Cloud

A couple weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending the GSA IaaS Education Day. While sitting in a room full of federal agency IT and IT acquisition professionals, Keith Trippie, Executive Director for Enterprise System Development Office at US Department of Homeland Security, reviewed DHS roadmap to the cloud and succinctly illustrated the benefits of adopting cloud services.

At Carpathia, we see a lot of pretty unique customer requirements, and from our vantage point, we also have a good view of trends both in terms of technology and workloads. One of the nice things about not being a one trick pony is that we can deliver the full spectrum of infrastructure services, ranging from colo to cloud. With that said, this may not be a particularly well-received post from the pure play cloud crew. From our perspective, we really see somewhat of a maturity model presenting itself.

I spent this week in Orlando at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo talking about clouds from two perspectives – IT and weather – as we endured a vigorous tropical storm dumping buckets of rain in the area. It certainly brought a whole new meaning to "cloud bursting" this week! Kudos to the Gartner team for pulling together a very impressive show, a great mix between the emerging technology providers and more established companies. I ended up splitting my time between the show floor, where Carpathia had a booth, and attending the main sessions at the event.

This time each year, the hosting industry gathers in Las Vegas for 48 hours of events at Tier1's Hosting Transformation Summit. It’s been interesting to watch this event evolve over the past 4 years. The first events were small with a variety of hosters/like minds meeting and included a few panel discussions. This year however, the event attracted over 800 attendees and included a very robust set of panels, keynotes and exhibitors. Last year it was clear the focus of the event had completely switched to cloud. It’s interesting this year to see that the discussions both at the event and in the hallways seemed to shift and soften a little to talk more about cloud in the hybrid form vs. the pure form of last year.

As you have heard from me over the past few months, the network is where the innovation needs to occur in the cloud. One of our partners that has been driving this innovation is Citrix -- starting with the VPX load balancers in 2009, one of the first commercially available load balancers optimized for the cloud and delivered as virtual machines.

As I sit here watching the snow fall at 6,500 feet in beautiful Lake Tahoe, the peacefulness has allowed me to formulate some conclusions on the exciting events of the past week. Everyone is talking about Amazon’s EC2 outage...

I spent a day in San Francisco recently, meeting a couple of potential customers and one new one. Interestingly enough, they all wanted to talk about Amazon, and they all had used Amazon EC2 at one point. The common question was, "so what do you think about the outage?" This would be a great time to bash on Amazon, but in reality, the responsibility here really needs to be shared with the users.

Lately, I have been putting a lot of thought around what to think about all these questions we’re hearing with the latest cloud-related buzzword, “Platform”. “What is your IaaS platform running on?” “What do you think about the OpenStack platform?” “How is your platform better than Amazon’s EC2?”

When I first entered the field, thin-client was the rage. The intent was to offload the computing requirements from the desktop machines, and instead pass only entered / parsed data and screen refresh information back to the desktop. I’m dating myself here, but the functional imperative of thin-client was borne of the weak processing power of the desktops of yore. As Moore’s Law asserted itself, desktop machines became more and more robust… and the technical limitations that made thin-client de rigueur were rendered moot.

Think back roughly 10 years ago. Worldcom had just imploded, the Treo 600 was the hottest phone out there, and Microsoft had just launched the Xbox Live service. Each of these examples were major evolutionary steps in computing. We’re in the midst of another massive paradigm shift for computing.