Cloud Feed

Web X.0

Summary

• Web 1.0 is about 1-way information sharing.
• Web 2.0 is about bi-directional participation and collaboration.
• Web 3.0 is about the semantic web and ubiquitous computing.
• Enterprises always lag behind consumer adoption on all leading web technologies.
• There’s a long overlapping period between each of these phases due to the laggards.

Long Version

Web 1.0 is about information sharing. Web sites are built and information are put up. Usually web 1.0 has the “build it and they will come” type of mentality, and it’s mostly a one way communication. The poster children of Web 1.0 are companies like Yahoo, Ebay and Amazon.

Web 2.0 is about participation and collaboration; it’s about bi-directional communication. Social media such as blogs, wikis, and forums are huge in the Web 2.0 era. Post children of Web 2.0 are Wikipedia, Facebook, and MySpace. Web 2.0 has the “build it and encourage others to come and participate” mentality. The expectation of “they will come” is not as prominent. Most of these sites work hard to create a core community and get others to join.

Notice how both 1.0 and 2.0 are both about users going to these sites. These sites require users to fill in their profiles, browse around and understand what the site is all about. In essence, these site require the users to understand the web and go to the web.

Web 3.0 is going to change that. The notion of Semantic Web, which was first described by Tim-Berners Lee, is about having the web understand its users and go to the users, wherever they are and whatever they are using (Ubiquitous Computing). The web will carry enough meta data so that it’s self-describing. The web will know where its users are (by communicating with the devices that the users are carrying wherever they go.) The web can go to the users and present/share the relevant information and allow the users to collaborate and participate with the web as well as other users.

The technologies behind Web 3.0 are quite long, including different ways to describe the web (RDF, OWL, etc), different ways to connect and locality awareness (cell phone, portal computing devices, etc), cloud or web services (cloud computing, SaaS), etc. The piece that’s not as well understood and developed is the Semantic Web. It will be a while before websites will start describing their information in a structured manner.

Like most trends, leading edge technology will first be used in the consumer space, then slowly migrate to the enterprises. So there’s usually a pretty long overlapping period between the X.0 phases. For example, universities and consumers started building websites way before the enterprises realize the benefit of using the web to communicate. Same as Web 2.0, the collaboration tools such as blogs, wikis, forums, communities are first popularized in the consumer world, and it’s just now that enterprises are starting to adopt them. This enterprise adoption trend is referred to as Enterprise 2.0.

This again will happen with 3.0. The consumer space is now attempting to to do a lot of mobile computing, which is the start of ubiquitous computing. Cloud computing and SaaS have also been more prevalent in the consumer space. For example, Facebook, Google and others have been offering web-based services for sometime now. The enterprise space are just now starting to wake up to it. Some of the key obstacles to enterprise adoption are data governance, SLA and integration issues. However, companies like Salesforce.com are trying to change that.

Cloud Computing in the Enterprise

[ Via @yarapavan ]

Laird OnDemand: Visual Map of the Cloud Computing/SaaS/PaaS Markets: September 2008 Update

Peter’s did it again! Peter has updated his cloud computing taxonomy. Check his site for continual updates as I am sure there will be additions as companies find that they are not on the list.

byteonic.com » The Platform as a Service (PaaS) Landscape, PaaS in the Enterprise

Anand Ganesan from byteonic has written a good post on PaaS: The Platform as a Service (PaaS) Landscape, PaaS in the Enterprise.

Cloud Computing Expo 2009 East Call for Papers Deadline October 15, 2008

The Cloud Computing Expo 2009 East, to be held March 22-24, 2009, in New York City, announces that its Call for Papers is now open. Topics include all aspects of providing or using massively scalable IT-related capabilities as a service using Internet technologies (see suggested topics below).

Merrill Lynch analysts estimate that by 2011 the volume of Cloud Computing market opportunity will amount to $160BN, including $95N in business and productivity apps (e-mail, office, CRM, etc.) and $65BN in online advertising.

Help plant your flag in the fast-expanding business opportunity that is The Cloud: submit your speaking proposal today!

Help with that transformation: submit your speaking proposal today.

Topics will include:

• SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS
• Automation
• Grid Software
• Elastic Computing
• Cloud Databases
• Scalability
• Fabric Computing
• Cloudstorming
• Green IT
• High-Performance Computing
• Service Management
• Web-scale Computing
• Cloud Standards
• Cloud Reliability & Security
• Private Cloud Computing
• Internal Clouds

Google Group Discussion on “Private” Clouds

I asked a totally unrelated question on the Cloud Computing google group a few days ago and triggered a very active discussion on where “private” cloud is an oxymoron or not.

[ Please let me know if I am taking any of the quotes blow out of context. ]

Ben Yamin called “private cloud computing a paradoxical phenomenon” and Ray Nugent called it an “oxymoron.” But even Ray agrees that many of his customers are asking about it,

Correct me if I’m wrong but most, if not all, of what I’m hearing from customers is around how to take AWS like services and tuck them within the four walls of their enterprise to somehow get economies of scale, lower costs and quicker scale/customer service to their constituents. Therein lay the Foggy part…

Rich Wellner agrees that we should “not care so much what things are called as much as what they do,” so he explained that “private” clouds does exist based on the list of attributes he’s compiled:

1) Multiple vendors accessible through open standards and not centrally
administered

2) Non-trivial QOS (see the gmail debate thread)

3) On demand provisioning

4) Virtualization

5) The ability for one company to use anothers resources (e.g. bobco
using ec2)

6) Discoverability across multiple administrative domains (e.g. brokering to multiple cloud vendors)

7) Data storage
Per usage billing

9) Resource metering and basic analytics

10) Access to the data could me bandwidth/latency limitations, security,

11) Compliance – Architecture/implementation, Audit, verification

12) Policy based access – to data, applications and visibility

13) Security not only for data but also for applications

Now here we start to see some things that aren’t applicable to enterprise clouds (i.e. 1, 5, 6). But the bulk of the list still works. And it’s worth noting that EC2 fails on more than three of those things (i.e. 1, 11, 12, 13), but people don’t hesitate to allow them the use of the term cloud.

I think Jim Starkey from NimbusDB summed it up best,

As I understand it, if you use Amazon EC2, it is cloud computing. But if Amazon itself uses EC2, it’s only fog computing. Or maybe (shudder) internal cloud computing. This is, of course, utter nonsense.

Laurent Therond also brought up an interesting point,

Amazon and Google would love for external entities to cofinance their clouds, because they own the infrastructure *and* they actually use it to run their own affairs. On the other hand, if you were to offer them to migrate their mission critical systems to some other Cloud Computing vendor (let’s assume you could find one up to the task), they would laugh at you loudly.

I am quite happy to see this level of discussion on this. My stand on this is quite clear and explained here.

The Rise of Cloud Privatization

The world of clouds these days is full of definitions and counter-definitions. There are many posts that try to define the concept of cloud computing; many that try to distinguish utility computing, grid computing and cloud computing; many that try to define public vs private clouds; and many that dismisses the notion of private clouds.

Jonh Foley, in his article “The Rise Of Enterprise-Class Cloud Computing“, referred to private cloud as an oxymoron,

That’s an oxymoron since cloud computing, by definition, happens outside of the corporate data center, but it’s the technology that’s important here, not the semantics.

But by whose definition? The industry as a whole haven’t even been able to nail down a concrete definition of cloud computing. Given that there’s no concrete definition, then by definition, private cloud is not an oxymoron. But I do agree with John, let’s focus on the technology and not the semantics.

Geva Perry, chief marketing officer at GigaSpace Technologies, did just that. By focusing on the technology and architectural aspects of cloud computing, he wrote in a GigaOM blog post,

Cloud computing is a broader concept than utility computing and relates to the underlying architecture in which the services are designed. It may be applied equally to utility services and internal corporate data centers, as George Gilder reported in a story for Wired Magazine titled The Information Factories.

Cloud Attributes

But instead of everyone trying to create their own definition of clouds, let’s look at the list of attributes that clouds have and compare public and private clouds.

• Elasticity: The ability to dynamically provision (expand) or de-provision (shrink) the computing capacity as needed.
• Utility: The ability to be charged by the amount of resources used. Great examples would include Amazon Web Services’ charge model. In an enterprise setting, sometimes business units are charged by the internal IT groups for the resources they requested. The utility model would allow IT groups to perform chargebacks in a similar model to AWS.
• Scalability: The ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner, or to be readily enlarged. For example, it can refer to the capability of a system to increase total throughput under an increased load when resources (typically hardware) are added. [ via wikipedia ]
• Reliability & Availability: No failed whale! The cloud infrastructure and platforms must be reliable and available to the applications that are using them. There’s probably a lot of technology involved here to make this happen. For example, the ability to transparently migrate a virtual server when the running node has failed.
• Manageability: The ability to effectively manage (start/stop/migrate/expand/shrink/etc) the different server and application instances in the cloud.
• Security: The ability to secure the data and access to the cloud. Public clouds still have a trust issue with many of the enterprise customers, which is why the ? is there.
• Performance: The ability to execute and complete tasks within the acceptable timeframe (defined by the SLA).
• API: I consider this to be a desired attribute. This refers to the ability of doing resource management via some type of documented programming interface.
• Virtualization: Applications are decoupled from the underlying hardware. Multiple applications can run on one computer (virtualization a la VMWare) or multiple computers can be used to run one application (grid computing). [ via GigaOM ]
• Multi-Tenancy: The ability to house multiple customers using the same infrastructure and still be able to segregate the data.
• SLA-Driven: The system is dynamically managed by service-level agreements that define policies such as how quickly responses to requests need to be delivered. If the system is experiencing peaks in load, it will create additional instances of the application on more servers in order to comply with the committed service levels — even at the expense of a low-priority application. [ via GigaOM ]
• Support: The ability to smack someone upside the head when something fails.

Attributes	Public	Private
Elasticity	✓	✓
Utility	✓	✓
Scalability	✓	✓
Reliability & Availability	✓	✓
Security	?	✓
Performance	✓	✓
API	✓	✓
Virtualization	✓	✓
Multi-Tenant	✓	✓
SLA-Driven	?	✓
24×7 Support	✓	✓

So if we are looking purely from a technology perspective, private clouds can absolutely exist. In fact, given the questions for the public cloud, enterprises are more likely to experiment with private clouds for mission critical applications.

Market and Vendors

According to Merrill Lynch, the public and private cloud infrastructure, platform, applications and advertising together will be a $160 billion market by 2011, or roughly 12% of the total worldwide software market.

The total $160bn addressable market opportunity includes $95billion in
business and productivity apps, and another $65 billion in online advertising.

IBM and Sun have comprehensive solutions for ‘internal Clouds’. Dell targets large scale data centers, and HP provides ‘everything as a service’, making their solutions attractive for ‘external Clouds’.

So who are some of the private cloud infrastructure/platform startups that are taking advantage of this $160 billion market? (Feel free to leave a comment if I missed anyone.)

Company	Product
3Tera	AppLogic
Arjuna	Agility
Cassatt	Active Response?
Elastra	Elastra Cloud Server
Enomaly	Enomalism
GigaSpaces	XAP, EDG, and Community Edition

Private Cloud Links

Adil Mohammed’s “Startups In The Cloud”

[via James Governor’s Monkchips]

Adil Mohammed, co-founder of entrip, with his take on why the cloud is perfect for startups. This was a presentation he gave at CloudCamp in London.

The Rise of Cloud Platforms and Why the OS Doesn’t Matter

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is one of the buzzwords that’s mentioned often in the cloud computing space. I’ve written a blog post describing IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. In short, PaaS is a platform for delivering applications, similar to a pre-built system with hardware, OS and application stack all built in. In the PaaS case, this system is hosted. All you have to do is “upload” the application code and it should take care of the executing and scaling of it.

A quick survey of the land (by no means comprehensive, I am also including ONLY application platforms, not service-specific platforms such as DabbleDB) shows that there’s a plethora of PaaS players out there, each with their own target audience. Some provide more of a raw execution platform, some provide a full suite of tools for creating applications online. Unfortunately, most of these vendor approaches will lock you into their proprietary platform. If you ever want to move to another platform, you have to rewrite at least a portion of code using the new vendor’s API. Phil Wainewright has written about this in his blog post “A plethora of PaaS options.”

Company	Application Type
Bungee Labs	Web applications
Coghead	Web applications
Google App Engine	Python web applications
LongJump	Business applications
NetSuite NS-BOS	Business applications
Ning	Social networking applications
Joyent	Web applications
Mosso	Web applications
Rollbase	Business applications
Salesforce Force.com	Business applications

In one of the CloudCamp SF sessions in July, one of the guys from Microsoft asked whether the OS matters in cloud computing. My answer to that was it depends on the type of application. If it’s a web centric application that has a web front end, uses a database for storage, and doesn’t use any of the low level file IO, then really there’s no need to know what the OS is. In that case, the OS doesn’t matter.

All these vendors have targeted applications that are delivered over the web, and almost all of the vendors listed above try to abstract the OS from the developers so that they don’t have to worry about the underlying infrastructure. As Mosso’s slogan claims, “Code, load and go.”

Even though cloud computing is still in its infancy; however, as it matures, cloud providers will move upmarket to provide additional business value to customers. We will see a rise of cloud application platforms appear on the horizon. Specifically, we will see more domain-specific cloud platforms for different verticals or application types. For example, I can imagine there are developers working on a MMORPG cloud platform (maybe it’s here already if you consider Metaplace to be that) that will provide execution and management (of virtual goods, zones, accounts) for MMO developers; or a data analytics cloud platform that provides all the basic OLAP functions.

Will BGP and DNS Exploits Affect the Future of Cloud Computing?

Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.

Recently we seem to be hearing more and more security exploits aimed at core Internet protocols. In July, Dan Kaminsky revealed a critical exploit aimed at the DNS protocol.

A couple of days ago “[t]wo security researchers have demonstrated a new technique to stealthily intercept internet traffic on a scale previously presumed to be unavailable to anyone outside of intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency.” See Revealed: The Internet’s Biggest Security Hole | Threat Level from Wired.com for more detailed reporting.

According to Wired.com,

The tactic exploits the internet routing protocol BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) to let an attacker surreptitiously monitor unencrypted internet traffic anywhere in the world, and even modify it before it reaches its destination.”

. . .

Anyone with a BGP router (ISPs, large corporations or anyone with space at a carrier hotel) could intercept data headed to a target IP address or group of addresses. The attack intercepts only traffic headed to target addresses, not from them, and it can’t always vacuum in traffic within a network — say, from one AT&T customer to another.

The clever trip the researchers have done is to

use a method called AS path prepending that causes a select number of BGP routers to reject their deceptive advertisement. They then use these ASes to forward the stolen data to its rightful recipients.

All these core protocol exploits have direct impact to cloud computing as the nature of cloud computing is that computing will happen out there on the Internet somewhere. According to the article,

The method conceivably could be used for corporate espionage, nation-state spying or even by intelligence agencies looking to mine internet data without needing the cooperation of ISPs.