Kicking off my series of videos from last week’s Cloud Expo in Santa Clara, here is a chat I had with Oren Teich, of Heroku. Heroku, if you’re not familiar is a 2-yr old Platform as-a-Service company targeting Ruby developers. Oren recently joined Heroku as their head of product management and had the following to say:
Some of the topics Oren tackles:
Where the name “Heroku” comes from and why they were going for a Japanese sounding name.
Why did they choose Ruby and why did they go with a cloud-based plaform?
How Heroku is similar/different from Google App Engine and Engine Yard.
The majority of the folks who have created the 39,000+ apps on the site are hobbists. That being said, the folks who pay their bills are those who are creating social media apps for platforms like Facebook, Twitter and the iPhone.
How Heroku makes their money: they charge as you scale and they charge for add-ons.
What they plan to concentrate on in the year ahead
Jimmy Pike is the director of systems architecture for the Data Center Solutions group here at Dell and self-proclaimed “head geek.” Using a tool case with its insides stripped out, part of an old inbox and a bunch of off the shelf components he has created the world’s first portable “data center.” (All for the princely sum of ~$2,000)
This former toolkit now holds:
Two dual-socket servers featuring 2.5GHz Intel processors
One server running Windows ’03 acting as the DHCP and domain server and the other running Red Hat linux.
Last but not least in my series of video’s from last month’s Cloud World/Open Source World I present to you Ken Oestreich, VP of Product marketing at Egenera. I grabbed some time with Ken to learn about Engenera, the cloud and how they’re working with Dell.
Some of the topics that Ken tackles:
While a hypervisor abstracts software, Egenera’s PAN manager abstracts the “plumbing” e.g. NIC cards, switches, host bus adaptor cards etc.
PAN manager allows you to consolidate networks, fail-over entire machines and, in the case of disaster recovery, recover and reproduce entire compute environments.
Egenera is working with Dell in the form of the Dell PAN system to provide agility in your infrastructure.
This Infrastructure as a Service system can be used inside or outside your firewall.
What developments Ken is most excited about in the upcoming year.
I’m getting down to the end of the videos I recorded last month at Cloud World/Open Source World and I’ve saved some of the best for last. My penultimate interview is with Michael Crandell, CEO of Right Scale.
Right Scale, based in sunny Santa Barbara California, makes a cloud management platform that provides greater control over the cloud and makes it easy for companies to begin to migrate applications to the cloud or start building new ones there. See what Michael has to say…
Some of the stuff Michael discusses:
Right Scale focuses on three things: 1) Automation, 2) Providing a library of cloud ready solutions, 3) doing all this in an open and transparent way that allows portability among cloud platforms.
How Right Scale came to be. Their founder was teaching a class at UCSB about how to build an ecommerce site. Amazon granted him some free compute time to use in his class. He realized he needed a framework for managing and monitoring the classes usage, he also realized there was a business to built around this idea…
Where Right Scale will be putting its efforts in the up coming year:
Supporting more cloud platforms as the come online
Increasing their partner program and their cloud-ready solutions
Increasing support for enterprise level editions and features e.g. security and compliance, user control, billing, metering…
The CEO and founder of GoGrid, John Keagy, made an interesting assertion at Cloud World/Open Source World: over the next decade, the IT economy will shrink from $1.5 trillion to $500 billion. I thought this was an interesting statement so I followed up with him after his talk and we sat down for a quick interview:
Some of the things John talks about:
GoGrid plays in the Infrastructure on demand space and has been doing so since 2002.
They work with partners in the layers above infrastructure and don’t have plans to venture north.
The IT economy shrinkage will be driven by automation and reduced capex (commodity hardware is a big component of this)
Right now its hardly a competitive market in the IaaS space (“its GoGrid and a bookstore”) so you can expect to see prices drop as the competition heats up.
If you’re not doing your test and development and QA in the cloud, your not engaging in best practices.
Reductive Labs, the company behind Puppet, recently received $2 million in funding. Puppet, a framework for automating system administration across the network at scale, allows an admin to build and configure a passel of servers in a period of hours rather than months.
Earlier this month at Cloud World/Open Source World I sat down with Luke Kanies of Reductive Labs to learn more about Puppet, who uses it and what they plan to do with all that money.
Some of the stuff Luke talks about:
In the cloud you can turn on 100s or 1000s of servers at the click of a mouse, but what happens when you want to configure them?
Users include Red Hat, Sun, Dell, Rackspace and Google. Google manages their entire corporate infrastructure with Puppet.
No GUI for you! Puppet has its own simple language that you use to program your infrastructure and then Puppet runs it across your entire infrastructure. The language is based on Perl + Ruby + Nagios.
A good portion on the $2 million will be spent on building some GUI tools (along with a little sales and marketing)
Puppet is 100% open source and based on Ruby. There are no commercial features (yet).
Puppet has a pretty vibrant community: 1,200 – 1,400 on the user list along with what could be the largest system focused IRC channel.
At Cloud World/Open Source World earlier this month I grabbed some time with Forrester’s “Mr. Cloud” James Staten. I wanted to get his take on Cloud Computing and what was hot and what is not. Here is the result.
Some of the things James talks about:
How the conversation about cloud has changed over the last year.
He spends a lot of time telling people what the cloud is not.
The three things they’ve learned (coming soon to Forrester report near you):
First thing to do in the cloud is test and development
Organizations can take short term web promotions and marketing efforts and drop them into the cloud (witness Wendy’s 99c promotion)
Put apps that are triggered by revenue into the cloud
Rather that “Public vs Private” clouds, Forrester segments it into “internal vs. hosted vs. public
Cloud is not an all or nothing proposition, it’s another tool in the toolkit.
I first met Chander Kant, CEO of open source cloud back provider Zmanda, last year at the MySQL conference. At that time we did an audio interview. Just like Jonathan, this time around I caught him on “film.”
Earlier this month at Cloud World/Open World I bumped into Jonathan Bryce one of the two founders of the cloud platform formerly known as “Mosso” (now known as Rackspace Cloud).
Last year when I interviewed Jonathan, I did an audio podcast. This time around I was armed with my Flip Mino and caught it all on video for the little(r) screen.
Some of the topics Jonathan addresses:
When Rackspace funded employees Jonathan and Todd to go off and start their cloud venture 4 years ago, why didn’t they brand it “Rackspace?”
Why did they recently decide to roll Mosso back into the mothership and rebrand it?
The progression of in-house -> colocation -> managed hosting -> cloud.
The three pieces of Rackspace Cloud: Cloud Servers & Cloud Files (infrastructure as a service) and Cloud Sites (platform as a service with the option of using either the LAMP or .NET stack).
Which offering is getting the most traction.
Why their customer Fresh Books went with Cloud Files.
James Urquhart of Cisco and author of “The Wisdom of Clouds” blog on Cnet, gave a talk last week at Cloud World entitled, “Virtualization to Cloud.” I wanted to capture some of the topics he talked about and learn a bit more so I grabbed him for a podcast after he got off stage. Here is the result…
Some of the topics James tackles:
Whereas four months ago the question was “What is cloud” the conversation has recently shifted to “how can I replicate some of the success stories that I’ve heard about?”
One effect of the cloud is that has greatly lowered the VC capital that start-ups require to get set up and going.
Internal IT needs to realize they are no longer delivering a product but are delivering a service. To be of value to the business they don’t have to wire servers, they can help them through the process of getting the right compute power for each app.
Regulatory and industry standards will be what dicates the speed of the evolution of the cloud, not technology.
On the first day of Open Source World/Cloud World/Etc World I attended Brian Aker’s talk entitled “Drizzle, Rethinking MySQL for the Web.” For those not in the know, Drizzle is a reworking of the MySQL database to slim it down and make it more appropriate for web-infrastructure and cloud computing . I caught up with Brian after his talk to learn a little bit more about Drizzle, where its come from and where its going.
Some of the topics that Brian tackles:
Looking at what customer needs were not being addressed by MySQL.
Stripping stuff out of MySQL and setting up Drizzle as a microkernel design that modules can be added to.
One of the main goals was to allow greater community involvement in the development (currently Sun folks only make up 6-7% of those making contributions).
Is Drizzle production ready?
What cloud bits have been contributed to the project?
A little over two weeks ago the latest Blueprint update, the Spring ’09 release, was loosed upon the world. We took the opportunity of the launch, which included launches for our other products and services, to overhaul our web pages. In the specific case of Blueprint we created new pages for Overview, Features, Resources and Success Stories.
You gotta see it to believe it
For the top of the Overview and Features pages we created the following video that presents a 3 minute and 18 second overview of Blueprint. (I recommend you click the full screen button so you can see the details). Check it out and let me know what you think 🙂
Last year I did a podcast with Mosso (“The Rackspace Cloud”) co-founder Jonathan Bryce. Last Saturday at Cloud Camp Austin I caught up with the other co-counder of Mosso, Todd Morey to get his side of the story.
Some of the topics Todd tackles:
How Todd and Jonathan formed a good partnership, Todd on UI and design and Jonathan on the development side.
Starting Mosso out of a desire to have place where they could run their code without having to worry about the infrastructure.
Mosso’s integration back into Rackspace
Will Mosso bring some of its hipness to Rackspace? (editorial note: looking at the Rackspace’s site it looks like Mosso has already influenced it for the better)
At Austin Cloud Camp on Saturday I ran into Ubuntu linux developer and Canonical employee, Dustin Kirkland. Dustin is on the server developer team at Canonical and, as he explains it, focuses on various aspects of virtualization, the plumbing layer below cloud computing. I grabbed Dustin for a few minutes and chatted with him about last week’s release and what he’s been working on.
Next month I’ll be heading over to Houston to attend APQC’s knowledge management conference. One of the talks I’m interested in checking out will be given by Bryant Clevenger, the global leader for IBM GBS’s knowledge sharing strategy.
On the KMedge blog, Bryant explains what they’ve been up to:
At IBM, leveraging knowledge has always been an important part of our business. Last year, we undertook a massive overhaul of the technology and approach we use for knowledge management, moving from a centrally managed, linear, taxonomy- and repository-based system to one that leverages the best of Web 2.0, including social software, user participation, and key market-driven concepts like sponsored links.
As a promo for his talk, Bryant put together the following video, complete with a rockin’ BTO instrumental soundtrack :).
Some of the topics the video addresses:
How do you harness the expertise and leverage the knowledge that is spread across 387,000 people located in 170 countries?
1 in 4 workers has been with their current employer for less than 12 months.
People are using web 2.0 in their daily lives, they expect the same tools in the workplace.
The IBM employee knowledge portal allows users to
Search across multiple content repositories
Create social tags, peer ratings and tag content
Locate experts and contact them.
The portal surfaces: 1) the highest rated internal content, 2) Leadership priorities and 3 external competitor info.
Bryant’s “modest” vision for the portal: Unprecedented access to content and experts will shorten the sales cycle and will expand the reach of information…removing country and organization barriers and enabling the globally integrated enterprise.
Goodness for any size
Whether this project actually leads to the “enabling of the globally integrated enterprise” or not I think this effort will create considerable value. I also believe that you don’t have to be a huge multinational like IBM to benefit from the availability of Web 2.0-based tools in the workplace. Web 2.0 tools are built around the principles of linking, sharing, participation and collaboration — valuable elements for a company of any size.
Don’t touch that dial
BTW, If you are interested increasing linking, sharing, participation and collaboration in your organization you’ll want to check out our next Blueprint release, coming soon to a browser near you. Stay tuned 🙂
One of the more interesting people I met last week at Web 2.0 was Gaurav Mishra who is visiting the US from India as a Yahoo! Fellow in Residence. As a Yahoo! Fellow, Gaurav is doing research and teaching at Georgetown University in the field of social media. I was able to grab some of his time and learn what he’s up to.
To watch in High Quality: after clicking play, click the “HQ” button that will appear on the bottom.
Some of the topics that Gaurav tackles:
Looking at social media from an international perspective and examining how businesses, civil society and governments make use of it.
The seminar Gaurav teaches is one of the 2 or 3 social media courses that Georgetown offers.
What Gaurav was doing in India before he got the fellowship.
Social media and activism
The analysis and measurement of social media and how to tie it back to business processes, civil society goals or government objectives.
Last week Rackspace announced the appointment of Lew Moorman as president of Rackspace’s Cloud Computing Efforts. As luck would have it, Lew was attending Web 2.0 and I was able to grab a few minutes of his time to shoot a video. Not only that but as added bonus, recent Rackspace conscriptRobert Scoble joined the conversation as well.
To watch in High Quality: after clicking play, click the “HQ” button that will appear on the bottom.
Some of the topics Lew and Robert tackle:
What does it mean to be president of Rackspace’s computing efforts?
What’s “building 43” about and what is Robert’s mission at Rackspace?
How did Rackspace decide on hiring Robert and Rocky?
Rackspace added to the NASDAQ index (even though they trade on the NYSE)
Robert asks Lew about Slicehost and Rackspace’s plans there.
Lew out at Web 2.0 meeting with a lot of developers and looking to help them sell their tools to Rackspace customers.
At SXSW interactive I came across the booth for the cloud-based app Animoto. I was intrigued since I have seen a couple of Amazon Web Services presentations and both held up Animoto as a great example of an application that would have been impossible to deliver any other way.
Animoto, which creates videos for consumers and corporations, relies on a huge amount of processing power and has had gigantic spikes in usage (e.g. going from 70 servers to 8,500 servers in 5 days). You can say they put the “elastic” in Amazon’s “Elastic Compute Cloud.”
Here is an interview I did with Animoto co-founder and President Jason Hsiao.
To watch in High Quality: after clicking play, click the “HQ” button that will appear on the bottom.
Some of the things Jason talks about:
Total number of servers owned by Animoto = 0
The most expensive piece of equipment in the office is the espresso machine.
How the enterprise side of the business has taken off.
Why they’re based in New York and where the founders came from.
How their extreme processor intensiveness allows them to work extra closely with Amazon.
See how he deftly avoids the question about what feature he is looking forward to seeing from Amazon, they must be working on something 😉
Charlene was at SXSW as a speaker and I caught up with her not long after she finished her session in the main ballroom. You can check out the slide deck she presented below. You can also access the Twitter feed and a summary of the presentation from Charlene’s post. [BTW don’t miss the blooper reel at the bottom]
To watch in High Quality: after clicking play, click the “HQ” button that will appear on the bottom.
Some of the topics Charlene covers:
Groundswell: How company leaders can leverage social networks rather than fear them
Which companies are making the best use of social networks
What social tools Charlene uses and her use of twitter (how it got her quoted in the Wallstreet Journal)
What Charlene is most excited about in the coming year with regards to social networks
The Blooper Reel
You may have noticed that there a few cuts in the video above. This is because they were shutting down the show floor and kept announcing it over the intercom. Check out the blooper reel below for proof — and these aren’t even all the interruptions. (Unfortunately I didn’t capture the part when the Elvis impersonator started singing.)
To watch in High Quality: after clicking play, click the “HQ” button that will appear on the bottom.
I just got back from SXSWi and Bar Camp. I will post pictures from there as well as interviews with Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group and Jason Hsiao of Animoto in the next few days. Before then I wanted to post this one minute walk-thru of Bar Camp that I shot near the end of the event. Heck, watch this and you’ll feel like you’re actually there ;-).
To watch in High Quality: after clicking play, click the “HQ” button that will appear on the bottom.
Posted by Barton George 
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