Randy Bias
Co-Founder, CTO at Cloudscaling. Since 1990, Randy has driven innovations in infrastructure, IT, operations, and 24×7 service delivery. He was the technical visionary at GoGrid and built the world’s first multi-cloud, multi-platform cloud management framework at CloudScale Networks. He led the open-licensing of GoGrid's API, which inspired Sun Microsystems, Rackspace Cloud, VMware and others to open-license their cloud APIs. Randy blogs @ Cloudscaling blog, is recognized by The Next Web as one of the 25 Most Influential People Tweeting About Cloud, is frequently interviewed and speaks at dozens of industry events annually.
Cloud 2020 Summit: Perturbing the Punditocracy
Two independent analysts who have contributed an unvarnished voice of pragmatism to the cloud conversation are Ben Kepes of Diversity Limited and Krishnan Subramanian of Rishidot. They’ve made a name for themselves in providing points of view that everyone might not always agree with, but everyone respects because they bring thoughtful analysis and clarity to [...]
VMware vs. Amazon … ROUND TWO … FIGHT! — VMW Conceding Impotence?
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. The message to VMware’s partners was simple: “We want to own corporate workload,” said Pat Gelsinger, VMware’s CEO. “We all lose if they end up in [...]
Vote on OpenStack Summit Speaking Submissions
(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 there, as will others who’ve [...]
A response to Geoffrey Moore: Manifest Disruption
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 that made me very sad. Besides being off-track, it felt to me as if Mr. Moore had spent more time looking [...]
The Right Storage, the Right Cloud
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. 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 at how storage systems are [...]
Looking back, looking ahead: 200th Linthicum podcast
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 podcast. It’s a notable accomplishment, [...]
Lesson in simplified storage shows how complexity fails
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. When developers write code, they talk about “elegant code,” meaning they are [...]
Laying a Foundation
When we first began supporting the OpenStack project, we saw something that other open source cloud software projects did not. 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. What I said was: “OpenStack, with a strong [...]
Architectures for open and scalable clouds #ccevent
Below is the presentation I gave at this year’s 2012 Cloud Connect 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 in quite this way before. [...]
Cloud Computing Came to a Head in 2011
Happy New Year! I hope you all had a fantastic holiday. This is a review post 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’. As many of you long time readers know, I’ve been ‘in [...]
AWS Rebooting 100s or 1000s of EC2 Instances for Security Update
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 one of the emails that was sent [...]
How is AWS Failing to Service Webscale Applications?
I’ve made the argument on numerous occasions 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 that model displaced ‘mainframe computing’ “Enterprise clouds” [...]
AMZN ‘Other’ Revenue in 2011+
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 of AMZN’s ‘Other’ line. The [...]
Is Open Compute Ready for Prime Time?
I just returned from the Open Compute Project (OCP) 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 is a clear challenge right [...]
What is Amazon’s Secret for Success and Why is EC2 a Runaway Train?
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-Qreported 87% year-over-year growth, well over their consumer electronics business. Per predictions from myself, UBS, and others, AWS is staying on-track for 100% year-over-year growth, revenues in the [...]
