“Build It Because They Are There” – The Real Meaning of Cloud Connect – It’s About Getting Apps Up and Running

As I sit in the CloudConnect Event at the computer history museum (twitter stream here), I was wondering about how to talk about cloud computing and the meaning of all this.  It became clear to me when I saw the Paul Buchheit post today on “Communicating with Code”.

He writes (talking about his experience with the development of Gmail..)…“From that day until launch, every new feature went live immediately, and most new ideas were implemented as soon as possible. This resulted in a lot of churn — we re-wrote the frontend about six times and the backend three times by launch — but it meant that we had direct experience with all of the features. A lot of features seemed like great ideas, until we tried them. Other things seemed like they would be big problems or very confusing, but once they were in we forgot all about the theoretical problems.”….”The great thing about this process was that I didn’t need to sell anyone on my ideas. I would just write the code, release the feature, and watch the response. Usually, everyone (including me) would end up hating whatever it was (especially my ideas), but we always learned something from the experience, and we were able to quickly move on to other ideas.”

What we have here is a real time web waiting for real time code.  All of the discussion about cloud computing is really about rapid development,provisioning of resources..etc. – in the end a better product for users (hopefully).  Paul talks about this in his post -Gmail turned out pretty good.

Cloud computing allows developers the ability to get “stuff” up fast.  Speed and feedback is critical to success and more important than having some “hardened app” that no one wants.  This is only way to develop in the web today.  Success is about speed and product acceptance is dependent on that speed which drives relevance.  Build a great product and it will work.

The motto “build it they will come” is irrelevant.  Instead the motto today is “Build it because they are there already”.  Having a robust, easy to use, easy to provision, and reliable cloud and services will flow to users for critical feedback  The rest will take of itself.  The good apps and services will “come to us” – Welcome to Infrastructure 2.0.

discussion on twitter via tag #cloudconnect

Recession Induced Network Innovation – Everyone is Freaking Out

Recession = Innovation; George Colony over at Forrester is saying it will be different, but people are still freaking out in Silicon Valley. I just got off the phone with someone in NY and they are freaking out all over the place in the Big Apple.  I’m not afraid of this market and other entrepreneurs are doing stuff as well. Entrepreneurs are blind to the recession but it doesn’t matter they don’t have the money only the ideas.  It will be a tough road ahead.

I think it is only a matter of time before ALL of the leading networking players start talking about the (strategic importance of the) network as a way to succeed in an uncertain economic climate. Last week, in “Cloud Computing, Virtualization and IT Diseconomies” I talked about the increasingly intense pressures already building on static network infrastructure, and the underlying need for more intelligence and automation.

These intense pressures are setting the stage for the next technology boom, by creating gaps between what networks can do today and what they’ll need to do tomorrow. I was amazed at how quickly the concept of Infrastructure2.0 spread, including an interesting discussion at F5 Network’s pace-setting DevCentral blog.

These pressures are coming from increasing rates of change, especially in larger networks supporting more devices and branches and processes, as well as with the introduction of consolidation, virtualization and cloud computing initiatives. These new initiatives are introducing even higher rates of change and making it clear that a static network will no longer be a strategic network.

The rest of the article is here at Greg Ness’ personal blog

Thanks Greg for the deep analysis.

Cloud Doesn’t Work Well With Infrastructure Improvements – Expect Cisco to Follow Microsoft

Steve Ballmer has been rabid about the cloud lately. Here is a detailed interview with Ballmer on the cloud direction.

Everyone is talking about applications and OSs and mobility and IP everywhere… yet everyone assumes that the infrastructure will continue to simply take on unprecedented scale, complexity and availability challenges without a rethink.

Come on people the cloud is real and it needs to develop more. It’s still unstable. Expect the traditional network infrastructure players to follow suit – mainly Cisco. This might be a problem for Cisco to go after these adjacent markets and deviate off their core business. Why? Because Cisco has to grow and this is an area that Cisco could do well in.

The pundits need to get their heads out of the clouds and on to the infrastructure that will support all of this. Cloud will have to drive a new integration of management into infrastructure… yet only Microsoft, Google, Amazon etc are really talking about this… the networking players have been relatively silent. This is collaboration and virtualization and about every other initiative over the last ten years on steroids.

Expect the big player on the infrastructure side to get into this big time. Word has it that Cisco is going to get into compute side. If Cisco jumps into the compute cloud expect them to alienate their OEMs – hello Juniper this is an opportunity for you.

“Cloud Bandwagon” is the Hottest Trend in Tech – Wait That’s Web 2.0

I love how the bandwagon of cloud computing it hitting on all time high. Everyone is about the cloud even AT&T.  Today AT&T announced it is joining the Cloud Bandwangon. AT&T said Tuesday that it will offer cloud computing services via a new service dubbed AT&T Synaptic Hosting. AT&T is just the latest company to join the cloud computing game. Everyone from traditional IT giants like HP and IBM to Amazon and Google have cloud computing services catering to companies ranging from enterprise giants to startups.

The category of the “Cloud” is the new branding or categorically sector for all the big infrastructure players. Cloud computing is the new category that we’ll all keep score on who is the best vendor.

Why is cloud computing such a hit for these companies? It’s because it spans multiple sectors – enterprise datacenter, web services, consumer, virtualization, security. It’s sort of a convergence between intranets, DMZ, extranet, and outside web all in one.

It’s a land grab and yet it’s so unknown. It’s a marketing dream for a big vendor to say ‘we own the cloud’.

My take: it can’t be owned. Lock-in is harder in today climate. Old lock in tactics don’t work in today’s infrastructure.

What are the new lock-in tactics? We’ll be covering all the cloud computing trends on BroadDev.com (my new blog on cloud computing among other topics).

Right now Google, VMWare, and Amazon are putting on a clinic in the cloud area. Everyone else is an also ran.