We just finished the first 2 hours of the public cloud day and it's time for a 15 minute break. There were 10 different speakers who threw a lot of information at us.
There were quick presentation by 4 different public cloud providers -- Amazon's AWS, CloudOps, VMware's Cloud Foundry, Red Hat's OpenShift and Joyent. Amazon talked about their reliability, which was a little ironic given the problems they had a couple of weeks ago. Cloud Froundry and OpenShift are currently in beta and free. That hasn't stopped some companies from running production services on them.
The other sessions dealt with the economics of cloud computing and why CFOs are so interested in them. Joe Weinman of HP argued that clouds are not less expensive in unit cost, but can be less expensive in total costs. He used the analogy of hiring a taxi vs. buying a car. It expensive to use a taxi, but if you are traveling at a conference or only need a car occasionally, it may make sense. For small companies, clouds can make economic sense due to the startup costs of running a data center. For large companies with variable demand, it can make sense to deal with highs and lows of demand.
The wins with cloud computing come from the agility, flexibility and redundancy that they provide. Companies can spin up the servers needed for a short-term marketing efforts without capital expenses.
Has anything been said about cloud security or the weakness thereof? It's a fairly hot topic in the credit card processing world.
ReplyDeleteThere has been some discussion of security, but I wouldn't say it was as hot a topic as some others. The only specific mention was about vulnerabilities that could allow someone to "hop" from one cloud instance to another. I'll have to check my notes on whether that actually happened or was only identified as a problem. There may be more discussion on this topic today.
ReplyDeleteDid VMWare discuss their recent outage?
ReplyDeletehttp://support.cloudfoundry.com/entries/20067876-analysis-of-april-25-and-26-2011-downtime
No they didn't. They were talking about Cloud Foundry, which they pitched as open source and still in beta.
ReplyDelete