Open is good – but encouragement better than mandate
Image via Wikipedia Openness is undeniably cool right now, at least if you move in the slightly odd circles that I do. Openly available scientific papers are disrupting the world of scholarly publishing (which may not be all good, but that’s a post for another day). Openly available university courses are finally beginning to work [...]
Future Of GlusterFS – From Open Core to Open Source
In October of 2011, Red Hat (previous CloudAve coverage) announced the acquisition of Gluster, the company behind GlusterFS (previous CloudAve coverage) open source distributed storage solution. Even though Red Hat is a company based on open source philosophy, there were questions about what is in store for GlusterFS under Red Hat. Last week Red Hat [...]
TOSCA may prove a prescient name for new cloud standards effort
Image via Wikipedia Last week, open standards body OASIS unveiled yet another shiny new standards effort. The OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) Technical Committee hopes to make it “easier to deploy cloud applications without vendor lock-in,” and to support moving from one cloud to another. The usual suspects — the likes of IBM, [...]
On TOSCA and Cloud Standards. MyPOV
Recently OASIS standards body started work on the proposed Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (or TOSCA) for short, standards specification. The standard aims to deliver on the long-heralded, but much disputed concept of cloud bursting – the ability to move workloads between public and private infrastructure in a transparent way. I posted about [...]
Reality Distortion Field : 17 Companies’ Sitrep
I’m sitting on the bus this morning. As happens almost every day of the week. I’m flipping pages, sort of, it’s an eBook on my Kindle App. I’m reading about Steve Jobs taking over the Macintosh Program at Apple. How things started to fall into place for Apple, for the Macintosh, and how Jobs saw what could be a pushed for it. Everybody else; Microsoft, Xerox, Canon, and practically every single other company was missing it. Xerox Parc had it right in front of them, the GUI, Mouse, Object Oriented Language, and about every single thing we assume for computer use and development today but wasn’t doing anything with it. They were all missing it, except Jobs. The eccentric, crazed, reality distortion field generating Jobs pushed forward and found those that agreed, this was absolutely the future. Today’s computers owe so much to Jobs efforts to pull these people together, to what he saw as the future, and our modern computing world will forever be indebted to Steve Jobs.
Howard Hues had done this 50 years earlier. He simply stated, “nobody wants to fly on a plane at 10k feet and get shaken to pieces, planes need to fly at 30,000 feet or more were the air is smooth!” He then went about working to get a plane built that could do this! The Government was in his way, the industry was fighting him, everybody said this wasn’t the way to go. Nobody could build a plane that would do that right now! It’s absurd. He did it, and bought every single one of them he could putting the airline (TWA) in hock at the same time! But it paid off, and his airline had the nicest planes, best flight in the world, easily. Today’s airlines are all modeled after this ideal, our modern travel owes a huge debt to what Howard Hughes pushed forward.
The competition, the fighting pushed the envelope, but in both cases a visionary could see the future. To them it was plain as an image on a clear sunny day. To them, the future didn’t need to be tomorrow, it was ready right now. The future just needed dragged kicking and screaming directly into today! They did this, they pulled people together who could make these changes, and they with their teams yanked the future right into humanity’s grasp.
…read more, click through…
HP Opensources WebOS: My Quick Thoughts
HP (previous CloudAve coverage) today announced that they are opensourcing their WebOS mobile operating system. After their initial plan to shed WebOS completely, there was a rethink once Meg Whitman took over as CEO. They were dillydallying for many weeks before making this smart move. HP today announced it will contribute the webOS software to [...]
Geoloqi, CivicApps, and TriMet API/SDKs
I’m heading off on yet another coding adventure this coming weekend. I can never get enough hackathons, startup weekends, and such. The energy, creativity, and learning is unbeatable at these types of events. This adventure will be mashing up a plethora of APIs (SDKs) and other capabilities to build something cool against. What it may [...]
High Availability From Non-High Availability: OpenStack, Dell, Crowbar, Private Clouds, and Moving the Enterprise Forward…
The Environment Recently a conversation came up about high availability in a traditional Enterprise Environment. Let me paint the picture for this environment; “This environment has several hundred servers, and several hundred applications. These application range in simple client server applications to n-tier applications strung across multiple services and machines. Some are resilient, some are [...]
NGINX Starts Commercial Operations
NGINX, the open source alternative to Apache web server, today announced their plans to start a commercial company around their software. Yesterday, they announced a $3 Million Series A funding round and how they are planning to monetize their open source software. As an analyst focussing on both open source and cloud computing, this is [...]
Why WordPress ISN’T A Good Choice For Your Website (Really?)
Last month I did a guest article for Jemima Gibbons monthly newsletter on Freshbusinessthinking.com about Social Media Monitoring and Analytics. In that same newsletter Nikki Pilkington argued why WordPress is a good choice for your website. I decided I wanted to argue, passionately, the opposite, and my article has just been published there this month. [...]
Spotlight on HP Open Source
While at OSCON 2011 I spoke to a Phil Robb, Bryan Gartner, and Terri Molini with HP. Phil is heading up the Open Source Program Office for HP, which we spoke about. Context and Clarity: I knew HP was involved in cloud computing to some degree, know they make tons of devices, hardware, printers, and know they [...]
OSCON: Talking Shop With HP, Heroku, ForgeRock, Open Source For America, and More!
Today and yesterday I specifically aimed to meet and interview a number of sponsors and companies attending OSCON. My big quest I’d assigned myself was to determine who was doing what, where, when, and why in the Open Source Community. Of course I wasn’t going to get to every company, but I was going to [...]
OSCON: Energy + Awesome + Space Exploration + Hacking
I wanted to post these two keynotes from OSCON 2011. They really bring out the spirit of exploration, adventure, care, and doing things bigger than oneself. This is about doing things that go beyond the cat picture of the day. These presentations, well, I’ll let them speak for themselves. Absolutely great!
OSCON: The Web, It’s HUGE! Cloud Computing More Realistically…
It is day 3 of OSCON data & java, and the kick off to the main keynotes and core conference. There are a repeating topics throughout the conference: The Web, It’s Still HUGE! Imagine that! HTML 5, CSS3, JavaScript/jQuery/Node.js – This is starting to look like it will be the development stack of the web. [...]
Acquia Gets Another Round Of Funding: Commercial Open Source Is Still Strong
Acquia (previous CloudAve coverage), the commercial company behind open source Drupal content management software, announced the completion of Series D round of funding worth $15 Million Dollars. This round was funded by Tenaya Capital along with significant follow up participation from their existing investors, Northbridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners. Acquia will tap into this [...]
