John Treadway

I’ve been looking at the PaaS space for some time now.  I spent some time with the good folks at CloudBees (naturally), and have had many conversations on CloudFoundry, Azure, and more with vendors, customers and other cloudy folks. Krishnan posted a very good article over on CloudAve, and at one level I fully agree that PaaS will be come more of a data-centric (vs. code-centric) animal over the next few years.  To some degree that’s generally true of all areas of IT – data, intelligence and action from data, etc.  But there is a lot more to this. Most PaaS frameworks have very few actual services – other than code logic containers, maybe one messaging framework, and some data services (structured and unstructured persistence and query).  You get some scale out, load balancing, and rudimentary IAM and operations services.  Over time as the enterprise PaaS market r... (more)

Cloudy Implications and Recommendations in Megaupload Seizure

The FBI seized popular upload site Megaupload.com yesterday.  They took the site down and now own the servers. I am not an attorney, and I have no opinion on whether or not the MegaUpload guys were breaking laws or encouraging users to violate copyrights through illegal uploading and streaming of movies, recordings, etc.  Right or wrong, the FBI did it and now we need to deal with the fallout. The challenge is that there were very likely many users who were not breaking any laws.  People backing up their music, photos, websites, documents and who knows what else.  I highly doubt... (more)

Cloud Computing Opinion: More Froth, But More Clarity Too

The cloud stack market continues to go through waves and gyrations, but increasingly now the future is becoming more clear.  As I have been writing about for a while, the number of competitors in the market for “cloud stacks” is totally unsustainable.  There are really only four “camps” now in the cloud stack business that matter. The graphic below shows only some of the more than 40 cloud stacks I know about (and there are many I surely am not aware of). VMware is really on its own.  Not only do they ship the hypervisor used by the vast majority of enterprises, but with vCloud ... (more)

Gartner’s Cloud Numbers Don’t Add Up (Again!)

Once again, Gartner has publicized entirely useless and (worse) misleading numbers on the global market for cloud computing services.  Their numbers from last year were disputed by me (here, and here) and several others, yet they kept to their fataly flawed methodology for the 2010 update.  This is despite at least one of the analysts who’s name appears on the report privately agreeing with me that last years numbers were “rubbish” and that they were pressured into using this methodology. The press release cited above indicates that “cloud services revenue is forecast to reach $... (more)

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 how much less money Amazon costs than your internal infrastructure, even though it’s absolutely critical to the success of cloud computing that this is the case.  Instead, the real value being created is how cloud computing dramatically lowers the barriers to experimentati... (more)