Latest News from John Treadway

Cloud API Standardization – It’s Time to Get Serious

Tue, 15 May 2012 17:16:51 EDT

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Eucalyptus and AWS – Much Ado About Nothing

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 08:15:00 EDT

Yes, this is a delayed post. But hey, I’m busy. The Eucalyptus – AWS announcement last week was really a great case of Much Ado About Nothing. Marten Mickos is a great marketer, and the positioning in this story was almost magical. For a while there it seemed that Amazon had truly anointed Eucalyptus as “the private cloud” for the enterprise. Here is 100% of the content behind this story as far as I can tell: Amazon granted Eucalyptus a license to the AWS API and might provide some technical assistance. That’s it – there is no more.

Seeking Proof – Did Eucalyptus Get Cozy with Amazon?

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 23:06:00 EDT

It was widely reported today that Eucalyptus had struck some kind of deal with Amazon. The details of the deal, unfortunately, have been lacking. There’s no press release on either the AWS or Eucalyptus web sites or that I can find through Google News, PR Newswire, BusinessWire or other sources. None of the articles I have read link to the release. The best they link to is the GigaOm article which mostly references a chat between Om Malik and Marten Mickos.

Talking Cloud in the Enterprise

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 09:00:00 EDT

Despite the fact that cloud is part of the daily conversation in many enterprises, I still find a significant gap in many places in terms of a true understanding of that it means. This is somewhat compounded by the reliance on standard definitions of cloud computing from NIST and other sources. These definitions are helpful in some respects, but they are far more focused on attributes than on business value – and the business value is what is truly needed in the enterprise to break through the barriers to cloud computing.

How Some Journalists Confuse People About Cloud

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:00:00 EST

Simon Wardley and I had a quick exchange about the sloppily written and factually inaccurate writing of Wired’s Jon Stokes. Simon commented about a November post on Wired CloudLine. I’m sorry, but if you’re renting out your cloud, it’s public – so you’re building a public cloud and you better damned well know what you’re getting into. Anybody who has a clue about building clouds knows that there are tremendous differences in terms of requirements and use cases – depending on the cloud, the maturity of your ops team, and a whole bunch of other factors. Yes, you can build a cloud that is dual use, but it’s rare and very difficult to reconcile the differing needs. I know of only one today – at it’s in Asia, not in the U.S.

PaaSing Comments – Data and PaaS

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 06:00:00 EST

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 really starts to take off, we may find that these solutions are sorely lacking.

Cloudy Implications and Recommendations in Megaupload Seizure

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:00:00 EST

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 any large corporations would want to use such a site, but I bet a lot of small businesses did. My focus here is on the ramifications to the enterprise, and how to protect yourself from being impacted by this.

Cloud Computing Opinion: More Froth, But More Clarity Too

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 08:30:00 EDT

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.

Don’t Mention the Cloud

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:08:29 EDT

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Putting Clouds in Perspective – Cloud Redefined

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 09:15:00 EDT

You’d think as we head into the waning months of 2011 that there’d be little left to discuss regarding the definition of cloud IT. Well, not quite yet. Having spent a lot of time with clients working on their cloud strategies and planning, I’ve come to learn that the definition of cloud IT is fundamentally different depending on your perspective. Note that I am using “cloud IT” and not “cloud computing” to make it clear I’m talking only about IT services and not consumer Internet services.

CloudFloor Drives the Cloud To Achieve Business Results

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 23:38:05 EDT

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Dell Joins OpenStack Parade to the Enterprise…

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 12:21:31 EDT

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Citrix + Cloud.com = OpenStack Leadership?

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 09:00:00 EDT

TechCrunch reported today that Citrix has acquired Cloud.com for > $200m. This is a great exit for a very talented team at Cloud.com and I’m not surprised at their success. Cloud.com has had great success in the market, especially in the last 12 months. This is both in the service provider space and for internal private clouds. Great technology, solid execution. Citrix has been a fairly active member in the OpenStack community, most recently with their Olympus Project announcement in May.

The Hybrid Enterprise – Beyond the Cloud

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 08:26:51 EDT

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Forward PaaS: VMware’s Cloud Foundry First Down

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 13:12:42 EDT

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SeaMicro: Atom and the Ants

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 07:00:00 EDT

I predict that significantly more than half of new data center compute capacity deployed in 2016 and beyond will be based on Atoms, ARMs and other ultra-low-power processors. These mighty mites will change much about how application architectures will evolve too. Lastly, I seriously believe that the small, low-power server model will eliminate the use of virtualization in a majority of public cloud capacity by 2018. The impact in the enterprise will be initially less significant, and will take longer to play out, but in the end it will be the same result. So, let’s take a look at this in more detail to see if you agree.

BlueLock Takes an IT-Centric Cloud Approach to Hybrid Cloud

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 22:05:52 EST

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Ready! Fire! Aim!

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 12:56:16 EST

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VCs and Cloud – Are They Leading Us Down the Wrong Path?

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 11:52:56 EST

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BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 12:05:34 EST

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A Vision of the Future Cloud Data Center

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 08:40:00 EST

A new year is often a time for reflection on the past and pondering the future. 2010 was certainly a momentous year for cloud computing. An explosion of tools for creating clouds, a global investment rush by service providers, a Federal “cloud first” policy, and more. But in the words of that famous Bachman Turner Overdrive song — “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”

Cloud Core Principles – Elasticity is NOT #Cloud Computing Response

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 14:57:11 EST

Ok, I know that this is dangerous. Randy is a very smart guy and he has a lot [...]

If You’ve Never Used A Cloud, Can You Call Yourself An Expert?

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 09:50:57 EST

A recurring challenge I have with a lot of enterprise vendor “cloud” solutions I get briefed on is [...]

SQL In the Cloud

Mon, 08 Nov 2010 10:39:29 EST

Despite the NoSQL hype, traditional relational databases are not going away any time soon. In fact, based on continued market evolution and development, SQL is very much alive and doing well. I won't debate the technical merits of SQL vs. NoSQL here, even if I were qualified to do so. Both approaches have their supporters, and both types of technologies can be used to build scalable applications. The simple fact is that a lot of people are still choosing to use MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server and even Oracle to build their SaaS/Web/Social Media applications. When choosing a SQL option for your cloud-based solution, there are typically three approaches as outlined here.

HP Cloud Strategy? No So Much…

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 12:32:45 EDT

At Interop this week I met with Doug Oathout, VP of Converged Infrastructure at HP. It’s often been [...]

Savvis Offers Peek at Enterprise Cloud Future

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 15:51:00 EDT

I was first briefed on the Savvis Symphony VPDC (virtual private data center) back at Cloud Expo NYC in April of this year and had intended to post about it back then, or at least when they went live in July… so much for good intentions… They are starting to market this more heavily now, so perhaps it’s not a bad time to get this done because VPDC has a few innovations that are worth noting.

Fixed Instance Sizes Are Dumb

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 09:57:30 EDT

After my recent post on EC2 Micro instances, I received a great comment from Robert Jenkins over at [...]

CSC Throws off “N-I-H” – Partners with Skytap for Dev/Test Cloud

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 11:44:23 EDT

In a fairly uncharacteristic move, CSC rejected a traditionally strong “not invented here” syndrome and has joined forces with [...]

Micro Instances Do Not a Web Host Make

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 14:58:50 EDT

Amazon’s announcement of Micro Instances this week ist great news for web sites who need a lower-capacity intense [...]

Cloudy View from HostingCon

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 22:48:00 EDT

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 of little guys. Small hosting resellers, guys with a couple thousand feed of space inside a larger data center, etc. A good 40% of the conference content was about cloud. But for people in the cloud business for the past few years, it might have felt a lot like 2007. Lots of very basic information being shared/discussed, and a whole bunch of people who don’t know or don’t want to know. I stopped by the cPanel booth in the expo. cPanel is the #1 hosting control panel for this shared hosting business, with a gazillion hosters using their stuff. I asked one of their exectutives if they were going to make it easy for their customer to move to a cloud model? “Customers are asking us, but then we ask them what they mean by cloud and as soon as they can give us a straight answer maybe we’ll do that,” was his reply. Okay, that’s a failure to lead if I ever saw one.

OpenStack First Reaction – Rackspace Open Sources Their Cloud

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 09:49:00 EDT

[openstack] 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 you please with the code – including commercializing it to a degree (e.g. charge for support). As Krish tweeted to me last night – OpenStack is kind of the Apache of cloud stacks.

The Red Ocean of Cloud Infrastructure Stacks

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 15:51:00 EDT

It seems like every day there’s a new company touting their infrastructure stack. In recent weeks we’ve seen new offerings fromNimbula and Cloud.com. I’m sure I’m missing some, but I show 20 solutions for building clouds below, and I am sure that more are on their way. The market certainly can’t support so many participants! Not for very long anyway. This is the definition of a “red ocean” situation — lots of noise, and lots of blood in the water. I hope you’ll pardon my dubious take, but I can’t possibly understand how most of these will survive. Sure, some will because they are big and others because they are great leaps forward in technology (though I see only a bit of that now). There are three primary markets for stacks: enterprise private clouds, provider public clouds, and public sector clouds.

IT Chargeback Planning – A Critical Success Factor for Enterprise Cloud

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 10:38:38 EDT

“If you don’t know your destination, any road will do.” That little nugget from one of my colleagues [...]

Open Source Cloud Bits

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 18:20:00 EDT

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 my position on open source vs. proprietary source in this aspect of the market: both have a role to play and natively one is not better or more advantaged than the other. However, when you get into the details there are factors that might favor one model over the other in specific cases. I will look at this from the perspective of the service providers and enterprises who use cloud stacks. In a future post I may touch on factors that vendors should when choosing between open source and closed source models.

The Real Cloud Action is Innovation, Not Economics

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 19:51:00 EDT

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 experimentation and new models of delivering capability, thus increasing the chance that true innovation can occur.

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

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 11:53:00 EDT

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 $68.3 billion in 2010…” My primary question is “Hey Gartner, what color is the sky in your world?” Or perhaps it should be “What have you been smoking?”

IT Disintermediation and The Cloud

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 13:59:22 EDT

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 just get rid of them?" Well, no, not exactly. But their jobs are changing in fairly meaningful ways and that will only accelerate as cloud computing penetrates deeper and deeper into the enterprise.

The End of Over-Provisioning

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 15:01:50 EDT

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 true for some of us. That that's a very big and risky assumption.

The End of Over-Provisioning

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 14:13:13 EDT

One part of the debate on cloudonomics that often gets overlooked is the effect of over-provisioning. Many people [...]

The Cloudification of IT

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 12:31:49 EDT

The state of solid matter can be converted to gas or liquid if a catalyst (chemical, heat, etc.) [...]

IT Disintermediation and The Cloud

Tue, 18 May 2010 19:37:28 EDT

On a fairly regular basis I get into a discussion with people that starts something like this: Hey John, [...]

Enterprise Cloud Musings

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:26:50 EDT

The enterprise market is a bit like a a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. On [...]

Once Upon a Cloud

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 09:34:29 EDT

Here is a little story I tweeted last night… ONCE Upon a Cloud, there was a big river that [...]

Markets for Cloud Tools

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 14:02:33 EDT

I often get asked about where cloud tools and technologies are being sold/implemented today. Note that cloud tools [...]

VMware Should Run a Cloud or Stop Charging for the Hypervisor (or both)

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 10:40:25 EDT

I had a number of conversations this past week at CloudConnect in Santa Clara regarding the relative offerings [...]

Protecting Yourself from Cloud Provider & Vendor Roulette

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 08:51:51 EST

David Linthicumwrote a piece today in InfoWorld regarding the coming wave of cloud vendor consolidation. After CA’s acquisition of 3Tera, [...]

Amazon Adds Consistency to SimpleDB

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:56:42 EST

Last week Amazon announced the addition of full database consistency as an option for SimpleDB users. Most of [...]

Skytap Goes Deep in Networks

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 10:00:49 EST

Skytap is known as a cloud dev/test provider today, but they have been seeing more workloads coming on-board [...]

Amazon Named ‘CloudBzz Innovator of the Year’

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 11:45:00 EST

2009 has certainly been a cloudy year. The sheer volume of real innovation somehow makes all of the hype worthwhile. While there were many companies doing interesting and innovative things in the cloud – Microsoft Windows Azure could be a strong 2010 contender – the decision on who wins for 2009 is no contest. Amazon gets the [...]

Amazon Adding Active Directory Support

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:45:00 EST

I was surprised to find an Amazon Web Services booth at the Microsoft PDC yesterday. They had nothing specific to say regarding additional Windows support or capabilities - at least not officially. What I did get was a wink-wink, nudge, nudge when I commented on Azure's integration with Active Directory and other touchpoints. "This is coming soon," I was then told. Then they saw that I had a media badge and that ended the discussion... Looks like the enterprise is the battleground - which was only a matter of time. Following the great enterprise roadmap preview I saw last week at the RightScale user meeting in Santa Clara, this is quickly becoming a great market for business computing.