
Big telcos with cloudy pretensions
Two stories in the past week, to remind us that big telecoms incumbents have the customer relationships, the brand recognition, the data centres, the network and the ambition to offer cloud services. These are normally aimed at their existing customers, particularly big enterprises with existing co-lo relationships to these telcos. They’re also, normally, aimed at […]

Amazon binds itself more tightly to the enterprise
Amazon Web Services (AWS) spent years being dismissive of anything that didn’t run in an AWS data centre. Private and hybrid clouds were, we were repeatedly and vehemently told, ‘false clouds.’ There was no value in doing anything cloudy any way but the Amazon way. Non-cloudy workloads were, simply, anachronistic. Left alone, they’d get on with the […]

Private cloud silliness
Private clouds are real. It’s well past time to grow up and accept this. Not every IT workload is most logically run in a cloud, now or in the future. But, for those workloads where cloud is advantageous, it seems likely that public cloud will eventually supplant both private cloud and hybrid cloud deployments. Public […]

The Perceived Risk of The Purely Cloud Deployment
In this post series, I will raise some basic questions and will delve deeply into this topic to debate the common resistance to what I call “pure cloud deployment”. Let’s begin with a leading question: Can’t the hybrid economy model live within the public cloud? From the enormous number of conversations with top cloud thought leaders, CIOs, […]

Missing the Point on Private, Public, and Hybrid Cloud APIs
At the recent Structure event in San Francisco, I watched Werner Vogels’ presentation, along with about 500 others in a packed auditorium. Werner is the CTO of Amazon Web Services and one of the industry’s more prophetic voices. (I was honored to share the keynote stage with him at Cloud Connect a couple of years ago.) During Werner’s conversation with […]

Another Data Point on Ascendancy of OpenStack Cloud
Earlier this week, I gave the keynote address at the Storage Plumbing and Data Engineering Conference in Santa Clara (it’s abbreviated SPDEcon and pronounced, “Speedy-con,” by the way). Sponsored by the SNIA, the event is targeted for hardcore storage development and data engineers who configure, integrate and support storage and data management solutions – often called “storage […]

Unpicking the multi-cloud at GigaOM Structure
Image © Mission Bay Conference Center Last month, RightScale’s State of the Cloud report got me thinking about the rise of multi-cloud solutions. Next month, I’ll be moderating a Mapping Session at GigaOM’s Structure event to work out how, where, when, why and if this trend is going to prove significant. Hybrid clouds, in which one […]

5 Key Essentials of Cloud Workloads Migration
The benefits of migrating workloads between different cloud providers or between private and public clouds can only truly be redeemed with an understanding of the cloud business model and cloud workload management. It seems that cloud adoption has reached the phase where advanced cloud users are creating their own hybrid solutions or migrating between clouds […]

Survey lifts covers on Cloud Promiscuity: good thing, bad thing, or who cares?
Figures from RightScale‘s latest State of the Cloud Report (free registration required) suggest “a strong interest in multi-cloud strategies” amongst respondents. The rationale for hybrid cloud (mixing a public cloud service like Amazon’s with something running in your own data centre, colocation site or hosting facility) is reasonably well understood, but why might companies choose to use more […]

Hewlett Packard: a tale of many clouds
Hewlett Packard used its Discover event in Frankfurt last week to reassert the company’s cloud credentials. Public, private, hybrid; HP is painting pictures that encompass them all, whilst seeking to protect hardware revenues and reassure conservative executives at some of its largest and most profitable customers. But HP has been here before, making bold claims […]

East & West Coast PaaS, Being Polyglot, Reply to Dan Turkenkopf
Dan (he’s a good guy, check him out on Twitter @dturkenk), your “East Coast vs West Coast PaaS Psychology. And Why It Matters.” is great write up. Loved it! I’ve got to say, I’m pretty much in agreement with almost every single thing you’ve written here. Matter of fact I’m staunchly in agreement with a […]

CloudBees Multi-Cloud Approach: A Lesson For Cloud Service Providers?
Last month CloudBees (previous CloudAve coverage), the Java PaaS provider and the company behind Jenkins, announced the availability of CloudBees AnyCloud, their multi-cloud strategy in an era where every cloud provider is offering support to multiple infrastructure services underneath. Though the news is a month old, I got briefed by them recently and the discussions […]

Coming To A Place Near You: A Private Cloud Spiked With Big Data
Netflix similarity map Yesterday, I moderated a couple of panels at the Big Data Cloud event. I have been a keynote speaker, panelist, moderator, and participant for many conferences in the last few years. It has always been a pleasure to see the cloud and big data becoming more and more mainstream. Here are my […]

Rackspace Private Cloud: Repackaging Fanatical Support Around OpenStack
Yesterday Rackspace announced Rackspace Cloud Private Edition, a repackaging of their Cloud Builder services around the OpenStack product. If you want to hear a purely open source perspective on this move, I recommend you to read Christian Reilly’s article on the topic. However, I am going to approach the topic from the business strategy point […]

Early Signs Of Big Data Going Mainstream
Today, Cloudera announced a new $40m funding round to scale their sales and marketing efforts and a partnership with NetApp where NetApp will resell Cloudera’s Hadoop as part of their solution portfolio. These both announcements are critical to where the cloud and Big Data are headed. Big Data going mainstream: Hadoop and MapReduce are not […]