Barton's Blog

Today mark’s the release of Ubuntu 9.04, nee “Jaunty Jackalope,” and the debut of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud powered by Eucalyptus.

To get some insight into the release and what it means, I grabbed some time with Simon Wardley of Canonical.  Simon, who joined Canonical near the end of last year, is the person tasked with looking into cloud computing for the company in order to figure out what it means for them, what it means for the industry and ultimately, determining what Canonical should be doing about this change that’s occurring in our industry.

My interview with Simon (16:14)  Listen (Mp3) Listen (ogg)

Simon Wardley, setting the controls for the heart of the cloud.

Some of the topics Simon tackles:

• How did Simon get his present job and what was he doing before?
• When looking at adopting cloud computing three risks need to be evaluated
  • The risk of doing nothing (which should be balanced against the next two)
  • Transitional risk
  • Out sourcing risks
• Cloud standards will emerge through the marketplace rather than via committee
• Why Ubuntu went with Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus.
• Today’s release is a technical preview, “a starting point in a journey.”
• For the “Karmic Koala” release due in October, they will be focusing on persistency, policies and portability.  They are also working with a bunch of management tool providers  to allow users a choice of how they want to manage their environment.
• Whats coming next year in the cloud space:
  • A hybrid model: Private clouds that allow bursting between them and public clouds.
  • Portability between providers will become a big issue.
  • A lot of standardization at the infrastructure layer of the stack
  • An explosion of innovation
  • The IT department will face real governance issues
  • Open source will continue to be critically important

Pau for now…

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 at 7:19 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.