Next Iteration Of PaaS: Will Amazon Join That Race?
I have been critical of “me too” approaches to PaaS by current breed of PaaS providers and have been calling for some differentiation which will take innovation to the next level. Some people have been asking me how the next generation of PaaS will look like. I have framed a simple model to explain where [...]
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 [...]
Two Events That “Clouded” Our Thinking In 2011
2011 is long gone and I should have done this post last week. However, I still think it is relevant to highlight some changes in our thinking about the cloud that happened due to events in 2011. Whether many agree with me or not, I see 2011 as a year where cloud computing moved from [...]
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.
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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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Cloud Outages: Design For Failure Or Enterprise Clouds?
Last weekend saw Lightning taking out datacenters associated with Amazon Cloud and Microsoft BPOS. It affected one Availability Zone (AZ) in AWS Europe. Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge has detailed information on the incident. Amazon said that lightning struck a transformer near its data center, causing an explosion and fire that knocked out utility [...]
Understanding Changes in the Software & Venture Capital Industries
In this three-part series I will explore the ways that the Venture Capital industry has changed over the past 5 years that I would argue are a direct result of changes in the software industry, not the other way around. Specifically, Amazon has changed our entire industry in profound ways often not attributed strongly enough [...]
Amazon Quietly Announces AWS CloudFormer
Amazon made a quiet announcement on Wednesday in their forums about a release of a new prototype tool called AWS CloudFormer. This is a deviation from the usual practice where they announce newer features to their cloud offerings, however tiny the feature is, through a midnight blog post. The new tool allows users to create [...]
PaaS Is The Future Of Cloud Services: Battle Lines Are Clearly Drawn
Earlier this week, Heroku (previous CloudAve coverage), the PaaS player Salesforce acquired during last year’s Dreamforce, announced a major new release Celadon Cedar adding some powerful features targeting enterprise customers. They also announced full Node.js support and added Ruby 1.9.2 support. Some of the features include: New process model with support for background processes Procfiles [...]
Fujitsu Opens Up Their Public Cloud Services To North America
Fujitsu, the leading Asian giant, today opened up their global cloud platform to North American users after Japan, Australia, Singapore and UK. They are starting up with a free beta trial now which will convert into paid offering after 31st August, 2011. With their large customer base and enterprise credibility, they are focussing on enterprises [...]
SAP On Amazon Web Services
Sapphire Now conference is going on in Orlando right now and it is time to hear about another player from the traditional era making their software available on AWS (previous CloudAve coverage). According to Arik Hesseldahl, Amazon today announced that they are working with SAP (previous CloudAve coverage) to run their applications on Amazon cloud. [...]
What happens in Vegas…
As I board the plane to head to Las Vegas for 2011′s Interop and Enterprise Cloud Summit, predictably, yet somewhat rhetorically, the great AWS outage post mortem continues to rumble on. Exactly two weeks after the event, blog after blog and article after article continues to serve up a veritable range of delights from the [...]
