Jake Sorofman, rPath, James Duncan, Joyent and Chet Kapoor, Sonoa Systems chat with Alistair Croll on the futures of cloud. These companies offer software, products that are adjacent to, or run on, the cloud. They are not cloud operators.
Jake: rPath is adjacent to cloud. Platform to package applications for deployment and automated maintenance for many environments, inclusive of clouds.
Chet Kapoor: Visibility, Control and Scale for APIs, feeds and services. Sonoa Systems provides technology for providers and consumers of cloud services.
James Duncan: Company had internal IaaS cloud, took that knowledge and packaged as company called Reasonably Smart, which was acquired by Joyent.
Q: VM/AMI Standards?
Chet – standards need to move to higher level, not just VM level, but up at layer 7.
James – To predict the precise mechanism, shape or form, it’s too early. Agrees they need to be higher level. Standards need to reflect innovation, not run ahead.
Chet – It’s hard to get momentum around standard without real-life adoption (working code as example). Doesn’t want to see WS* again.
Q: Enterprises want to dip toe-in, how to do that, without being in “big cloud”.
Brings up the discussion that cloud technology is not limited to “off-premise” use.
Chet – The next 12-18 months need to resolve security concerns. For enterprise adoption.
James – Security in the cloud is a trust issue, rather than a security issue. Over next 12 months there will be increase in familiarity, not increase in security related products and protocols.
Q: How much of cloud computing is intrinsically linked to the client? Organizations will want to have some code on client.
James – developers, engineers are exposed to the costs of what they are doing like never before. That visibility will be even more granular over time. What is the cost of any given API, or URL? Clients will become more important in that realm. Costs will be factor in software engineering.
Chet – RIA client to DB picture is wrong. RIA client will fan out calls to dozens or hundreds of applications 90% of the time, only 10% will be RIA client to DB.
Will every cloud eventually be a service cloud?
Chet – comes down to one question, “is the organization comfortable sharing fate”. What business are they in, what is their familiarity?
Jake – Companies will always want to package up the applications that contain “their secret sauce”. These applications will never be developed on PaaS.
Q: When all clouds are interoperable, doesn’t economy of scale win?
James – obvious comparison we try to make is to electricity. A better commodity to compare is to is corn, pork bellies, something that needs to be moved around. Excepting the “rot factor”.
Jake – Electricity moves more rapidly that data, but not efficiently.
Chet – Customers will self-select based on business need, application portfolio, etc.
Chet – how many enterprise CIOs actually write checks to Amazon, not many at all. Enterprises more often use a Rackspace.
Jake – Sees use case specific cloud deployment. Metadata enriched policies will be packaged with applications stating where that application can run.
James – Governance, Service Desk, ITIL model is concern in enterprise cloud adoption.
Q: Is data portability the new Open Source debate?
Chet – Open Source resolved accessibility problem, not “free as in beer”. The bazaar model is far better than cathedral, offers more innovative ideas. Customers don’t get up in the morning thinking about data portability, or getting down to 5 vendors. Customers think about who they are betting on, and how to manage those relationships if something goes bad. [Chet ran Glue Code prior to sale to IBM]
Management Issues
Jake – cloud will reduce barrier to application deployment. Number of units deployed will go through the roof. That will make the number of units to be managed go through the roof. Tendency to deploy and forget. This is a problem enterprises need to face. Throwing people at the problem isn’t the solution.
One big prediction – 12 Months
James – Governance. Governance around acquisition. Take all those Amazon EC2 charges off of developer’s credit card expense report.
Chet – Familiarity will happen over the next 12 months. This is as big, or bigger, than web computing. Will see enterprise adoption.
Jake – Will see examples of high profile applications leaking to the cloud. Will see some rogue applications, breaches happen. Will force controls, formalized strategies, governance.
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