Business users will eventually build “applications” for their consumption using an user interface they are comfortable with. All the interactions between the service enablers and rest of the organization will be through APIs.

I hope I have articulated this meme well. Since “importance of developers meme” has already gained foothold among the pundits, I think it is time to go beyond that and talk about the empowerment of business users in a services oriented world in the future. As usual, I urge you to pick my arguments apart so that I can tweak and tune this model before others start talking about this meme

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Historically, platform as a service offerings were focussed on modern web applications that handle “smaller quantities” of data. In some cases, PaaS was used for applications that handle (or make use of) large volumes of data. But, in my opinion, most of these applications on these platforms were just scratching the surface. In reality, the PaaS offerings were not built to meet the needs of data hungry organizations. In 2012, PaaS vendors understood the changing needs of enterprises and were slowly starting to focus on the big data use cases. At the same time, we also saw the emergence of big data applications which were built on top of big data infrastructure platforms like Hadoop. As enterprises understand the full impact of big data and start building apps to take advantage of data (collected across the length and breadth of these organizations), they will really feel the need for more sophisticated platform services that run on top of big data infrastructure.

Vendors like Continuuity are trying to attack this problem. VMware’s CloudFoundry spinoff seems to be heading in this direction. In 2013, we are going to see the emergence of more such players and we will also see most of the existing PaaS vendor take steps to boost their platform services so that they are capable of supporting big data applications. Keep in mind that whatever we have seen so far with regards to “big data applications” are mostly focussed on analytics and visualization. What we are going to see in the future are set of services built on top of Intelligent Platforms that will go beyond simple analytics. We are going to see applications (services) that are self evolving and which can tweak itself based on the insights gleaned from various data sources (including the data these applications themselves produce). The underlying platform services needed to support such sophisticated services are going to be much more complex underneath than what we are seeing among the PaaS vendors today.

In short, 2013 will be the year when platform vendors are moving towards building platform services suitable for intelligent self evolving applications (services) of the future. All these services are going to be centered around data. Not just business and governments but the entire human society is going to rely on the data driven services with unprecedented complexity and automation underneath. The key for any vendor in the space is to build Intelligent Platforms that mask all these complexities and offer a simple interface for developers.

Cross Posted at Rishidot Research

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

In fact, the bickering has already started. I have been hearing from every single company in the OpenStack ecosystem and they are all critical of every other company in the ecosystem. The honeymoon phase is over and now it is just the dynamics involving pure business interests. Every company will try to convince pundits, journalists and customers that theirs is the best edition of OpenStack and everyone else’s offering is substandard. To be fair to them, this is the only way they can differentiate when their business model is based on open source where the forces of commoditzation are in full speed.

While the OpenStack naysayers might be feeling happy about this, I am going to argue that it doesn’t matter. The reason is simple. Whether by design or by accident, every single player in the ecosystem has major stake in the success of the project. For many companies, their very competitive existence is based on the success and longevity of this project. Their business posturing will not (should not) affect the development. Yes, as companies go further with their business based on OpenStack, the realities are going to force them to push the project in a direction suitable for them. This will definitely create ruckus in the mailing list and conferences. But if you have spent anytime in open source, you will understand that it is just a normal behavior in the community. You will understand that it is not unique to OpenStack. Also, every single OpenStack ecosystem player understand that they cannot fork the community and survive on their own. The so called invisible hand (remember, open source communities are perfect examples of free market behavior) will keep the participants honest to the project and ensure the longevity.

However, there are few things which I think is important for the community to consider at this stage than at a later stage where the discussions could get even more complicated than US fiscal cliff discussions. I will highlight them here for the sake of kick starting discussions and it is up to the OpenStack community to ignore at their peril.

• As I told many times in the past and, most recently, during the IBM #cloudchat, transparency is key. If Steve Ballmer was leading OpenStack and was hell bent on its success, he will be jumping up and down the stage of OpenStack conference shouting “transparency, transparency, transparency, transparency, ……..”
• It is important to bring enterprise end-users and service providers into the community and encourage them to contribute code. It is important to highlight that their participation is key to the success of OpenStack and, in turn, to their own success if they are betting on OpenStack.
• It is important that all these end-users vote in the OpenStack individual board elections so that people from vendors who are not part of the platinum and gold sponsorship get elected along with actual end-users. A quick look at the list of people participating in the election reveals the same vendors and it is not going to help the project in any way.

Well, these are some thoughts that came to my mind after a discussion with an industry colleague on the state of OpenStack. I am open to hearing from you on this issue as I feel that any discussion is good for that open source community and cloud market (in general).

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Logo Open Source Initiative (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Recently a blogger wrote an article comparing the mailing list interaction in the communities around major open source infrastructure projects. It is a personal project by a blogger using various data sources available in the internet. But the post kickstarted discussion among the punditry talking about whether OpenStack or CloudStack is the top ranking infrastructure project with each party pointing to metrics convenient to them. Even though the bloggers intentions were completely different, cloud chatterati (or clouderati or pundits or whatever term you want to use here) is going wild analyzing these metrics. Not to be left alone, I thought I will jump in and offer my analysis of this analysis

What are the usual metrics used to study open source projects and why it matters

Though different folks use different metrics to highlight the point they want to highlight, the most popular among them are:

• Software downloads
• Mailing list activity
• Production deployment claims
• Conference/PR case studies
• Github activity
• Google Trends
• Job board metrics

There are other metrics too but these are the most widely used metrics in any discussion/debate. In this post, I will offer my thoughts on some of these metrics and see if the discussion leads eventually leads to a more comprehensive metric that can be used to measure the health of an open source project.

To begin with, I want to dismiss two of the metrics right away as they are completely meaningless. They are software download numbers and mailing list activity (the metric behind current brouhaha). Even though software download gives some idea about the interest in the project, it doesn’t give any granular information like how many of them are for use in production systems, how many of these downloads have lead to installations, how many of these installations are being used, etc..Without this insight, the number of software downloads means nothing. Similarly, the activity on the mailing list is another meaningless metric. Even though mailing lists are like oxygen for open source projects, the activities in these lists can range from some serious discussions to unnecessary flame wars. In fact, you can see many mailing lists where flame wars are a daily affair. Measuring the activity doesn’t represent anything about the project’s health. If the activity on the mailing list is an accurate indication of any project’s health, we can then conclude that OpenStack was healthiest during the board elections fiasco. #justsayin.

There are some suggestions that metrics regarding production deployments can accurately describe the health of the open source project. Yes, it does describe it accurately from the user point of view but it is still not a good metric. First, it is difficult to get the metric uniformly for all the open source projects. Many of the end users may not be willing to publicly talk about how they are using an open source project. Second, even if we assume that we get that metric accurately, it only offers information on the usage of the project and not the developer activity. In order to understand the actual health of the open source project, we need data both on the usage front and developer contribution. Not only this metric is difficult to obtain, it only gives partial information about a project. The same argument applies for conference/PR case studies too.

Github activity, including pull requests, commits, number of lines of code, etc., is a good indicator of developer activity but it doesn’t say anything about the actual usage of the software. Though it is possible to make an indirect observation about actual usage based on the developer activity (why would developers spend their time if there is no traction for the software), it still doesn’t give accurate information on the use of the software. Though github activity is easier to obtain, it still gives partial information on the health of the project. Google Trends offers some interesting insight on the interest on a particular project but it is still a partial information. Job board metrics (like number of job openings on sites like indeed.com) is a very good metric that can offer insight on the actual usage of the software but it is still an indirect measure.

So

If someone is interested in getting a grip on the health of an open source project, it is important that they take into account many relevant metrics so that they can build an accurate story covering all the bases. Talking about the health of the project based on a single metric is meaningless. It is definitely a waste of time to talk about the health of a project based on metrics like number of software downloads and mailing list activities. #justsayin.

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Having said that it is time for me to revisit the analysis I did two years back on IBM’s SmartCloud Docs (called Lotuslive Symphony then). Many things have changed since then and I would like to take a look at the market landscape again. To begin with, let us look at what has changed. Unlike in 2011, Google is more focussed on enterprises even if their penetration is limited. Microsoft has a solid cloud strategy for their Office productivity suite. Now, let us look at some of the points I raised in that article two years back and see how it compares to today’s reality.

In my previous article, I said

It is tough for a consumer focussed company like Google to convince enterprises to use modern technologies but, if they succeed, it also offers them an opportunity to grab the marketshare before Microsoft wakes up to the new reality.

IBM’s entry into this space changes the market dynamics entirely. Unlike Google, IBM has enormous clout in the enterprise space and they can easily push their web based office suite to the enterprise customers using this clout.

As I told earlier in this post, Microsoft is a serious contender now. However, IBM still has a powerful sales team that could push their cloud office productivity suite to their IBM Connections customers. Legacy software companies make up for the lack of innovation with the muscle power of their sales teams. I think IBM and Microsoft has an advantage here but let us not underestimate Google here.

In my previous article, I said

IBM has a great vision for social business. If they execute this vision well and make Symphony Live an integrated part of this strategy, they could really grab a good marketshare over both Google and Microsoft.

In the past two years, IBM has followed up on their Social Business vision. If you ask me if I am satisfied with their Social Business offering, I will say “not entirely”. However, they are in a much better situation in tackling the social business buzz than they were two years back. It will be interesting to see if they can push IBM Connections and SmartCloud Docs in a big way to enterprise customers who are slowly warming up to cloud based social offerings from younger companies.

In my previous article, I said

Google has an upper hand with the pricing model and mobile strategy. Even though IBM promised me that their offering with be competitive to the other offerings in the market, I don’t think IBM will be willing to enter a price war with Google. Plus, I haven’t got any hint about IBM’s mobile strategy for their office suite. Today’s enterprises are embracing mobile in a big way and if LotusLive Symphony doesn’t offer a compelling mobile experience, they could easily lose out to Google

I will have to reserve my opinion in this case. During last year’s Lotusphere, I discussed with them about their mobile strategy on the Social Business side but I didn’t hear anything about about the SmartCloud Docs mobile offerings. With Microsoft and Google ramping up their Office mobile strategy with native applications, IBM has to offer mobile version of their Office productivity suite. If they don’t, as I told in my previous article, they will lose out. Since I haven’t heard anything from IBM on this, I will leave it here and revisit at a later date.

In short, IBM is trying their best to compete in this social and cloud world. Their success is entirely dependent on the muscle power of their sales teams. We will have to wait and see where they are going in the next two years.

Related articles

• IBM Doesn’t Compete With Google Drive. Really (readwrite.com)
• IBM SmartCloud Enterprise – Features and Functions (clean-clouds.com)
• IBM Expands the Power of Social Media Business with New Cloud, Mobile Advances (hispanicbusiness.com)
• IBM Launches Cloud Docs In Competion With Google (valuewalk.com)
• IBM Launches Cloud Docs; Eyes Google, Microsoft (informationweek.com)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Werner Vogels: Werner Vogels is the CTO of Amazon.com. I never had a chance to meet him personally but I have been following his work closely through the inter webs. But he is there in my list just for the simple fact that he is at the center of the most innovative cloud computing company in the world today. The rapid pace of innovation happening at Amazon Web Services is not matched by any other vendor today and I would like to give significant credit to Werner Vogels for spearheading the team there. Unlike the lesser mortals out there, visionaries set trends and not buckle under the weight of conventional wisdom. Werner and his AWS team has consistently proved this fact and proved pundits (including me) wrong again and again. From my vantage point, Amazon has a long way to go before they can dominate the market but there is no denying that there is no other company in the cloud computing space who can get anywhere closer to the momentum they are having in the market. Regular readers of my blog know that I am pushing the idea of federated clouds as an antidote to potential Amazon market monopoly in the cloud space. However, the rapid pace in which Amazon is innovating and executing makes me revisit my idea of federated clouds regularly and makes me to critically analyze, from time to time, to check if the idea is even relevant against the Amazon momentum. Werner makes this list just for keeping me honest and for pushing the industry to ramp up the pace of innovation. The buzz among the developers during Amazon re:invent at Vegas was amazing and I am already excited to see what is in store for 2013.

Mike Hoskins: Mike Hoskins is the CTO of Pervasive Software, a company based in Austin, Texas. He has personally inspired me with his ideas on the data driven world and he is the reason why I revisited my understanding of PaaS and started pushing hard on PaaS v2.0 around data. Pervasive Software might be under the radar for the popular tech blogs but the work they are doing around big data and the way they are leveraging cloud for their services is on a solid footing. My idea of the services based future is closely aligned with the world view of Mike Hoskins and this is the reason I asked him to keynote at DeployCon, the PaaS conference Rishidot Research organized last year in New York. I could go on and on about Mike’s vision for the future but it will make sense for me to just link to the video of the keynote he gave at DeployCon which will clearly explain why I am excited and have Mike in this list.

Jonathan Murray: Jonathan Murray is the CTO of Warner Music Group. When the conventional wisdom was strongly against the media companies for their role in innovation, I found my brief chat with Jonathan early last year refreshing. He not only understands how the media distribution is changing in today’s world and he has also convinced the WMG leadership on the need to innovate internally for meeting these challenges. He is betting on the cloud and he strongly believes PaaS is the way to go. Regular readers of my blog know very well that I have been pushing PaaS as the future of cloud services for a long time now and Jonathan, with his trust on PaaS, has actually shown the world that it is the case. He gave a fantastic keynote at DeployCon (unfortunately, I can’t share the video here) where he highlighted how WMG is planning to take advantage of the cloud. In fact, his work has put an end to the controversy about whether cloud is enterprise ready and his vision for where technology is headed will help enterprises in a big way. These are the reasons why I am excited to have him in my list of cloud visionaries. In fact, some of the hires WMG made recently (including my friend and data gravity guru Dave McCrory) clearly highlights the fact that his team is heading in the right direction with right set of ideas. I am really excited to see where his team at WMG is headed in the next couple of years.

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

The rumors are true with VMware publicly announcing that CloudFoundry will be spun off as a separate organization along with EMC’s Greenplum and VMware’s vFabric. This unit will be headed by Paul Maritz, former CEO of VMware. This leaves VMware to focus on their Software Defined DataCenter initiative which they announced during last VMworld. I think this is a natural move from VMware not just to meet the needs of the modern world but also to have an effective monetization strategy around CloudFoundry. In this post, I will briefly offer my thoughts on why this is a right move.

There are multiple issues at play here:

• VMware’s Software Defined DataCenter: Even though VMware’s Software Defined DataCenter Strategy is theoretically aligned with CloudFoundry based Platform strategy, it will be better for their infrastructure business if they delineate their infrastructure strategy from their platform strategy. In short term, as they battle public cloud providers on one side and open source cloud infrastructure platforms on the other, the software defined datacenter story will resonate better if there is a complete delineation from the higher order services. It will help them push their message effectively than approaching the customers with offerings across many layers of the stack.
• PaaS v2: As I have mentioned in my post advocating a rethink on how we see the evolution of PaaS, it is critical to think about platform services needed (see Intelligent Platforms for more info) for scaling data than the current generation of PaaS focussed on scaling users. As organizations accumulate large amounts of data, the future applications will derive tremendous insights from this data to continuously evolve themselves. This requires a platform that is around the data sources and can scale effectively to meet the needs of modern day apps. With this in mind, it makes complete sense to “package” CloudFoundry with EMC’s properties.
• CloudFoundry Monetization: Even though VMware was expected to monetize CloudFoundry through Cloudfoundry.com and a vCloud optimized CloudFoundry private cloud platform, it makes complete sense to tap into EMC resources for monetization than use VMware’s infrastructure offerings. CloudFoundry can not only benefit from EMC’s powerful sales and marketing teams, the story of application development platform around data is a much interesting story for buyers than when packaged with infrastructure components. It is a much effective monetization strategy than going with VMware core infrastructure components.

I really feel that the developments are interesting and I am not at all worried about the impact it will have on the open source project. It is in the interest of EMC to continue developing and pushing CloudFoundry open source project. If they screw up, fork is always a factor. There is a strong ecosystem around CloudFoundry and there are many viable candidates such as ActiveState, Tier3, AppFog, etc. who can lead the fork. The developer community will always side with a fork lead by startups than EMC. Any concern about the future of CloudFoundry open source project is unwarranted. These are some of the thoughts that came up when I read the VMware announcement today. I am also excited about the fact that Paul Maritz is going to lead the new initiative. What do you think?

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Picture Credit: Workasone.wordpress.com

The cloud is supposed to help organizations embrace best of breed applications for their needs. Cloud is supposed to make suite based approach to software consumption irrelevant. Cloud is supposed to enable best of breed without the integration mess of the traditional software era. But it looks like the opposite is happening, especially when it comes to social. The very idea of social business is to break down the silos inside the organization and help improve collaboration is creating silos elsewhere. I thought I will briefly touch upon this topic in this post.

When SaaS started gaining stream, it appeared organizations could take advantage of best of breed cloud applications that fits their needs. In fact, some of the integration platforms made it so easy to integrate SaaS from different vendors that there were widespread expectations that vendor lock-in will be a thing of past. However, I am starting to wonder whether this is not going to be the case in the future. I would cite the following two developments as culprits.

• As SaaS adoption increased and certain vendors gained dominance in the enterprise market, they started thinking about a Suite approach as a way to take on traditional enterprise software vendors. They are in a position to integrate social into all their apps, thereby, avoiding silos and offering tighter integration between the app and social layer.
• As social gained traction and became critical part of every enterprise cloud application (see out position paper defining the five attributes of enterprise cloud applications), we started seeing social features inside the best of breed applications.

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Some of highlights of the announcement include:

• Better web console
• Enhanced reporting
• Better admin capabilities
• More robustness

Apart from their strong marketing message regarding AWS compatible private and hybrid cloud, they also announced a new functionality that mimics AWS closely. They announced JBOD storage adopter which overlays EBS functionality over block devices and JBODs while also providing support for AWS EBS API. Their marketing message, product strategy, etc. clearly points to the fact that Eucalyptus sees AWS coattails as the only way to future structure. With AWS in the enterprise horizon and with private cloud still the enterprise focus, their strategy is on the right track.

Looking at the competitors VMware is building up a strong foundation for services future with their Software defined data center strategy. CloudStack has gained traction among Telcos wanting to offer cloud infrastructure services to enterprises and Citrix is now plotting a roadmap for a private-hybrid short term future strategy. OpenStack is still riding high on the momentum from the initial marketing campaign. We are now seeing some solid enterprise use cases coming out from the OpenStack ecosystem. This leaves Eucalyptus in a vulnerable position. They clearly understand that AWS needs a private-hybrid cloud strategy in the short term before they can gain enterprise credibility and they also figured out that AWS will not join the mating dance put forth by CloudStack because of potential troubles from the service providers in their ecosystem. They stepped in, convinced AWS to publicly certify them and are trying to grab the enterprise attention as organizations plot their AWS (public cloud) strategy.

It is not just a smart alignment on the Eucalyptus part but, also, the only viable option for them to fend off their competitors and stay relevant into the future. Whether it will succeed or not depends entirely on Amazon’s enterprise strategy. It could still backfire but it is the only alternative for them right now. They can give AWS some enterprise credibility and Amazon can help them fend off competitors like VMware, OpenStack, Citrix, etc.. Any thoughts?

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

The crux of my post is the following. If you lose sleep over application portability in PaaS environments, go ahead and make sure your apps are compatible with CloudFoundry Core but you will miss out some of the advantages offered by non-VMware CloudFoundry vendors. If you don’t care about a little vendor lock-in (which can still be overcome with code rewrite (aka additional cost)), take advantage of the unique features offered by your chosen CloudFoundry PaaS vendor(s).

In this post, I want to take a seemingly opposite point of view and argue that even though CloudFoundry Core is not important, CloudFoundry, by itself, is very important for avoiding vendor lock-in and ensuring business continuity. This argument follows from the fact that CloudFoundry is open source. Let me try to elaborate a bit more on this topic.

I have long argued in this space that even though open protocols are critical in the cloud world, open source is also equally important. The fact that CloudFoundry is open source highlights this point once again. Let us take a step back and see the available options with a PaaS vendor in the CloudFoundry ecosystem when, in a hypothetical scenario, CloudFoundry is not available under an open source license (i.e.. available only under a proprietary license). If an app is designed to be compliant with CloudFoundry Core, one can ensure app portability. However, if the app takes advantage of certain unique features offered by the PaaS vendor, the barrier to application portability is very high because

• CloudFoundry will be under a proprietary license and the licensing fee for the software will be exorbitant to deploy in-house
• Since CloudFoundry source code will not be available (in most cases and restrictive even if is made available by the vendor to paying customers), it will be very difficult to replicate the features offered by the PaaS vendor
• In short, you are locked into the PaaS vendor because the cost of avoiding lock-in is prohibitively exorbitant

However, in reality, CloudFoundry is available under an open source license. Now let us consider the case of an app written to take advantage of some of the unique functionalities offered by a PaaS vendor. If the app architecture is properly planned while taking advantage of the unique features offered by the PaaS vendor, it is quite possible (in most cases) to move this app to another CloudFoundry deployment that replicates the functionality offered by the PaaS vendor. The possibility to replicate the CloudFoundry deployment with the PaaS vendor is much easier because the open source license of CloudFoundry lowers the barrier significantly:

• The CloudFoundry licensing fee is completely removed or considerably lowered
• The lack of restrictions with the source code will allow you to set up a CloudFoundry deployment that could mimic the PaaS provider. Yes, there is a cost involved in ensuring this business continuity but it is usually much lower than being locked into a PaaS vendor or getting your business completely disrupted. Also, in some extreme cases, it may not be entirely possible to mimic the PaaS vendor’s setup but, as I pointed out earlier, it is still possible to ensure portability with proper application architecture strategy.

Under this context, CloudFoundry, by itself, is very important even though CloudFoundry Core may not be all that important.

PS: There is still a possibility of vendor lock-in in spite of the open source nature of CloudFoundry but my main argument is that such a lock-in risk is significantly lower in the case of CloudFoundry.

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

First, why it is important?

VMware has already written a blog post on why it is important but I will rehash it again and add some of my own thoughts to it. At the heart of the announcement is application portability across many different clouds (PaaS in this case).

Preserving cloud portability is imperative in the cloud era. Being locked into a single cloud restricts the ability to respond to changing needs now and in the future. Cloud portability allows movement between providers that better suit pricing needs or can offer better quality of service. It provides the flexibility to pick and choose where to deploy applications based on compliance requirements, data protection laws, and latency constraints. A choice of public or private clouds is key to adding capacity for managing growth as well as dealing with “cloudbursting” scenarios for optimizing spending.

Whether we like it or not, PaaS involves certain levels of vendor lock-in. Before traditional vendors and pundits start peeing on PaaS, I want to point out that it is the case with traditional application development process too. In a way, developers lock themselves in the moment they decide on the programming language they are going to use. I would say that data gravity problem is a serious problem than this lock-in risk. However, it is a separate discussion and I will just focus on CloudFoundry Core announcement. Also, PaaS offers way too many advantages and it is definitely not worth losing sleep over this fact.

Instead we should focus on how we can take advantage of PaaS while also minimize the lock-in risks. CloudFoundry Core is the first step towards mitigating this risk inside CloudFoundry ecosystem of players. This will allow application developers to develop apps that can seamlessly move from one CloudFoundry deployment to another without any large scale rewriting. This is the basic premise behind this announcement.

However, this could also help avoid the fragmentation issue that many successful open source projects (e.g.: Android) are susceptible. In fact, during the recent OpenStack Summit, fragmentation of OpenStack was voiced as one of the concerns by analysts. CloudFoundry Core could help limit the fragmentation of the project to a certain extent.

Second, why it is a smart move by VMware?

Apart from the perceived altruistic aspects of this announcement in terms of openness and portability, I would say this is a pretty smart move by VMware. Imagine a world where developers using CloudFoundry PaaS write against CloudFoundry Core specs. It will imply that apps can be easily ported to any CloudFoundry deployment that stays true to CloudFoundry core. Now imagine VMware getting serious about monetizing CloudFoundry.com or even CloudFoundry on vCloud. Just think how easy it will be for VMware’s all powerful sales and marketing team to go against other PaaS startups betting on the CloudFoundry ecosystem. It is just a matter of nudging the “enterprise users” of CloudFoundry platform to go with VMware’s offerings. If you see from this angle, this is a smart move by VMware.

Finally, why it is not important?

The arguments for this point follows from the previous one. The very fact that it is theoretically possible for VMware to leverage the compliance to CloudFoundry Core to their advantage will ensure that other vendors betting their business on CloudFoundry are worried. They will try to differentiate themselves by offering functionalities that goes beyond CloudFoundry Core. They will add features that are not part of the core to ensure that their users stay with their service. In fact, they have to do this because it is the only way they can monetize successfully. In fact, Tier 3 and Activestate has made this clear in their respective blog posts on the Core announcement. If all these vendors start offering “value added core incompatible” features and functionalities, the application portability problem (more or less) remains the same. In this sense, this announcement is not significant.

So

The crux of my post is the following. If you lose sleep over application portability in PaaS environments, go ahead and make sure your apps are compatible with CloudFoundry Core but you will miss out some of the advantages offered by non-VMware CloudFoundry vendors. If you don’t care about a little vendor lock-in (which can still be overcome with code rewrite (aka additional cost)), take advantage of the unique features offered by your chosen CloudFoundry PaaS vendor(s). This is my take in a nutshell.

Related articles

• VMware Cloud Foundry Core Ups Application Portability (thevarguy.com)
• Cloud Foundry Core and the Future of PaaS (appfog.com)
• New Cloud Foundry app validates cloud portability [GigaOM] (gigaom.com)
• Preserving Cloud Application Portability – Introducing Cloud Foundry Core (cloudfoundry.com)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

• Workday has been steadily growing ever since I have started following them and the trajectory seems to be getting better with each year.
• One aspect of Workday which impressed me was how they have used Business Process Framework to seamlessly integrate governance into the fabric of their platform. In fact, I would attribute this to be one of the biggest reasons why enterprises are comfortable using Workday for financials.
• On New Announcements: Apart from the customer driven product enhancements like time tracking and custom objects (for extensibility), Workday announced some new features which shows where they are heading in the future. The three important announcements are Workday Workgroups (their first step at social), Workday Big Data Analytics (their attention towards big data) and Workday Recruiting (a way to extend Workday’s HR to recruitment). This clearly shows the direction they are headed in the short term.
• Workday Workgroups is not your regular enterprise social tool but a first baby step to build conversation around Workday objects which can come handy for the enterprises. In fact, in the position paper we published in January of 2012 on enterprise software, we have argued that social should be built into the fabric of enterprise software than deploying it as an afterthought in terms of an add-on. Workday’s foray into social appears to be consistent with this expectation and it will be interesting to see where they are headed in the coming years.
• Workday Big Data Analytics is another interesting announcement for me. Workday is the enterprise social graph and it is critical for organizations to leverage this social graph with the data they have amassed to gain valuable insights which may not be available otherwise. In this regard, their new analytics offering is interesting to me. Workday is leveraging Hadoop to offer this Big Data Analytics platform which will let their customer import their organization’s data into Workday cloud to do the analytics. I am still not clear how organizations can bring in their historical data without facing significant delays as import over the internet faces the network latency which is not going to go away anytime soon. I hope they are offering other options like “mailing in the data” much like AWS offers to their customers. We will have to wait and see how they are going to handle this. Even though I am pretty excited about Big Data Analytics offering, I am a bit disappointed that they do not offer a solid application development / integration platform which will let users build apps using the data. I am not even talking about app development platforms like CloudFoundry. I fully understand that Workday is focussing not on developers but on business users who expect a simplified user interface. But they could offer a business process platform like Orangescape (previous CloudAve coverage) or Visual Force tools from Salesforce. This will give business users build interesting applications using both the enterprise social graph and the big data that is being on boarded to Workday cloud. Yes, users can still take advantage of this data on Force.com platform but it will be better if there is a platform closer to where data is than elsewhere.
• I have been following their infrastructure since 2011 and they updated on the changes they have made during this year’s analyst event. Since it is under NDA, I cannot go into the details but all I can say is that their infrastructure evolves to take advantage newer technologies. Unlike some other SaaS vendors, they don’t patch work their infrastructure to meet the growing demands but, rather, they evolve their infrastructure to meet modern needs. They have two European Datacenters to meet the needs of organizations who are unwilling to put their data inside US borders. They also have plans to expand to more locations on the need basis.
• One of the criticism about Workday is that they don’t offer REST based access to their data. It will be changing soon.

These are some of my thoughts on the event and I am looking forward to hearing from them early next year on the newer enhancements to their product.

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Newvem (disclosure: Ofir who works at Newvem is a fellow CloudAve blogger but this is my independent opinion), San Francisco based company offering visibility into an organization’s AWS deployment, Called Cloud Smart Meters, it helps CIOs and IT managers to gain detailed visibility into their AWS costs, risks and assets using their iPads or iPhones. As iOS devices enter enterprise workforce from top to bottom, giving CIOs and IT Managers a tool like this is the right move.

People buy into the cloud cost savings hype and eventually realize that the cost management is a big nightmare. With the lowering of barriers to procurement of IT resources with empowerment of end users, abuse and waste becomes a big headache. In many cases, it even defeats the cost advantage of moving to cloud. In order to rein in on such waste/abuse, IT managers should develop a set of policies that will govern the organizational cloud usage. Both in order to develop these policies and to enforce the policies, IT managers should have visibility into their cloud deployment. Cost management offerings like the one offered by Newvem (other players in the segment include Cloudability, Apptio, Cloud Cruiser, shopforcloud, Cloudrows, Cloudyn, Uptime Cloud, CloudFloor, CloudSplit, etc..) is critical.

As we move from traditional desktops to mobile devices, having a mobile implementation is the next step for these vendors. Newvem has taken the step with their iOS native app. Some of the key features, according to their press release, are:

• Visualization of AWS trending costs, operational risks, and assets
• Rich graphics with top-level and drill down views into AWS cloud usage
• Operational risk reports covering spending, security, utilization, and availability
• Powerful sharing tool for easy team collaboration, course correction, and decision making
• Full iPhone and iPad functionality

Whenever I think about cost management vendors, the following issues comes to my mind

• I expect cost management to be a feature of the bigger cloud management too itself. With Rightscale buying Shopforcloud.com, and possibly integrating inside their cloud management tool in the future, there is a realistic threat for these cost management vendors. Even Tier 3 has integrated cost visibility into their cloud management tool and I don’t see why other service providers will not do the same. At the same time, cost management is a critical component of cloud management and it will be interesting to see the strategy of these vendors in the coming years.
• Newvem is entirely focussed on AWS and I would expect them to go beyond AWS as more and more IaaS providers are propping up. I hope to get their point of view on this issue during the AWS re:invent event.

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Recently a journalist contacted me to talk about a company she was covering. Since I never interacted with the vendor, I told her that I can talk about general trends in the market segment rather than anything specific about the vendor. I then checked the vendor’s website which claims to be a cloud services company. From the website I figured out that they are selling whitelabeled infrastructure, colocation and managed hosting. I didn’t see any signs of cloud services except a web page talking about cloud computing 101. In my book, this is a perfect case of cloud washing.

Even though cloud puritans don’t like the NIST definition of cloud computing, I am ok with considering NIST definition as a good starting point and not bible (or Quran or Gita or whatever religious text you want to have here). NIST definition keeps on demand self service as one of the core attributes of the cloud. If you are a cloud services provider and I couldn’t find a way to test out your cloud through your website, then it is not cloud. Period. I do agree that not every organization want the pay as you go model but if the term cloud services is to be used, it is critical that the self service requirement is satisfied. Asking the end users to call the vendor’s sales team IS NOT SELF SERVICE. Any vendor who uses the cloud term without self service option is just cloud washing their offerings. Period.

A vendor could be offering the software for private cloud or even offer hosted private cloud without the self service option. I am ok with it because there is no point in offering the self service option for a single tenant private cloud (though IT may decide to offer the self service option to their users). However, the requirement for self service through the website becomes a critical factor for any vendor offering public cloud services. Also, unless it is a public cloud offering, it is pointless for a vendor to call themselves a cloud services provider. I just hope pundits in the industry understand this requirement in the cloud definition and call out vendors who are cloud washing their offerings. Though this might have negative impact in short term, it is good for the industry in the longer term.

Yup, it is a Friday rant but I am open to hearing counter opinions. Feel free to jump into a discussion in the comments section or on Twitter by responding to me @krishnan.

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Having said that, I can confidently say that Microsoft has taken the first step towards offering a more cohesive platform strategy in the next year or two. Gone are those days when they were reluctant to push Windows Azure. On the other hand, they are now pushing the developers to try Azure first than anything else. Yes, they are still making their money on the legacy server software but I never saw the kind of push towards Azure which I noticed in this conference. After the initial stumble, they have got the cloud story sorted out with a mix of PaaS and IaaS offerings. With Windows 8, they are in a position to bridge desktop, web and mobile with a more unified and seamless experience. The next step for Microsoft is to get the developers see this convergence and offer a platform for them to build apps and services.

After a complete failure with Office 365 APIs earlier, Microsoft seems to have got their act together and now they are pushing the developers to take advantage of Office 365 (the person at the booth was not 100% sure on what APIs are available for Office 365 and I will dig into it later) and Sharepoint to build apps that they can sell on the upcoming (not sure of the launch date) marketplace. With this move, Microsoft has put together a coherent platform strategy and a place for developers to monetize their apps. They already have a “big data on cloud” strategy including their data market and the only missing component is the social component for the platform. With Yammer acquisition, I am sure they are on track to plug that hole.

But……

The only aspect of their platform strategy that bothers me the most is Sharepoint. They still don’t have a cloud equivalent for Sharepoint. It is still a synonym for legacy software and, in fact, a pretty bad one. Before Sharepoint fanbois (girls) attack me on this statement, I want to make it clear that it did serve a purpose in the past but I think it is time for SharePoint to die and make way for a cloud native offering. From the way they are pushing SharePoint at their dev zone, I get a feeling that they have no plans to move towards a cloud native substitute. Unless they come out with a cloud offering to replace SharePoint, I will consider their platform strategy incomplete. I want to once again emphasize that this post is written without any briefing from the Microsoft side. I might have missed something. If you think I am missing something, please point it out in the comments section below or respond to @krishnan on Twitter.

So

Almost every vendor is moving towards the services based future with a coherent platform strategy. From IBM to Oracle to SAP to Salesforce to Google, vendors want a large share of enterprise platform market pie in the coming decade. Having had a successful run in the past on the enterprise platform segment, Microsoft is not going to grab popcorn and watch these vendors take the lead. The message from Build 2012 is that they are ready to compete hard for the developers attention. Even if it appears that they don’t have a compelling enough story, we have to admit that they have taken the first step towards a compelling story in the coming years. Build 2013 might offer us more clues on their strategy.

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

According to the announcement AppSecute will offer application deployment, configuration, scaling and monitoring, providing a single pane of glass to manage applications running in different platform services. They are targeting individual developers with a low end plan, followed by plans suitable for startups and enterprises. The enterprise plan offers auditing features that are critical for organizations as they try to control “rogue IT”.

AppSecute is an early stage startup and they have a long way to go. I would see the following as problems in their path and would expect them to address in the coming months (years). Even though they are the only PaaS focussed company offering application management and governance, there are many other vendors in the space doing it across all layers of the cloud stack. I would even expect a company like enStratus to solve this problem going forward. In fact, when they hired fellow #clouderati James Urquhart, this is exactly what I expected them to do. People who had followed James’ writing will understand what his strategy might be for enStratus. Similarly, there are many others who are just moments away from handling the application management and governance problem at the platform level. I would even say that some of the PaaS vendors might offer a way to control “rogue IT” from within their dashboards. Even though this is a good start, I would expect them to go beyond this and address some of the critical pain points specific to PaaS. I had a chat with AppSecute founder at VMworld 2012 and he is a smart man. They have a pretty good team with some good advisors and investors. I am sure they will push themselves ahead of the pack next year.

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

• Competitive pricing
• Slick web interface
• Pretty good collection of Google services

During the recent OpenStack Conference at San Diego, I had a chance to bump into Sebastian Stadil, Founder and CEO of Scalr. We started discussing generally about service provider market and then, specifically, about Google Compute Engine. Sebastian told me that they are pretty impressed with the performance of Google Compute Engine that they may even completely move to the service when it is publicly available. He told me that the latency between two different regions are almost non existent (of course, taking into account the limitations imposed by Physics). For example, you could experience “zero latency effect” (double quotes used to account for limitations imposed by physics) between a region in US East and Asia. Their investment in dedicated fibre optics network is helping them achieve this level of performance. This opens up interesting possibilities in software development and one could achieve not just superior performance unavailable in public cloud providers like Amazon and others but also be able to achieve highest levels of reliability without any performance impact. This is truly amazing and it is going to fundamentally change our perception on public cloud services.

I also had a chance to heck out their interface which was very Google like. When I created an instance, it was created in less than 10 seconds and was available and ready to go in less than 30 seconds. Compare this with almost 2-3 minute delay (at times even more) in AWS and other public cloud services. Similarly, when I tried to mount a volume, I could do it INSTANTLY. Nope, this is not happening because Google has a dedicated pool for GCE private beta customers. In fact, GCE runs in Google data centers with other services like search, Gmail, Youtube, etc.. Even when they open up the service to public, expect to achieve similar levels of performance.

I think Google is going to set the bar too high and completely change the expectations of users on the cloud performance. This is going to add considerable pressure on other cloud service providers (including AWS which doesn’t seem to have necessary infrastructure to offer performance comparable to Google, especially in terms of not having direct fibre connection between their data centers). This is going to fundamentally change the way we compute in the cloud and take the innovation to the next level. In this sense, Google Compute Engine is a true game changer.

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.