John Treadway

Okay – this is easy… or is it? Lots of people continue to perpetuate the idea that the AWS APIs are a de facto standard, so we should just all move on about it.  At the same time, everybody seems to acknowledge the fact that Amazon has never ever indicated that they want to be a true standard.  Are we reallyIn fact, they have played quite the coy game and kept silent luring potential competitors into a false sense of complacency. Amazon has licensed their APIs to Eucalyptus under what I and others broadly assume to be a a hard and fast restriction to the enterprise private cloud market. I would not be surprised to learn that the restrictions went further – perhaps prohibiting Eucalyptus from offering any other API or claiming compatibility with other clouds. Amazon Has ZERO Interest in Making This Easy Make no mistake – Amazon cares deeply about who uses their APIs ... (more)

Talking Cloud in the Enterprise

Despite the fact that cloud is part of the daily conversation in many enterprises, I still find a significant gap in many places in terms of a true understanding of what it means. This is somewhat compounded by the reliance on standard definitions of cloud computing from NIST and other sources. These definitions are helpful in some respects, but they are far more focused on attributes than on business value – and the business value is what is truly needed in the enterprise to break through the barriers to cloud computing. First, let’s divide the enterprise IT landscape into three ... (more)

Cloudy Implications and Recommendations in Megaupload Seizure

The FBI seized popular upload site Megaupload.com yesterday.  They took the site down and now own the servers. I am not an attorney, and I have no opinion on whether or not the MegaUpload guys were breaking laws or encouraging users to violate copyrights through illegal uploading and streaming of movies, recordings, etc.  Right or wrong, the FBI did it and now we need to deal with the fallout. The challenge is that there were very likely many users who were not breaking any laws.  People backing up their music, photos, websites, documents and who knows what else.  I highly doubt... (more)

How Some Journalists Confuse People About Cloud

Simon Wardley and I had a quick exchange about the sloppily written and factually inaccurate writing of Wired’s Jon Stokes. Simon commented about a November post on Wired CloudLine as follows: @swardley:  ”This Wired post on cloud from Nov ’11 – where it isn’t wrong (repeating unfounded myths), it is tediously obvious – bit.ly/wWLbsL” I piled on and Simon posted about another post here. @swardley: “Oh dear, another of the wired author’s articles - http://bit.ly/vHWPZW – is so full of holes, well, no wonder people are confused.” Stokes replied here. @jonst0kes:  ”@cloudbzz @swa... (more)

PaaSing Comments – Data and PaaS

I’ve been looking at the PaaS space for some time now.  I spent some time with the good folks at CloudBees (naturally), and have had many conversations on CloudFoundry, Azure, and more with vendors, customers and other cloudy folks. Krishnan posted a very good article over on CloudAve, and at one level I fully agree that PaaS will be come more of a data-centric (vs. code-centric) animal over the next few years.  To some degree that’s generally true of all areas of IT – data, intelligence and action from data, etc.  But there is a lot more to this. Most PaaS frameworks have very... (more)