For instance, application design principles changed dramatically when the PC, x86 architecture, and client/server paradigm were born in the ’80s. And  it happened again with the advent of the web and open-source technology in the mid ’90s. Whenever such abrupt changes arise, application developers are forced to rethink how they build and deploy their software.

Today, we’re seeing a huge leap in infrastructure capability, this time pioneered by Amazon Web Services. It’s clear that to take full advantage of the new cloud infrastructure, applications that run successfully on AWS must be inherently different than applications that were built to run successfully on a corporate server – even a virtualized one. But there are a number of other particular ways in which today’s (and tomorrow’s) cloud applications will need to be designed differently than in the past. Here are the most crucial ones, and how the ways of the old world have been changed in the new one :

Scaling 

In the old world, scaling was accomplished by scaling up – to accommodate more users or data, you simply bought a bigger server.

In the new world, scaling is typically done by scaling out. You don’t add a bigger machine, you add multiple machines of the same sort. In the cloud world, those machines are virtual machines, and their instantiations in the cloud are instances.

Resilience 

Before, software was seen as unreliable, and resilience was built into the hardware layer.

Today, the underlying infrastructure – the hardware – is seen as the weak link, and it is up to applications to accommodate for this. There is no guarantee that a virtual machine instance will always function. It can disappear at any moment and the application must be prepared for this.

By way of example, Netflix, arguably the most advanced user of the cloud today, has gone the farthest in adopting this new paradigm. They have a process called ChaosMonkey that randomly kills virtual machine instances from underneath the application workloads. Why on earth do they do this on purpose? Because they are ensuring uptime and resilience: By exposing their applications to random loss of instances, they force application developers to build more resilient apps. Brilliant.

Bursting

In the old world – think accounting and payroll applications – the application workload was reasonably stable and predictable. It was known how many users a system had, and how many records they were likely to process at any given moment.

In the new world, we see variable and unpredictable workloads. Today’s software systems have to reach farther out in the world, to consumers and devices that demand services at unpredictable moments and unpredictable loads. To accommodate such unforeseen fluctuations in individual application workloads required a new software architecture. We now have it in the cloud, but clearly it is still in its infancy.

Software variety

In the past we didn’t have much software variety. Each application was written in one language and used one database. Companies standardized on a single, or at least very few operating systems. The software stack was boringly simple and uniform (at least now in retrospect).

In the new world of cloud, the opposite is happening. Within a single application, many different languages can be used, many different libraries and toolkits can be employed, and many different database products can be used. And because in a cloud you can create and spin up your own image, tailored to your and your application’s specific needs, applications within one company must be able to operate under a spectrum of configurations.

From VM to cloud 

Even between the relatively new technology of hypervisors and the modern cloud thinking, there are differences. VMware, the pioneer and leader in virtualization, built its hypervisors to essentially behave the way physical machines did before.

But in the cloud world, the virtual machine is not a representation of a physical server; it’s a representation of units of compute. (Steve Bradshaw wrote about this topic in depth.)

User patience

In the old world, users were taught to be patient. The system may have needed a long time to respond to simple retrieval or update requests, and new features were added slowly to the application (if at all).

In the new cloud world, users have no patience. They hardly tolerate latency or wait times, and they look for improvements in the service every week, if not every day. Evidence of this can be found in self-service IT. Rather than file a ticket with IT and wait for a response several days later, users of IT can self-provision the resources they need.

Do these observations rhyme with what you are experiencing and taking action on in your organization? I look forward to comments and debate on this topic.

Marten Mickos is the CEO of Eucalyptus Systems. He previously served as CEO of MySQL AB, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems. He is a member of the board of directors of Nokia.

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Photo courtesy of Mike Flippo/Shutterstock.com.

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By supporting these tools that help deploy, run and monitor workloads on AWS, Eucalyptus is going a step beyond supporting the bare-bones AWS APIs, Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos said in a recent interview.

The new Eucalyptus 3.3 release, due in May, will support Chaos Monkey for testing the limits of a cloud deployment under stress; Asgard for automating deployment of large-scale applications; and Edda, a dynamic querying tool, for polling AWS resources.

“For Eucalyptus customers, this is real proof of AWS compatibility. Other folks who say they are AWS-compatible really aren’t — the real proof of the pudding is in supporting these Netflix tools,” he said. ”We’re not saying that everyone in the world will start using Asgard, although many will.”

That Eucalyptus would throw its lot in with Netflix is not shocking. Mickos and members of the Eucalyptus team attended the Netflix OSS open house in February. Netflix used that event to promote the use of its open-sourced cloud management, testing and monitoring tools by third parties, at least partly so that cloud alternatives to AWS will emerge.

Netflix is one of the biggest and most skillful AWS customers. Netflix tools fill gaps in AWS and help it run better. But Netflix is also acutely aware that Amazon has a streaming video service that is a direct competitor to its own core business and would very much like there to be another cloud out there that is as scalable and price efficient as AWS.

In the open-source cloud world, Eucalyptus contends with a slew of OpenStack players as well as OpenNebula and CloudStack.  But there is concern that the market, as young and potentially big as it may be, will not support all these options. Talk at the recent OpenStack summit and beyond is that there will be consolidation of the contending vendors.

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The OpenStack community keeps chugging along, with Morphlabs the latest to come out with an updated version of its OpenStack cloud. MCloud Osmium is designed and priced for third-party service providers wanting to offer Amazon-like public cloud services.  The OpenStack Foundation  recently voted to name the next major release of its technology Havana. There should be a lot more information on that at the OpenStack Summit in Portland come April.

Rackspace to staff up, with some help from Texas

One of the original OpenStack backers, Rackspace plans to add 1000 people to its ranks in the next 2 years. The San Antonio, Texas-based company is getting some help from its home state, with Texas funding a $2.5 million grant, according to Computerworld.

Rackspace will get help educating people in “cloud-specific IT” like Ruby or Python programming languages.

Eucalyptus co-founder returns to academia

Rich Wolski, the University of California Santa Barbara phenom who co-founded Eucalyptus, will spend more time back at UCSB and less at the private cloud company he helped create, as GigaOM reported Friday.

Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos also confirmed that Said Ziouani, a Red Hat veteran who came aboard two years ago to lead sales, has left.

Late last year, Mickos told me that Eucalyptus is now running its EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region out of the US and that David Butler, the SVP of marketing that joined the company two years ago, left last fall.

Other news you can use

Government IT reseller DLT adds Amazon Web Services to its GSA contract.

Oracle releases still more Java patches.

Microsoft makes collaboration easier by dropping SkyDrive sign-in requirement.

Belgian startup ComodIT takes on Puppet and Chef with autoscaling.

 Feature photo courtesy of  Flickr user mnsc

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Mickos said Wolski’s transition back into academia was always part of the plan and that he will remain on the Eucalyptus board. Asked if this was a shake up, he said: “Anytime, Marten Mickos is CEO there is going to be change and adjustments.” Tim Zeller now heads up sales, he added.

The company, which went commercial and closed its first venture capital round in April 2009, grew out of work by Wolski and others at UCSB — the company actually has 7 co-founders.

While it may be true that these changes are part of the natural ebb and flow of business,  it’s definitely true that Eucalyptus competes with CloudStack, OpenStack and OpenNebula open-source clouds, as well as VMware’s proprietary vCloud Director. There are a half dozen different distributions of OpenStack alone from Rackspace; Cloudscaling; Piston Cloud (see disclosure), HP and others. The real question is whether there’s enough market demand to sustain that many choices for the long haul.

In the words of one VC executive familiar with the company, there are too many “me-too” clouds. “Demand is not there for 90 flavors of OpenStack plus Eucalyptus plus these others,” he said.  Perhaps rising demand for cloud computing will float all boats. But it’s just as likely that there will be consolidation. Watch this space.

Disclosure: Piston is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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“With this release we’ve made Eucalyptus harder on the inside and softer on the outside,” Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos told me. “We’ve fixed some difficult bugs in the engine and made it easier to log data, troubleshoot to get better reporting. It’s much easier to run in production now. Softer on the outside means we’re making it easy to use. It sounds silly and simple, but our research background did not lead us into usability early on. We’re doing that now.”

The research background Mickos speaks of is Eucalyptus’s roots as an academic project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The company became a commercial entity and closed its first venture capital round in April 2012.

Also new to the Eucalyptus 3.2 release is support for EMC’s VNX storage adapter — an important addition for big customers that tend to rely heavily on SAN storage.

News of the 3.2 release, due out in early December, comes just in time for the Amazon AWS: Reinvent show kicking off this week. Last spring, Eucalyptus and Amazon inked a deal under which Eucalyptus-based private clouds can interoperate as needed with the Amazon public cloud using the AWS APIs.

Other clouds are embracing Amazon APIs, as well. Earlier this year, Cloudscaling said version 2 of its OpenStack-based cloud will also support key Amazon and Google Compute Engine APIs.

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1: Facebook bids adieu to HP, Dell, server OEMs. Facebook really is parting ways with traditional hardware OEMs. The company’s Swedish data center in Luleå will be its first to use “100 percent non-OEM” servers, Jay Parikh, Facebook’s VP of infrastructure engineering told Structure Europe attendees. That is bad news for the likes of Dell and HP, which compete aggressively for this kind of scale-out business.

(L to R) Stacey Higginbotham of GigaOM and Jay Parikh of Facebook JULIADEBOER PHOTOGRAPHY http://www.juliadeboer.com

“We have to fine-tune performance given the scale and real-time nature of our application,” Parikh said. “We want to push forward aggressively not only on the user experience but all the underlying pieces of infrastructure to support it. We can iterate with the hardware we’re designing and deploying. Most of the time it’s cheaper and consumers less energy. It’s better for the environment and better for us, gives us more flexibility.”

2: Europeans are cloud paranoics. The widespread contention that cloud adoption is slower in Europe than in the U.S. was reinforced by several speakers. One reason: Europeans are more wary of outsourcing than Americans. Another: They’re not wild about putting their data on a U.S.-based cloud given concerns over the USA Patriot Act and right now the major cloud services providers are U.S.-based, said Christian Echeyne, director of IT infrastructure technologies and engineering for Orange Business Services.

Ditlev Bredahl, CEO of OnApp agreed that cloud is a much harder sell in Europe because people view the term with distrust. “If you want to sell cloud in Europe, call it something else,” he said.

3: European cloud adoption is fragmented but coming. It’ll be tough for one huge cloud player to dominate in Europe the way Amazon has in North America, said Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus, an open-source cloud company. “There is too much fragmentation, too many local players. And, when companies here grow up, they tend to go global…  pan-European companies don’t happen often.”

“It takes an American company to build a pan-European brand,” he said. There are lots of soft drink companies across Europe but most of them remain local. For a pan-European brand, look at Coke, he said.

4: Cloud plus big data equals big opportunity. Cloud computing is a natural for storing reams of big data. But getting that data in and out of the cloud is tricky — and can be expensive. Ask anyone about their Amazon data transfer charges if you don’t believe this.

Michelle Munson, President, CEO, and Co-Founder, Aspera, Structure Europe 2012 JULIADEBOER PHOTOGRAPHY http://www.juliadeboer.com

Transporting all that big data can overwhelm traditional transport protocols like TCP, said Michelle Munson, co-founder and CEO of Aspera. Her company addresses that problem by providing a layer above TCP to facilitate fast transfers and makes that data — video for example — easier for cloud systems to ingest.

Once the transport problem is addressed, the floodgates are open for new sorts of big data processing applications, she said.

5: Amazon intends to be the Amazon of Europe. There was much speculation about what, if any, cloud provider could emerge to be the Amazon of Europe, given the aforementioned fragmented nature of the European market. Many agreed with the contention (see number 3 above) that it’s unlikely that a single player will replicate that heft — but that national telcos and big service providers will serve up cloud services.

(L to R): Om Malik, GigaOM; Werner Vogels, CTO and VP, Amazon Structure Europe 2012 JULIADEBOER PHOTOGRAPHY http://www.juliadeboer.com

It was clear from Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, however, that he sees no reason to cede the top spot. He promised a range of unnamed “unbelievable” services to come from Amazon. He said he sees no hesitancy among European businesses including financial institutions who seem to trust Amazon Web Services just fine with their workloads, thank you very much.

6: The cloud is open source — so far. While there’s been no Linus Torvalds of cloud, it’s safe to say that the foundation of today’s cloud computing infrastructure is open source — XEN virtualization, new-age MongoDB or Cassandra databases. And, of course, various flavors of Linux underly everything. There are four healthy contenders in open-source cloud platforms — CloudStack, Eucalyptus, OpenNebula and OpenStack.

Werker team (from left) Jacco Flenter, Wouter Mooij, Micha Hernandez van Leuffen, Benno van den Berg. (Lindsey Batema not pictured.)

7: Wercker’s SaaS deployment tool takes Launchpad prize. Amsterdam home-town team Wercker won the inaugural Structure: Europe Launchpad competition.  Wercker is building a SaaS-based continuous deployment system to keep up with the hyperactive pace of webscale development — where companies can develop and release hundreds — or more — software updates per day.

“Customers have trouble deploying code across a global footprint, everyone who’s doing development can benefit from this,” said Launchpad judge Sam Johnston, Equinix’ director of cloud and IT services.

Check out the Launchpad demos and judge’s discussion in the video below:

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[View the story "Tweet Chat: Marten Mickos, Eucalyptus Systems" on Storify]

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As SUSE announced its OpenStack private cloud iteration, and VMware unveiled its vCloud Suite, even pundits scratched their heads about such mega issues as cloud interoperability; what defines an “open” cloud; and which cloud technology a company should pick to run its workloads. And, the constant fighting of vendor factions pushing their own cloud agendas isn’t helping matters.

The OpenStack Foundation seeks to build “the Linux of cloud,” a single infrastructure stack that many vendors can build upon without losing basic interoperability. But in April, Citrix, an OpenStack member, started pushing CloudStack as a more mature open-source rival to OpenStack. The nightmare scenario, as vocalized by Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus, still another open-source cloud, is that OpenStack is really the “Unix of the cloud,”   a menagerie of not-quite-compatible clouds by different vendors.

That fear of fracturing remains a problem. “I understand the Linux Foundation and how the kernel is controlled [but] OpenStack doesn’t have that model and has very influential and powerful companies [with] very different interests.  So, I  … fear that OpenStack may not achieve its goal because of the divergent agenda’s of it members,” said Keith Townsend, chief architect for Lockheed Martin Information Systems and Global Solutions, a large systems integrator.

What makes a cloud open?

TechCrunch’s Alex Williams made a valiant attempt to define what an “open cloud” means – his list of attributes includes open APIs;  a collaborative development community; an absence of cloud washing (from his keyboard to God’s ear.) He also contrasted the two West Coast shows characterizing VMworld as evidence of VMware moving beyond its tried-and-true virtualization pitch to a broader, vision that includes participation in OpenStack and data centers, while CloudOpen is all about software.

Over at Infoworld, David Linthicum, CTO and founder of Blue Mountain Labs, wrote that the ‘open cloud’ is getting awfully confusing.  With the emergence of the OpenStack camp — Rackspace, HP, Internap, Piston Cloud (see disclosure) and others have OpenStack clouds running — and rival CloudStack and Eucalyptus, there are too many flavors of open-source clouds.

Wrote Linthicum:

If you’re looking at adopting an ‘open cloud’ technology, you have complex work ahead. Assessing their value is complicated by the fact that many of the vendors are less than a two years old and have a minimal install base that can provide insight into fit, issues, and value.

Hazy understanding of cloud

If corporate IT gurus are confused about the cloud, think about the poor consumer. Despite the success of  Apple’s iCloud and various Google services,  new research sponsored by Citrix shows that many consumers still don’t really “get” the cloud.  The most quoted factoid from the Wakefield Research report was that 51 percent of the 1,006 American adults surveyed, believe that stormy weather interferes with cloud computing.

Once the concept was explained to the respondents however, 40 percent thought the ability to access work information from home would be a good thing if only so they can work in their “birthday suits.”

That’s progress I guess.

Disclosure: Piston is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user Dano

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(L to R) Jo Maitland, GigaOM; Chris Kemp, CEO Nebula and co-founder, OpenStack; Sameer Dholakia, Group VP and GM, Citrix; Marten Mickos, CEO, Eucalyptus Systems
(c)2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

The stage was set for a lively debate between public cloud rivals at GigaOM Structure in San Francisco Thursday – representatives from Citrix, Eucalyptus and the OpenStack project certainly delivered. Nebula CEO and OpenStack co-founder Chris Kemp didn’t even get past the introductions before he challenged his fellow panelists on their “closed” cloud implementations and embrace of Amazon Web Services’ API, which he compared to the Walmart of infrastructure.

“It’s reasonably fast, reasonably priced and reasonably secure,” Kemp said, which is why it has the lion’s share of the cloud business today. But AWS will never be incredibly fast or incredibly secure, Kemp said, and while AWS may be emerging as a de facto standard, it doesn’t change the fact its API is proprietary. “I don’t think a de facto standard is a standard,” he said.

Kemp took Citrix and Eucalyptus to task for reinforcing Amazon’s dominance rather than embracing the OpenStack project. As you can imagine, Eucalyptus Systems CEO Marten Mickos and Citrix Systems Cloud Platforms Group GM Sameer Dholakia took exception to Kemp’s claims, particularly his characterization of their cloud platforms as closed.

Both pointed out that their platforms are open-source, just like OpenStack, but Kemp refused to accept that definition, saying the companies developed the core of platform internally and then released their software to the open-source community. Kemp contrasted that with the OpenStack, which is developed top-to-bottom by its broad membership with no large company having any outsized influence.

Dholakia countered that having a tight-knit group of engineers develop the core code and then releasing it is actually an ideal approach, since it provides a “rock solid” base from which the open-source community can build. Citrix recently abandoned OpenStack to pursue its own open-source rival CloudStack, which it has released to the Apache Software Foundation – so the wound to OpenStack may still be a bit raw.

Mickos went on the offensive, comparing OpenStack to the Soviet Union – a collective farm ostensibly run for the good of its members, but where nothing is actually accomplished. Eucalyptus is moving in the same direction its customers are heading – and that direction is overwhelming toward AWS, he said. When another public cloud API emerges as a legitimate challenger, Eucalyptus will support it, Mickos said. If that challenger is OpenStack, Mickos said he would welcome its API, but he’s not holding his breath.

“We’re very happy to support the next [API], but I have no idea what it will be,” Mickos said.

Check out the rest of our Structure 2012 coverage, as well as the live stream, here.

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Eucalyptus, the cloud platform company that wants to bridge corporate private clouds to the Amazon cloud, is updating its platform software to bring it more in line with the open source model.

CEO Marten Mickos said the latest release of the Eucalyptus cloud platform cements its status as a champion of open source development but does not do much to further the promise of Amazon API compatibility. That will come in the 3.2 release due at the end of the year, he said.

“The 3.1 release marks our full commitment to open source. We did away with different editions — now it’s just the Eucalyptus cloud platform all free and open source, all hosted on Github. Not just the code contributions but the bug databases, and we’ve made it easy to integrate with other products, easier to build plug-ins and tools atop our platform,” Mickos told me last week.

Functionally, the company also improved performance, stability and added a new FastStart process to speed up private cloud deployments. The company will provide plug-ins and support for paying subscribers. “If you want to run this integrated with VMware you need plug-in and you’ll pay for that but it’s not a separate edition,” he said.

The company made a big splash in March when it announced — with Amazon —  that it would support of Amazon’s key APIs, easing interoperability between a business’s internal private cloud and Amazon’s public cloud. Specifically it will support the Amazon EC2, S3, EBS and IAM (identity and access management) APIs, but most of that work won’t surface until release 3.2 due at the end of the year, Mickos said.

The Amazon API hue and cry

Given the popularity of the Amazon public cloud model with developers and consumers (if not all IT departments) and that private cloud is the preferred mode of cloud computing for IT pros, technologies that bridge those worlds safely and efficiently could be much in demand.  The Eucalyptus-Amazon pairing was thus been viewed by many as a way to make Amazon Web Services palatable to business accounts and a way for Eucalyptus to bask in the reflected glow of Amazon’s success. It was also seen as a counter move to the OpenStack forces including Rackspace lining up around that technology for private and public cloud deployment.

But the whole notion of cloning or relying on Amazon APIs is controversial. Last week John Engates, CTO of Rackspace, warned attendees of the Open Data Center Alliance Forecast Conference that cloning Amazon’s APIs is a continuous game of catch-up, not a way to innovate. “The idea that cloning the Amazon API will solve everything is ridiculous,” he said.

Mickos last week acknowledged the controversy, but said Eucalyptus is being pragmatic. “Look, it’s not specifically important to be compatible with Amazon, it’s important to be compatible with the leading API in the public cloud space. If and when there’s another major standard, we will support that as well,” Mickos said.

Expect more debate around the importance of Amazon API compatibility at this week’s GigaOM Structure show where Rackspace President Lew Moorman and Amazon Web Services’ CTO Werner Vogels will both speak.

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