I am at the Cloud Computing Expo in NYC this week...it's great to attend a conference where (1) i am not presenting and (2) I have a lot to learn about the subject matter. I'm going to post brief summaries of the sessions that I attend with an eye on how it relates to enterprise software.
Session One
I arrived half way through and passed the other meeting rooms which were sparsely attended but the session I wanted to go to was filled to overflowing. It was a session on "how to move legacy apps into the cloud". What does that tell us? Seems like people might be thinking about reengineering their apps for the cloud but in the interim we all want to get our current code lines up into the ether. Not too much to report because I missed the meat of the session. The bit I heard was a discussion about the 'best' hypervisors and how to select a vendor; annoyed that I missed the beginning of the session. Ho hum.
Session Two - War in the Clouds - Terry Woloszyn.
This was all about security and the cloud. This was interesting primarily because he took a very different approach than I'd expected. I'll summarize "if you put all of your eggs in someone else's basket then make sure that basket is secured". He wasn't talking so much about how to secure a cloud but more about understanding that a single data breach into a cloud provider can affect dozens/hundreds of dependent systems. Common sense but worth reminding people I guess.
Terry seemed fairly certain that the serious 'bad guys' were going to be attracted to the cloud because their effort to breach a cloud provider can yield much higher rewards – killing multiple pigs with one bird.
Session Three - Sam Machiz from Voxel - Why a "cloud only" strategy does not make sense.
Nice opening point - moving to the cloud is NOT a business goal...it is a deployment topology!! Your real goal MIGHT be satisfied by moving to the goal but your real goal is more likely to be cost savings, efficiency, speed to deployment, etc.
Another interesting point that hit home with my past life in compliance was what Sam called “VM sprawl”...who is governing where your VMs are and who has access to them? Who is auditing your VMs and making sure that they are being turned off and secured when necessary? Each VM is a potential silo which can contain data, metadata and processes that can represent a compliance headache.
Sam seems to be an advocate of using cloud solutions to supplement your existing on-premise systems using a hybrid deployment topology. He thinks that this works especially well for medium and large companies with existing investments in infrastructure. He also mentioned that if you are scared to put certain data in the cloud then deploy it locally but make it available to the cloud.
Session Four - Why Windows Will Not Be the Desktop of Cloud Computing by Rick German from Stoneware
Great session title if you want to get people in the room and stir up some Redmond controversy!
Rick relished the “Cloud computing is similar to mainframe computing” argument. We are bringing all of the compute power back from distributed computing into centralized computing...regardless of whether centralization is to a 3rd party datacenter or your own. Rick questioned whether cloud computing is just marketing's answer to what to call the return to the mainframe model ;-)
He jumped into what we at EMC all "choice computing". Choice computing means that people want to use their choice of device (like my personal iPad that I am writing this on) and not the device that the company wants me to use. Delivering a Windows desktop solution for every problem isn't going to be the answer unless we virtualized Windows to every device which we will not be doing. Most of us would rather use a native app than a virtualized environment. Oh, BTW I'm not going to let IT manage the device that I purchased...the cloud needs to consider all of these factors.
His proposed answer...browser based solution. Why? The browser is pretty much the only app that exists on every single device in every single form factor. I guess that he is saying that a browser is like a hypervisor for choice devices. If you program to a browser then you are abstracted from the underlying implementations.
Seems like this wasn't a session about why Windows is NOT appropriate specifically but why we need a common deployment platform and the browser is the closest that we have so far.
One interesting thing he talked about was that systems in the future should make decisions on how to deliver an app depending on device, context, and user and then deliver the optimal service. What this means is that if you want to launch Excel the system should look at your device, bandwidth, user type, content type, etc. and launch either local Excel, web Excel, a virtualized Excel app or whatever makes the most sense. I liked this idea.
Session five - Evaluating Enterprise Clouds.
A bit of a marketing pitch for Terramark and very infrastructure focused but he did say one thing when comparing data centers to planes planes that resonated - he said that he likes to see that his plane to have "a redundant array of jet engines" before he boards. You know that the room is full of geeks when that gets the biggest laugh of the day!
Last session of the day (starting at 7:10) - How are Collaboration tools and Cloud trends coming together? Vipul Aggarwal from iGATE Patni.
Started with a way too detailed explanation of what collaboration is. I'd have to say that the speaker could have assumed that anyone attending the session would understand the basics of collaboration but maybe I'm just getting tired. Nope, after 15 minutes we are still hearing about different types of collaborative tools and reasons. More than half way in and we've learned nothing about “Cloud AND Collaboration”. The expo opens in 11 minutes and there's food there...I try not to walk out of sessions part way through but I'm probably going to have to...bye.
Conclusions
There's a lot of public bravado right now in the world about cloud computing. When you sit down in a room with a few thousand cloud people you realize that we are at the very beginning of a revolution. Getting apps to run efficiently in a cloud environment really is subtly but importantly different to just running in the Internet or on a mainframe. We are taking apps that were designed to run on individual servers but we are now co-locating multiple instances of these apps in a single environment.
I'll post more information tomorrow...really quite psyched.
Was the Angry Birds reference yours or Terry's??!
Posted by: Turnerkid | 06/07/2011 at 06:08 AM
Mine...you like that? I stole it from my son, not sure from whom he stole it.
Posted by: Andrew Chapman | 06/08/2011 at 08:48 PM