The Armada Group

Thought Leader Series with Treb Ryan, CEO of OpSource

Treb’s perspective on the Cloud hype was fascinating. He had a simple no nonsense approach to explaining it last month when we sat down to discuss current industry trends and how Cloud is affecting businesses.

“First of all not many people even know why it’s called Cloud. When you look at the structure and architecture of the system you realize that it’s because of the way people drew the diagram and the internet was on the top “in the Cloud.”’Simply put . . .  it’s just a term for the internet. He notes that there are a few major key elements to helping deliver the Cloud: Availability, immediacy and expandability.

A post by James Urquhart titled “What cloud boils down to for the enterprise” prompted some passionate exchanges of opinions. The most interesting between James, Andi Mann (CA) and JP Morgenthal and then I put in AUS$0.02 worth.

The crux of the discussion was around the statement “cloud is an applications centric operations model”. The discussion focused on two different issues;

It has become increasingly obvious that the marketing has turned on the cloud, supported by articles and interestingly the apparent abandonment of the clouderati.  I wrote a post a couple of weeks back titled “Its getting a little less cloudy” discussing the passing of the marketing hype and a new awareness of the real benefits of Cloud based architecture. The conclusion it reaches, is cloud has abstracted a lot of detail that might be labeled support and/or operations at a infrastructure or physical data center level. It has not however reduced the importance of IT Service Management (ITSM) or proper architecture design.

James Urquhart wrote a piece for CNET on the ability for anyone to catch Amazon’s dominance as a public cloud infrastructure provider. Full respect from James and his words are insightful from a technological and functional requirements perspective. From a business success perspective I think it has some limitations. Volume has its place, but it is not the sole indicator of leadership.

Is it just me, or is the fog lifting on cloud computing*

At the peak of the hype curve, the statements were;

1. Don’t have to worry about  (monitoring, operations, power, cooling, servers, infrastructure etc.. etc..)
2. Infinite scalability and high availability
3. Infrastructure is a commodity

What do PC’s, Linux, MySQL, Eucalytpus, public clouds and many other products have in common? They all leverage the phenomena of personal decision making power inside enterprises to create innovation adoption. In the last two decades of IT, this is also referred to “going around IT”. The current adoption of cloud overwhelmingly dominated by individuals, swiping credit cards or downloading opensource/freemium products. The “grass roots” approach is typical for enterprises at the leading edge of the diffusion of innovations curve.  These companies have the resources with the technical skills and business motivation to drive the adoption. Does this model “grass roots” model have the ability to continue the momentum cloud adoption into the enterprise.

Last week at RedHat Summit (presos, webcasts here) reinforced some of my views on RedHat. Although not the most prominent vendor in the cloud marketing media, they have not been sitting around. From Jim Whitehurst’s keynote, to the range of sessions on IaaS and PaaS, it’s clear the strategy is picking up momentum. With enterprise adoption of “cloud architectures” said to be ramping up in the next 24 months. The timing appears to be good.

Looking forward to the Redhat Summit next week in Boston with a theme of “Platform, Middleware, Virtualization, Cloud”. The cloud market is dominated by a lot of startups, with some goliath size companies still waiting in the wings. Depending your point of view, they are either lumbering dinosaurs unaware of the next evolutionary shift, or if you are like me, I think they are poised to strike.

There is so much posted on the AWS outage in the north east.. Some great detailed blogs on designing high availability for the cloud, some people who survived, and the modern equivalent of CNN moments for those who didn’t, why this was the app owners fault and not amazon and vice versa.. As always, there is alot of fluff around the cloud. Who is at fault and who is to blame ? Is the cloud a failed concept? Hyped up load of bollocks.