I have no numbers for the AWS event but as of Tuesday night, the count for OpenStack Summit is 2,400 registered attendees up from 1,314 for last year’s San Diego extravaganza, according to an OpenStack source with access to that data. (The data is here and here is a readable, updated count.)

Rackspace, HP pack OpenStack show

Rackspace, one of OpenStack’s granddaddies along with NASA — has registered 199 216 people — a number which one OpenStack member characterized as overkill. Hewlett-Packard, depending on how you count or spell it, has 169 171 people or so on tap. Here’s how that list breaks out: HP (85), Hewlett Packard with no dash (30); Hewlett-Packard with dash (22); HP Cloud Services (21) and HP Cloud (7), Hewlett Packard Co. (4). Seriously, HP, what’s up with that?

Red Hat is on with 74, IBM with 72 and the list goes on. What I’ll be looking for, however will be real, live OpenStack customers which are starting to trickle out. OpenStack Foundation member Cloudscaling (which registered 14 summit attendees) just announced video game publisher Ubisoft as a customer and already has claimed LivingSocial and IBS Datafort as reference accounts.

Structure 2011: Werner Vogels – CTO, Amazon.com

Some other interesting tidbits from the OpenStack Summit attendee list: Controversial foundation member VMware registered a whopping 4 22 people. VMware bought Nicira, a big OpenStack player in software-defined networking. And non-member Oracle registered 14 people. Interesting. Oracle is going its own way with cloud but recently buy bought Nimbula, an OpenStack member.

The new OpenStack Grizzly release will be front-and-center in Portland.

Amazon to tout OpsWorks, other enterprise-class services

Meanwhile, on the other coast, AWS CTO Werner Vogels will probably talk up AWS’ value to the enterprise and tout its new-and-improved cloud management features and services including OpsWorks lifecycle management offering and RedShift, Amazon’s inexpensive data warehouse alternative to Teradata, Oracle, IBM and HP products.

AWS, a favorite among developers at startups and big companies alike, still needs to persuade  financial services companies and organizations in other heavily regulated industries that its public cloud infrastructure can be trusted for sensitive workloads — things beyond archival storage. And, there are indications — including the private cloud it’s allegedly building for the CIA that it’s getting over its aversion to private cloud deployment as well.

OpenStack clouds are starting to gel — at least at some customer accounts. What remains to be seen is which of the many OpenStack cloud providers will gain traction. And meanwhile, AWS continues to chug along.

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But even without a cute name, the distributed infrastructure that underlies the web services that we turn to day in and out is just as important. And this year as we gear up for our sixth Structure event (June 19 and 20), dedicated to the infrastructure that serves both the internet and the cloud, we’re thinking about what’s changed in the last year and what’s ahead.

Last year, we spent a lot of time discussing software-defined everything — broadly, the abstraction of the physical hardware from the applications and even operating systems running on top of them. We had tiffs and debates over different platforms and whose APIs are really open. We even had a group hug.

Structure 2012: Marten Mickos – CEO, Eucalyptus Systems, Chris C. Kemp – CEO, Nebula and Co-Founder, OpenStack, Sameer Dholakia – Group VP and GM, Cloud Platforms Group, Citrix

This year’s focus: The physical cloud

Looking ahead, we’re peeling back some of the software-defined abstraction to focus on the physicality of the cloud. Like how do we build special-purpose architectures for our apps? What happens when we scale beyond the confines of the data center with dark fiber or other distributed resources?

We’ve got some amazing speakers signed up already: from Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of VMware who will undoubtedly hit upon the business side of the cloud, to Adrian Cockroft of Netflix, who will talk about some of the practical issues associated with supporting a giant movie streaming service on Amazon’s cloud. And of course, we’ll have Amazon’s Werner Vogels back for his sixth appearance onstage, where he’ll defend the online retailer’s title as the king of the cloud. Just kidding, this isn’t a boxing match, it’s an infrastructure conference. So please, no wagering.

Structure 2012: Christofer Hoff – Chief Architect, Security, Juniper Networks, Simon Crosby – Co-Founder and CTO, Bromium, Stacey Higginbotham – Senior Writer, GigaOM

Meet the people getting their hands dirty with deployments

And for those who have moved beyond the public and private cloud debates, or the “Is the cloud secure enough?” worries, we’ll have several practitioners discuss how they operate their businesses in the cloud. The CIOs of The Clorox Co., Revlon and Pabst Brewing Co. will all be onstage. We’ll also have tips for making sure your software is built to scale without breaking the bank, and processes for building out IT infrastructure in a more flexible manner.

One of the emerging trends we’re seeing in applications is that their architecture is no longer this static set of code, but is actually evolving not just with little tweaks, but with wholesale architectural rewrites. Speakers including Kevin Scott, an SVP of engineering at LinkedIn and Sam Schillace, a VP of engineering at Box will share their experiences building new application architectures to meet both scale and business needs. It’s not enough to keep your application from breaking. It needs to run efficiently for the business too.

So join us on June 19 and 20 in San Francisco at our Structure conference. We’re going to have something for everyone, from the business team to the developer community. Register now and get $500 off the regular ticket price with our earlybird discount. See you in San Francisco.

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Remember last July when our own Om Malik and Stacey Higginbotham reported on VMware’s plan to take on Amazon with a cloud of its own?  Remember VMware denying it?  Well, last Wednesday it all became official with the announcement of VMware Hybrid Cloud services — in which VMware will host its own public cloud that will be sold by existing VMware partners.

Gartner’s Chris Wolf has an interesting take on his blog here.

Now, there is some wiggle room for VMware here. Our original story showed the big cloud coming out of the then-unannounced spin-off of VMware and EMC That spinoff — the Pivotal Initiative — did happen, but it appears that it’s VMware, not Pivotal, that’s running the big cloud. Paul Maritz the former CEO of VMware and now the head of Pivotal, will be speaking this week at GigaOM’s Structure: Data in New York.

Amazon beefs up Virtual Private Cloud

It was an even more busy week than normal for Amazon itself which unveiled new Virtual Private Cloud capabilities for AWS users. Launched 4 years ago Amazon VPC lets users create “a virtual network of logically isolated EC2 instances and an optional VPN connection to your own data center,” according to the AWS blog. what’s new now is that soon, when a new customer launches EC2 instances, they will do so in the ”EC2-VPC” platform.

“You don’t need to create a VPC beforehand – simply launch EC2 instances or provision Elastic Load Balancers, RDS databases, or ElastiCache clusters like you would in EC2-Classic and we’ll create a VPC for you at no extra charge.  We’ll launch your resources into that VPC and assign each EC2 instance a public IP address.”

At that point you can assign multiple IP addresses to a single instance, change security group membership on the fly, and add egress filters to those groups.

One of Amazon’s weak points when it comes to the enterprise accounts it wants to attract is the unwillingness of IT pros — especially in heavily regulated businesses — to put mission critical workloads on shared public cloud infrastructure. This new VPC capability might make them more amenable to using AWS at a time when more and more “private” cloud options — from competitors Rackspace, HP, and others are coming on line. GCN has more on VPC.

Also new his week: AWS tripled the amount of storage that can be associated with each RDB (Relational Database) instance.

“You can now create DB instances (MySQL or Oracle) with up to 3 TB of storage (the previous limit was 1 TB) and 30,000 IOPS (previously, 10,000). SQL Server DB Instances can be created with up to 1TB of storage and 10,000 IOPS.”

And, Amazon also launched a version of its mobile AWS console for iPhone so It types can see what’s going on with their Amazon cloud when they’re not at their desks. An Android version of the console debuted in January.

This public cloud war will only get more interesting if, as has been reported here and elsewhere, IBM is in the market for SoftLayer and/or Rackspace.  If IBM ends up making either of those rather substantial purchases — Reuters put a $2 billion price tag on SoftLayer and Rackspace would be much more — it would only show how critical IBM sees this market that it would spend that kind of dough after already investing billions in its own cloud infrastructure. Of course, no one — from IBM, from SoftLayer, from Rackspace or from EMC (which was also reportedly in the hunt for SoftLayer), is commenting.

Working with your Frenemy: Newvem debuts AWS heat map

Newvem is the energizer bunny of AWS watchers. Amazon keeps “totally copying” Newvem’s capabilities (in the words of Newvem CEO Zev Laderman) and Newvem just keeps on adding more capabilities.

Newvem, the Israeli company obsessed with showing you more about your Amazon Web Services use than you know, was at it again this week, unveiling its Cloud Utilization Heat map that shows AWS users their utilization over multiple regions by time, machine type and availability zone.

Newvem CEO Zev Laderman (left) and AWS CTO Werner Vogels.

The sales pitch?A substantive portion (15 percent) of the clouds Newvem analyzes now are underutilized. That means “$30 million of $200 million EC2 spending tracked is wasted,” says Newvem spokesman Cameron Peron. Presumably if you know what resources are being wasted you can make moves to streamline operations and run things optimally. Sell off reserved instances you’re not using, for example.

Here’s my guess: Newvem has focused 100 percent on AWS to this point. But as Amazon keeps adding more of its own dashboard and monitoring alerts, I would bet Newvem, like other monitoring companies, will soon turn its eye to other clouds as well. After all, multi-cloud deployments are one tactic large companies are looking at to avoid locking into a single provider.

That Amazon competes with its own partners is certainly not new. It’s been going on for years as we’ve reported. The company, like Microsoft or IBM before it, treads a fine line between relying on smaller, nimbler partners to come up with innovative new services, and then adding more value-added services itself. Amazon launched a partner program last year to help navigate this terrain.

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The streaming video company, famous for its use of cloud services, is putting up $100,000 to urge developers to come up with new features or “improve usability, quality, reliability and security of computing resources delivered as a service over the internet.” The company’s not new to contests: In 2006 it launched The Netflix Prize for the best collaborative filtering algorithm to aid in personalized film ratings. That prize was discontinued a few years later.

As for the new challenge, Netflix chief product officer Neil Hunt said in a statement:

“Cloud computing has become a hot topic recently, but the technology is still just emerging … No doubt many of the key ideas that will take it to the next level have yet to be conceived, explored, and developed. The Netflix Cloud Prize is designed to attract and focus the attention of the most innovative minds to create the advances that will take cloud to the next level.”

Prizes will be offered in 10 categories and winners will be judged by a panel including Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon; Martin Fowler, chief scientist of Thoughtworks; Simon Wardley, cloud strategist; Joe Weinman, author and Telx SVP; Aino Corry, developer training expert at University of Aarhus; and Yury Israilevsky, VP of Netflix Cloud.

Deadline for entry is September 15, 2013 with winners to be announced at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Re:Invent conference in November. There’s more information on the prize at Github.

AWS already hosts a startup challenge, but contests like this might bring in some fresh thinking from new and exciting sources.  I look forward to seeing what comes of this contest.

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Specifically, the company is cutting the cost of reads and writes by 35 percent and indexed storage by 75 percent across all regions. The usual AWS blog chart is here:

In his blog, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels lauded how customers like Shazam have wielded the managed database service.

As Vogels told GigaOM last year at the product launch, NoSQL suits social gaming and web applications but is also critical for the big data applications demanded by business.

Since DynamoDB debuted, Amazon has launched a series of other big data and enterprise-focused services like the newly shipping Data Pipeline and promises more as it faces heightened competition from OpenStack players which include legacy IT giants IBM, Red Hat, Hewlett-Packard as well as Rackspace and others. Rackspace just bought into the NoSQL database service with its acquisition of ObjectRocket and its MongoDB technology.

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I’m exaggerating, but not much. Accounts out of VMware’s partner conference in Las Vegas this week really lay it out: CRN‘s Steve Burke quotes VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger telling VMware partners that “if a workload goes to Amazon [Web Services], you lose, and we have lost forever.”

Gelsinger continued:

“We want to own corporate workload … We all lose if they end up in these commodity public clouds. We want to extend our franchise from the private cloud into the public cloud and uniquely enable our customers with the benefits of both. Own the corporate workload now and forever.”

So who really loses or wins here? Would it really be everyone or would it be VMware? No one is blind to the fact that Amazon Web Services’ growing power is of huge concern to legacy IT vendors and even to some of AWS’ own partners, but VMware hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory when it comes to partner relationships. Long-time VMware partners always complain about having to compete with VMware sales in the field. And, Gelsinger’s verbiage sounds very much like Microsoft whining a few years ago that Microsoft partners lose when customers go to Google Apps.

It’s a never-ending story: vendors love their VAR and integration partners until the vendor hits critical mass and business matures. Then those partners — and the margin they take from vendors — become an albatross and it’s time to go direct or to cut partner margin. Guess who loses then?

Conflating your own vendor-specific interests with those of your partners (and  users) is tricky stuff, as Matt Asay writes in ReadWrite.

CRN also quoted VMware President and COO  Carl Eschenbach telling conference attendees: “I look at this audience, and I look at VMware and the brand reputation we have in the enterprise, and I find it really hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books.”

To which, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels responded on Twitter:

@beaker as long as people see us as a bookstore, we are fine :-)

— Werner Vogels (@Werner) February 28, 2013

The problem VMware has is that many of its own partners don’t see huge value in selling vCloud Director: Many will provide it but they often offer other options — OpenStack etc.– as well.

VMware’s advantage is that nearly every company of any size runs vSphere in-house, but parlaying that virtualization dominance into the public cloud has proven difficult. Fair or not, VMware is seen as the expensive, proprietary option while AWS has become the go-to plan, at least for  test and development environments. Now Amazon is pushing hard  to win production workloads as evidenced by its big AWS: Reinvent show last November.

Here’s the thing: Gelsinger’s a smart guy. If he really wants VMware partners to fight its battles, the company has to start being better to its partners and stop competing with them in the field. Oh, and it has to offer a public cloud strategy that people want to buy into.

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But until recently, the hiring spree underlying this effort — Amazon has been seeking (and in some cases poaching) high-level sales engineers from enterprise IT companies like Sungard, HP, Oracle and EMC for a year or so — was a bit under the radar, as GigaOM reported in November.

Can you sell to a CIO? AWS wants you

What’s new, as Business Insider reported this week, is that it’s now out in the open; Amazon has posted lots of listings for enterprise-focused sales reps and sales managers. BI claimed 75 — I didn’t count them all, but the list is pretty rich. As of Thursday morning, AWS was seeking enterprise sales managers for New York, Dallas, Herndon, Virg., San Francisco, Irvine, Calif., and Seattle, among other areas.  As one listing puts it:

“As an Enterprise Sales leader you will have the exciting opportunity to help drive the growth and shape the future of an emerging technology. Your responsibilities will include driving revenue, adoption, and market penetration in enterprise accounts within the local geography. Your responsibilities will include building and managing a highly talented sales team focused on driving revenue, adoption, and market penetration in the Enterprise market. The ideal candidate will possess a technology sales management background that enables them to lead a team of senior enterprise sale representatives with engagements at the CXO level.”

Brian McCallion, founder and CEO of New York-based Bronze Drum Consulting, sees a tangible change in his AWS interactions of late. “What I see as a difference from 2012 is also the kinds of people AWS is hiring … the new Enterprise Account Manager and AWS Solution Architect I met with this week and last are more focused on eliminating organizational barriers that limit consumption of Cloud Services. And the focus area seems to be enabling Direct Connect for enterprise to simplify how enterprise connects to AWS.”

Startups and enterprises: two different animals

The fact that an established enterprise is, by definition, not a startup,  illustrates Amazon’s conundrum. Selling services to developers in startups is one thing and AWS was built on that business. But selling into an established enterprise with existing IT and with an internal bureaucracy is a whole other matter.

For all of AWS’s momentum — it claims enterprise accounts including Nasdaq and systems integration partners like  Accenture, Deloitte and Capgemini — some still doubt that big companies will trust mission critical loads to what they see as shared, and therefore insecure, infrastructure.

Amazon has worked to ease these concerns with new enterprise support options; with Virtual Private Cloud, which cordons off a section of Amazon’s cloud for a given company’s use; and management tools like Trusted Advisor.

And then there are such enterprise-y services as RedShift data warehousing, the Data Pipeline data consolidation service, and any number of new big data and other services promised by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels at Structure: Europe last year. The Register picked up on yet another job listing indicating more big data goodies to come from AWS. Perhaps some sort of big data managed service similar to DynamoDB would be in order.

Christopher Smith, cloud analyst at Cloud Technology Partners, a Boston-based systems integrator, says corporate customers are warming up to AWS and are getting more sophisticated about the notion of putting IT loads outside the firewall. “”Obviously [AWS is] the elephant in public cloud space. Clients are hesitant because of associated compliance and governance risk, but we’re seeing more openness due to key enabling technologies, while at the same time a cultural shift and greater understanding that just because you can see and touch the box, doesn’t mean its secure.”

But that new-found understanding comes as more cloud providers enter the scene. Going forward, Amazon will face more enterprise-focused competition for those business accounts.  EMC chief strategist Paul Maritz will doubtless speak about Pivotal Labs’ take on cloud infrastructure at GigaOM’s upcoming Structure:Data conference in New York, March 20-21.  And, as Rackspace, HP and Red Hat gear up their OpenStack-based clouds — IBM will likely say more about its OpenStack plans at the upcoming OpenStack Summit — one thing is for sure: Amazon may be the biggest cloud seeking enterprise customers, but it won’t be alone. And all of those rivals sport enterprise relationships that Amazon still craves.

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But now that AWS is seeking credibility as a for-real platform for enterprise applications — a recurring theme at November’s inaugural AWS: Reinvent conference — should it offer a similar challenge for enterprise?

The suggestion was posed on Twitter by IT specialist Jeff Schneider, CEO of MomentumSI. 

Shouldn't #AWS kill their startup challenge and launch an enterprise challenge (if they were serious)?—
Jeff Schneider (@jeffrschneider) January 16, 2013

Over the past year, AWS has launched a series of higher level services and partnerships with such enterprise software stalwarts as SAP. If you so desire, you could run your Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server and even SAP Hana database on AWS although for now, as Capgemini CTO Joe Coyle has pointed out, licensing policies by those enterprise players pretty much nukes their ability to compete there.

#AWS prize for nastiest ERP implementation on cloud—
Jeff Schneider (@jeffrschneider) January 16, 2013

If AWS can encourage corporate execs to promote a contest for their in-house developers to build prototype mission-critical applications in AWS, an enterprise cloud push could accelerate. At GigaOM‘s Structure: Europe conference in October,  Amazon CTO Werner Vogels insisted that these enterprise apps are already taking off in AWS. Others disagree — maintaining that deployment of mission-critical applications in a public cloud is still a very dubious proposition especially in financial services and other regulated industries.

Some say this reluctance stems more from fear, uncertainty and doubt than from real issues with Amazon’s services. CIOs worry that AWS snafus in the consumer arena could impact their corporate services as well, although experts say well-architected IT services across AWS availability zones and regions mitigate that risk.

Then there’s the ingrained fear of change. ”IT people worry they’ll lose their jobs because of cloud,” said Greg Shields, senior partner and principal technologist for Concentrated Technology, an IT consultancy. “I tell them, ‘you will lose your job because of cloud but remember, there’s a legion of former punch-card feeder people out there who are still working. It’s just that they changed. Cloud won’t make you lose your income, you’ll just be doing something different. You may do higher order architecting and thinking about what services make sense in the cloud and how to construct them to make them efficient and secure.’”

So, GigaOM readers, what do you think? Does Amazon need an Enterprise Challenge? Please use comments to weigh in.

Feature photo courtesy of Shutterstock user tommistock

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As is usually the case with AWS, there is a free tier of usage available for those wanting to test the waters:

And then there’s a paid tier for production workloads:

In announcing Data Pipeline plans at AWS: Reinvent, last month, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels painted it as a way to help customers create automated and scheduled workflows of data — from Amazon’s own DynamoDB database service or S3 storage to Elastic MapReduce or wherever the data is needed (here’s where Redshift comes in.)   He promised pre-integration with AWS data sources and “easy connection” to third-party and on-premise data sources as well. It’s not clear from the post what connectivity there is to those third-party data sources now although there is mention of  copying on-premises MySQL on the list of Data Pipeline templates.

.

Also new from AWS: Fat, new instance types

On Friday, Amazon also announced a new “high storage EC2 instance family”  tailored for data-intensive jobs that need lots of storage density and fast sequential I/O handling. Such applications include data warehousing (hello again Redshift), log processing etc.

According to the blog post announcing the new family:

“High Storage Eight Extra Large (hs1.8xlarge) instances are a great fit for applications that require high storage depth and high sequential I/O performance. Each instance includes 120 GiB of RAM, 16 virtual cores (providing 35 ECU of compute performance), and 48 TB of instance storage across 24 hard disk drives capable of delivering up to 2.4 GB per second of I/O performance.”

The new instances are available immediately from AWS’ US East facility and will roll out to other regions later. Pricing for on-demand instances starts at $4.60 per hour but users can also buy one- and three-year reserved instances with prices listed on the EC2 pricing page.

Both the Data Pipeline and fat new instances show that, as customer applications continue to generate tons of data — both relational and non-relational — Amazon is determined to attack the biggest and some of the toughest big data applications around. A combination of the Data Pipeline and Redshift, if it works as advertised, could mean serious problems for big, pricey data warehouse solutions from Teradata, Oracle, and Hewlett-Packard /Vertica

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In Netflix case, it’s MicroStrategy. “For every man-year we have invested in our data warehouse, we have 20 invested in MicroStrategy,” Yury Israilevsky, VP of cloud computing and platform engineering for Netflix.

Amazon Chief Data Scientist Matt Wood works with customers to meet their big data needs, and uses lessons learned to create services like Red Shift as well as  a new Data Pipeline service to make it easier for AWS customers to automate and schedule common workflows that ship their data from DynamoDB and S3 storage to Elastic MapReduce or wherever it makes most sense.  The service is “ pre-integrated with AWS data sources and easily connected to third-party and on-premise data sources,”  Amazon CTO Werner Vogels told attendees in Las Vegas. The pipeline is now in limited private beta, according to Amazon.

Third parties took advantage of the AWS: Reinvent buzz this week as well.  Google launched not one, but two, storage price cuts, one on Monday before the show and another on Thursday, the day after Amazon cut its S3 storage prices by 25 percent. Google is hellbent to prove that it’s serious about winning business customers over to its cloud platform.  And Greenpeace created  a “Green AWS” web site to make its point that AWS is not nearly energy efficient enough for their taste.

So what’s the takeaway? There’s obviously a race to the bottom on one front — storage —  but also a race to create of higher-end — and presumably higher margin — services to meet data analysis and transfer needs as well.  In other words: stay tuned, this is only going to get better.

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