DMI: Moving into the Cloud

10:58 - Mike Gordon onstage, introducing panelists.

10:59 - Culver - We call it “web scale” computing and are making available the best practices that are running Amazon.

11:00 - Brown: Cloud gives you massive scale and capacity in a dynamic fashion. Its about any small startup - giving them the tools they need to get them up and running. Cloud means having any product in development today, and have it in market tomorrow.

11:01 - Engates: We are trying to move our infrastructure offerings and turn them into a much more rapidly dynamic service for our customers. Same things we have always done, but better faster cheaper.

11:02 - Gordon: Most important question - what is cloud computing? We’ve heard software-as-a-service, IBM saying we can help you build your own. How should web presence really think about cloud?

11:02 - Engates: Its all of the IT resources you need - software, hardware, apps - offered as a service, typically over the ‘net, consumed as a service. Its a multitenant environment.

11:03 - Brown: Its about the dynamism and fluidity. The ability to consume as much as you need, and instantly turn the dial up or down as your business needs more or less. You have a much faster response time when you need to scale, which fits these massive, rapid growth curves.

11:04 - Culver: At a technical level, its XML web services, it is remote and you don’t need to know exactly where it is. You are giving up some element of control but getting a lot of productivity back because someone else is taking care of all of the infrastructure Its infinite scale - you self-provision your services, and and your needs/demands vary, you provision more servers, etc. When that need passes, you can scale back.

11:05 - Culver: The industry is shifting from purchasing fixed resources, to a fluid model where you pay for what you use and there are no monthy fees or utilities. Its fluid, like a utility model.

11:07 - Gordon: What am I giving up if I adopt a cloud component to my infrastructure?

11:08 - Culver: You are giving up a bit of control because its abstracted. But what you are getting in return is that you don’t have to run that infrastructure. For a little loss of control you are getting a big bang in return.

11:08 - Brown: For those of us propeller heads, we are always into the physical. But in this model, its like the Model T: You can have anything as long as its black. You are allowing someone else to control the availability of the service, and the servicing of parts on the back end. You lose a window into what’s actually happening.

11:09 - Engates: The “server-huggers” of the world like to know what patch software things are running on, we hear there is a security concern. You have to trust your cloud vendor to handle all of that and protect your information.

11:10 - Brown: Security is going to be a big differentiator in the future.

11:11 - Engates: Its like people are afraid of flying, but they are more statistically in danger in a car. But they like the control they get in a car. So there’s a tradeoff.

11:11 - Gordon: Is this yet another area where IT is asking us to “trust them”?  How do we enfore things?

11:12 - Engates; We make sure everyone inside our customers that have a stake in the project is involved. Doing this already, extending that capability into the cloud. Also make recommendations of what ought to be in the cloud, too.

11:13 - Brown: You are going to hear transparency a lot. Its about what you can do to make sure your customers can trust you…third party auditors, goos information, etc.

11:14 - Culver: I think that over time we will see the rise of various certification standards for the data center.

11:14 - Gordon: How should potential consumers think about what cloud means for your company’s agenda?

11:15 - Engates: I urge people to think about who they trust doing business with. Rackspace has a history of customer service - we are there 24×7 to help customers whenever something goes wrong, which it always will. We are building services that could potentially replace our current infrastructure, or they could compliment them. The benefits of the cloud plus our current market solutions go hand-in-hand.

11:17 - Brown: Its interesting that Microsoft, Amazon, Rackspace, we are all converging on this space. We are building the largest data centers in the world, and getting really good at it. At Microsoft, we have a history of chasing tail lights, but once we catch up, we usually pass and move forward. Our agenda is that since Windows is the big platform, why don’t we do the same thing in the server place.

11:19 - Culver: We have ability and expertice in operating very high-scale web applications. And now we’ve rolled some of those things out and made them available to our customers. One of the key learnings of Amazon.com is that the entire data center is replicated, so we can’t go “off the air.”

11:21 - Gordon: How real is this?

11:21 - Engates: Its early. We still see outages and hiccups in the cloud space. But there are people willing to try it out. Companies that have the developers that are willing to get their hands dirty. We have a platform today - Moso - a place to put a web application and a database that you can scale up or down without worrying about the hardware. So when traffic goes through the roof — we had a blogger who wrote on the debate who’s traffic went up during the debate, then right back down — we can scale. This blogger isn’t a tech person, and if he had to figure it our he would have missed his window. We help.

11:24 - Brown: Changing very rapidly. For Myanmar disaster, we were able to spin up capacity in-region to help out in less than an hour. Ability to help customers locally is important. Where you want it, as quickly as you need it, and scale up, scale down.

11:25 - Culver: Its a little bit about where the company is on the curve. Startups think about how to operate on no cash — this is a way to help them do that. Worked with a company that built a Facebook app that went viral, and they autoscaled to 3500 servers in a day-and-a-half. And when the wave passed they scaled down again.

11:28 - Culver: Also seeing a wide variety of enterprises adopt this, and the curve is faster.

11:28 - Gordon: Interesting, because the enterprise is a fixed set (or predictable set) of users.

11:29 - Culver: Yes - they are questioning why they need to operate a data center.

11:30 - Engates: Agree. Its in stealth mode now, in the way Linux made its way into the enterprise. You have a developer that can use cloud to get access to resources today, buy them on their own credit card, and deploy and show it off next week — without waiting for corporate IT to purchase things.

11:30 - Culver: Interesting that things go in circles. That’s how Windows got onto desktops, because users didn’t want to wait for IT to set them up.

11:31 - Gordon: Where is it going? 18-24 months? 10 years?

11:31 - Brown: Security - transparancy and compliancy. But also interoperability between these services - almost as a business-to-business connector. How can enterprises exchange data - easy if they have systems that share common formats. Also business continuity/disaster recovery. Makes the business federated, replicated and accessible from anywhere.

11:32 - Engates There’s a shift in computing from IT closets to data centers. This is the first time I felt that utility computing is actually happening and enabling that thing they all promised 5 years ago. Its really a way to use computing resources differently, and the direction things are going. People don’t want to be in the weeds with their hardware.

11:33 - Culver: I see one megatrend that will shape user experiences-  utility computing, or pay by the hour. Rent software or their operating system by the hour. Users don’t want to buy a monolithic licence that’s not portable - they want to buy only what they need, when they need it.

11:35 - Engates: You are not buying a thing, or a license. You are buying access.

11:35 - Time for Q+A

11:36 - Do you see overlap between could computing and traditional CDNs?

11:36 - Engates: Funny. I was going to mention that Limelight is a cloud of sorts. CDNs have a relationship that co-exist. Most clouds today are not as tuned - its a lot of work to make a CDN hum. Some people are starting to use CDN as the origin for their cloud.

11:37 - Brown: I agree. There’s so many ways to bind up utility and dynamic computing with rich media delivery.

11:37 - Culver: There are many use cases that if you don’t have delivery, you won’t have the user experience they have come to expect.

11:38 - Gordon: I think it depends on how CDN services continue to evolve. Cloud raises the bar for us, and it makes us continue to raise our game.

11:39 - It makes sense for corporations to do this. But from a consumer perspective - AT&T turns over phone records w/o asking customers, MS wants my health info, Amazon had outages. Why should I trust you with my privacy?

11:40 - Culver: Amazon has a strong track record of protecting customer information. They way we have architected things, you get root access to your virtual servers, and we don’t. We need to all be super passionate that your data is safe, and that in being safe, you come to trust us. Trust, but verify.

11:41 - Brown: Transparency is important. You can point at any big company, and at some point, you have seen them make decisions that go aginst common opinion. Interoperability can help - if we make it easy for you to move from one to another, then we are all have incentive to do the right thing.

11:42 - Engates: Do detective work on your own before you dive in. Use low-risk information before you put critical information.

11:43 - Thank you.

Tags: DM Innovation Forum

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