Comments on: When Is the Right Time to Launch Your Own Cloud?

By: Sun Sees Fragmented Cloud Market - GigaOM

Sun Sees Fragmented Cloud Market - GigaOM — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 03:00:39 +0000

[...] vendor believes that there will be multiple clouds tailored to specific industries, and that more than one or two vendors will provide the underlying cloud computing infrastructure. Executives dodged questions as to [...]

By: Network Management Links 2008-05-16 « Network Observations

Network Management Links 2008-05-16 « Network Observations — Fri, 16 May 2008 17:08:43 +0000

[...] When Is the Right Time to Launch Your Own Cloud? – So I’m probably more of the mainstream and less a part of the cutting-edge crowd, but the term cloud computing was new to me. Anyway, found this article on GigaOm speculating on the business and technical evolution of cloud computing very interesting. [...]

By: Virtually Speaking mobile edition

Virtually Speaking mobile edition — Wed, 14 May 2008 10:54:27 +0000

[...] recently read the post, When Is the Right Time to Launch Your Own Cloud? and thought Alistair Croll was on to something. We’re all hearing quite a bit of media chatter [...]

By: Kapan cloud computing jadi tren di Indonesia? : Geek Building The Bridge Part 2

Kapan cloud computing jadi tren di Indonesia? : Geek Building The Bridge Part 2 — Mon, 12 May 2008 01:25:25 +0000

[...] Tentang tren layanan cloud yang saya baca di GigaOm. Jika anda telah membaca url terkait GigaOm (When Is the Right Time to Launch Your Own Cloud?) maka anda akan tahu bahwa belakangan ini banyak pihak yang meluncurkan layanan berbasis [...]

By: Ideas: Social Compile Cloud (cont.) : Geek Building The Bridge Part 2

Ideas: Social Compile Cloud (cont.) : Geek Building The Bridge Part 2 — Sat, 10 May 2008 14:12:15 +0000

[...] mengawali penjelajahan saya atas Web 2.0. Hari ini GigaOm is back in my heart. Post-nya tentang tren layanan cloud menggelitik otak saya dan akhirnya ide SCC mendapat bahan [...]

By: JonK

JonK — Fri, 09 May 2008 18:02:47 +0000

“It was twenty years ago today…”

Has everyone forgotten the Unix Wars already? Go Google them, and then brace yourselves for round 2.0, where once again the difference in semantics between the English word “standards” and the technology industry’s interpretation of same gimps thousands of innocent developers.

Anyone who even *dares* to mention POSIX will feel the sharp end of my boot…

By: tech pr

tech pr — Fri, 09 May 2008 16:26:45 +0000

IMHO, most effective strategy to be adopted by small players is specialization. To the end user, clouds give infinitely scalable bandwidth, computing power and virtualized operating system. But spcialisation plays a key role in differentiating your service. Someone building a cloud entirely for java based applications can have edge over plain vanilla cloud providers running VMWare or XEN. Some may even resell smaller portion of larger cloud as their own, just like resellers in webhosting business.

By: Wes Felter

Wes Felter — Fri, 09 May 2008 16:23:25 +0000

Alstair, this article suggests that people should buy software like 3Tera to manage their own clouds, and I’m saying that once your cloud gets large you’ll be paying a *lot* of money to 3Tera – maybe more than it would cost to do it yourself.

By: Alistair Croll

Alistair Croll — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:48:47 +0000

@vijay: Yes, as best I could with a show of hands. They seemed to feel that Amazon has 2 years’ experience with the problem of running things, which gave them the upper hand. Not sure why they ignored Live and Hotmail though…

@friarminor: I’ve actually been chatting with friends about the idea of “open service” versus open source — a loose federation of services that keep the for-pay ones honest. Openoffice limits the maximum amount Microsoft can charge for a word processor; why shouldn’t a set of RESTful APIs and hosted platforms, built on space computing cycles from willing participants, do the same for hosting?

@Wes: Software costs are IMHO immaterial when you consider that most of the platforms are wrought from open stuff anyway. Not sure license fees are entirely relevant here, unless you’re talking about enterprise applications that have a per-CPU cost (in which case, you may want to consider a new license.) As you point out, this isn’t the case for for-profit licenses like MS. AMZN not only has custom kernel support, they’re also getting lots of pressure to put MS kernels on EC2 — something that the audience felt was the top feature needed.

By: James

James — Fri, 09 May 2008 08:35:36 +0000

Wes, they may not be buying in licensed software, but all four you mention will be building their own to some extent – and seeking to recoup those costs from their customers. The economies of scale you mention will bring the costs down, but the need to support different customers with different scenarios will inflate them again; if you have simple or special requirements, particularly if you have a big system anyway, you may well come out ahead by doing the same thing for yourself. Obviously Amazon, Google, Sun and MS all thought it worthwhile to build their own, and I’m sure many others have as well: why did Google build their own rather than buy into Amazon’s?

By: Wes Felter

Wes Felter — Fri, 09 May 2008 03:35:01 +0000

Amazon, Google, Sun, and MS probably pay no license fees for their cloud infrastructure and they will also have large economies of scale. Given these facts, I doubt it is possible to be cost-competitive with the big guys while using proprietary management software.

By: friarminor

friarminor — Fri, 09 May 2008 00:41:40 +0000

Uhmm, I’d like to see a couple of major ‘clouds’ condense and challenge Amazon but I don’t see the point of having proprietary platforms putting the clamps on developers and their software.

Let the clouds take on the character of the open and collaborative web and not the other way around. Open sourcing the grid and its API’s would make the most sense especially for ISV’s who are careful to thread the waters because of Lock-in but do have a really interesting app. Doing anything other than that is like feeding them to sharks.

Best..
alain
morpheXchange.com

By: vijay gill

vijay gill — Thu, 08 May 2008 22:39:55 +0000

I asked the audience how many of them would entrust Microsoft to run a cloud with Microsoft applications, and how many would prefer to see Amazon running a Microsoft kernel on EC2. Roughly 75 percent said they’d trust Amazon to run Microsoft’s own apps rather than Microsoft.

Did you ask the follow up question of why they’d trust amazon more than msft to run the apps?

By: Should You Launch Your Own Storage Cloud? | MSPmentor

Should You Launch Your Own Storage Cloud? | MSPmentor — Thu, 08 May 2008 21:39:27 +0000

[...] spotted a very interesting article on GigaOm today. It explores the factors you should weigh before launching your own storage cloud. It’s a particularly timely read for managed service [...]