Okay – this is easy… or is it?
Lots of people continue to perpetuate the idea that the AWS APIs are a de facto standard, so we should just all move on about it. At the same time, everybody seems to acknowledge the fact that Amazon has never ever indicated that they want to be a true standard. Are we reallyIn fact, they have played quite the coy game and kept silent luring potential competitors into a false sense of complacency.
Amazon has licensed their APIs to Eucalyptus under what I and others broadly assume to be a a hard and fast restriction to the enterprise private cloud market. I would not be surprised to learn that the restrictions went further – perhaps prohibiting Eucalyptus from offering any other API or claiming compatibility with other clouds.

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As part of our cloud strategy, we’ve recently released a VMware version of our cloud security offering. It allows cloud providers using VMware, as well as the cloud users themselves, to create an encrypted environment within minutes, while eliminating the complexity around encryption key management in the cloud without compromising trust and confidentiality.
During this process we’ve engaged in many conversations with the cloud providers’ community to better understand their requirements, and equally important – their customers’ requirements. We’ve identified some interesting patterns with regards to cloud data security, which I thought would be beneficial to share.

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HP have joined the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market and released their HP Cloud service in public beta. Here’s the announcement press release. The services on offer are:

Available Now as Public Beta

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There was a time during the height of the dot-com boom when executives in Silicon Valley believed that Washington, DC was irrelevant. As two generations of entrepreneurs strived to build The New Economy, it was laughable to think that the ancient dunderheads back in our nation’s capital had any notion about – or right to tamper with – what was going on in the tech world.

This was the era of the Clinton Administration, a time when the President himself had declared that “the era of big government is over.” Defend the shores, deliver the mail, and otherwise stay the hell out of the way – this was the thinking in the tech world during the bubble.

Clinton’s years were peaceful from the perspective of people living in the US. A few targeted attacks here and there, with even the major, US-backed military action by NATO in Serbia having little effect in day-to-day American lives. The Black Hawk Down episode in Somalia convinced most Americans that we wanted little or nothing to do with foreign military misadventure. The idea of nation building was not popular, and indeed was rejected by both Al Gore and George W. Bush during the 2000 Presidential campaign.

Keep Out
Domestically, the mindset was also to keep the government from meddling. We were running federal surpluses for the first time in most people’s memory, the economy was booming, and we were all discovering the personal liberation of being able to hang out on the Worldwide Web.

With 9/11 the US entered a different reality, one in which the federal government became more important, and dominant, than ever. The whole dot-com castles-in-the-sand economy had washed away by then; that dreadful day assured that it wouldn’t come back.

But the federal government has proven in the past decade to be a poor driver of the innovation found in Silicon Valley, despite having invented the Internet a generation ago.

We are now in a new innovative era, characterized by massive social media, massively Big Data, and emerging back-end behemoths that keep everything running through increasing amounts of virtualization and cloud computing. The US government has committed itself to a Cloud First strategy, perhaps, but what true technology leadership and vision can we expect from Washington?

A Nuanced Reading
George W. Bush reads lots of books. He mentioned to author Robert Draper, for the book Dead Certain, that he was on his 87th book midway through one of his years in the White House. He reads nonfiction about U.S. Presidents and other historical political leaders.

But yet in Dead Certain, which is neither hagiography nor an anti-Bush polemic, he seems strangely unaffected by all that he reads, other than his rock-ribbed belief that he must be strong and unflinching in his decisions. He doesn’t do nuance, it’s said.

Nuance quickly becomes casuistry and sophistry, or endless parsing – think Bill Clinton. It can be the biggest obstacle to decisiveness and direction. But a little nuance here and there is not necessarily a bad thing. Diplomatic success is based on it. More to the point of our industry, a nuanced understanding of other nations – and how the people in them conduct their lives and business – is essential if American technology is expected to succeed globally.

It was horrifying to read in Dead Certain how uncertain – or perhaps obtuse – our federal government was, at its highest levels, when it came to understanding the world and the consequences that US actions bring. There was nary a word of how the spread of technology might improve the state of the world.

Dead Certain also recounts how a top Bush aid got a job as an Undersecretary of State, in which she traveled internationally with the goal of improving the perception of the United States. The passages in Dead Certain about this escapade are painful to read. They describe a high-level government official with neither an iota self-awareness nor a scintilla of knowledge about how people think in the countries she visits.

And Today?
Other than reading about the Cloud First strategy, I have no idea of how well the current administration understands the power of global IT and its ability to improve economies and the lives of people. My guess is that glib talk of the Twitter Revolution may be as deep a dive as these folks can make. The sad irony is that Washington doesn’t get technology but does matter.

All this brings me to the upcoming Cloud Expo in New York, where a substantially international crowd will gather to discuss the latest developments, successes, advances, and well, nuances of cloud computing.

I hope that during the millions of individual discussions that will happen in New York, some people will discuss the idea that Silicon Valley needs to do more than the two things it does well politically: oppose onerous legislation (like SOPA, PIPA, and CISPA) after it’s introduced act as an ATM for favored presidential candidates after they’re well established.

Somehow, Silicon Valley must learn to matter as much in Washington as Washington matters to Silicon Valley.

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On the surface, everything seems fine. If you do a search, you’ll see lots of people offering support for cloud-centric application frameworks. But, when I speak with companies actually moving Java applications into the Cloud or trying to create new Cloud services based on Java, I get a different story. It’s not the application in many cases that’s in the way, it’s the JVM.
An example that highlights these issues comes from one of our partners, Intalio. Intalio offers Cloud solutions based mostly on open source. They and their customers are frustrated by the fact that Java can’t take advantage of Cloud elasticity – the JVM strictly limits the amount of memory and cores an individual instance can use. To make matters worse, operators have to deploy multiple small instances (around 2-4 GBs of memory each) to keep garbage collection pauses short enough so users wouldn’t really notice the delay. Plus, managing it all is painful. Developers have to create distributed networks within individual machines, and the IT staff has to create and launch lots of new instances and tune carefully to avoid long response times delays. (Their CEO, Ismael Chang Ghalimi, describes the problem in detail in a paper called “Cloud Computing is Memory Bound – located here: http://www.intalio.com/cloud-computing-is-memory-bound.)

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As a media partner of Cloud Expo, TMCnet is offering a special 20% discount for each registration package for SYS-CON’s 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11-14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City. To obtain your 20% discount, here is a quick summary of all you need to do – feel free to cut and paste these instructions into any email blast you might be sending out:
TMCnet is the world’s leading communications and technology Web site. TMCnet is one of the most flexible, useful and fastest growing b-to-b technology sites. Covering IP communications, CRM, contact center and information technology topics, TMCnet is read by two million monthly unique visitors. Source: Webtrends. Please visit www.tmcnet.com

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How can businesses harness the power of APIs to reach new customers and markets?
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Alistair Farquharson, CTO at SOA Software, will walk the audience through the growth and evolution of the API, why effective API management is important, and how the game changes when companies expose business applications to the outside world. He will also discuss:
A brief history of the API
How to use APIs to make money, save money, build brand
«Appification» and the innovation model of the open API
API management nuts and bolts, and best practices
Why Enterprise APIs are important
Some great examples of companies doing it right

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Called “the biggest software company you haven’t heard of yet” by one of its shiny new backers, 10-year-old Qualtrics has gotten $70 million from Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital in the VCs’ largest joint investment ever. It’s also the company’s first outside investment.
Reportedly profitable since it started, it’s supposed to use the money to expand its SaaS products beyond market research and accelerate its global growth, expecting to hire another 250 employees to add to the existing 200 in the next year.
Qualtrics is used for online data collection and analysis claiming to make it “easy for anyone in a company to conduct PhD-level research.” It figures outsourced research and data collection is too expensive – it’s shooting at data generated from customers, sales reps, channel partners and employees – and competitive tools are either too basic or too complicated.

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Compuware Corporation on Tuesday announced a deep transaction management solution for dynamic cloud and Big Data applications. The Compuware APM Spring 2012 Platform Release introduces new innovations in Compuware dynaTrace Enterprise that simplify performance optimization, operation and management of modern, dynamic applications.
These transformational application environments require a new approach to application performance management (APM) to support massively scalable architectures and dynamic, elastic resource allocation. With dynaTrace Enterprise and its patented PurePath(R) technology, EC2 and Azure cloud applications as well as Cassandra and Hadoop Big Data applications can be easily optimized and managed for greater performance and availability.

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As I mentioned in my last blog post, the promise of cost reduction is compelling many enterprises to move their workloads into the Cloud but many IT leaders are reluctant to do so, for fear of compromising the security and availability of their services. These concerns are well-founded but the benefits of Cloud are too great to ignore. To obtain these benefits, companies must adopt techniques that protect against the attendant risks, without compromise.
Many people are familiar with Layer 7’s industry-leading security functionality, so it’s no surprise that I’d recommend using our Gateway technology to protect connections from on-premise infrastructure to off-premise Cloud services. The flexibility of deployment options we offer makes it possible to create a network of secure on- and off-premise endpoints to meet the most stringent requirements. This covers security but what about availability?

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