Another year, another dollar… or something like that. It’s time for an update on the 6 things I think I think for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) in the coming year!
1. Hybrid Cloud Computing
2012 Perspective: Hybridization WAS key in 2011 and I’m doubling down in 2012. If you’ve paid attention to the consolidation in the industry, you’d best do the same. The big boys are snapping up anything that smells like bridging the enterprise to the multi-tenant host. Look for this trend to intensify.
OpenNebula 2012: A Year of Innovation in Open Source Cloud Computing
Time flies, and we are approaching the end of another successful year at OpenNebula!. We’ve had a lot to celebrate around here during 2012, including our fifth anniversary. We took that opportunity to look back at how the project has grown in the last five years. We are extremely happy with the organic growth of the project. It’s five years old, it’s parked in some of the biggest organizations out there, and that all happened without any investment in marketing, just offering the most innovative and flexible open-source solution for data center virtualization and enterprise cloud management. An active and engaged community, along with our focus on solving real user needs in innovative ways and the involvement of the users in a fully vendor-agnostic project, constitute, in our view, the OpenNebula’s recipe to success.
As 2012 draws to and end, we’d like to review what this year has meant for the OpenNebula project and give you a peek at what you can expect from us in 2013. You have all the details about the great progress that we have seen for the OpenNebula project in our monthly newsletters.
SYS-CON.tv Interview: Cloud Security Compliance
“The cloud adoption isn’t completely done. People who are coming into the cloud are realizing that they still have compliance requirements regardless of where their data lives,” stated Dan Rojas, Director of Strategic Development at Coalfire, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 11th International Cloud Expo, held November 5-8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Expo 2013 New York, June 10–13, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Let’s Hope Not: Least Favorite 2013 Prediction is “Hacking-as-a-Service”
Among all the pundit predictions for the coming year in cloud computing the one that caught my eye was this one by BusinessInsider’s Julie Bort in an article entitled “5 Totally Odd Tech Predictions That Will Probably Come True Next Year”
1. Bad guys start offering “hacking as a service”
Security company McAfee says that criminal hackers have begun to create invitation-only forums requiring registration fees. Next up, these forums could become some sort of black-market software-as-a-service. Pay a monthly fee and your malware is automatically updated to the latest attack. Don’t pay, and it would be a shame if something happened to your beautiful website …
HaaS? Let’s hope not.
Era of Analytic Applications – Part 1
I was talking to one of the prominent General Partners at a Venture Capital firm here in Silicon Valley over the holidays…discussing how the Cloud market is evolving. We both agreed that 2013 will mark yet another shift in the evolution of web applications.
I personally simplified this view of cloud evolution by defining its progression in the following periods…dating back to these noteworthy events.
Sure, Apache Hadoop was technically released on December 27, 2011…but most of us were out drinking brandy eggnog then (just as I am now).
Let’s just look at the beginning…when The World operated by Software Tool & Die started the first ISP. Pretty cool to think that they were the first dial-up service provider that offered direct access of the Internet to the general public.
Looking into the EU Cloud Computing initiative
The European Commission produced a communication entitled “Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe,” which announced a new cloud computing strategy for the European Union. The EC released a statement saying that the Cloud computing strategy will, if it works, facilitate the use of the cloud across the EU both in the state and private sector.
This would create and estimated 2.5 million jobs and 160 billion Euros added to the EU’s GDP by 2020.
The initiative would align cloud computing services with existing EU protocols regarding consumer rights such as privacy and security of data under the Data Protection Directive. This would mean that those individuals concerned with the distribution of their data online and in the cloud would have a better degree of protection.
The proposal has several strategies including:
– To put in place scheme whereby technical standards are voluntarily taken up by the relevant …
SYS-CON.tv Interview: The Distributed Computing World
“We are a scale-out SQL database, perfect for Big Data and the cloud. People are here to try to figure out how to deal with Big Data and the cloud together,” stated Mark Sarbiewski, CMO of Clustrix, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 11th International Cloud Expo, held November 5-8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Expo 2013 New York, June 10–13, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
All for the Want of a Global Load Balancer
Christmas Eve and the AWS/Netflix outage to me aren’t so much about whether or not the Cloud is viable or scary or dangerous. Rather, the event resonated with users across the United States because the Cloud delivers so much utility to each of us. And regardless of who was at fault–Netflix or Amazon Web Services, the event made it clear that there’s no going back and that the Cloud has quickly become a part of our culture and our everyday lives. This is significant because while the Internet itself is a technology consumers have grown to love, Cloud is a way of delivering service that makes a service like Netflix streaming possible, and at a measly $8 bucks a month. The Netflix business model of delivering outsize utility for a low price point makes the business of streaming video all the more difficult. HBO, Cinemax, and the networks for me are unusable. I sense something beyond just making money remains in play at Netflix. Somewhere in that organization seems to beat a heart that quickens for humanity.
Cloud First May Be Cloud Lost
The days are growing longer as I sit in a second-floor office in northern Illinois, but barely. A rare clear, but very cold day is ending shortly after 4pm as a bright orange sun sets in the southwest outside my frosted window.
The year ends tomorrow. So may Congressional negotiations over the so-called fiscal cliff. Whether they result in an agreement or not, we now know that they will address taxation and fixed benefits (eg, Social Security) only; our “leaders” long ago abandoned any pretense of settling the tails side of the coin – fixed, dramatic cuts in spending.
The “sequestration,” as it’s called, involves an immediate cut of $110 billion in this year’s federal budget. Expect cuts of between 8 and 9 percent across the board.
The federal government has an IT budget of about $85 billion per year, so sequestration could mean cuts of around $7 billion, perhaps more. This is a big number.
Meanwhile, the government’s cloud-computing initiative seems to be as docile and inactive as it could possibly be. I wrote less than two years ago about how “stunning” the government’s Cloud First strategy was.
Meanwhile, the administration official behind it, Vivek Kundra, gathered a bunch of accolades and moved into the private sector. His replacement has been very quiet; the last missive from his office was issued in February. He tweets, but not often and not about cloud, or IT, for that matter.
I’ll keep an eye on this sequestration business and how it will in reality affect federal IT spending next year. For now, things look bleak for IT in general, and Cloud First may have become Cloud Lost.
Big Data Defined for 2013
We have previously written about the importance of discipline in terms of art like Big Data. There are plenty of indications that more discipline and rigor is required on how we use the term. To date, our key message has been that it is the enterprise CTO who is responsible for defining how the term should be used. We still believe that.
We have also always supported using the community-edited site Wikipedia’s entry on Big Data as a starting point for a Big Data definition. The definition I put there was morphed and edited by the community pretty significantly, but that is just the nature of the beast. The end result of a collaborative site like that is usually far better than if a single person had created a definition so it is definitely worth checking out as you determine how to use the Big Data term in your enterprise.