County Arcade, Leeds

The global CloudCamp movement continues to grow, with events over the next few weeks in Denmark, Germany, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and across the United States. And now, I’m very pleased to announce that the English city of Leeds is joining the party.

CloudCamp events have been taking place in the UK for years, and the London gatherings have picked up real momentum. Outside London, we’ve seen a few events in Warrington, Newcastle, and Edinburgh. We believe that the time is now right for something more regular; a place in which the cloud-building, cloud-using, cloud-interested and cloud-exploring can come together for talk, beer, pizza and more… without having to jump on a train to the deep south.

CloudCamps are interesting events, with a real emphasis on informality. I’ve attended several around the world, and am always impressed by the energy in the room, and by the welcome extended to newcomers. As the main CloudCamp site describes,

“CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged you to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.”

Jeremy Jarvis at Brightbox and Karyn Fleeting and Joel Turner at Tinderbox Media have been driving this event forward, and they’ve invited me on board to help out. I also get to be MC on the night.

We’ve got speakers and sponsors committed, with more of both to come. If you think you should be one of those doing the speaking or the sponsoring, do let us know.

So, if you like talking Cloud, if your boss has ordered you to learn Cloud, or if you’re just keen to understand a little more about what this Cloud thing can do for you, stick the evening of 14 June in your diary, sign up (for free) on Eventbrite, and come along to the Hilton DoubleTree in Leeds for an evening of fun, learning, beer, and more.

See you there!

Image of the County Arcade in Leeds by Flickr user Francisco Perez

Image: NASA

Amazon’s globe-encircling cloud infrastructure is compelling to many. From Virginia to California, from Ireland to Singapore, and from Japan to Brazil; wherever you find yourself there’s a local instance of the same familiar set of services. And, in all likelihood, Australia will soon be added to the list. For those primarily interested in just serving both Europe and the US, the list of options grows to include Rackspace, GoGrid, CloudSigma and a few others. And yet, despite the buying power and increasing ubiquity of these larger players, there seems to be plenty of space left for smaller entrants. For prospective customers only concerned with a single country or region, for example, the choices are almost too many to count, and choosing between them becomes a complex and multi-faceted affair.

Take Brightbox, for example. As my family know all too well, those pesky timezones mean that many of my evenings are punctuated with calls to or from the States, where so much of the innovation in this sector continues to take root and grow. Either that, or I’m creeping out of a sleeping house to catch early trains for the 150 mile journey south to London. It was therefore refreshing to talk to someone in this industry whose offices are only 50 miles away in the UK city of Leeds.

Established back in 2005 as a Ruby shop capable of hosting apps on dedicated hardware, Brightbox has evolved to place increasing emphasis upon the provision of infrastructure. In 2010, the company began to seriously explore the possibility of offering a generic cloud infrastructure environment. This was in the days before OpenStack, but Eucalyptus existed and was attracting interest. But according to Brightbox co-founder Jeremy Jarvis, 2010′s Eucalyptus lacked some key resilience features (load balancing, multi-data centre capabilities, etc) that the team believed were critical… so they built their own system from the ground up. And, at the end of September last year, Brightbox Cloud entered general availability.

The Brightbox cloud operates out of two UK data centres, with planning underway for a third. Both data centres are now owned and operated by Telecity, which acquired the two independent data centre providers with whom Brightbox had launched. Brightbox owns the racks and (Dell) hardware, and also ensures provision of redundant network access into the data centres. Customers are predominantly drawn from across Europe, but Jarvis says he’s seeing some customers coming from as far away as Australia, New Zealand, and Brazil. The company sees its potential growth through eventual expansion to data centres on the European mainland, but Jarvis says he’s “much less interested in setting up yet another” North American operation. The company is profitable, employs ten staff, and is seeing steady growth in usage.

Brightbox does not (yet) offer a web management console, but Jarvis describes this as a conscious decision and also something of an asset. The company has instead focused their attention upon crafting a rich, capable and intuitive API (and associated command-line interface). According to Jarvis, the developers that the company tends to target have responded favourably to the API, describing it as “nice” and “more consistent” than the various APIs offered by Amazon’s growing suite of services.

A focus upon developers (and the growing Dev/Ops movement) was also a strategic decision, and Jarvis cites examples in which ‘mere developers’ have proved instrumental in securing significant contracts with Brightbox from their employers. Corporate purchasing processes may, finally, be evolving. Despite the success of Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings such as Heroku and EngineYard, Jarvis also suggests that Brightbox is seeing growing evidence that developers are seeking more fine-grained control over infrastructure than PaaS typically offers. A platform abstracts the underlying complexity of infrastructure, making it easier for application builders to focus upon creating the specific services they wish to provide. But abstractions typically require compromises, with configuration decisions being made for everyone on the platform on the basis of ‘normal’ requirements. For developers with non-normal requirements (and they may actually be the majority of users), IaaS is more likely to offer the fine-grained control that they need.

But the cloud infrastructure world has come a long way since Brightbox began planning their product two years ago. OpenStack has arrived, and (despite a growing body of nay-sayers) is credible. Rackspace, HP, and others are on the cusp of delivering real clouds to real customers on the back of its codeline. Eucalyptus appears to have turned a corner, and pulled back from a brink that I (and others) saw them teetering on the edge of. Canonical’s marriage of Ubuntu to OpenStack is now just one of several ways to get the same cloud code, capabilities and apis onto machines running inside your own data centre. Amazon just keeps on doing what Amazon does, incrementally adding features, cutting prices, and becoming ever-harder to not choose.

In that world, surely a little cloud provider operating their own bespoke solution from the wrong end of the Leeds-London railway line, in a country on the wrong side of both the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean has no hope? Surely they should just pack up shop, and either adopt OpenStack/Eucalyptus fast… or find a new line of work?

Jeremy Jarvis disagrees, vehemently. And he’s not alone. Look at Edinburgh’s Flexiant, Glasgow’s SymetriQ, and a whole host of other companies that have built their own solutions from nothing. Others, of course, have recognised the value in taking OpenStack, Eucalyptus, Microsoft’s Windows Azure, and similarly established technologies, and making them their own. Look at Eduserv’s Swindon data centre, or the hosted desktops from East Yorkshire’s own GoCloud.

So how can Brightbox (or Flexiant, or SymetriQ, or any of the other non-conformers) compete? How, indeed, can they survive? Jarvis suggests that “Buy British” continues to carry weight here. Even without raising the scary (and often, actually, wholly irrelevant) spectre of PATRIOT Act-powered snooping, a significant proportion of UK (or European) companies like the idea of buying services from UK (or European) suppliers. They like that the documentation is spelled correctly. They like that telephone support is (more or less) in their timezone. They like that the development team shows up at local events, and that it’s a person buying the drinks in the bar, rather than the disembodied marketing budget of some far-off corporation.

Purchasing decisions for something like cloud infrastructure are complicated. Often, they’re probably quite illogical. Price isn’t always the deciding factor (and even if it were, smaller providers like Brightbox aren’t ridiculously expensive in comparison to their larger competitors). Having been the friendly face at a local developer event might swing that big contract. Or having a “nice” API. Or implementing niche features in firewalls, or networking, or port forwarding might each grab the attention — and loyalty — of specific sectors of the long tail. Tesco might sell ‘everything’ to ‘everyone,’ but we still have room in our lives for the SPAR corner shop, and for the upscale deli with the nice cakes.

The same’s true in the cloud, although I can’t help feeling that we’re going to see quite a rapid decline in entirely new cloud infrastructures as the next generation of niche cloud boutiques take OpenStack or Eucalyptus and mould them to their requirements. They probably won’t be making those decisions because (like we Clouderati) they agonise endlessly about interoperability or portability or the de facto standard of the Amazon Web Services stack. For most of their SME customers, those things simply don’t matter. Instead, they’ll be adopting OpenStack or Eucalyptus because the grunt work (and the marketing) has been done. It simply costs less to take something off the shelf than to develop it yourself from scratch. But for companies like Brightbox, where that investment has already been made? Well, for them there may still be plenty of prospective customers out there.

Related articles

• Eucalyptus grabs $30M from IVP to push the open-source private cloud forward (venturebeat.com)
• Announcing Brightbox Cloud – the UK’s first true IaaS platform! (brightbox.co.uk)
• Platform as a service ready to rev up, says Gartner (zdnet.com)
• Hosting providers aim to challenge cloud leaders (zdnet.com)
• Joyent Brings Its Public Cloud To Europe (techweekeurope.co.uk)
• Rackspace launches OpenStack-powered next-gen public cloud (venturebeat.com)
• Ubuntu Cloud Portal: Brightbox 12.04 daily images now available, discounts for testers and Ubuntu members (cloud.ubuntu.com)
• Ubuntu Linux heads to the clouds (zdnet.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Last week, open standards body OASIS unveiled yet another shiny new standards effort. The OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) Technical Committee hopes to make it “easier to deploy cloud applications without vendor lock-in,” and to support moving from one cloud to another. The usual suspects — the likes of IBM, CA, and Cisco — are on board. The usual holdouts — Google and Amazon, of course — are not. So what is TOSCA trying to achieve? How does it fit alongside all the dead, dying, or ponderously deliberating cloud standardisation efforts that have gone before? And without the giants of the cloud, is there really any point bothering?

As I’ve probably mentioned before, involvement in various national and international standardisation efforts played a big part in my early career. I went to the working group meetings in odd (but often beautiful) locations. I participated in the conference calls. I engaged on the mailing lists. I drafted and edited and reviewed the documents. I completely buy into the idea that there is a place for foundational standards, developed through consensus-building and maintained for the long haul by organisations that stand apart from the vested interests and their competing agendas.

I also believe that there’s a time and a place for these standardisation efforts. Do it too soon, and we end up ossifying something that needs to be in a state of flux. When you don’t know what the best way to prepare a meal is, it’s too soon to print the recipe book. We need to try different approaches, and we need to be able to throw away the attempts that didn’t work out. More worryingly, standardisation efforts can be used for political ends. They can be little more than a rod with which to beat the (usually dominant) competition. At best a distraction, or a talking shop for those unwilling or unable to just get on and do something. At worst, one amongst a toolchest of dirty tricks in a broader war for hearts, minds, and — ultimately — wallets.

The cloud market is a fascinating place. There are leaders and there are followers. There is innovation, and there is competition. There is agreement, and there is debate. For all the rhetoric, and all the posturing, we really don’t yet know the right answer to many of the cloud’s questions.

Maybe TOSCA and the Open Data Center Alliance and IEEE and the rest are — still — too early, and should be content to let the market thrash out a few more of these issues before anyone tries to write anything down? And when it is time to write some stuff down, let’s make sure we focus on specific, finite, tangible, atomic tasks rather than “the cloud.” As Dave Roberts commented in regard to TOSCA’s scope;

“That goal is so large, that I think it’s probably unbounded. When problems get unbounded, the best you can ever hope to achieve is to solve a large enough subset of the problem that the solution is still interesting. If you can’t achieve that, people ignore the solution because it fundamentally doesn’t help them. There is always an ‘interesting’ part of the problem space that they have to solve a different way, and that undercuts the use of the partial ‘solution.’”

And as for Tosca? Things didn’t end well for her, did they? Might TOSCA’s fate, too, be sealed?

Related articles

• Tech giants back standard for cloud portability – InfoWorld (infoworld.com)
• Proposed spec aims to nix cloud lock-in (gigaom.com)
• On TOSCA and Cloud Standards. MyPOV (diversity.net.nz)

San Jose-based Cirtas emerged from stealth back in September 2010 with a $10 Million (€7.86 Million then) Series A funding round, their novel Bluejet hardware appliance, and the backing of Amazon.

Today they’re back, with a new CEO and another $22.5 Million (€16.6 Million) in the bank. The Series A investors — New Enterprise Associates, Lightspeed Venture Partners and, unusually, Amazon — are joined by Shasta Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners for a Series B round that positions the company for some rapid growth.

Cirtas’ Bluejet Cloud Storage Controller is a hardware appliance, deployed in the data centres of medium and large enterprises to simplify the task of integrating existing on-premise Tier 2 and Tier 3 storage with disparate Cloud-based solutions such as Amazon’s S3, EMC Atmos, Iron Mountain and AT&T’s Synaptic Storage as a Service.

Talking ahead of today’s announcements, new CEO Gary Messiana suggested that Cirtas’ decision to deliver a hardware appliance rather than a software-based solution reflects their deep understanding of both their customers and the sales channel. Messiana is not the first to suggest that buyers of enterprise storage are a conservative bunch, and he’s certainly not criticising that conservatism; when business continuity depends upon the decisions you make and the systems you buy, you’re hardly going to take unnecessary risks, now are you? A piece of physical hardware that you can see, touch (and even hug) delivers an element of familiarity that appears to appeal to enterprise-class customers taking the first steps to leverage Cloud-based storage within their existing solutions portfolio. With Bluejet, Messiana suggests, control continues to reside inside the data centre. The Cloud provider(s) to which the appliance directs data are simply (dumb?) utilities upon which the enterprise may choose to draw in a manner abstracted by Cirtas’ technology. A hardware solution also suits the channel-based (rather than direct sales) model by which these companies tend to buy. As Messiana notes,

“[much of] the money changes hands in the channel… and [channel partners] know how to sell tin.”

Formerly an entrepreneur in residence at Series B participant Bessemer, Messiana talks persuasively about the clarity of proposition and go to market strategy that drew him to Cirtas. Drawing upon pre-Bessemer experiences as CEO of traffic optimising Netli (acquired by Akamai in 2007), Messiana argues that the shift off-premise makes expertise in moving data just as critical as the data storage skills of incumbents. Might Akamai, Limelight and their ilk make inroads into this market, at the expense of EMC, HDS, 3Par et al, I wonder?

In storage as in so much else, big incumbent enterprises are very different from smaller or younger companies. Whilst startups and SMEs might be quick to embrace entirely virtual solutions — often starting in the Cloud rather than migrating to it from elsewhere — the ‘multi-billion dollar corporations’ served by Cirtas will almost inevitably follow a very different path. Across Pharma, HR, manufacturing, publishing, insurance and finance, Messiana reports that customers with market caps of $500 Million – $10 Billion and more are flocking to the company.

So why take more VC money, so soon, and dilute the company? Messiana insists that “plenty” of the initial $10 Million is still in the bank, and that VCs were falling over one another in their enthusiasm to invest. The deal was apparently closed rapidly, with an aggressive valuation that sees “minimal dilution” whilst giving Messiana the cash to expand sales, support, and other areas of the company.

Cirtas would appear to be off to a good start, but it would be dangerous to be complacent. The company is not alone in seeing hardware as a way to encourage enterprises toward the Cloud, and there are plenty of software-based cloud storage gateways waiting for the opportunity to demonstrate their capabilities as those conservative CIOs become more willing to trust the Cloud. And then there’s Amazon. What might they do next?

Related articles

• Nasuni grabs cloud development cash (go.theregister.com)
• Enterprise Poll: Do You Use Cloud Storage? (readwriteweb.com)
• F5 Friday: F5 ARX Cloud Extender Opens Cloud Storage (devcentral.f5.com)
• The $20 Million Club: 10 Well-Funded Cloud Startups (nytimes.com)

I’ve been a fan of Om Malik‘s boutique analyst site, GigaOM Pro, pretty much from the outset, and happily renew my subscription each year. The site covers a wide range of industry topics, and those Quarterly Wrap-ups are worth the fee all by themselves.

I’ve written a few reports for them in the past, but was delighted when Mike Wolf got in touch to see if I fancied trying my hand at curation on their Infrastructure/Cloud channel.

So next week (from 31 January) I’m going to be gathering and commenting upon links from around the web, writing a daily ‘Today in Infrastructure,’ and finishing off with a Weekly Update. If you’re not (yet!) a subscriber, why not sign up for a free seven day trial and join me for the start of my little adventure?

If there’s something you think I should be covering, do let me know.

Related articles

• Free GigaOM Pro Webinar: The Scalable Cloud (gigaom.com)
• GigaOm raises $2.5M, claims 10,000 Pro subscribers (venturebeat.com)
• The Cloud has a place, even inside heavily regulated industries (cloudofdata.com)
• Talking Scalable Clouds with GigaOM Pro and Limelight Networks (cloudofdata.com)
• GigaOM Structure 2011 (datacenterknowledge.com)
• Join GigaOM at Big Data on March 23 in New York City (gigaom.com)

I don’t think I’ve ever really been convinced by the argument that everything will end up in the data centres of Amazon.

The straightforward provision of commodity Cloud Computing is an important – and growing – area, and one that will continue to expand as interfaces become simpler, FUD is challenged, and prices maintain their relentless march towards the bottom. Everyone has something they could usefully, sensibly, and cost-effectively run in a commodity Cloud such as those offered by Amazon, Rackspace, Flexiant, and others. In this space, basic stability, security and reliability combine with a compelling – and diminishing – pricing proposition to create commodity services targeted squarely to lowest common denominator functionality. Here, market forces may (inevitably?) lead to an eventual reduction in the number of providers. Cost, although not the only consideration, is both important and compelling. Although markets like competition, there may even be a single winner here, one day.

Layered all around the basic, routine, grunt-work computation that these commodity public clouds handle so well, many organisations find themselves having to cope with a wide range of other use cases and data sets. Some require specialist hardware (like the GPUs that Amazon has recently begun selling access to). Some demand particular regulatory and legislative hoops to be jumped through. Some have quirky requirements around latency in data transfer or speed of in-CPU processing. Some have lots of data, and issues with regard to getting the stuff from one location to another with a sensible balance between transfer cost and time.

All of these are certainly capable of being addressed in the Cloud, but the economics and the business rationale begin to shift. For the data owner, cost may no longer be quite so significant a factor. Reliability may matter more, or speed, or the audit trail. For the Cloud provider, these requirements no longer look like the lowest common denominator. It’s not cost-effective to provide these capabilities to everyone and still keep the price low. It becomes more sensible to segment, to divide, and to create bespoke offerings of various kinds. Some of these services require such specific things in terms of network topology, physical building layout, and staff expertise that it may even become counter-productive to have these services in the same building as the commodity Cloud. Here, there’s plenty of room for new entrants, plenty of scope for competition, and plenty of opportunity to differentiate in terms of price, location, support, and a host of other factors. This segment of the Cloud is only just getting started.

In these contexts, we see compelling arguments made for on-premise private clouds, off-premise private clouds, hybrid clouds, community clouds and the rest. Some of the arguments made in favour of private and hybrid certainly are part of the FUD we see in this space, but beneath the noise, the security scares, and the vested interests of SysAdmins and sellers of data centre components, there lies a grain of truth. Not everything is most sensibly run on a cheap VM, rented from Amazon (or Rackspace, or whoever) with your credit card, and physically located half way round the planet.

Unfortunately, it can be difficult to make sensible decisions about which type of cloud works best in each situation, and large swathes of the market are doing everything in their power to add to the confusion.

Having accepted that the basic offering from a public cloud provider is not the solution for my particular requirements, where do I turn next?

Do I listen to the (convincing) pitch from a vendor of ‘community cloud’ solutions for my domain? If I’m in Healthcare, they come with HIPAA and European Data Protection Directive, and all sorts of other accreditations. For dealing with sensitive patient data, this may be just what I need… but does the wily salesman also persuade me to run staff email and the hospital volleyball club website on this over-specified (and expensive) infrastructure?

Do I listen to the (convincing) pitch from a vendor of virtualisation software? If I’ve got a reasonably sized data centre with some life left in it, I may see the value of virtualising all of that expensive hardware, and running current applications in house more efficiently. But instead of gradually reducing my in-house costs, do I continue to add more machines as current ones reach end of life, or as new requirements come along?

Do I listen to the (convincing) pitch from my co-location facility, which happily sells me a ‘private cloud’ that may fail to deliver some of the economies of scale so central to the main Cloud proposition?

Do I listen to the horror stories, stick my head in the sand, and simply keep ordering servers until every single one of my competitors undercuts my costs and I go out of business?

These, and more, are certainly possible. But let’s return to that UK project I mentioned right at the start.

Flexible Services for the Support of Research (FleSSR) is

“a new cloud pilot project looking at utilising hybrid private-public IaaS cloud infrastructure to provide computational and data services to the academic research community. The project is a collaboration between the Oxford e-Research Center, IT Service @ University or Reading, e-Science Centre @ STFC, Eduserv, EoverI, Eucalyptus INC and Canonical Ltd.”

The ten month project is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), an organisation that supports the innovative use of IT across UK universities.

Now, to a degree, the project’s mindset must be influenced by its partners. IT staff at Reading and STFC are incumbents with turf to protect (or new vistas to discover, map, and claim). Eduserv has a new data centre that they’d like to fill with willing clients. It would be easy to be cynical, but knowing some of the people involved, I see no real reason to be. It is perfectly reasonable to suggest that a ‘community’ the size of UK Higher Education would realise value in replicating less (not nothing) at every university campus across the country, and bringing much of that together in some sort of Cloud. That Cloud might use public infrastructure, or it might be served up from an organisation such as Eduserv, which is known to the community, aware of the community’s requirements, quirks and foibles, and (importantly) not-for profit (and therefore cheaper?).

Personally, I’d always rather presumed that an organisation like Eduserv (or JISC itself) would act on behalf of the community to procure a competitive price on access to the resources of Amazon, Rackspace, or one of the others. I’m not convinced that most UK research computation needs any sort of special treatment that couldn’t be met from Amazon’s Dublin data centre… unless the community itself can somehow beat – and continue to beat – Amazon on price. Somewhat surprisingly, that’s exactly what some calculations in two posts by Eduserv’s Andy Powell suggest could happen. By including network costs and other charges over and above the basic storage cost, Andy finds Amazon, Rackspace and Dropbox to be more expensive than anticipated, and posits that Eduserv (connected to every UK university free of charge via JISC’s high speed JANET service, and constrained in the ways it can generate profit from services sold to universities by its charitable status) might actually work out cheaper.

There’s a lot of work to do in terms of fleshing out the assumptions behind some of Andy’s figures, but the whole industry certainly benefits when people conduct exercises like these out in the open, for all to see. If Andy has made mistakes, the vendors should be quick to jump in and correct them. If his assumptions miss the mark, public debate can redress the balance.

The Cloud is not all about price. But more transparency around the true cost of computing in the Cloud – and in your data centre – means that we can all make more informed decisions.

Thanks for sharing, Andy – and hopefully readers will be willing and able to look over your calculations and share their own views.

Note: this post was conceived and written in the United Kingdom. By reading this post you agree to comply with UK usage, and will henceforth pronounce the word ‘niche’ from the title as ‘neesh,’ not ‘nitch.’ Or maybe not.

Related articles

• Rackspace launches managed cloud services (zdnet.com)
• Are hybrid clouds the path to cloud-computing nirvana? (venturebeat.com)
• We’ll Take Care of Your Cloud, While You Manage Your Business (rackspacecloud.com)
• Trust Is Key For Cloud Success And What Can We Do About It? (cloudave.com)

The OpenStack activity was unveiled by Rackspace, NASA, and their partners back in July, and is on track to deliver functional initial releases in the next few weeks. We discuss the relationship between OpenStack’s deliverables and earlier developments from Rackspace and NASA’s Nebula project, and begin to explore the implications of an Open Source Cloud Computing stack for the wider industry.

This podcast was recorded on Friday 10 September, 2010.

During our conversation we referred to the following resources;

• Amazon
• Amazon EC2
• Amazon S3
• Apache license
• Citrix
• Cloud.com
• Dell
• GoGrid
• HP (and my podcast with Russ Daniels)
• IBM (and my podcasts with Kristof Kloeckner and Ric Telford)
• KVM
• Linux
• Microsoft (and my podcast with Amitabh Srivastava)
• mySQL
• NASA
• NASA Nebula (and my article for GigaOM Pro)
• OpenStack
• OpenStack code launchpad
• OpenStack design conference, November 2010
• Oracle
• Rackspace (and my podcast with Lew Moorman)
• Rackspace CloudFiles
• VirtualBox
• Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, discussing ‘false Clouds’ at GigaOM’s Structure conference
• XenServer

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• OpenStack sets some Texas-sized deadlines (zdnet.com)
• OpenStack: Rackspace and NASA Nebula Join Forces for Open Cloud Ecosystem (readwriteweb.com)
• NASA gives OpenStack instant credibility (zdnet.com)
• Impact of OpenStack Project Goes Beyond the Cloud Industry Leaders (readwriteweb.com)
• Space IT, the final frontier (radar.oreilly.com)
• What’s next for OpenStack’s cloud efforts (news.cnet.com)
• Rackspace Announces Open Source Cloud Platform (informationweek.com)

When I was a child, I wanted to be a spaceman. No great surprise there, perhaps, and also no great surprise that I — like so many others — never got to achieve that dream.

Still, when the opportunity presented itself to write a space-y piece as my latest contribution over on GigaOM Pro, I jumped at it.

It was fascinating to hear about the very different efforts at the European Space Agency and NASA to harness Cloud Computing… and it brought back some of that childhood excitement in the process.

Thanks to William O’Mullane at ESA and Chris Kemp at NASA Ames for their time and insight.

And if a slot opens up on the next non-robot mission, you know where to reach me…

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• NASA’s Nebula: The Cloud in a Container (datacenterknowledge.com)
• To Space and Beyond: The Rise of Research-driven Cloud Computing (gigaom.com)
• Cassini Shows Saturnian Roller Derby, Strange Weather (spacefellowship.com)
• Ames expects Obama budget will mean growth (insidehpc.com)

Twitter is aflutter once again this morning, this time over a Wall Street Journal suggestion that ‘IBM in talks to buy Sun.’ I am not able to comment on the veracity of the rumour itself, but it’s clear that Sun needs to do something in order to strengthen its position in a competitive market. Selling to IBM is certainly one route, but an easier one might be the provision of a more complete Sun-badged proposition.

Elsewhere on WSJ.com this morning, in news that seems extremely unlikely to be unconnected, Don Clark reports on Sun’s

“plans to offer its own cloud-style services. Sun also plans to offer software, as well as hardware, to other companies that want to build clouds.”

Alongside competitive enterprise server hardware and Sun’s widely used stable of open source software (Solaris, Java, MySQL, OpenOffice, etc), this latest announcement of ‘Sun Cloud Storage’ (equivalent to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, S3) and ‘Sun Cloud Compute’ (equivalent to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2) should make Sun a serious player in the Cloud Computing space in a way that their abortive network.com never really did.

So why is anyone discussing either a desire on Sun’s part to sell, or a desire on IBM’s part to consider buying?

I’ve greatly enjoyed the insights of Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, especially as enunciated most recently on his blog in two videos discussing community adoption of Sun’s open source software and the commercial models Sun deploys to monetise that community. Despite Jonathan’s arguments, though, it seems to me that Sun lacks a fundamental piece of the whole; an effective and highly visible professional services arm. IBM has this. HP, with the purchase of EDS, has this. Accenture and gang are this, but nothing makes them choose to use or recommend Sun over its competitors today.

As Jonathan discusses in the first of the videos I pointed to (YouTube version embedded below, in two parts), Sun has been successful in encouraging use and innovation around a suite of open source operating systems, tools and applications.

Indeed, it was little more than a year ago that the company announced plans to spend some $800 million in acquiring European open source web database company MySQL. The problem is that these solutions are all freely downloadable from the Web, and the inevitable professional services and consultancy work associated with enterprise delivery — which could generate so much revenue — goes to far more companies than just Sun.

Alongside the software, Sun has a competitive range of hardware offerings in the enterprise space, and sells these in competition with IBM, HP, Dell and the rest.

By omitting a compelling and enveloping professional services proposition, Sun damages its own ability to capitalise upon its software and hardware efforts. Potential customers download Sun software, and then run it on anything; Sun gets a very small slice of the hardware sales. Sun isn’t doing badly at selling hardware, but maybe a more rounded services proposition would enable them to do better, despite Jonathan’s points in the commercial innovation video.

With more emphasis on offering a comprehensive package of solutions — whilst not removing choice and the vibrant open source community of which Jonathan speaks — might Sun not be a more obvious choice for customers in need of services and support?

An acquisition might, as Larry Dignan writes, make sense. But there’s plenty of life left in a standalone Sun, too… if it can monetise more of those downloading free software or steer more of those who ‘just need a server’ towards one with a Sun badge on the front. Professional Services are the road to both.

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• Cisco’s Data Center Play Reinvents The Server (gigaom.com)
• Sun takes another swing at cloud computing (infoworld.com)
• Sun CEO: Open source = free advertising (news.cnet.com)
• Sun Microsystem Business Revenues (Latest Discovery) (it-sideways.com)
• Schwartz: Not worried about Sun’s future (infoworld.com)

In conversation with RightScale CEO Michael Crandell yesterday it would appear that he, at least, sees little need to join this scramble upward.

Show notes for this podcast are available on Talis‘ Nodalities blog.

For those with absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, it’s worth taking a moment to step back and describe this Cloud Computing stack. At its simplest (and this is quite complex and descriptive enough for almost every real-world conversation, thank you very much), the stack can simply be characterised as Applications (or Software), which sit atop Platforms, which sit atop Infrastructure. I have lifted four slides from a recent presentation, to graphically illustrate the stack and to show some of the players found at each layer.

Each layer of the stack is extremely dependent upon the one below, and there is a tendency for the lower levels to be perceived as more of a commodity or utility. As such, pricing tends to be highly competitive and margins on individual transactions are (often) vanishingly small, requiring successful players to operate at scale in order to effectively generate revenue.

Assuming these presumptions to be true, it’s easy to see why those operating at and near the Infrastructure layer might wish to progress upward to a space where there is less direct competition and far more opportunity to charge premium prices.

As Michael and I discussed in our podcast ‘basic’ Infrastructure providers such as Amazon, GoGrid, Rackspace and others are increasingly seeking to enrich their own offerings, adding dashboard and management functionality that was previously the preserve of value-adding third parties such as Michael’s company.

Faced with pricing pressure from direct competitors and potential feature creep from below, it’s certainly easy to believe the truism with which this post began.

Have a listen, though, and hear a rather different view of the space from Michael… who seems perfectly happy where he is in the stack.

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