After my recent post on EC2 Micro instances, I received a great comment from Robert Jenkins over at CloudSigma regarding the "false construct" of fixed instance sizes. There's no reason why an EC2-small has to have 1.7GB RAM, 1 VPU and 160GB of local storage. The underlying virtualization technology allows for fairly open configurability of... Continue Reading →
CSC Throws off “N-I-H” – Partners with Skytap for Dev/Test Cloud
In a fairly uncharacteristic move, CSC rejected a traditionally strong "not invented here" syndrome and has joined forces with Skytap for their CloudLab service. The Skytap-powered CloudLab has been in customer testing at CSC since mid-August and is now generally available to CSC customers. Within the domain of enterprise IT, public cloud usage typically falls into one... Continue Reading →
Micro Instances Do Not a Web Host Make
Amazon's announcement of Micro Instances this week ist great news for web sites who need a lower-capacity intense type for simple operations or low-volume processes. Some people have equated Micro Instances with a VPS model, or specifically as competition to traditional mass market web hosts. A small instances is not an offering that replaces a... Continue Reading →
Cloudy View from HostingCon
I spent a couple of days in Austin at HostingCon, meeting with a broad cross-section of the hosting community. Rackspace CTO John Engates and lots of other "Rackers" were there to promote OpenStack. Most of the other big mass-market shared hosters were there too - like The Planet, Hosting.com and others. Then there were lots... Continue Reading →
OpenStack First Reaction – Rackspace Open Sources Their Cloud
Late yesterday, Rackspace launched OpenStack with a reasonable community of boosters. OpenStack aims to disrupt the cloud stack red ocean with a complete open source release of the Rackspace CloudServers compute and CloudFiles object storage systems for use by anybody. Importantly, OpenStack is released under Apache 2.0, which basically means you can pretty much do as... Continue Reading →
IT Chargeback Planning – A Critical Success Factor for Enterprise Cloud
"If you don't know your destination, any road will do." That little nugget from one of my colleagues concisely sums up the theme of this brief post. After having read a recent analyst note on IT chargeback, and knowing about some of the work going on in various IT organizations in this area, I was originally... Continue Reading →
Open Source Cloud Bits
Last week I got into a nice discussion on Twitter regarding the role of open source in an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) stack. With open source cloud stacks from Eucalyptus, Cloud.com, Abiquo and others competing against proprietary source solutions from Enomaly, VMware and others, this can get fairly confusing quickly. For clarity, here is... Continue Reading →
The End of Over-Provisioning
One part of the debate on cloudonomics that often gets overlooked is the effect of over-provisioning. Many people look at the numbers and say they can run a server for less money than they can buy the same capacity in the cloud. And, assuming that you optimize the utilization of that server, that may be... Continue Reading →
The Cloudification of IT
The state of solid matter can be converted to gas or liquid if a catalyst (chemical, heat, etc.) is applied. The molecules start to speed up, eventually breaking the bonds that hold them together. This liquefaction (conversion to liquid state) or gasification (conversation to gaseous state) enables solid matter to flow more freely, to take... Continue Reading →
IT Disintermediation and The Cloud
On a fairly regular basis I get into a discussion with people that starts something like this: Hey John, with the cloud is IT even necessary anymore? I mean, if I can buy computing and storage at Amazon and they manage it, what will happen to all of those IT guys we're paying? Do we... Continue Reading →
John Treadway 