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 →
The Real Cloud Action is Innovation, not Economics
I have no doubt in my mind that Thomas Edison, were he alive today, would instantly spot the real value of cloud computing. Most people think it's the economics. To one of history's most prolific inventors, cloud computing would mean innovation. You see, cloud isn't just about how cheap you can make a VM, or... Continue Reading →
Enterprise Cloud Musings
The enterprise market is a bit like a a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. On the one hand, the investment by service providers in "enterprise class" cloud services continues to accelerate. On the other hand, pretty much all I hear from enterprise customers is how they are primarily interested in private clouds.... Continue Reading →
Once Upon a Cloud
Here is a little story I tweeted last night... ONCE Upon a Cloud, there was a big river that ran wide and deep. And it was called Amazon.com And this great river Amazon grew fast upon great Infrastructure that it built, so that it was a marvel to behold in all the land. And the... Continue Reading →
John Treadway 