Disqus - Friends of lancew

Re: Sometimes change must happen...

jamesurquhart — Thu, 22 May 2008 01:56:23 -0000

You'd better make me jealous. I'd love to find myself cursing my luck as I cash out my stock options! :)

Thanks, Jay, I appreciate the kind words. I enjoyed exploring corporate blogging with you, and your insights and feedback were invaluable (and infallible). Now, get back to work! :)

Re: A Funny Thing Happened On The Way to the Apple Store...

jamesurquhart — Thu, 22 May 2008 16:04:22 -0000

Almost 3 years since I owned a Mac. That's forever in technology years.

I agree whole heartedly about the opportunity for companies to build "everyguy/gal" friendly interfaces to cloud capacity allocation and management. I once thought building such a thing myself, but I was concerned about standards, etc., and getting locked into supporting one vendor. I was an idiot, of course, in the sense that the people doing this today for EC2 look like they've found a growing and enthusiastic market.

Re: It just keeps getting cloudier and cloudier

jamesurquhart — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:04:51 -0000

Bert,

OK, there is value in your additional requirement. However, I'm not sure the "if you can run it on the Internet" definition really fails your test. However, let me preface my argument by observing that some of our variance comes from our perspectives. I am looking at cloud computing from a systems integration perspective. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you are coming at it from a systems infrastructure perspective.

That said, let me address the 3TERA / Salesforce.com example. Let's take the example of a corporate web site that runs on AppLogic in an enterprise installation that communicates with Salesforce.com to get customer and order details. In this example, is AppLogic really "in the cloud"? Isn't Salesforce.com a much better example of cloud computing?

Again, there is a hole in the terminology that is tripping us up. There is no accepted term for the automated shared-resource infrastructure that supports capacity-on-demand, which in turn supports cloud computing services. So we struggle to apply the term to both the infrastructure and the service--with many perhaps compromising for a "infrastructure as a service" definition. My support of the "from the Internet" definition is largely an attempt to firmly establish the term relates to services, and not to infrastructure per se.

Re: Say what, Mashable?!? Why Microsoft won't be acquiring Amazon

jamesurquhart — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:30:01 -0000

Adam, thanks for the response. Good to see we agree on the basics. With Rackspace expected to IPO at ~$400M, it seems the much more cost effective bet, IMHO.

I corrected my cut-and-paste error on your name. My apologies.

Re: Why cloud computing doesn't get us out of the woods yet...

jamesurquhart — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:46:13 -0000

I'm not sure I agree that capacity planning is easy for a blogger or news provider to do. Ask John Williams about the sudden interest in his post about "captchas". Mosso seemed to handle the surge, but I wonder if he lost a few people getting to peak capacity.

Even a SaaS offering could come up with a feature that unexpectedly draws the attention of a large audience web site. In any case, however, the more that is known up front, the more responsibility it is for the target site to prepare and/or warn its cloud provider.

Re: Why cloud computing doesn't get us out of the woods yet...

jamesurquhart — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:45:43 -0000

So, Roland, you are essentially saying that Amazon is not a true cloud? Last time I checked, Amazon could only scale a server instance as much as a single physical box, after which you would be required to spin up an additional instance. Oh, and Amazon doesn't supply any built in monitoring or automation, so you have to patch that together yourself.

Same seems true of FlexScale, Mosso and others called clouds. Do these not fit the definition of a true cloud?

Re: Why cloud computing doesn't get us out of the woods yet...

jamesurquhart — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 02:35:42 -0000

While I agree that is the ideal vision in many cases, I reserve judgment about whether that is the ultimate definition of cloud computing. Its not that I don't share the excitement about that level of dynamic computing, its just that I am not sure that it applies to all cloud-based applications, nor do I believe you can ignore the problems that I raise during this "transition phase".

Good discussion. You have made me think a bit, which I always appreciate.

Re: Which Sun Do You Orbit?

jamesurquhart — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 12:29:04 -0000

You will have to ask Kent Langley of ProductionScale about that (see credit immediately below the image). I borrowed the diagram mostly for the top half, and can't say that I necessarily agree with the bottom half.

For what it's worth, I outlined some of my understanding of these definitions in my post on cloud computing definitions.

Re: Watch out for Cisco, kids!

jamesurquhart — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 01:31:59 -0000

Thanks, samj.

I read your post and I you make a compelling case. I think I disagree with your assertion that the term cloud is a metaphore for the Internet, however. For me, "cloud" represents shared network-based resources in general, including the concept of a "private cloud" which may or may not be on the larger 'Net.

This comes from more of an application architecture point of view than a market segmentation or even infrastructure architecture one. That being said, thank's for giving me much to think about.

Re: Watch out for Cisco, kids!

jamesurquhart — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 03:13:55 -0000

Fair enough. It is quite true that the proprietary world continues to look for "lock-in" approaches, paying homage to open standards where necessary for integration, but not always for extension or modification.

I hope I make that clear in this post...I am indeed worried about how Cisco would react if they did indeed take a large portion of the private cloud market. The idea that they would help competing firms leverage their success to enhance the overall market just doesn't seem to fit their personality.

Then again, that's just the tension between capitalism and community, isn't it?

Re: The Cloud Computing Bill of Rights

jamesurquhart — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 17:17:55 -0000

Peter,

Thanks so much for your response. The information you have collected at the post you link to above is invaluable, and serves as a primer to those who have to read contracts from other SaaS vendors out there--and I would add IaaS and PaaS vendors as well.

There has been some confusion about the intention of this post, in that some seem to think I'm saying these rights exist today. I mean this post to represent the expectations customers should have of their vendors; the things they should be fighting for in the marketplace.

Its clear from your post we have lot's left to do. No guarantees we'll gain these rights any time soon...

Re: The Cloud Computing Bill of Rights

jamesurquhart — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 17:21:09 -0000

Well, again, I think it is right for a customer to expect that they own their data. However, governments are free to do whatever they want within their legal structure, even to manipulate the things you own. It happens all the time. I can't update the outer appearance of my historic home without approval from the city's historic preservation board.

That being said, I think citizens the world wide have to be aware of how easy it is for governments to use technology to invade your privacy more than ever before. Nick Carr pointed this out in The Big Switch, and I get more nervous about that than anything else technology oriented these days...

Update: See http://www.theregister.co.u...

Re: The Cloud Computing Bill of Rights

jamesurquhart — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 17:26:05 -0000

Don't you think cloud computing is a different beast, though? Its not information about the business that is contained in the cloud--it is, for most, essentially the business itself. I'm not saying vendors will walk willingly into the light, but I expect customers to be constantly demanding to move in this direction. Otherwise the "cloud" fails to commoditize anything.

But then, as James Governor pointed out at London CloudCamp, perhaps we all run to proprietary much more than we are willing to admit, in which case these rights are certainly overkill.

Re: The Cloud Computing Bill of Rights

jamesurquhart — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:51:39 -0000

Thanks, John. I'll certainly take a look at geek-pac. I'm beginning to feel this is an important policy issue to debate.

Your point about rights of termination (in your brief statement linked above) is critical, and I missed it entirely.

Re: The Cloud Computing Bill of Rights

jamesurquhart — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 01:27:27 -0000

Excellent point!

It fits with my theory of Follow the Law computing (see http://blog.jamesurquhart.c.... Organizations will leverage the geographic distribution of cloud systems and the ability to migrate running processes (or code flows) from server to server to develop applications that move to wherever the regulatory environment is best for a given task.

But, whether or not that vision plays out, regulatory adherence is, in the end, the customer's problem, not the vendor's. The vendor's responsibility is, as you say, to provide the tools and metrics to assure that compute loads and data exist physically where you want them to.

Re: Update: The Cloud Computing Bill of Rights

jamesurquhart — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 14:26:12 -0000

Technically, data encryption is certainly one piece of the security puzzle. (I'm not so sure it directly relates to privacy, per se.) It certainly seems possible for a vendor to provide an interface to allow customers to encrypt their own data, though the support of such a function might expose the vendor to liability.

However, I am much more worried about the political and legal threats to security and privacy than the technical ones.

James

Re: Why Every Linux Application Known To Man Will Be SaaS Soon

jamesurquhart — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 19:09:09 -0000

Ah, but that $75 includes infrastructure, which would cost for a single tenant app whether directly owned or via hosting providers. When looking at this as a service alone, single tenant may be untenable (without automation to save $$ where possible). However, if comparing to the cost of hosting the same application on the same quality and quantity of resources yourself (or via dedicated hosting), it doesn't look quite so bad.

Good point, though. Most people will quickly look at an app hosted in the cloud as a service, not necessarily an instance of a license.

James

Re: Cloud Computing and the Constitution

jamesurquhart — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 23:26:11 -0000

Excellent question. I'm just getting to know this issue and the associated laws. I'd welcome comments from anyone with applicable expertise, but I plan on hunting down an answer either way.

Re: Update: The Cloud Computing Bill of Rights

jamesurquhart — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 22:24:21 -0000

Thanks, Sam. I'm excited to see this happening. I look forward to reviewing the draft, and I encourage others to do so.

James

Re: Cisco's Nexus 1000v and the Cloud: Is it really a big deal?

jamesurquhart — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 03:18:02 -0000

I will update the post to reflect this. I am unfortunately unable to make VMWorld this year, but I'd love to get a demo sometime. Send me an email at jurquhart at yahoo dot com.

Re: Cisco's Nexus 1000v and the Cloud: Is it really a big deal?

jamesurquhart — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 03:20:01 -0000

See! I knew there were some very cloud-smart people working on that project!

Re: What the hell is going on with the Cloud Computing group on Google?

jamesurquhart — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 23:19:12 -0000

Jeremy,

You caught me on Sam's stats. I didn't do my homework there, and I'll update to reflect that. However, that just means he is in the top 2% of members, not the top 1%.

Everyone promotes their stuff on that list. I'm not with a product company, so I'm not pushing product, but I certainly used my blog as post fodder (and more rarely did the reverse). So did Reuven, botchagalupe, etc., etc., etc.

Finally, I have no desire to take over anything. I thought I was a part of a community, with a certain level of community self policing. I was wrong. I can't speak for Sam.

However, you and Reuven are right about one thing. I can take my discussions elsewhere.

James

Re: Cracks in the Clouds, but the Sky Ain't Fallin'

jamesurquhart — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 03:50:04 -0000

Point well taken, and thank you. Fixed now.

Re: The PaaS Spectrum: Choosing Your Coding Cloud

jamesurquhart — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 15:18:57 -0000

Heroku is actually very cool. It falls squarely in the category of "Productivity/Ease of Operation", but there are a few Ruby PaaS providers out there, so perhaps not as "far right" as some.

Re: The PaaS Spectrum: Choosing Your Coding Cloud

jamesurquhart — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 15:21:53 -0000

Which is great, and certainly a big effort saver for those looking to scale applications across tens or hundreds of systems. Not portable, though.

Tim Bray's site has an interesting discussion about this right now: http://www.tbray.org/ongoin...