GigaOM » Cloud Computing

Picking the cloud’s winners and losers: From SaaS to SDN

Derrick Harris — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 01:34:09 +0000

A group of technology executives played the cloud computing and enterprise IT version of “hot or not” during a Wednesday afternoon session at GigaOM Structure. While hardly a scientific study, their viewpoints on the various technology trends that tech vendors have pushed over the past few years were at least interesting.

Here are the winners and losers, according to Paul Santinelli, general partner at North Bridge Venture Partners; Arne Josefsberg CTO of ServiceNow; Peter Frey, president and founder of Krey Associates; and Raj Patel, VP of cloud services at Cisco Systems.

Winners

Software as a service
Solid-state drives
Enterprise cloud
OpenStack
Self-service IT
Puppet and Chef

Losers

Software-defined networking
IPv6
Carrier clouds
Facebook’s custom switch plans

Memorable quotes

On SDN: “The conversations today sound almost exactly like the conversations we had three to four years ago,” Josefsberg said.

On OpenStack: It’s great conceptually, Santinelli said, but “the contrarian view to OpenStack is are there too many chefs in the kitchen?”

On carrier clouds: “All I can think of is someone in a pair of spikes climbing up the telephone pole to turn the phone on,” Sanitelli said. If we couldn’t trust them with voice, he added, how can we trust them with managing enterprise applications?

On self-service IT: “Try moving a really high-end video0conferencing system with FPGAs and ASICs to the public cloud,” Patel said. You can’t really do it today, but that doesn’t mean IT organizations can’t enable service-oriented applications behind the firewall.

Check out the rest of our Structure 2013 live coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

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Software is important to networking, and Juniper is on it

Jordan Novet — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 23:33:40 +0000

As software-defined networking (SDN) startups such as Big Switch and Embrane make headway and headlines, Juniper and other big network gear vendors have been responding with big visions and insider consortiums. In doing so, Juniper is looking to help companies bring ease and scalability to their networks just as compute and storage are becoming easier to control.

As companies get excited about transforming their on-premise infrastructure into private clouds, this is becoming more obvious, Bob Muglia, executive vice president of Juniper’s software solutions division, told GigaOM Research Analyst David Linthum at GigaOM’s Structure conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.

“They want to have the agility associated with what they can get from building a cloud, but the network is holding them back,” Muglia said. “And SDN is the solution to that.”

As Muglia sees it, SDN could enable developers keen on deploying a new application to spin up compute, storage and networking services in a matter of 15 minutes, instead of two days, using on-premise infrastructure.

But while Juniper is striving to look good in front of its customers and the general network community with its SDN doings, Muglia punctured the hype bubble around the networking protocol that kicked off the wave of interest in SDN in the first place. OpenFlow is nothing but a protocol, and Juniper already supports 270 of those. “This is the 271st,” Muglia said. Indeed, its forthcoming JunosV Contrail controller does not support OpenFlow, although it could be added later.

The controller is expected to become available in the second half of this year, under a new licensing model. Looking ahead three years, Muglia said he thinks Juniper will be even more of a software company. That’s well and good, but it doesn’t guarantee that Juniper customers will stick around and hold back on paying less for white-box gear.

Check out the rest of our Structure 2013 live coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

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RightScale sizes up Google Compute Engine

Barb Darrow — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 14:03:57 +0000

The availability of Google Compute Engine has certainly shaken up the cloud infrastructure world. GCEpretty much zoomed to number 2 on most people’s lists of most scalable public clouds. But there’s been precious little third-party data about it.

RightScale hopes to change that. In a blog post Wednesday, Brian Adler, RightScale’s senior cloud architect outlines tests RightScale performed with Apica,a website testing and optimization company, that give some indication of the scope and performance to be expected from GCE.

In the testing, Apica drove traffic to a three-tier web application running on GCE with RightScale Cloud Management Platform configuring , monitoring and scaling the deployment.

From Adler’s blog post:

During the test, we scaled up to 330,000 page views per minute from 200,000 concurrent users, maxing out at 42 servers on GCE during the peak load. To put these numbers in perspective, Evernote states that its application on average receives 150M requests per day. Our testing on the GCE platform nearly doubles the load that Evernote typically experiences.

Now keep in mind that RightScale is supporting GCE — indeed reselling it. I would recommend reading the blog for the full result summary, but net, net, net, Adler said GCE exhibited “extremely high performance, low complexity, and great flexibility.”

Now here’s hoping that RightScale will run some comparative tests of GCE and Amazon Web Services to see what sort of race we’re looking at here.

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Security fades as a hurdle to cloud adoption

Barb Darrow — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 11:46:08 +0000

Companies still cite security as a top concern when they consider cloud adoption, but it’s a worry that’s starting to fade, according to new research.

In its third annual Future of Cloud Computing survey, North Bridge Venture Partners found that the percentage of respondents citing security as their top concern fell to 46 percent this year from 55 percent in last year’s survey.

Other issues that impact cloud adoption include worry that IT management will grow more complex as workloads move to cloud — a factor that 46 percent cited. More than a third (35 percent) of those surveyed named vendor lock-in as a concern, and 27 percent cited interoperability as an issue going forward. Other inhibitors included regulatory compliance (30 percent) and privacy (26 percent.)

“It’s a good sign to me that security is starting to fade as an inhibitor year over year,” said Michael Skok, general partner with North Bridge Venture Partners in an interview. On the other hand, the fact that so many respondents cited complexity as a potential issue is concerning. “People are accepting and adopting cloud but they also realize it’s not as easy as it should be. We’re still very early in the market here and this worry over complexity tells me we have industry issues to resolve.”

Check out results from last year’s survey here:

Skok will talk about the results of the survey, conducted with GigaOM Research, Wednesday at GigaOM’s Structure event in San Francisco.

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The internet of things: a market landscape

Jon Collins — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 06:55:20 +0000

What can we expect the IoT landscape to look like, and how will its impact be felt? And is the attention being given by governments, manufacturers, and industry players merited, or is this just a fad? In this paper we look at the trends leading the growth of the internet of things, its components, and its characteristics. We examine the scale of the different opportunities and early examples of use cases. Finally, we look at potential inhibitors to adoption and potential challenges, notably around security, privacy, and system failure.

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Meet the heavyweight team behind Heavybit, a community for developer-focused startups

Derrick Harris — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:00:08 +0000

James Lindenbaum learned his lessons the hard way. When he co-founded Heroku in 2007, life wasn’t nearly as easy as it is now for startups targeting application developers as their end-users. He and his team had no real choice but to host their application platform on Amazon Web Services and to learn the ins and outs of that cloud service as if they were real, dyed-in-the-wool systems engineers. Only, they weren’t.

They were app developers; the transformation into systems engineers was just a necessity of growing the business. A website that looked pretty and worked smoothly was little more than veneer if the real product — the AWS virtual servers running Heroku’s customers’ applications under the covers of the hip samurai-themed web service — didn’t work. At one point, Lindenbaum joked during a recent call, Heroku had to do a UX refresh “and we literally didn’t have anyone in the company who could build web apps anymore.”

After leaving Heroku and ultimately its parent company Salesforce.com , Lindenbaum is back in the public eye with a new effort called Heavybit Industries that aims to save other startups from Heroku’s early growing pains. The idea came after so many fledgling companies came to Heroku looking for help, and after Lindenbaum got personally involved with some as an adviser or investor. He eventually realized that there’s a lot of institutional knowledge out there about how to build business that serve developers, but there’s also a lot of duplicated effort because the people starting these businesses often don’t know their peers exist, much less what they’re up to.

How Heavybit works

Heavybit is like a co-working-space-meets-incubator-meets fraternity, and Lindenbaum has recruited some of the biggest names in venture capital, application development and developer-focused startups to make sure Heavybit delivers on its promise. It works like this: Companies that have raised some money, gained some traction among developers, and now have to deal with the difficult problems of scaling their code or monetizing their business come to Heavybit. Once accepted, they’re in the “active period” for nine months, which includes a curriculum of weekly talks on technology or entrepreneurship; office hours with experts and investors; and meeting/work space in a building in San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood.

James Lindenbaum at Structure 2009. (c) Pinar Ozger

Membership in Heavybit is in exchange for equity, and the community has space for between 10 to 15 companies at a time, Lindenbaum said (although it’s really a “membership for life” situation). The first batch of startups includes some more-established ones — Zencoder, Stripe, PagerDuty and Meteor — that will serve as mentors as well as receive mentorship. Other inaugural Heavybit members include Treasure Data, Kodowa, Iron.io, CircleCi, CloudConnect, Keen IO, Codenvy and Backlift.

Early Heavybit expert advisers include Derek Collison (Apcera/VMware/Google), Adam Gross (CloudConnect/Salesforce.com), Jesse Robbins (Opscode/Amazon), Javier Soltero (Acompli/VMware/Hyperic), and Lindenbaum’s Heroku co-founders Adam Wiggins and Orion Henry. Among Heavybit’s early investor partners are Ping Li (Accel Partners), Chris Sacca (Lowercase Capital), John Connors (Ignition Partners) and Matt Ocko (Data Collective).

Bringing “bad-ass” engineers back from mobile apps

One of Lindenbaum’s goals when putting together the advisers — and one of his continuing goals with Heavybit — is to to put member companies in touch with people who really understand the business and architectural complexities of distributed, multitenant applications. “The reason [these developer-focused] products are so great is because they’re built … by app developers for app developers,” Lindenbaum said. But, like the Heroku team early on, the founders aren’t always skilled in building systems designed to scale.

“The scale curve is much steeper for these companies,” he explained, because the way it usually works is these businesses attract customers who also have their own customers to serve. So rather than handling data for one company, they might be handling data for 20 of that company’s clients, as well.

In order to put his companies in touch with the best of the best of distributed systems engineers, though, Lindenbaum first has to walk those guys back from the Instagram edge. Once you prove yourself at a place like Google or Facebook, Lindenbaum said, “[E]veryone thinks you’re a bad ass. As soon as you say you’re going to build a thing, VCs line up to give you money.”

Unfortunately, he added, many of these people are chasing the past rather than future, trying to cash in their lottery tickets on building the next photo-sharing app rather than on the hairy enterprise-grade systems problems where their skills would really be valuable.

But he has a plan to bring them back to the enterprise side. He intends to push the message of how hard these problems are and how much the cloud services and developer-focused products industries are becoming analogous to traditional heavy industries in terms of the complex but mature supply chains involved.

Essentially, he wants to do the “Got Milk?” ads for the cloud services industry, educating the market so the individual companies don’t have to. It’ll be like a trade association, he joked, “only the non-evil version of that.” Once you shine a light on the difficulty of the problems, Lindenbaum said, the really good engineers come running back to solve them.

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See inside Facebook’s network & explore Google’s data dreams at Structure

Stacey Higginbotham — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 13:00:59 +0000

Want to understand how Facebook connects its servers? Hear from VMware’s CEO how the virtualization giant plans to build its next big business? Discover why Snapchat builds on Google App Engine as opposed to Amazon Web Services? Or maybe you want to understand if Microsoft can compete in the cloud.

We’re going to have people discussing all this and more on Wednesday and Thursday at this week’s Structure conference in San Francisco. In the sixth year of the event we’re spending a lot of our time delving into the practical matters of building out webscale infrastructure, from the networking conundrums to the business process around scaling.

If there’s one big theme for the show this year, it’s what happens when IT meets the business and how to bring an understanding of business goals to scaling out services, whether you are Amazon or Revlon. We’ll have Kevin Scott of LinkedIn sharing how he re-architected the business social network’s infrastructure to better meet business goals. Cory von Wallenstein of Dyn will discuss the process the company follows to support existing features while building new ones that must scale rapidly without breaking the service or the bank.

We’ll also have executives from Warner Music Group sharing how the company is building out an internal platform as a service and what it will do for the business, while CIOs from Revlon, Kohl’s and The Clorox Company share their takes on the cloud from inside the enterprise.

Networking nerds from web giants will be there discussing the importance of using software defined networks and real-time information for building application aware networks. Plus, we have several talks from people such as Jeff Dean of Google, Jason Hoffman of Joyent and Adrian Cockcroft of Netflix that will discuss how to push our infrastructure’s boundaries for the data-rich era we’re entering.

We’ll also have ten three-minute talks from our Cloud Trailblazers who will be there ready to talk about their ideas for how to rethink infrastructure. You can meet the stars of tomorrow over the course of the two-day event. Or you can network with the stars of today. Plus, two hot startups will debut and there’s also a six-company LaunchPad with very young startups.

I’m preparing to get on a plane from Austin to spend this week in San Francisco. I’ve made this trip dozens of times for dozens of GigaOM events, but this one has me the most excited. We’ve pulled some amazing people together to talk not just about defining the cloud or various trends in infrastructure, but how the shift in information technology is playing out at real companies whether they are startups, enterprises or the giants of the webscale world.

We have a few tickets left, so just sign up and get on over to the event. This isn’t some wannabe cloud show. This is Structure, the first and the best cloud show planned by myself, Derrick Harris, Barb Darrow and the GigaOM events team. We wouldn’t let you down.

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HP Cloud scores big customer win, a passle of PaaS moves: The week in cloud

Barb Darrow — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 16:00:54 +0000

HP trumpets big cloud win

HP COO Bill Veghte

Hewlett-Packard claimed a big win at its Discover Conference last week. On the final day of the show, COO Bill Veghte told attendees that Workday, the human resources SaaS firm that’s giving Oracle fits, has moved from Amazon Web Services to HP Cloud, according to CRN.

Update: ~~I pinged Workday for confirmation on this early Sunday, since it’s dicey when a third-party claims a big customer defection from a competitor, but have yet to hear back.~~ AWS, on the other hand, wrote in to say that Workday remains “an active and happy AWS customer and our relationship with them continues to deepen.” Sooooo, we really do not know what’s going on there. Another update: Workday responded by email to say it remains “a happy AWS customer.”

Let me put it this way: This story just got a lot a ton more interesting. The CRN reporter is a veteran and the chance of his mis-reporting what Veghte said is nil. And since Veghte is also an industry long-timer with years of experience at Microsoft then HP, it’s hard to believe he mispoke. My guess is that Workday is using both AWS and HP but got a barrage of irate phone calls after the HP Discover press event on Thursday. Interestingly, the video stream of Veghte’s talk is not available although all the other general sessions are. Conspiracy theorists rejoice!

The company also trotted out HP Cloud OS, based on standard OpenStack infrastructure but with some of its own bells and whistles not yet supported in OpenStack itself. But, true to HP’s hardware roots, you can’t get the software without buying some HP boxes– initially it comes with HP CloudSystem and Moonshot servers, according to PC World.

Not to be outdone, Red Hat, which also targets enterprise cloud workloads , officially announced Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure (RHCI) which melds the company’s virtualization, namesake Linux, and Red Hat’s OpenStack implementation and the related but somehow not equal Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. ~~Frankly, I’m unclear about the difference between the two so will circle back later on that~~. Update: A Red Hat spokeswoman helped out. She wrote:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform is for organizations who are ready for OpenStack today (advanced cloud users, ISPs, telcos, etc.) who also don’t require cloud management add-ons via CloudForms. Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure is a solution for organizations who still want traditional datacenter virtualization (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization) with on on-ramp to Red Hat OpenStack and with CloudForms.

In the public cloud arena, Red Hat also started offering a free tier of Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances running on AWS to a select users.

Red Hat, HP, Rackspace and the rest of the EBA (Everyone But Amazon) cohort is stressing choice of cloud deployment models — the pitch is that while AWS public cloud is great for many workloads, it’s not optimal for companies that want to split or move workloads between private and public clouds.

And, for those sick of the OpenStack schtick, buck up, CloudStack Collaboration 2013 kicks off in Sunnyvale in two weeks.

Stay tuned for a discussion on the competitive landscape of cloud computing this week at Structure 2013 where luminaries including Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, Rackspace CTO John Engates, Microsoft server and tools president Satya Nadella will all be front and center.

Lots of PaaS action

There was lots of moving and shaking in the Platform-as-a-Service world last week as Pivotal launched Version 2 of its Cloud Foundry platform as a paid-only service (there used to be a free version.) and CenturyLink /Savvis bought AppFog, a member of the Cloud Foundry ecosystem to make it part of its Savvis Cloud lineup. Oh, and Red Hat made OpenShift, its corporate-focused PaaS, broadly available.

As James Watters, head of product for Cloud Foundry put it, a soft launch of its hosted service is ongoing, with invitations going out to current 1.0 users daily.

The idea is to have a “publicly available on-prem enterprise edition (software based) in Q4 — that product is in early access mode with select paid customers,” Watters said via email.

Watters also claims that running an app on Cloud Foundry Version 2′s developer tier is actually cheaper than running it on AWS small or medium instances -- the type that Amazon’s Beanstalk PaaS would use.

Cloud Foundry 2.0 does not incorporate the Pivotal HD data fabric. That will come in the fourth quarter aas part of the enterprise edition. And more of those data goodies will be incorporated into the regular Cloud Foundry 2.0 service over time.

PaaS adoption may be high among developers in small shops and startups, but enterprises remain a quandary for PaaS vendors. Among big companies that do look to PaaSes, Microsoft Azure is a strong contender which shouldn’t really be surprising given Windows and .NET adoption in large companies.

“Microsoft is the current leader among PaaSes for enterprise users, followed by Salesforce.com and Google with Cloud Foundry bringing up the rear,” said 451 Group analyst Carl Brooks, citing his company’s research. “There’s still a wide gap between the web kids’ online application playground and the enterprise,” he said.

CenturyLink’s buyout of AppFog indicates the pressure that telcos and hosting providers are feeling to provide slick cloud-like services for developers as well as CIOs. Several folks on Twitter and other outlets predicted more M&A in this space as those companies seek to compete with Amazon Web Services.

Other news of note from around the interwebs:

From VentureBeat: Tibco acquires Streambase to bring real-time analytics tech to Wall Street

From Infoworld: Software AG buys complex event processing technology from Progress

From FierceTelecom: Verizon brings private IP service to Equinix data centers

This story was updated at 9:11 a.m. PDT June 16 with Red Hat’s clarification on its two OpenStack-based products and again at 12:39 p.m. PDT with Amazon’s statement about Workday and again at 2:47 p.m. PDT with Workday’s official comment.

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Ex-Yahoo CTO launches Altiscale, hardcore Hadoop as a service

Derrick Harris — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 13:40:45 +0000

Raymie Stata knows a lot about Hadoop. It was Stata who helped bring Hadoop creator Doug Cutting to Yahoo in 2006, and as during a seven-year stint as chief architect and then CTO at Yahoo, Stata was instrumental in helping position Hadoop as the technology famously “behind every click” at the web portal. Now, Stata is trying his hand at the Hadoop startup game, launching a new startup called Altiscale that recently closed a $12 million Series A round from Sequoia Capital and General Catalyst Partners, as well as Accel Partners, Jerry Yang’s AME Ventures and a few individual investors.

Altiscale is in some ways a manifestation of Stata’s seven years of experience helping turn Hadoop from a cute little project into a production system running across 42,000 nodes. It might not be not pretty, but it gets the job done. And, thanks to the handful of former senior Yahoo, Google and LinkedIn engineers that joined Stata (who’s the company’s CEO) at Altiscale, the company knows Hadoop cold.

Team Altiscale (State is middle row, second from left). Source: Altiscale

The deep knowledge of Hadoop shows itself in the product design and business model. The company is “all Hadoop, all the time,” he explained, and everything — including the hardware and the network — is optimized for particular aspects of Hadoop workloads and operations. Essentially, Stata told me, Altiscale wants to be companies’ Hadoop dial tone — when users need to run a job, the service should just be there ready to do it.

So, although Altiscale is a hosted service, it’s not exactly a cloud service as many people would define it. Rather than charge by the hour, for example, Stata’s experience suggests Hadoop services are best charged based on a monthly baseline usage with room even built in for reasonable overages. This is because companies familiar with Hadoop usually understand their baseline requirements, give or take a handful of additional jobs, and would prefer to be able to budget for that each month.

He compares traditional hourly cloud billing to cell-phone billing in the 1990s: “At the end of the month,” he joked, “you were typically surprised on the wrong side.” Altiscale is more like a wireless plan with a maximum amount of minutes per month and some rollover minutes included. In fact, Stata said, ”We’re pretty forgiving in terms of the limits. … As long as you’re not abusive, you don’t get charged more for it.”

And unlike many other Hadoop services, Altiscale isn’t immediately going after developers who want to try their hand at big data or deal with data through a wizbang interface. Rather, its initial audience is current Hadoop users — companies and data scientists — who know how the technology works but just want a better way to consume it. Right now, users access Altiscale by SSHing into a “desktop” environment (that’s actually hosted on Amazon Web Services) that gives them access to their favorite Hadoop tools such as MapReduce, Hive, Pig and Flume, as well as to data science tools such as R.

“We call that the scaling down problem,” Stata said.

What that means is that it takes a lot of effort to build a true self-service model that greenhorn Hadoop users can dive right into, and Altiscale would be irrelevant if waited to launch until it had figured that out. Part of that is a design problem, and part of that is a matter of Hadoop being designed to run better at scale. Plus, Stata added, the folks who got to first or second gear with Hadoop and then got stuck are way underserved right now.

However, although Altiscale might be about serving experienced Hadoop users with a more-managed experience, it’s not about serving legacy workloads. A lot of companies are using Hadoop today to somehow perform traditional enterprise data warehouse tasks or tie tightly into existing IT environments, he explained, but “we go after what I call ‘new data problems.’” That means online advertising and any workloads — servers log analysis, smart grid data, logistics, etc. — relying heavily on lots of sensor- or machine-generated data that can stream right into Hadoop.

Stata acknowledges it won’t be easy trying to win customer away from established Hadoop vendors such as Cloudera, MapR and Hortonworks (which many of Stata’s former Yahoo comrades founded), but, he told me a few months ago, he thinks its very doable. That’s because no matter how easy they make it to manage Hadoop, there’s a class of customers that’s just better served with a cloud service rather than trying to scale their operations staff and energy bill along with their Hadoop cluster.

“Self-managed Hadoop, essentially, is [those vendors'] ultimate goal,” Stata said. “Our goal is to to just take on the management responsibility, to take on all those management things the Yahoos and Googles do under the covers and just run Hadoop as a managed service. The winds of change are in our favor.”

If you want to hear more about where Hadoop is head, stop by our Structure conference next week, where I’ll be discussing that topic with Google Fellow and MapReduce creator Jeff Dean. Other webscale speakers include Facebook VP of Engineering Jay Parikh, Box VP of Engineering Sam Schillace and Amazon CTO Werner Vogels.

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FireHost secures $12M in funding to promote its secure cloud

Barb Darrow — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:05:57 +0000

FireHost, the cloud hosting company that gained fame by offering its services to ace-hacker-turned-security-consultant Kevin Mitnick, now has $12 million in new funding. This Series D round was led by a previous backer, Stephens Group LLC – and brings total investment to about $34 million.

One priority will be to boost marketing and raise FireHost’s profile, CEO Chris Drake told me. And, given that FireHost competes with big companies like CenturyLink Savvis, Verizon Terremark and AT&T, it’s a bit of a David against several Goliaths.

Drake makes some big claims for his cloud: “What we offer is a way to protect customers from the Chinese and the Russians as well as themselves — you should be as concerned with your database administrator as you are with the NSA because if that person goes rogue, you’re in trouble.”

The company obviously hoped that proving it could protect Mitnick — who gets the service for free — from all comers would be useful but he is just one of several high-profile users. Paying customers include Wal-Mart (the Stephens Group helped take the retail giant public), Kaiser Permanente and Casio, as well as high-profile sites for Rush Limbaugh, the Clinton Foundation and the magician David Copperfield all of which are magnets for hackers. (David Copperfield, really?)

FireHost is based in Dallas, but hosts cloud servers in Phoenix, London and Amsterdam as well.

“Mitnick has been using us since 2009 and there have been more than 1 million block attempts and zero breaches,” Drake said. As Derrick Harris reported last year Mitnick is happy with FireHost but still does not trust any valuable or mission-critical data to any cloud.

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