Latest News from Reuven Cohen

The Rise of The Vertical Cloud

Wed, 09 May 2012 03:00:00 EDT

While some are happy to debate definitions of cloud computing, I prefer to focus on the characteristics that make successful companies, successful. Lately there seems to have been a shift from the anything for anyone cloud to the industry or vertically focused cloud. Adding to this is today's piece of news from Zynga who announced what they describe as "the beta release of Zynga.com, a new service enabling third party developers to create and publish games on the Zynga Platform." Yes, that company that brought you farmville is now going to be a cloud service provider enabling a whole new crop of game companies, which I can only assume they will acquire when the time is right.

So why is this news important? It's another great example of a trend in the cloud computing sector of "Vertically focused" cloud products and services. In the early days, there was this mentality of just build it and they would come. Problem was that for most, they never really came. Instead you had a handful of very large players and everyone else fighting over the table scraps. What those who survived learned, is that in order to be successful it isn't about being the best funded or even the best performing, but instead it is about being the most focused on the needs of a particular customer vertical. Those who focus on a particular problem, be it for a particular enterprise sector, application or customer need will have a clear and distinct differentiation in a market dominated by me-too cloud services.

This trend certainly isn't unique to the cloud space, look at Facebook as an example. In an early market they were able to quickly gain a dominate position as a fairly generic social network. As the social market began maturing you started to see the most successful companies becoming more and more laser focused. A great example is Instagram who according to Mashable now has more than 50 million users and is gaining about 5 million users per week, not to mention it was recently acquired by Facebook for 1 billion dollars. They succeed because of their ability to focus on a vertical. This trend seems to be gaining momentum recently with apps like SocialCam seeing astounding growth by focusing on the vertical niche opportunities over looked by their larger, better funded competition.. TechCrunch reported that SocialCam jumped from 12 million users last week to 20 million users today. Yes, 8 million new users in 1 week. Focus Focus Focus. Where's youtube?

So what does a consumer focused app and a gaming company have to do with Cloud computing? Everything, as our market matures we are beginning to see the same sort of vertical focus for the most successful new bread of cloud companies entering the scene. No longer is it acceptable to want to be a clone of Amazon or who ever you consider to be the leader in a particular sector. Nor is it wise. Those who focus on the industry sectors neglected by the largest players will see the most success and will be selling themselves for an Instagram or two.
(1 instgram = $1 Billion USD)

The Cloud Backbone – Infrastructure: Digital Nibbles Podcast episode 008

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 09:24:30 EDT

I'm hosting solo this week and our guests are Ben Kepes from Diversity Limited and Reza Malekzadeh from Nimbula. Ben chats about the infrastructure and tech industry in New Zealand and how that ties to the opportunity in emerging markets while Reza tackles a discussion of the open source model and where the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) industry is heading.

You can find Ben on Twitter @BenKepes

Show Timeline:
0:00: Reuven updates us on his travels in Korea and covers the News of the Week
10:13: Interview with Ben Kepes from Diversity Limited
24:57: Interview with Reza Malekzadeh from Nimbula
35:21: Wrap up

SaaS and the Rise of PaaS

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 06:30:00 EDT

While on the road at CloudCamp DC, I had the opportunity to interview long time friend and cloud expert JP Morgenthal (Principal Solutions Architect from EMC). We talked Clouds, Hybrid, Federation, SaaS and the rise of PaaS, moving toward a services based architecture/economy.

Cloud Computing in China with Intel's Billy Cox

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 12:14:00 EDT

Chatting with Intel's Billy Cox outside Olympic Park in Beijing. We discuss the cloud computing marketing in China.

A Venture Into The Business of Business in the People's Republic of China

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 22:42:13 EDT

View from my Hotel in Shanghai

My Asian adventure continues. This time I'm writing from Shanghai. Like many of my trips to the region, I've learned more in a few days than you could in a lifetime of studying the Chinese IT business scene from afar. At this point that fact that I've build and sold a Chinese joint venture puts me in a rather unique position to describe the business landscape in China like no other. Not just from a purely academic one but from a practical one. One that allowed me to experience the full lifecycle of a Chinese JV. In my case, this lifecycle went from concept, to funding to sale within 16 months and included a cast of characters ranging from senior party members, international funders and business partners. To say business in China is exciting would be putting it mildly.

I've often described business here as an episode of TV show Madmen. Done in smoke filled rooms with significant quantities of liquor flowing freely. A business scene dominated by influence. Who you know and who you can introduce are central. A social network based on degrees of separation in the most human of ways. Your social graph in China is your currency and how you leverage it is key to your success here.

Another observation is that money and access to it is extremely accessible. This is thanks in part to strong government support for international joint ventures (such of my previous JV) makes funding potentially much more attainable. In order to be successful in this market requires that government (or at least it's money) plays a central role in your business venture. It's not a relationship based on control so much as support. Assuming your ok with the rules of engagement, the opportunities are vast. But there are caveats, IP controls are lacking and the Chinese are highly dependent on foreign innovation and technology to offset a lack of home grown options. I believe a big reason for the heavy investment in these types of foreign joint ventures is a kind of indirect flow of knowledge. It's not a blatant copying of IP so much as a loose knowledge transfer. Understand that a international joint venture is essentially a training vehicle. Once you understand this, you can properly address the market and the opportunities it holds. Mainly access to one of the largest fastest growing markets on the planet today. A planet currently dominated by stagnating growth in the established western markets. What's going on in Europe these days? Not much. Of course with risk comes great reward. In my case the ability to build and ultimately sell a venture in less a year and half. Try that in Canada? Unlikely.

I'll be posting more details of my discoveries in the coming days, in the mean time. Some food for thought.

Going Global: Data Sovereignty in the Cloud

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 05:15:00 EDT

View from my Hotel in Seoul

As I sit here in downtown Seoul waiting for my various meeting (including with the Canadian Embassy). I am reminded, thanks to a great post in the UK's Guardian by Ben Kepes, on the importance of Geography when it comes to cloud computing. The post is very timely in part, because of the recent campaign by some in our industry to downplay the importance of the geo-political aspects of where and how information is handled.

In the article Kepes says

"The thing limiting uptake of some of these solutions is a requirement, be it regulated or merely perceptional, is that data needs to be stored domestically. In relation to the connection between filesharing services and the risks introduced by US legislation such as the Patriot Act,"

You know what? He's right and his line "merely perceptitional" hits at the heart of the problem. I've also been saying this for years and it all truly does boil down to data sovereignty.

Yes, I know that many say that this is little more than FUD, like what our friends at Microsoft in a recent post where they state;

The essence of the problem is that there is a perception that organisations are not allowed to send data outside the geographic boundaries of their home country. In Australia, the perception is that data must stay on the island. There is no law that states data must remain on the island. There are some policies that recommend it, but nothing actually preventing it except in national secret instances.

Herein lies the problem, I do agree that policy, law and regulations are for the most part lacking. But I also realize that this is a reality of an emerging and fast changing industry. Just because there is "no law" doesn't mean that it doesn't make sense. (Need i point to the banking industry) The problem with IT in general is there tends to be an America First policy. Go ahead and sign up for a cloud service and you'll notice things like the requirement of ZIP Code, or State as part of the registration process. Hey I'm in Canada, we don't have states or Zip codes!

Adding to the mess are reports like the recent one Ovum published that it says "debunks the common misconception that data sovereignty issues are a major barrier to the use of public cloud services."

Whether implicit or just generally expected. The fact is that most US centric cloud providers treat global as, well, just the rest of the world. For these guys, going Global means anything outside of the USA. So let me remind you, each country is indeed its own country and shouldn't be expected to just except the laws of some distant land because that happens to be where the biggest cloud happens to be head quartered. To succeed in a truely global landscape you must accommodate the local variances and curtual differences. One size doesn't not fit all.

IT's the Cloud Ecosystem That Matters Most

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 21:22:00 EDT

Just catching up on some of my cloud news this morning and read an interesting PR release from the CloudStack team over at Citrix. Generally the news was less interesting than a couple small tidbits from the actual press release. In it, they stated that CloudStack has "hundreds of production clouds, collectively generating more than $1 billion in cloud revenue."

Yes, you head correctly, $1,000,000,000 in collective cloud revenue. It is impressive to say the least. But what I really think they're saying is that their "eco-system" is monetizing like crazy. Although I have no proof, it does make you wonder.

An eco-system is why people choose to build applications for a certain platform, for example Apple over let's say Android, or AWS over Azure or salesforce over whomever. It's always the eco-system. Moreover it's the ability to leverage a large talent pool of users, customers and solution providers. It's the ability to piggy back atop of what others have already done and best of all, a quick and easy way sell to them.

Moving on, I also found this little bit interesting. Again focus on the numbers;

The transition to the Cloud is fueling a massive build out of cloud infrastructure, projected to exceed $11 billion by the end of 2014. This new market will feature thousands of successful clouds of all shapes and sizes, ranging from business, infrastructure and developer offerings, to consumer, mobile and gaming services. The proposed Apache CloudStack project will make it easier for customers of all types to deliver cloud services on a platform that is open, powerful, flexible and “Proven Amazon Compatible.”

They've hit both, they're saying they have an eco-system, but they're also themselves leveraging the AWS API to hit Amazon's Cloud eco-system.

To me, this speaks to the main and most important reason to choose a particular platform, *stack or cloud over another. The ability to capitalize on its eco-system. An interesting move and one to watch in the coming months.

The World Wide Cloud of Things

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 07:00:00 EDT

I've been asked to present on the topic of "Internet of Things and The Cloud" at an upcoming conference in Shanghai next month. As you can probably tell, I can pretty well BS myself out of any situation, I do admit this one has made me pause. What are we talking about when use the term "Internet" of things? Are we talking about the Internet as a architecture, a network, as a or as "uniquely identifiable objects (things) and their virtual representations in an Internet-like structure". Then I ask are we talking about "the cloud" as a metaphor for the Internet or are we talking about cloud computing as a structure for getting something done using remote Internet centric computing resources? Are we talking both? I think we're talking both.

It seems pretty clear that we as a society are moving to a world where everything that can be connected, will be connected. In essence if it's powered and has the ability to either provide information either by displaying it or collecting it will be connected to the internet. The Internet is the ultimate information conduit. Now I ask, how does this relate to computing? Maybe it relates in that all this new information must be aggregated, segregated and analyzed. The enormous amount of information will need new "distributed" ways to be stored and worked upon. Enter cloud computing and enter the theses for my presentation. See you in Shanghai April 12th.

(I'll try to post my presentation, after I present it in China)

Talking Mission-Critical Enterprise Clouds

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 05:00:00 EDT

I'll tell you one thing, since joining Virtustream a few weeks ago I've heard a certain phrase thrown around a lot, one the I admit I have long avoided when discussing cloud computing. The term is "Enterprise Cloud" and it's at the heart of our strategy. Hey we even call our cloud an "enterprise cloud platform". So what makes this more enterprise than others cloud platforms and more importantly why does it even matter?

First let's look at the broader market, it's true the largest players are moving to the cloud, generally speaking this has been a lower level entry point. A kind of ground up approach to IT where the developer with a particular need goes out and finds a solution to his or her problem set. More recently the term "Shadow IT" has been used to describe this type of usage model whereby IT systems and IT solutions are built and used inside organizations without organizational approval. Allowing developers the freedom to create is often credited as the central method of innovation within IT today.

Innovation aside, it's also often the central reason applications fail. Things like lack of oversight, planning, documentation and just generally a seat of your paints approach to application dev and deployment. Not exactly the kind of approach larger businesses (AKA The Enterprise) like to see within the more important parts of their business IT orgs.

So back to what the heck is an enterprise cloud? I suppose one could say it's a cloud platform or service that takes the the particular needs of a larger enterprise customer into consideration. Moreover, one that supports mission-critical processes. Yes, Mission Critical. What? Ok, back to wikipedia.

Mission critical refers to any factor of a system (equipment, process, procedure, software, etc.) whose failure will result in the failure of business operations. That is, it is critical to the organization's 'mission'.

I'm not going to go out and say that if a small businesses website, application or what have you fails it's less important, it's obviously just as important as a larger enterprise's infrastructure. The key difference is the amount at stake. Yes, cash money, baby. In a public company for instance if a mission critical application fails not only could this result in massive problems both human and economic, it could result in signicant legal and regulatory problems as well. Where if you're iPhone app stops working, sure your customers are pissed, but unlikely to result in government intervention via new policies and even potentially new laws. I suppose What I'm saying is there just more at stake for a so called enterprise customer.

In a recent Virtustream customer announcement, Steve Stone, senior vice president and chief financial officer of Morris Communications, a media company based in Augusta, Ga. that owns and operates 12 daily newspapers said it well. “We turned to Virtustream because they offer the only enterprise cloud platform that features the security and availability of a private cloud and the cost efficiencies of a public cloud—in fact they are the only vendor we could find with true consumption-based pricing. Virtustream xStream delivered superior performance, and the company has the in-house managed services expertise to advise and execute on the entire migration process.”

Ok, press fluff aside, they needed a full service cloud platform, both on premise (private), as well as off premise (public) and the service to help in the transition from the old tactics and approaches to the new more nimble architecture that a cloud centric environment enables.

At the end of the day what being enterprise ready means is taking into consideration the demands, processes and unique requirement of an enterprise customer. For an enterprise looking at moving from a traditional on premise approach to a mission critical cloud infrastructure, I've come to realize that leveraging their existing in house experience while also realizing the increased economic benefits of using the cloud is a central part of the rationale for making the move to cloud computing. Success means having enterprise customers who can easily see these benefits via a custom suite of tools and services, all the while keeping the ability to use the technology, skills and approaches that have made them successful in the first place. Processes, methods and expertise that has in many cases taken decades to perfect. In essence allowing them to gracefully take a leap forward into the cloud while keeping one foot on the ground.

Yes, Professional Services Are Important for Cloud Providers

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 16:56:00 EDT

I keep reading these stories about how various cloud service providers are building up their consulting practices around cloud computing mostly to address the enterprise market (see my previous post for some thoughts on that subject). These articles mostly read like it's a surprising realization. Today's post comes via our friends at GigaOM, I'm actually a little surprised to see this type of marketing piece from them, but that's besides the point. Let me get to the point. Of course professional services are important. These services are in many cases the most important part of the the decision process for businesses looking at utilizing cloud products. If you're going to implement an SAP platform (as a traditional example) you're most likely going to hire consultants and integrators to assist with the heavy lifting. The cloud is no different. Yes, you're going to hire a cloud consultant, expert, guru, whatever you call them, this is a certainty. The real question is whether that consultant is part of your providers organization or external. But to say this is a surprising realization, is absurd. Unless you of course have all the answers to all the questions.

All The Best Apps Are On My Phone

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 11:26:00 EDT

Last night I had a nice chat with my Mom (@mcuniverse) who with her various blogs, websites and gadgets is by all means someone way ahead of the technology curve for her generation. Yet even as a "Computer Buff" she still describes herself as a late adopter of technology. Beside being my Mother and the person who first introduced me to technology, she's a great sounding board when it comes to insights into the technology adoption curve of the boomer generation.

Back to the discussion ~ during it occurred to us that back in the day, (late 1980s) all the best apps were distributed via shareware or freeware specifically for the MS DOS and later Windows PCs. Fast forward 20 years, all the best apps are for, as she said are for "phones". She feels like she's missing all the best stuff, she said she'd love to use instagr.am but it's only available on phones. Like many other phone only apps.

And you know what? She's right. For the mass market a.k.a "the consumer", the PC has quickly become little more than a web browser with a few office type apps. Thats about it. Anything worth using or doing is either web based or in a walled phone only garden. There are attempts to re-create the mobile app scene on PC's with Google, Microsoft and Apple all trying to recreate this eco-system, but sadly they're little more than a mechanism for the delivery of traditional software of the past rather than a conduit into the new and exciting world of mobile apps. The problem with a desktop or laptop is, they aren't really personal. They aren't extensions of you. They're cumbersome additions, not integrated extensions of your persona.

So herein lies the problem, it seems that the boomer generation has little need or interest in smart phones. They see it as a phone. But are they really? They've quickly become the personification of true personal computers and to be honest the phone part of my iPhone is probably the part I use the least. Although I still lug my laptop on my various business trips, it most sits in my hotel room. What I do bring to presentations, meeting and escapades is my Tablet and smart phone. It's all I need, more to point, it's all I want.

So as the world debates the move to cloud. It's already happened. Just ask my mom.

The @ruv Instagram Photo Gallery

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 11:16:47 EDT

New Blog Design for Ruv.Net ~ Hard Wood

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 13:46:00 EDT

Studio @ Liberty Village Toronto

Let me start by saying if you're using an old browser and the site looks like crap, upgrade your browser now or view the mobile version. Please don't comment it's broken in IE6 or something stupid like that. Cause I don't care... Nah, Just kidding, let me know if you see any problems.

In designing this the new version of my site, I was inspired by my new studio located in Toronto's Liberty Village (see my pic). The office itself is an old converted factory full of exposed brick and wood with a smoking fast internet connection, a mix of the old with the new. Kind of like my new design. For this design, i dusted off my photoshop and CSS skillz using some the latest tricks such as drop shadows for the text.

Here's how I did it for those interested.

(text-shadow: 2px 2px 2px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.9);)

Another big part of the site is the use of Google Web Fonts which according to Google, "makes web fonts quick and easy to use for everyone, including professional designers and developers."

It's actually a pretty cool service, the goal is to create a directory of core web fonts for the world and to provide an API service so that anyone can bring quality typography to their webpages.

It even has it's own font API service which runs on Google's servers. They are fast, reliable and tested. Google provide the service free of charge. It is possible to add Google Web Fonts to a website in seconds. Like what you're currently looking at.

Best of all, the fonts are Open Source. This means that you are free to share your favorites with friends and colleagues. You can even improve or customize them and collaborate with the original designer. And you can use them in every way you want, privately or commercially – in print, on your computer, or in your websites.

For your reference, I'm using the Font Didot for the body, Sorts Mill Goudy for the headers and Calligraffitti for the dateline.

Let me know what you think.

(If you're reading this post via RSS, go to ruv.net and check it out)

Cyborg Anthropology with Amber Case

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 13:26:00 EDT

I'll admit it, one of the best parts of doing the Digital Nibbles podcast series is getting to meet new and interesting folks. A lot of the these people are brought to the show via my co-host @techallyson a.k.a Allyson Klein who also moonlights as a Marketing Director at Intel. (j/k)

Our upcoming show on Wednesday is going to be a great one with featuring a Amber Case who is a self described Cyborg Anthropologist.. what? Yes, someone who studies Cyberanthropology, What is that you ask? Well, I had no idea either so I went to the "trusty" Wikipedia page which stated it as.

"a subbranch of sociocultural anthropology that deals with cybernetic systems, the culturally informed interrelationships between human beings and technologies. These interrelationships include the attempts to fuse technological artifacts with human and other biological organisms, with human society, and with the culturally shaped environment."

Professionally Amber is a co-founder of a startup in PDX (Portland) called Geoloqi that has developed a mobile geolocation and geo-fencing API that is really quite cool, but even more interesting is what and how she describes herelf as a "cyber anthropologist." She has spoken at TED, as well as written about the subject in Wired, Forbes, TNW and TIME and recently spoke at SXSW.

She describes Cyborg Anthropology as: someone who "looks at how humans and non human objects interact with each other, and how that changes culture. So, for instance, we have these things in our pockets that cry, and we have to pick them up and soothe them back to sleep, and then we have to feed them every night by plugging them into the wall, right? And at no other time in history have we had these really strange non human devices that we take care of as if they are real. And we're very dependent upon them. So that's one of the aspects that I'm studying, the idea of mobile technology and its effect on people's relationships. Another thing is the idea of extending into the second self online, through an avatar. So studying how people interact with each other through these little technosocial interactions, versus just the analog interactions, is another aspect of cyborg anthropology."

You can finder more info on her at Twitter, Linked-In, and at her blog or tune into the Digital Nibbles Podcast this wednesday at 6pm Eastern / 3pm Pacific.

Condo Computing (Own the Base - Rent the Spike)

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 07:00:00 EDT

There's a long-standing joke in the cloud space. One that can be summed up as "All your bases R belong to your cloud provider" a play on the pre-internet meme all your bases are belong to us” The mantra is one of not only lock-in but one that has become a fundamental cloud business premise based upon what has become a central requirement of a complete and total migration to the cloud. One that assumes a binary choice must be made when deciding to use cloud centric services. But the reality is the choice is one that must take a wholistic view of many loosely coupled parts both local and remote. An aggregated (hybrid) approach that understands that key metrics are constantly changing and baseline capacity requirements are no longer as simple as mine or yours. But instead built upon the base of a partnership within a federated group of cloud services yours and mine.

Big Bucks for Virtustream & Webinar

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 16:09:38 EDT

We're on a roll, Virtustream has secured an additional $15 million dollars in venture capital funding, bringing our total equity raised to $75 million to date. We'll be using the funds to further accelerate Virtustream's growth, accelerate development of our xStream cloud solution, expand our geographic coverage and support the rapid growth in the cloud market.

A little background, The xStream platform was purpose built to address the exacting requirements of enterprise customers as they move their IT and applications to the cloud. xStream delivers secure enterprise class clouds, with application level SLAs, supporting multiple hypervisors and is the industry's first cloud solution to use ‘µVM' (See - A Kilowatt for the Cloud?) It’ technology providing efficiency significantly beyond traditional virtualization and enabling a truly consumption based pricing model. Virtustream offers xStream, Enomaly and Spotcloud worldwide and has offices in New York, Washington, London, San Francisco, Toronto and operates four data-centers worldwide.

For an in depth look at our compelling technology based on the Micro-VM (µVM™), please attend our interactive webinar on Wednesday, March 21 at 8am PT/11am ET/3pm GMT. Register here.

Going forward you will see further hybrid and federation cloud capabilities as we enhance our solutions. Check us out at www.virtustream.com or follow us on twitter @virtustream

µVM - A Kilowatt for the Cloud?

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 12:24:23 EDT

It's been interesting getting settled into a new company, specially one that's not mine. From expense reports to new platforms and new systems to learn, I'm actually quite enjoying the change of pace and scenery. Over the last couple of weeks a big part of my job has been getting a feel for our Virtustream technology and platforms. One of the more interesting descriptions I keep hearing is our "µVM" (micro VM) tech, the basis for how our cloud is measured, metered, and billed.

First of all let me start out with the term. Micro (μ) is a prefix that comes from the Greek μικρός (mikrós), meaning "small". It's also a prefix in the metric system denoting a factor of 10-6 (one millionth). So its ideal when talking about a unit of cloud measurement, at least from a marketing standpoint.

Marketing gimmics are useful, but lets take a closer look at the actual technical analogy. When I ask what it is, I keep hearing the same response. Me: What's a µVM ? Geek: It's like a kilowatt for the Cloud?

According to Wikipedia, one watt is the rate at which work is done. Or to put it another way the measurement of the actual work or power required to do something or the amount of energy consumed while doing it. It's a unit of measure for getting something done - a perfect anology for cloud, where we are typically forced to look at cloud from the point of view of a traditional CPU. But really, the idea of RAM or GHZ as the basis for work is a little off the mark for a uniform unit of measure, it's importance is in a group or collection of elements. What we're really talking about is how much aggregate resources are required to get something done, and moreover how much those resource will cost on the smallest of increments as possible. So essentially a µVM is an aggregate, a collection of technical items that are gathered together to form a total quantity (in our case for cloud resources). It allows us to pack a much greater quantity of resources into a much smaller area. (How you ask? That's another post)

So enter the Kilowatt for the Cloud. Although technically if we're talking about "Micro" maybe the MicroWatt is a better phrase, it's equal to one millionth (10−6) of a watt and uses the same µ symbol :)

Reviving the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF)

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 07:00:00 EDT

It's been two years since for a variety factors we decided to stop posting to the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum. Over that time, a lot has changed within the industry, as well as in my personal life (two kids) and professional life (Enomaly sold). The cloud has gone from a fringe concept to a mainstream phenomenon. A phenomenon that can be seen in almost every part of information technology today. We've seen open to data center alliances to open server specifications to open stacks, to say the least, the need for "open" has propagated far and wide. But alas, there is still no uniform access for a truly interoperable cloud. A single stack, hardware specification or alliance has yet to result in any global interoperability among cloud services.

Intel's #DigitalNibbles Livecast - Pilot Episode

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 13:49:24 EST

I'm happy to announce the new Intel #DigitalNibbles livecast with @techallyson & myself is launching Jan 4th.

In this our pilot episode Allyson and I talk with Raejeanne Skillern from Intel about the company's perspective on the cloud and where cloud computing will take us. John Kenevey from Facebook also stops by to talk about the Open Compute Project and transforming the data center.

Listen to our pilot episode.

Virtustream Acquires Enomaly, Inc

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 09:27:58 EST

Toronto, Ontario, Canada—December 15, 2011— We are happy to announce today that Enomaly Inc., has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Virtustream, Inc., a leading global cloud solutions provider. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, and the deal is expected to close in Q1 of 2012.

Virtustream owns and operates its own data centers in the U.S. and U.K., and has offices in Washington, D.C., New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, London and Dublin. Virtusteam clients include some of the worlds largest and most successful firms including Domino Foods and Yum Brands.

“Cloud computing is evolving quickly and we believe Virtustream to be among the fasting growing and best positioned for the massive opportunity within the enterprise cloud space. Virtustream is ideally positioned to capitalize on the needs of complex enterprises migrating to the cloud.” said Reuven Cohen, Founder of Enomaly. “We are ecstatic to be joining the Virtustream team.”

Enomaly is credited with pioneering the first cloud brokerage, SpotCloud, which provides a marketplace for buyers and sellers to exchange available compute and storage capacities. Virtustream will make two key enhancements to SpotCloud. First, the company will delay the production launch of SpotCloud 1.0, which is currently in beta release with thousands of registered users, so as to enhance its robustness and security. Secondly, Virtustream will significantly enhance SpotCloud’s workload exchange with the xStream Infrastructure Unit (IU). The IU, invented and patented by Virtustream, is a cloud atomic element - an extensible container of compute, memory, bandwidth and IOPS, smaller than a virtual machine, which enables highly efficient cloud management for customers and industry leading service level guarantees.

Along with these upgrades, Virtustream will continue to support released versions of Enomaly’s software products. Furthermore, the company will also integrate specific components of SpotCloud into its future product suite, which will include a trusted exchange for clients looking for business-class cloud federation using the xStream cloud ecosystem. Virtustream’s xStream cloud platform is available today and includes off-premise virtual private cloud services, off-premise public cloud services and on-premise private cloud enablement software.

Another key driver of the acquisition is the acceleration of Virtustream’s expansion into the Asia Pacific region. Earlier in the year, Virtustream announced a strategic partnership with XYBASE to drive cloud computing adoption in Southeast Asia, including Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. With the acquisition of Enomaly, the company will quickly expand its distribution into China.

“Enomaly has gained its most significant market traction in AsiaPac, specifically China” said Rodney Rogers, Chairman and CEO of Virtustream. “This acquisition allows us to leverage their customer base in this region and to expand upon it by bringing these customers a much broader capability set with the xStream Cloud Platform.”

About Enomaly
Enomaly (www.enomaly.com) has been a pioneer and leader in the cloud computing space. Enomaly's SpotCloud platform is the world's first many-to-many cloud platform, interconnecting hundreds of suppliers and thousands of cloud infrastructure users in a global marketplace of cloud computing capacity. Enomaly's Elastic Computing Platform and its High Assurance Edition empower service providers, governments, and enterprise end-user organizations to deliver highly scalable "infrastructure as a service" (or IaaS) services to their customers and stakeholders. Enomaly is based in Toronto, Canada, with additional operations in Vancouver and in major APAC markets. Needham & Company, LLC acted as financial agent to Enomaly in this transaction. Enomaly is also creator of CloudCamp, an informal global series of cloud computing events that provide a common ground for the introduction and advancement of cloud computing.

About Virtustream
Virtustream (www.virtustream.com) is an innovative cloud provisioning firm committed to delivering next-generation infrastructure services to enterprise class customers. We leverage our secure high performance platform, xStream, to deliver highly available and elastic compute resources at true consumption-based pricing. We lead our Cloud Platform Services with Cloud Advisory Services, providing expertise in the areas of cloud adoption, migration and architecture strategies and infrastructure-related integration services. We provide ongoing support for our Cloud Platform Services through two groups: our Cloud Cover team provides a managed service, from core infrastructure through enterprise applications and the Cloud Staging and Networks group that provides colocation, security and network services. Virtustream owns and operates its own data centers in the U.S. and U.K., and has offices in Washington, D.C., New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, London, Dublin and the Channel Islands. Keep tabs on us with Twitter: www.twitter.com/rjrogers87 and www.twitter.com/Virtustream.

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Media Contacts:

Lisa Desmond Mercedes Carrasco

Virtustream, Inc. Schwartz MSL
(615) 368.7325 (781) 684.0770
lisa.desmond@virtustream.com virtustream@schwartzmsl.com

Reuven Cohen
Enomaly Inc.
(416) 710-5831

Reuven Cohen Added as TechStars Cloud Mentor

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 13:44:00 EDT

I'm happy to announce that I've agreed to pitch in as a TechStars Mentor for their new Cloud accelerator program. For those of you unfamiliar with TechStars, it's the #1 startup accelerator in the world. Not to mention one of the most selective – although thousands of companies apply each year, they only take about ten companies per program. This gives them a selection rate lower than most Ivy League schools, so you have to be among the best of the best to be in TechStar. TechStars Cloud is a vertically-focused accelerator that funds companies focused exclusively on cloud computing and cloud infrastructure. For me, the more exciting aspect of the TechStars Cloud program is that it's specifically targeting cloud infrastructure startups exclusively. Yes, something I have a bit of experience with.

Talking about The China Cloud

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 15:47:07 EDT

Reuven Cohen is the founder of Enomaly, a cloud services provider. He is also one of the original CloudCamp founders. He travels more than most people I know. And a lot of that travel is to China and the Asia Pacific region. He is one of the first cloud people to start doing business in China and the Asia Pacific region.

Original link
http://ruv.net/a/zi

Announcing SpotCloud for OpenStack

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 13:38:29 EDT

SpotCloud, the world's best place to buy & sell cloud computing capacity, is happy to announce support for the OpenStack platform.

The open source SpotCloud OpenStack Connector is available for immediate use as a free Apache-licensed download (http://dl.enomaly.com/spotcloudopenstack). The SpotCloud OpenStack Connector provides an easy and effective way for service providers deploying OpenStack based clouds to sell cloud computing capacity through the global SpotCloud market.

This release represents another step in opening up the SpotCloud market with support for the widest range of cloud services. The SpotCloud market is open to all buyers of cloud computing services through www.spotcloud.com, offering the world’s best pricing and availability for cloud services from service providers on four continents, now including service providers using OpenStack as their cloud platform.

Key facts about the SpotCloud OpenStack Connector:

The SpotCloud OpenStack Connector easily connects any existing or new OpenStack deployment to SpotCloud

Through SpotCloud, service providers can choose to sell excess cloud capacity anonymously, and can also offer their fully branded cloud services for sale

Service providers have full control over how much of their cloud capacity is made available to SpotCloud buyers, what configurations are offered through SpotCloud, and at what price

SpotCloud provides detailed reporting of all transaction activity and provides payment settlement services in over 80 currencies

The SpotCloud OpenStack Connector is free open source software, supported and released under the Apache license

Download the free SpotCloud OpenStack Connector today

Curious how SpotCloud works? For a limited time, receive a free credit for cloud services when you sign up as a buyer!

SpotCloud Update - Non-Opaque Provider Branding Options

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 09:41:55 EDT

This is a quick note to let you know that we’ve added an exciting new “Non Opaque” feature for SpotCloud providers. This new branding option for hardware profiles allows you to selectively choose which profiles are made visible under your own company name and logo while allowing other profiles to remain opaque (hidden) to our more then 1200+ registered SpotCloud buyers.

By promoting your brand, you’ll benefit by attracting buyers who are willing to pay extra for the trust your brand implies.

To enable this feature please login to the SpotCloud dashboard as a provider, then go to the “settings” tab and upload your logo, your company name and website.

Next go to the “Pricing” tab and edit the profiles you would like to make your brand visible with by selecting the “branding” check box in each profile. Once approved your company, logo and link to your website will be visible to all SpotCloud buyers. You can login as a buyer to see this in action with our example "Enomaly Inc" provider.

Real-time SpotCloud Market Data API Released

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 15:33:35 EDT

One of the most requested additions to the SpotCloud API is the ability to get realtime market data. I'm happy to announce that we've added this to the latest SpotCloud Provider API update V1.2.

These new API calls allow you to adjust your pricing to be based on market conditions or simply see what the most popular locations or instance type are at any given moment giving our providers an extra level of insight into the SpotCloud market.

You can grab the latest API docs from the following locations.

Request

GET /api/v1/provider/market.{json|xml}

Response Fields

average_package_size - The average appliance storage size.
popular_cpu - A list of popular CPU counts used when creating instances.
popular_memory - A list of popular memory sizes used when creating instances.
popular_location - A list of popular geographic locations used to deploy instances.
average_memory_cost - The current average cost per GB of memory.
average_cpu_cost - The current average cost per CPU.

SpotCloud Update (New App Directory)

Fri, 11 Mar 2011 14:18:45 EST

We’re happy to announce that we’ve launched a new Appliance Directory for SpotCloud. The integrated appliance directory allows you to more easily deploy from a directory of pre-built SpotCloud appliances to any of our providers from around the globe. To get started, login to the SpotCloud management dashboard as a buyer, select a providers and you’ll see a list of appliances in the drop down.

We are actively adding new appliances to the directory, so check back frequently. Some of the appliances we have available currently included:

Webmin
The SpotCloud Webmin appliance is our generic Ubuntu 10.10 with a Webmin management console added to it. This allows you to visually configure all aspects of your server, including installing packages and managing users.

BOINC SpotCloud (Distributed Grid Computing Platform)
The BOINC appliance allows you to create clients anywhere in the world for handling distributed processing jobs. To operate the appliance, create a new instance with it. You can then ssh into the instance for configuration. The configuration script only asks for one item, and that is the IP address your BOINC management server that issues jobs.

OpenVPN
Built using the SpotCloud Ubuntu OS, the SpotCloud Open VPN appliance allows peers to authenticate each other using a pre-shared secret key, certificates, or username/password. Essentially, using Open VPN on SpotCloud allows for on-the-fly, anonymous internet access using on-demand, regional spot instances.

Ubuntu 10.10
Ubuntu JeOS (pronounced "Juice") is an efficient variant of the Ubuntu Server operating system, configured specifically for use as virtual appliances. This is a specialized installation of Ubuntu Server Edition with a tuned kernel that only contains the base elements needed to run within a distributed SpotCloud environment.

AflexiCDN
Built on Ubuntu JeOS & Aflexi's CDN automation control panel is the first CDN software especially catered for cloud computing. The Aflexi software allows you to quickly and easily build your own global content delivery network using SpotCloud resources from around the globe.

Varnish Cache
This is a fully functional SpotCloud appliance built on Ubuntu JeOS and Varnish Cache. It includes a one time command line configuration example accessible via SSH console on any SpotCloud provider. Once configured, the appliance automatically locks itself down preventing further access.

Get Listed in our Directory
We’re looking for more reference SpotCloud appliances, If you have an application well suited for SpotCloud please get in touch with us.

The Amortization of Cloud Futures and Derivatives

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 16:14:19 EST

Really interesting tweet from @jayfry3 earlier today. In it he noted a reference by @joeweinman that said Netflix treats reserved AWS instances as CapEx and depreciates it's cost over 3 yrs. This immediately got me thinking -- Wow, now that's an interesting concept.

Before I go any further I warn you I am not a tax expert, and if you are, please feel free to correct anything I say from this point forward. This is a random thought, more than a proof.

First of all, I don't think what they were referring to is actually depreciation since depreciation strictly refers to tangible assets. Instead I think what they're talking about is a very similar concept of amortization which is basically the same but for intangible assets.

A quick recap in tax law, according to Wikipedia "amortization refers to the cost recovery system for intangible property. Although the theory behind cost recovery deductions of amortization is to deduct from basis in a systematic manner over an asset's estimated useful economic life so as to reflect its consumption, expiration, obsolescence or other decline in value as a result of use or the passage of time, many times a perfect match of income and deductions does not occur for policy reasons."

With the launch of SpotCloud which essentially is a Spot Market for computing capacity, the concept of being able to reserve computing capacity in the form of a futures contract or derivative has been a popular topic of conversation during my various presentations and pitches lately. Previously I saw the opportunity for "cloud futures" from the point of view of the provider the capacity. Basically allowing the provider a greater level of insight into future capacity consumption, inventory and capacity planning. The missing part of the equation has been on the buy side, other then potentially locking in a future price, (as a hedge) the rationale for buying future computing capacity was fairly limited. With the introduction of amortization to the equation the concept dramatically shifts from not only a capacity planning exercise but also to a tax and accounting strategy for major buyers of computing capacity.

So much like traditional depreciation, amortizing future computing capacity bought as a "reservation" or derivative allows the compute asset to be deferred rather than treated as a current expense with the difference of the spot price of the compute asset as recorded on the Spot market at that the time of consumption defining a gain or loss. Taking this concept even further, if the 'depreciable' or amortized compute asset is not actually used, but instead re-sold on a computing Spot market such as SpotCloud, the business can again recognize a gain or loss based on net basis of the asset. (The net basis is cost less amortization) Yup, crazy, and it would seem -- totally do-able.

Are we on the verge of a cloud futures market? Maybe sooner than you think.

The Rise of The Cloud Aggregator

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 11:51:00 EST

Recently there has been a lot of renewed talk of "Cloud Aggregators" a term that has been thrown around quite bit of the the last few years. But what is a cloud aggregator really? How does one define this segement? How do you qualify a company or service as a cloud aggregator? It's time for my turn to attempt to define this some-what vague term. First, more generally what is a aggregator? One of the best descriptions I could find is described as "a system or service that combines data or items with similar characteristics (geographic area, target market, size, etc.) into larger entities. Value is derived from cost savings, or the ability to reach a larger market and charge higher prices from bundling multiple goods or services."

Living on the Edge

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 16:04:00 EST

There's somethin' wrong with the cloud today, I think I know what it is. We're seeing things in a different way, but should we be judging a cloud provider by the color of their -- logo?

It's seems that for many, the only basis of comparing cloud providers is based upon superficial aspects. I know of the company, recognize the logo, or read a random review. But the reality is we're moving away from the traditional vendor driven marketing fluff of a single provider world to a multi-cloud, federated ecosystem of capacity providers, where brand recognition is less important than performance and price. I'm talking about living on the edge, the edge of the network.

One of the more interesting recent announcements was Amazon's Japan availability zone, in describing their launch AWS spoke of latency for users within Tokyo being less than 10ms. Hitting directly at the heart of the opportunity. Yet on the flip side, they also mentioned that the Japanese zone was ideal for other nearby geographies, to which I say they're missing the point. Using Japanese resources in South Korea makes little sense given the rapid advancement and availability of cloud capacity in South Korea. The opportunity going forward isn't to address generalized areas of the world, but to address the specifics, not just on a country basis but on a city or even a neighbourhood basis. A single provider will never be able to get this level of granularity regardless of how much money they have. Economies of scale will always be limited by total market size, the more granular the market the less economies of scale work in favor the large provider. The only way to address this growing movement toward edge based, latency dependent application deployment is to federate many providers with many customers across many diverse geographies.

I admit that this is easier said than done, ask anyone who's attempted to use more than one provider in a federated, intercloud connection global cloud of clouds type of deployment and tell me what you think about your sit-u-a-tion. They'll tell you it's complication, and aggravation.

I know a few of you will point back to the inevitable economies of scale that an AWS or Google bring forth. Yes, they probably spent many millions building their Japanese cloud infrastructure. But did they have to? Economies of scale are important factors mostly for true for commoditized IT aspects such as bandwidth. But for areas such as ultra-localization computing, this is not practical for even the largest web companies. Sure there are many factors that cause a cloud providers average cost per compute unit to fall as the scale of output is increased, purchasing power is probably the most relevant. Essentially the biggest Internet companies can buy the most servers at a massive volume thus getting the lowest cost per unit of compute time and therefore achieving the best margins at the lowest cost. But even this equation has a practical limit when it comes to geography.

When it comes to ultra-localization the boundaries of the so-called provider economies of scale, commoditiziation and volume quickly breakdown. Now it becomes a question of federation and aggregation. Many providers connected through a normalized or structured market interface rather then one provider attempting to address all markets. I'm not just talking about what we're doing with SpotCloud, but what I believe to be the move toward a market centric economy of federated cloud ecosystems, a move I think is inevitable. Ultra-local capacity or edge based computing, or whatever you chose to call it in a nutshell is the opportunity moving forward.

The choice will quickly become one of choosing a single provider (one to many) or an aggregator (many to many). I believe the choice will quickly become obvious to anyone who has a geographic component to their applications. The opportunity is living on the edge.

SpotCloud Beta Update (March)

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 15:28:46 EST

To say we’ve had a spectacular launch would be putting it lightly. Since our Valentines Day SpotCloud Launch, we’ve been inundated with interest in the marketplace. Buyers, sellers, investors and media have flocked to us in the thousands from around the world.

As of today we have dozens of active providers online from Hafnarfjörður (that’s in Iceland) to Boston to Brisbane to Hong Kong. There are also in the hundreds of providers who have signed up and are in various stages of preparation and set-up of their SpotCloud environments. We are actively on-boarding new providers as fast as we can. If you haven’t done so yet, go ahead and get started as a provider.

We’re also seeing a lot of interest from the buyer side as well with a ratio of 5:1 buyers to sellers. It’s been great to observe an increasing rate of buyers converting from the initial “tire-kicking” phase to becoming more active users. The market is now open and free to browse. So go ahead and sign up as a buyer.

Some Various SpotCloud Market Updates

Instance Renewals
We just pushed an update to the SpotCloud marketplace that fixes a few bugs, but, most importantly, adds the ability for SpotCloud buyers to renew their instances at the current spot market price. Previously, at the end of the maximum duration, a buyer’s appliance would be automatically terminated (deleted). Now, if a SpotCloud seller enables this feature, a buyer will have the option to keep their instance at the end of the duration and pay the current spot price going forward. More importantly, they can keep their IP address and data. An email is automatically sent to the Buyer when their instance is close to being terminated to provide the option of having it renewed.

As a seller, to enable this feature, you must login to the SpotCloud management interface as a seller at https://spotcloud.appspot.com/provider/pricing and select the check box on each hardware profile labeled "Instance renew allowed"

As a buyer, you’ll see the new option in your instance information or via an email sent to you before termination. We hope to include this in our API in an upcoming release.

New SpotCloud Apppliances
We’ve published several new sample spotcloud Appliance including a OpenVPN appliance and Aflexi CDN appliance. In the next few weeks we will be releasing a built-in App Directory in the SpotCloud market, to enable much easier deployment of SpotCloud Appliances.

Get Featured in our upcoming App Directory
If you have an application that would make a great sample SpotCloud appliance, we’d love to include it in our upcoming App Directory, so please get in touch.

Create your own appliance using the SpotCloud CLI & appliance bundling tool
You can now easily convert an existing VM to the SpotCloud Appliance format using our SpotCloud CLI and Appliance Bundling Tool. This tool also provides an easy command line API access to the SpotCloud marketplace enabling a true hybrid cloud computing experience.

Selected Media Coverage

Economist Magazine - Cloud computing: A market for computing power
“LIKE oil or pork bellies, computing capacity is now a tradeable commodity. February 14th saw the launch of SpotCloud, the world’s first spot market for cloud computing. It works much like other spot markets”.

Eweek Review - SpotCloud Explores the Cloud's Utility Computing Future
“One of the most popular images used to illustrate the concept of cloud computing is the electrical grid. The “cloud” can be tricky to pin down, but everyone is familiar with plugging into a standardized socket and drawing the juice necessary to run many electrical devices from a network of large power plants.”

SpotCloud Beta Update (Jan 25th)

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 14:03:17 EST

Another strong week of development on the SpotCloud.com platform. Unfortunately, some of the coolest new additions relate to our administration and management system so we can’t show them to you. However, we plan to do a major 1.2 release next week with lots of other new eye candy for you.

We’ve also been busy signing up and on-boarding new providers from all over the world and hope to have all continents covered by our February public launch. A few notable additions to the SpotCloud market this week include, Brazil, Iceland, and Italy. I’d like to point out that we could use additional capacity from Asia, so if you have capacity or know of someone who does, please send them along.

Setting ECP SpotCloud Permissions
We’ve encountered a minor work-flow oversight that relates to the installation of ECP SpotCloud Edition. When installing ECP, users seem to skip the last step which is to set the correct permissions for their SpotCloud user. To help, we’ve updated our Setup_broker.py script which will complete the setup as well as configure the correct permissions.

Pricing Your Capacity
One of the most asked questions lately is “How do I price my capacity on the market?”
We've created a SpotCloud Pricing Guide for capacity providers. You can grab it here. In an upcoming release we will also include a market overview for sellers.

Documentation Error (Storage requirement)
I’d like to outline an error in the original SpotCloud Setup Guide whereby we outline a “2TB” per-host requirement. This is not correct. The actual number is 500GB per Host. In reality, you’ll be okay even if you only provide one server.

Press
Some more press: “Can a New IaaS Cloud Really Compete?” http://ruv.net/a/if

How to Make Money on SpotCloud (Provider Pricing Guide)

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 12:22:10 EST

One of the first questions SpotCloud providers ask me after they've setup their infrastructure and made their capacity available on SpotCloud is how to effectively price their capacity. There really is no easy answer, there are a lot of factors that dictate SpotCloud capacity pricing.

For example competition from a particular geography can lead to a higher or lower price. (Basic supply and demand) What I have noticed is that providers from specific regional hot spots such as Brazil, Russia and Asia tend to be able to price higher than places like San Francisco which tend to be more capacity saturated. Another question is what should the price be based on. My answer is typically it should be a combination of your fixed costs and a markup. It's also better to base it on the element that is the hardest (costliest) to share and delegate which in our case is typically RAM or potentially bandwidth. Also before you can hope to define a price you need to be able to understand what your own costs are on a monthly basis, utilization is also a key component.

To help with the SpotCloud pricing process, we've created a simple SpotCloud Provider Pricing Guide in the form of an Excel spreadsheet on Google Docs or Download the Excel Spreadsheet directly. (Feedback is greatly appreciated)

SpotCloud Beta Update

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 15:32:41 EST

We continue to see significant participation on the SpotCloud sell-side with providers from around the globe signing up for the service (Here’s a nice overview from GigaOM). We are currently adding providers to the market as we get ready to open the platform to buyers in the next few weeks. We have a select group of buyers who are currently helping us test the system and plan to include a broader group in early February.

We want to highlight that we are continually improving the workflow to help simplify on-boarding of both buyers and sellers. One area in particular that we want to bring to your attention relates to entering your hardware pricing information after you’ve registered as a provider. For those of you who have submitted API registration, you will receive an email once approved. At this point it is important to log into the platform and enter your hardware prices so that your capacity can be made available on the SpotCloud market. If you don’t set a price, your capacity will not be visible to buyers. Going forward we plan to improve the workflow to make this requirement more obvious.

To help you select the optimal price we plan to add a market overview for sellers so that it will be easy to assess how other providers are pricing their capacity. Furthermore, a number of sellers have indicated they’d also like to be buyers. These features and more have been added to our roadmap.

Over the coming days we will be rolling out new features frequently including improved interface elements and reporting. So, log in frequently to see the changes!

New SpotCloud API’s
We’re also happy to inform you that we’ve published the first drafts of our Buy and Sell side API’s. These API’s are great if you're looking to define a broader automated workflow (such as time of day or utilization based costing) you may want to download a copy of our API docs.

For Sellers

For Buyers

If you’d like access to a SpotCloud API sandbox, please get in touch.

Sample Spot Cloud Appliance
A few of our beta users have asked us for a sample SpotCloud appliance to test their third party platforms. We’ve created a small appliance & guide to help you!

SpotCloud Appliance Creation Guide (For Buyers)
http://ruv.net/a/scbuyerguide

This guide will help buyers through the process of creating a virtual machine image (an "appliance") that will work well with SpotCloud.

Sample SpotCloud Appliance (XVM2) 345MB
http://dl.enomaly.com/varnish - user: root - pass: spotcloud

This is a fully functional SpotCloud appliance built on Ubuntu JeOS & Varnish Cache. It includes a one time command line configuration example accessible via SSH console on any SpotCloud provider. Once configured, the appliance automatically locks itself down preventing further access. It's fully functional and serves as a great SpotCloud example appliance.

What Does it do?

Varnish is the key software that speeds up your web site. It is Open Source, built on industry standards and requires very few resources. Once configured this appliance will automatically replicate your website to any SpotCloud instance in the world. Just point your dns to the ip address. (Anycast + Geotargeting recommended) Essentially it's an instant global CDN.

Getting Started as a Provider
If you haven’t already done so, we’re giving you two options for participating as a Capacity Provider in the SpotCloud Beta.

1. Using the free Enomaly ECP SpotCloud Edition
You can use the Free Enomaly ECP SpotCloud Edition to provide capacity to the market.

2. Using your own cloud platform
It’s easy to integrate your own cloud with SpotCloud (some service providers have completed the process in a few hours). We’ve written a guide to assist service providers (capacity sellers) who would like to integrate their internally-developed or third party cloud infrastructure software platforms or services with the SpotCloud market.

Register to get the download at www.spotcloud.com and get access today!

Examining Compute Commodities

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 11:22:00 EST

Over the last several weeks I've been doing quite a bit of studying of the commodities markets, mostly around the emergence of energy trading in the early 1990's. During my research a few things have become pretty clear to me. I thought I'd outline a few of the more interesting observations. In looking at corollaries in treating compute resources as a commodity, the closest is probably that of energy creation and power plant financing. In the energy world, commodities trading desk are used to protect power companies from dramatic price shifts, using a so called "Hedge". These hedges are done in a number of very interesting ways. First of all, most of the major banks act as both a provider of capital for buyers and sellers of power plant assets and the companies themselves. The majority of the major finance players in the energy world also have commodities desks, allowing them to operate in the commodities market as well as in the more traditional loan / financing businesses. They can offer issuers (power providers) access to commodity markets where hedges can be created to protect an energy company from dramatic changes in prices of coal, natural gas or oil. Many utilities that provide electricity, for example, use coal to fire their plants are protected from price swings and more importantly the banks who are trading these commodities have greater influence and protection from these price spikes by sitting on both sides of the deal. In essence dovetailing leverage finance with commodities. In return, these banks are granted the ability to not only finance the development of the power plants, they also buy the future contracts on the energy itself which in turn gives the energy providers a guarantee of future revenue which then can be used as collateral for the development of their various energy assets and reduces the risk for all involved.

SpotCloud Update (Free ECP SpotCloud Edition & Webinar)

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 14:21:00 EST

It's been a crazy week at Enomaly after last week’s SpotCloud announcement. We'd like to take a brief moment to update you on some new and exciting opportunities that have emerged out of our discussions around the SpotCloud Marketplace (http://www.spotcloud.com). Signups for both the buy and sell side for SpotCloud have been very strong with hundreds registering for the service. One of the more interesting statistics is the ratio of buyers to sellers is tracking at 5:1 for buyers. This shows there’s a lot of buy-side demand for the service. For those of you who have already registered, we are selectively adding new buyers and sellers while we work through the beta phase, so hold tight, we haven't forgotten about you. If you haven't registered yet, go ahead and add yourself today.

Group Buying for Cloud Computing Capacity

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 16:01:00 EDT

As many of you know, I've been to China many times this year. The market for cloud computing is booming over there. But what you may not know is that these trips to China have been a key part of the inspiration for the creation of SpotCloud. Some of my inspirations has come from the popular concept of group buying know as tuangou in Chinese.

If you haven't heard of Group buying wikipedia describes it as follows:

Group buying, which refers to social buying or collective buying as well, is the buying an offer which has been significantly reduced, due to the fact that it is only valid if enough buyers are found. Recently, group buying has been taken online in numerous forms, although group buys prior to 2009 usually referred to the grouping of industrial products for wholesale (especially in China).

Group buys are a variation of tuangou buying that also occurs in China, in which an item must be bought in a minimum quantity or dollar amount, otherwise, the seller will not allow the purchase. Since individuals typically do not need multiples of one item or do not have the resources to buy in bulk, group buys allow people to invite others to purchase in bulk jointly. These group buys often result in better prices for the individual buyers or ensure that a scarce or obscure item is available for sale.

So now lets think about how this approach could be applied to the buying of cloud infrastructure resources through a marketplace such as SpotCloud. A simple example could be buying Amazon EC2 reserve instances. With Reserved Instances you pay a one-time fee and in turn receive a significant discount on the hourly usage charge for that instance over a 1 to 3 year term. Using this model of reserved Instances can save you up to 49% over the cost of On-Demand EC2 instances. But there is a small problem, you need to commit to at least 1 - 3 years with a fairly high utilization for the full savings to be realized.

Now apply group buying to EC2 reserved instances, say 100 or so capacity buyers who need cheap capacity for short periods of time. The brokerage (SpotCloud) essentially buys on behalf of the group and makes the the capacity available at a greatly reduced cost for all market participants. The group buying approach also leads to interesting arbitrage models for increased cost reduction by taking advantage of a price difference between two or more cloud resource providers (Amazon's Spot Instances for example), as well as potentially negotiating wholesale discounts on behalf of the collective buying group from other large cloud capacity providers.

Lots of interesting SpotCloud ideas. I'll keep posting as they come to me.

SpotCloud Launch Overview (Week 1)

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 14:33:00 EDT

So by now you've probably heard about the SpotCloud announcement. If you missed it, after more than a year of development, we finally took the covers off our SpotCloud Capacity Clearinghouse and Marketplace for service providers. The feedback so far has been tremendous, with hundreds of registrations for the SpotCloud service including a good portion of the major "Non ECP" based cloud providers signing up. One particularly interesting stat is the ratio of buyers to sellers registering for the service at a ratio of 5:1 for buyers, indicating significant interest from the demand / buy side. A key metric for a successful marketplace. But what I really want to tell you is some of the opportunities that have emerged in my discussions with both providers and buyers. Most of which I hadn't even considered before this weeks launch.

SpotCloud, a Clearinghouse & Marketplace for Cloud Computing Services

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 02:53:00 EDT

Enomaly Inc., the leading vendor of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing software, is proud to announce that it has launched the beta of SpotCloud (http://www.spotcloud.com) the first cloud computing clearinghouse & marketplace. For cloud service providers, the SpotCloud Marketplace Platform provides an easy way to sell unused cloud capacity. Cloud providers can use SpotCloud to clear out unused capacity and sell computing inventory that would otherwise go unsold, enabling increased utilization and revenue, without undermining their standard pricing. In order to avoid directly competing with regular retail sales of cloud services, SpotCloud uses an "opaque" sales model, similar to sites such as Hotwire.com. The SpotCloud service meters, tracks, and bills capacity buyers, and pays capacity sellers directly.

Enomaly, Autonomic Resources, and Dell Win US Federal IaaS Cloud Contract

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 21:42:00 EDT

Enomaly Inc., the leading vendor of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform software, announced today that it has been selected by US Government under the first Government-wide contract for cloud computing. Under the GSA’s blanket purchase agreement (BPA # GS00Q11AEA003), Enomaly ECP High Assurance Edition (HAE) software will help power Autonomic Resources ARC-P Public Cloud (IaaS) services platform for U.S. Government customers. Enomaly was chosen to be included in Autonomic Resources ARC-P Public cloud stack that will provide US Government customers the benefits of on-demand computing with no compromise in security. ARC-P integrates Enomaly with the ARC-P Dell hardware stack that will provide for trusted virtual machine assurance via Trusted Execution Technology. Additionally, Enomaly integration with Secured by SPYRUS technology for multi-factor authentication and sets a new “bar” for cloud security. ARC-P’s multi-factor solution utilizes the already approved US Cybercom USB flash drives, following Federal standards to levels not yet available on any commercial platform.

The Intel Cloud Builder Series Webinar Featuring Enomaly (Oct 14th)

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 21:53:37 EDT

Webcast: The sky’s the limit: How Enomaly’s Elastic Computing Platform removes the upper limit on VMs in cloud deployments

Join this discussion of Enomaly’s aptly named Elastic Computing Platform (ECP), which brings nearly infinite scalability and provisioning flexibility to cloud deployments. Learn how Enomaly’s ECP can support very large clouds with many thousands of servers, and virtually eliminate the upper limit on the number of virtual machines that can be provisioned. Cloud experts from Enomaly and Intel will present a logical blueprint for a typical configuration, discuss the unique attributes of ECP, and answer questions at the end of the presentation. Register today to hold your spot.

Thursday, October 14th, 2010 2:00 p.m. ET - Register Today!

HP, Intel & Enomaly Collaborate to Deliver End-to-End Cloud Platform

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 07:00:00 EDT

I'm happy to announce today that Enomaly has collaborated with HP and Intel to offer a complete end-to-end cloud IaaS platform for cloud service providers, hosting firms and Internet Data Center (IDC) providers. The solution is built with fully tested and pre-configured stack of HP products including HP ProLiant® servers, HP StorageWorks® storage system, ProCurve® Networking solution (3Com) powered by advanced Intel Xeon® processors. Essentially, everything you need to deploy a complete revenue focused cloud service.

Infrastructure Elasticity versus Scalability

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 12:43:00 EDT

Over the last few years I've gotten a lot of pressure to call our Elastic Computing Platform, a Cloud Computing Platform. Some may wonder why I've resisted to make this some-what semantic change in the branding of our platform. Yes, our customers are deploying cloud infrastructures, but how they're doing it is what this post is about. For me, 'the cloud' represents the Internet, or more specifically it's a way of looking at application development and deployment from a network centric point of view. It's pretty much about thinking about applications that treat or use the Internet as the operating system. To enable such an environment takes a new way of thinking about your underlying infrastructure. A unified (API driven) infrastructure that is distributed, an infrastructure that is global, an infrastructure that is fault tolerant and most importantly scalable & elastic. Some may think that being scalable is the same as being elastic, but I'm not convinced. Being scalable means being able to grow to the demands of an application and it's user base. This says nothing about what happens after this scale as been achieved. Being 'elastic' means being able to adapt (up, out and down again) The ablity to adjust readily to different realtime conditions. The metric that matters in an elastic computing environment isn't just how many users can I support, but how fast can I adapt to support those users. Speed and performance are key. How fast can I provision a new VM, how well does that VM perform once deployed, and how much will it cost me are what matters most. The problem with scalability is the question of what happens afterward. Elasticity is all about what is happening now.

Enomaly ECP 3.4 Service Provider Edition Released

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 15:34:08 EDT

Enomaly is proud to announce the latest 3.4 release of ECP Service Provider Edition. This is a major milestone, and brings many new capabilities and enhancements:

Full support for VMware ESXi 4.0 servers
A huge improvement in virtual machine I/O performance
Multiple Mix and Match Storage Pools

New Features

VMware ESXi 4.0 is now supported as a first class hypervisor alongside KVM and XEN.
Greatly improved VM performance with the addition of advanced machine flag for VirtIO for Disks (VIRTBLK). This allows pass through paravirt disk drivers.
Cluster monitoring and notification module.
Administrators can now restrict account/API access to a specific IP address or range.
Administrative user interface is now fully localizable.
Optional agent to manager heartbeat has been added for high latency networks.
New administrative interface for Disk Templates.
Users can now specify advanced VM tunables. Advanced options on VMs used to create packages will also be carried over into the package. The following options are now tunable:
PAE - Allows 32-bit VMs to address more than 4 GB of memory
APIC - Adding a virtual APIC can improve latency, performance, and timer accuracy, especially on multiprocessor virtual machines.
ACPI - ACPI power management
VIRTIO is a Linux standard for network and disk devices, enabling cooperation with the hypervisor. This enables VMs to get high performance network operations, and gives most of the performance benefits of paravirtualization.
Ability to connect ECP to multiple storage pools (mix and match storage tiers).
Added user editable "notes" field to VM details dialog. This is intended to be a location where users can document details about a virtual machine
API enhancements to allow VMs to be queried by IP or MAC address and package ID.

Enhancements

ISOs are now managed by the object-based permissions system.
Improved consolidated product documentation.
VM boot device can now be selected.
Usability improvements to customer users interface. VM tab is first in the customer UI. Home tab has been relabelled Logs.
Billing API has been improved to include additional information regarding packages and resource usage.
Improvements to the i18n Internationalization system to allow multiple versions of a given language.
Enhanced VLAN management. VLANs can now be assigned to alternative Nic’s on the host.
Updated Korean, Japanese and Swedish translations
Add installer support for CentOS 5.5.
Improvements to the Virtual Infrastructure machine listing table.

If you haven't already done so, I invite you to give Enomaly ECP a try, please get in touch for a free evaluation edition.

Someone Please Build Me a Laptop Based Blade Server

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 15:33:36 EDT

When it comes to building cloud based infrastructure it's not the performance of anyone single server that matters so much as the collective ability to deploy many parallel VM's quickly. Lately there seems to be a growing trend for service providers to use low end commodity servers rather than higher end kit. So building upon this concept, I have a crazy idea. Why not create a blade chasis that can use laptops or at least the realivant stuff inside anyway as the basis for a super cheap, power efficient lapserver?

Think I'm crazy? Well, I'm not the only one thinking about this. Take for example SeaMicro and their SM10000 High Density, Low Power Server. It uses ¼ the power and takes ¼ the space of today's best in class volume server. It is designed to replace 40 1 RU servers and integrates 512 independent ultra low power Atom processors, top rack switching, load balancing, and server management in a single 10 RU system at about $150k. Do that math, it basically replaces 40 traditional servers at nearly 1/8th the price per computing unit. Although there is one problem, the Atom processor which support Intel VT is 32 bit greatly limiting it's usefulness.

That's where the Laptop comes in. Let's take your lowest end laptop (Non Atom) with the Intel i3 processor. A quick search and I discovered that these laptops sell for about $350. Keep in mind these laptops come with a keyboard, and screen which add to the costs. Boil it down to just the components you need and you're looking at about $150 retail for the parts. (dual core i3 2.26ghz, 4GB ram, 500GB, network card, and 6 Cell battery)

So now consider putting this into a small form factor "laptop blade chasis" lets say a 2u or 4u size. My estimate is you could probably fit about 5 of these lapblades in a 2u or about 10 in a 4u. So doing the math on 4u (10 lapblades, 20 cores, 40GB Ram, 5,000GB of onboard storage and 10 batteries for about $1500 - $2000 net) Those same 20 cores would cost you about $25k-30k with traditional servers. So the ROI for a service provider would be days. Not to mention with ten 6 cell batteries, you've got an onboard UPS and laptops are inherently low power.

Crazy idea? Someone should do it, I'd buy one.

--Update--

A few people have pointed me to SGI's CloudRack and HP's BladePC

Edge Based Cloud Spanning

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 12:40:59 EDT

As a long time proponent of elastic computing or the dynamic use of global computing resources it's very interesting to see some of the new usage models emerging from the growing pool of regional cloud service providers around the globe. With this new world wide cloud, the concept of low cost edge base computing is now starting to take shape. More specifically the ability to run an application in a way that its components straddle multiple localized cloud services (which could be any combination of internal/private and external/public clouds). And unlike Cloud Bursting, which refers strictly to expanding the application to an External Cloud to handle spikes in demand, the idea of edge based cloud computing or 'cloud spanning' includes scenarios in which an applications component are continuously distributed across multiple clouds in near realtime.

Actually, wikipedia does a great job of outlining the rationale.

Edge computing has many advantages:

Edge application services significantly decrease the data volume that must be moved, the consequent traffic, and the distance the data must go, thereby reducing transmission costs, shrinking latency, and improving quality of service (QoS).
Edge computing eliminates, or at least de-emphasizes, the core computing environment, limiting or removing a major bottleneck and a potential point of failure.
Security is also improved as encrypted data moves further in, toward the network core. As it approaches the enterprise, the data is checked as it passes through protected firewalls and other security points, where viruses, compromised data, and active hackers can be caught early on.
Finally, the ability to "virtualize" (i.e., logically group CPU capabilities on an as-needed, real-time basis) extends scalability. The Edge computing market is generally based on a "charge for network services" model, and it could be argued that typical customers for Edge services are organizations desiring linear scale of business application performance to the growth of, e.g., a subscriber base.

Today one of the biggest opportunities I see emerging out of the rising tide of regional cloud providers is the ability to leverage multiple cloud providers, who exist across a so called inter-connected meta-cloud. This market has been traditionally limited to the realm of companies such as Akamai who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars building out global server infrastructures. The problem with these infrastructures are they are typically configured for one use case and are quite expensive. But with the emerging regional cloud provider, the ability to connect several of these providers together is now a reality greatly reducing the overall cost and essentially allowing anyone be build there own private CDN.

Also the underlying virtualization or even operating system is less important than the application itself. But the question is what is "the" application?

One such application ideally suited to this sort of edge based deployment architecture is a web cache such as Squid or Varnish as well as a selection of proprietary options. The interesting thing about web cache software in general is how it could be used in parallel to a series of random (untrusted) regional cloud providers. Moreover these caches don't necessarily need to worry about the security, performance or even SLA of a given provider; the location and connectivity is really all the matters. These local cloud services may be viewed as transient (see my post yesterday Random Access Compute Capacity) Meaning, location is more important than uptime, and if a given provider is no longer available, well, there are potentially dozens of others near by waiting to take up the slack.

It will be interesting to watch this space and see what kind of new geo-centric apps start to appear.

Random Access Compute Capacity (RACC)

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 10:53:00 EDT

Forgive me for it's been awhile since my last post. Between the latest addition to my family (little Finnegan) and some new products we have in the works at Enomaly, I haven't had much time to write. One of the biggest issues I have when I hear people talking about developing data intensive cloud applications is being stuck in a historical point of view. The consensus is this is how we've always done it, so it must be done this way. The problem starts with the fact that many seem to look at cloud apps as a extension to how they've always developed apps in the past. A server is a server, an application a singular component connected a finite set of resources albeit RAM, storage, network, I/o or compute. The trouble with this is development point of view is the concept of linear deployment and scale. The typical cloud development pattern we think of is building applications that scale horizontally to meet the potential and often unknown demands of a given environment rather than one that focuses on the metrics of time and cost. Today I'm going to suggest a more global / holistic view of application development and deployment. A view that looks at global computing in much the same way you would treat memory on a server - a series random transient components.

Saving Ryan's Private Cloud

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 22:33:06 EDT

I am all for debates. Some might even say I've become a master at it. But this whole private cloud versus public debate has to stop. We're fighting the symantics of the english language. Really who cares? If you want to run your own data center like Google or Amazon and call it a private cloud -- so what? If you want to outsource your infrastructure to Google or Amazon and call it a public cloud -- even better. If you want to focus on running your business rather than a data center, good on ya. But please, stop debating the semantics of a metaphor already. It's like a computing black hole where nothing smart or interesting can ever escape. But that's an analogy, which makes me an idiom ;-)

Should You Build or Buy Your Cloud?

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 14:11:00 EDT

It's the age old question in IT, the question of whether or not to build it yourself or just buy it off the shelf. Lately, I seem to be hearing the questions again and again. It seems that for some reason some IT guys have gotten it into their head that if they adopt a cloud infrastructure platform, either hosted or in house, they're going to lose their jobs. So the only choice is to build it. I think the reasoning is if you build it, you will control it, and your company will have no choice but to keep you around. Unfortunately the answer isn't so cut and dry.

The rationale for building it yourself has been around as long as IT. There have always been various reasons for it, from there weren't any systems that could delivery what we needed, or we're different, we're smarter, we're bigger.. you get the point.

The real question you need to ask yourself is where does youe strengths as an organization lay? As a software developer or selling some other core business? For most it's the latter. Building your own cloud software is fraught with risk. One such example is a major hosting firm who spent 16 months building their own cloud IaaS platform only to realize that the assumptions they made about the potential cloud market opportunity had changed and their platform couldn't deliver the technical requirements of their new customer reality. More to the point, their platform wasn't what their targeted customers wanted to buy. Compounding their problem was the platform they built themselves didn't actually work - period. The key system engineer left mid-way through the project, forcing the company to find a replacement as well as inducing a major delay in the development. Additionally poor documentation meant those replacements had no practical way to continue what had been started previously. Needless to say, several million dollars later the project did launch, only to be promptly replaced a by a turn key IaaS platform.

Then there is the question of service differentiation to which I say, if you choose an extensible cloud platform, then you're able to differentiate faster than you could if you build it yourself. Business is about adapting to market conditions. Building it yourself mean longer development cycles and potentially less adaptability. Customizing an existing platform, one that provides you a template for success and best practices is inherently less risky or time consuming. The real question you should be asking is can I deploy this cloud platform in a way that allows my business to be unique? If the answer is no, than find a platform that can. If you still can't find one, then build it yourself. But be prepared that you should now consider yourself a software developer.

As the founder of a IaaS platform vendor, I freely admit I am bias toward buying a platform over building it yourself. My reasoning is simple, our business is building IaaS platforms for service providers. Is it yours? If you answered no, my comment is unless you plan to get into the software business, building it yourself will only serve to add un-need risk, uncertainty and potential failure to your IT operations. Something I think we can all agree you should avoid.

Embracing Your Niche in the Cloud

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 02:05:00 EDT

With all the talk and the hype surrounding cloud computing many seem to be missing a major factor -- both in terms of the growth potential as well as the current opportunity for cloud computing products and services. Although the tech media and analysts love to tell you the cloud is everything including a $160 billion plus opportunity, like it or not, Cloud Computing is still an emerging niche market and exists only as part of a much larger market segment. And I'm here to tell you that as soon as you start embracing this fact, the sooner you will start to capitalize on the opportunity.

Regardless of your industry or market segment, every single product or service that is sold today can be defined by its market niche. Of course there are the products aimed at wider demographic audiences otherwise known as mainstream niches. But those markets tend to take years or even decades to mature. As an example think of the broader web hosting industry compared to that of the shared hosting, VPS, CDN, or the managed / dedicated server markets. Those companies that arguably have had the most success in each of these markets focused on winning in their particular niches. Rackspace within managed hosting sector or Akamai in the CDN space. Both can be considered as part of the broader hosting markets, but both have significant differentiation and more importantly success with in their particular niches. Both have also been able to charge signifcantly more than the previous generations of services within the broader hosting market.

Also being first in market doesn't necessarily mean you're going to own it. When looking at niche markets it's interesting point out that narrower demographics (PaaS, SaaS or IaaS in contrast to VPS hosting) lead to elevated prices due to the concept called the price elasticity of demand. (Which is a good thing) In other words, a niche market is a highly specialized market that allows you to survive among the competition from numerous much larger and broader focused competitors.

As a further example think of Amazon (the book version of course) versus your local community corner book store. The economics that define success for that corner book store are significantly different than what Amazon would consider a success both from a profit margin as well as a volume point of view. The corner book store wins by effectively differentiating itself from it's much larger competitor. It's books are more expensive to buy, but possibly you can also buy a coffee or browse actual physical books or even have a conversation with a human. This differentiation attracts a unique customer profile and caters to an alternative market segment. A segment that possibly is willing to spend more for something they could have gotten cheaper at Amazon. These differentiators allow the corner book store to compete and even win business (within their niche) from that much larger competitor even though the price is higher. The same concept applies to cloud computing.

I suppose what I am saying is you will never win if your goal is be Amazon. You will win by not being Amazon. By being different. By embracing your niche.

Do Customers Really Care About Cloud APIs?

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 13:35:00 EDT

Interesting post by Ellen Rubin of CloudSwitch asking if Amazon is the Official Cloud Standard? Her post was inspired by a claim that Amazon’s API should be the basis for an industry standard. Something I've long been against for the simple reason that choice / innovation is good for business. Although I agree with Ellen that AWS has made huge contributions to advance cloud computing. And also agree that "their API is highly proven and widely used, their cloud is highly scalable, and they have by far the biggest traction of any cloud". But the question I ask is do cloud customers really care about the API, so much as the applications and sevice levels applied higher up the stack?Interesting post by Ellen Rubin of CloudSwitch asking if Amazon is the Official Cloud Standard? Her post was inspired by a claim that Amazon’s API should be the basis for an industry standard. Something I've long been against for the simple reason that choice / innovation is good for business. Although I agree with Ellen that AWS has made huge contributions to advance cloud computing. And also agree that "their API is highly proven and widely used, their cloud is highly scalable, and they have by far the biggest traction of any cloud". But the question I ask is do cloud customers really care about the API, so much as the applications and sevice levels applied higher up the stack?

At Enomaly we currently have customers launching clouds around the globe, each of which have their own feature requests ranging from various storage approaches to any number of unique technical requirements. Out of all the requests we hear on a daily basis, the Amazon API is almost never is requested. Those who do request it are typically in the government or academic spaces. When it is, it's typically part of a broader RFP where it's mostly a check box and part of a laundry list of requirements. When pushed the answer is typically, -- it's not important. So I ask why the fascination with the AWS API's as a sales pitch when it appears neither service providers or their end customer really care? More to the point, why aren't there any other major cloud providers who support the format other than Amazon? The VMware API or even the Enomaly API are more broadly deployed if you count the number of unique public cloud service providers as your metric.

An API from a sales point of view isn't important because you're not selling an API. You're selling the applications that sit above the API and mostly those applications don't really care what's underneath. As a cloud service provider you're selling a value proposition, and unfortunately an API provides little inherent value other than potentially some reduction in development time if you decide to leave. Actually the really hard stuff is in moving Amazon machine images away from EC2 in a consistant way, which Amazon through their AMI format have made a practically impossible mission. [Paravirt, really?]

I'm not saying API's aren't important for cloud computing, just that with the emergence of meta cloud API such as LibCloud, Jclouds and others, programming against any one single unique cloud service provider API is no longer even a requirement. So my question to those who would have you believe the AWS API is important is again -- why? Is it because your only value is that in which there is little other than your API support? Or is there something I'm missing?