This is one of those questions with which I am getting bored.  You can’t attend a conference these days without someone asking that question.  The constant theorizing is akin to the classic debate of “Kirk or Picard?”  It’s a question that may never get answered, and in fact will engage the nerds for decades to come.

After my conversations last night at the Structure VIP reception, I came to the conclusion that the word “cloud” is like catnip for nerds.  You can attach the word cloud to anything to attain relevancy.

During his panel at the Structure 09 conference (being live streamed from GigaOm), James Lindenbaum from Heroku said that he doesn’t want to think about the question anymore; in fact, he wants to avoid the word “cloud” all together.  Instead, he would prefer that people focus on building applications and rely on abstractions provided by the development frameworks than to think about to cloud or not to cloud.

This just in, local San Francisco entrepreneurs are launching the world’s first cloud gas station.  They supply a true multi-tenant, pay by the drink model, removing the need to purchase your own refineries, and abstracting the gas production process to deliver a truly seamless experience for downstream customers.

Next up on the zeitgeist watch?  Attaching the word “scale” to the name of your company.

This week should be an exciting one.  Not only do I get to travel down to CA and see old friends, I get to talk to a bunch of great startups, and cap the week off by participating in a panel discussion at Structure 09 – the 1:30PM session titled “Toward Cloud Computing: Private Enterprise as a First Step.”

The panel is being run by George Gilbert, who, like myself, is an ex-Wall Street guy, and he used to work at Microsoft.  He’s now running TechAlpha, and based on the few conversations we’ve had in preparation for the panel discussion, it should be a good one.

If you are going to be at the conference and want to get together to talk about your company or your cloud needs, find me by sending me a DM or @ on twitter – I am @brandonwatson.

It looks like I will be speaking at the Structure09 event on June 25th in San Francisco.  I was invited to join a panel on cloud computing, and am honored to have the opportunity to share the stage with many industry heavy weights.  Quite frankly, I’m not sure I measure up to the panel, but the team over at GigaOm have faith in me.

If you haven’t already registered, they gave me a discount code for anyone who reads this blog or follows me on Twitter.  It should be a really good event.  They had their inaugural event last year, and I’m certain this one will be even better.  Here’s the synopsis of the panel:

Toward Cloud Computing: Private Enterprise Clouds As A First Step

Enterprises aren’t yet able or ready to migrate their applications to public clouds.  Public cloud infrastructure can’t run existing enterprise applications without requiring a rewrite.  Yet the lure of usage-based resourcing is strong. The solution? Build your own cloud with your existing infrastructure investment as a first step. This panel will contrast vendor visions about how internal systems can work in unison with external cloud platforms. A must attend for those looking to find solutions or opportunity in the migration path to cloud services.

Panelists

Moderator – George Gilbert, Lead Analyst, TechAlpha
James Urquhart – Market Manager Cloud Computing,Cisco
Brandon Watson – Azure, Microsoft
Steve Herrod – CTO Vmware
Dave Hitz, CTO, NetApp
Joseph Tobolski, Cloud Computing Lead, Accenture

Summary

There was a report released April 15^th by McKinsey called “Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing.”  The premise of the report was that the cloud was actually quite a bit more expensive for large corporations than running their own datacenters.  While it allows a nod to small to medium businesses in stating that the cloud may make sense for them, the top line message was that cloud services overcharge for things that companies could do for themselves.  The piece ends up being a push for virtualization, and knocks Windows as a main cost issue for moving to the cloud.

Report Out

The report starts out with McKinsey’s view on the cloud.  They lay out that the premise for the cloud has been lower cost and faster time to market, but the reality is that these claims are overstated and that “cloud computing” is at the top of the Gartner hype-cycle.

The report takes it one step further to claim that since there is no agreed upon definition for what the “cloud” is (apparently they found a study that found 22 definitions for the “cloud”, which seems low to me considering the conversations I hear at conferences and on news groups), large companies should not think about “internal clouds” but rather focus on the immediate benefits of virtualization of servers, storage and network operations.  They posit that the newness of the cloud is distracting IT departments’ attention from technologies that “actually deliver sizeable benefits; e.g. aggressive virtualization.”

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There’s been a new round of noise in what I like to call the “What is the Cloud?” discussion.  It never ceases to amaze me that so many people seem stuck on this one question, despite the fact that having an answer to it is not the asset people seem to think it is.  The cloud is evolving, with or without us, and is doing so based on the needs and demands of developers.

So it was with some amusement that I caught wind of the “secret” open cloud manifesto being circulated to some of the top companies.  My boss has posted the Microsoft stance on the open cloud manifesto, and I wanted to share some of my thoughts.

The press seems to have glommed onto this meme with quite a bit of coverage.  I didn’t know Steven was so popular.  Perhaps I need to hang around him more.  Darryl Taft at eWeek had a very insightful article, which took a very unexpected turn.  He admitted that journalists have a bit of a bias against Microsoft, and when it comes to us talking about things like open processes and standards, they can’t help themselves but be skeptical.  Here’s the money quote:

“…it’s a whole new world. And not only has the web — and increasingly the cloud — forced Microsoft to become more open and interoperable, so has the sheer force of customer and developer demand.”

That’s spot on.  The Hatorade was fine back in the 90s, but in case everyone missed the memo, the web kind of kicked our ass, and we have made a very strong effort to work with standards, embrace the needs of our developers, and deliver high quality products and services to our customers based on those demands.

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One of the things I am going to spending my time doing during Mix09 is talking to customers about what they find exciting, and more specifically about our cloud computing efforts.  Not really sure how this is going to turn out, but that’s what makes it so exciting.  Armed with nothing other than a Flip camera and my stunning charm (<g>), I will accost Mix attendees.  Watch out…you might be next.

I recently delivered a talk for a group of venture capitalists who wanted a primer on the cloud.  It was, so I thought, a pretty straightforward task to put together this discussion.  I have written about the motivations of those building cloud platforms, so I figured I could just transpose that content to slides.  Unfortunately, life often doesn’t work out the way we would like when you think there is an “easy” answer.

I wanted to ensure that there was some relevancy of my content not just to the VCs in the room, but also for their CEOs and CTOs, with whom they would undoubtedly share this content.  Further, I knew that I had to make it simple enough to fit into the allotted time, but meaty enough that everyone took something away from the call.  Given the time constraint, I focused on Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine and Microsoft Azure.  Lastly, given that VCs are investing and looking for ideas, I had to put on my old investor hat and present some high level whitespace analysis with some noted interesting companies.

I think the key takeaways would be that Amazon has built some very cool technology and they continue to innovate.  However, that must be tempered with some cost considerations (tied to growth) and the fact that the platform itself doesn’t solve any hard problems for you.  Google, on the other hand, has little in the way of cost concerns (they have a stated goal of supporting up to 5 million page views for free), but what you can do with the framework is pretty limiting in the context of the richness of applications now possible.  Lastly, Azure is a contender, but we have some things yet to prove, and of course, we are late to the game.  It’s still very early days, but there are some cool things happen in the clouds, both at the platform level, and at the “built on top of” level.

I’ve seen a couple of articles covering the announcement surrounding GOOG and Salesforce.com (SFDC) linking up their services, purportedly for the betterment of their collective customers.  It’s interesting to see how the different players are coming together in the cloud space, and what alliances are being formed to create space and opportunity.

What I don’t quite get is what they really believe they are accomplishing.  Connecting up these services is good, in the context of plenty of users on either end asking for this sort of thing.  As I have written about before, the AppEngine framework really drives developers down the path of building specific types of applications.  Those applications, by and large, are very consumer focused in nature.  The connection between a SFDC prospect (or customer) and a user of a GAE application is one that I don’t make.  There simply isn’t a center of gravity there.

Let me put this another way.  California has a reasonably size deployment of refineries.  That would be SFDC.  So they decide to hook up with a petroleum company (GOOG) to build a pipeline somewhere.  They decide, for whatever reason, to build it to the state of Washington (AppEngine).  Hey, it makes sense.  Let’s connect up refining capacity to a market.  Unfortunately, according to the Department of Energy, WA has “few fossil fuel resources.”  I’m not trying to be pejorative or anything, but does GAE really have a robust ecosystem of applications, and, more to the point, a future large potential market of applications, to support such this effort?  Given the assets at the disposal of GOOG and the potential for cross-sell with SFDC, I am surprised that this was the path they went down.

There’s been quite a bit of chatter on the web about the Azure Services Platform.  Obviously I’m excited to see people talking about our new platform, especially when there is plenty of good, some bad, and some good if not somewhat rambling.  There will be no shortage of guessing as to what Microsoft is “really up to” with our development efforts.  I wanted to take a crack at that one, but from a completely different perspective.  I want to frame the discussion centered on the motivations of the platform providers, and let that be a guide to understanding the delivered product.

Amazon

Let me start by giving a hat tip to the AMZN guys.  Their web services platform (AWS) has really been at the tip of the spear for cloud computing.  For the sake of this discussion, when I use the term “cloud computing,” I am talking about the developer platform, not things like GOOG apps.  The AMZN services are a loosely coupled set of services targeted at developers looking to avail themselves of infrastructure buildout.  Their infrastructure as a service (EC2) is a great way for developers to reduce their capital expenditures and take on a variable costing model for their servers.

The services, all up, encompass several key pieces for building applications that can take on a range of workloads.  The ability to now run Windows Server 2003 (which should get you terminal services) means that as a developer, you can deploy varying application types into AWS, beyond simply web apps.  From a developer standpoint, however, there is no unified development experience.  Which brings me to the discussion around motivations.

AMZN essentially spends 10 months out of the year building out servers.  They build out massive numbers of servers for the two months out of the year when they are handling the Christmas shopping season.  AMZN is, for all intents and purposes, a giant mall.  They spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year building more capacity for their mall.  Their store is the primary reason shoppers come in the front door, and most of the year, their mall is empty, relative to the size of the mall.  As a retailer with an ecommerce backend, their problems are no different than most enterprises.  They have machines that are sitting around doing little or nothing for large portions of the year.  Unlike most other enterprises, AMZN has the financial capacity to build out their server capacity.  At some point, AMZN made the decision to no longer be the primary traffic draw to their mall.  They realized that they could completely offset their own traffic (and then some) by taking the technology that they had built for themselves and making it available to other developers.

AMZN is, essentially, in the load management business.  They are a low margin retail operator that is running a hugely expensive infrastructure for which they are seeking maximum utilization.  They would like nothing more than to be noise in their own system.  AMZN is relentlessly metrics driven.  As such, they have a pretty good idea of how much money to expect off of traffic that walks through their front door.  They know how much to expect from traffic ending up at one of their marketplace partners.  With the addition of AWS, they have a new way to monetize their capacity, and with their predictable pricing model, they know exactly how much money they are going to make off of customers who deploy applications to their service.  Traffic on their network makes them money.  It may not make your app money, but it makes them money, so they are happy.  It more than likely saves you money, so you are probably happy too.

So, AMZN is motivated by maximization of infrastructure capacity, and optimization of what would otherwise be very low margin businesses.  They do this by delivering a loosely coupled set of services to developers looking for infrastructure as a service.  They aren’t necessarily targeting developers.  They aren’t a platform, per se.  They are targeting anyone who is looking to move workloads off of their own infrastructure and onto AMZN.

Google

Ahh, Google.  I love those guys.  They have done plenty of cool things, and their release of the AppEngine (GAE) was welcomed with very loud praise from many in the tech community.  According to some reports, they had 25,000 developers sign up for GAE in the first few hours of releasing it.  Taken as a whole, GAE is a very tightly coupled set of services designed to allow developers to build applications that will have no problem scaling up to, theoretically, infinite capacity.  The rigid requirements for a developer deploying into the GAE are such that you use one language (Python) and their database (big table).

Once again, when considering what has been built, one need look no further than the motivations of GOOG to really get where they are going.  When you consider the stricture imposed on the architecture of apps built for GAE (singple process, no long running queries, no local file access, no network access), a developer is all but required to build standard CRUD web applications.  There is no stack for enterprise integration.  The delivery vehicle is the web browser.  The data that is created goes right into big table.

Some might say that GOOG’s core business is search.  I actually have a different opinion.  GOOG’s core business is the monetization of page views.  Search is their instantiation of that business model, but many of their other applications have nothing to do with search, and everything to do with the monetization of page views.  Think about gmail – ads on the sidebar.

Applicaitons on GAE are mostly CRUD apps, storing structured data into big table.  As a developer, building an applicaiton on GAE, you are essentially feeding the GOOG beast.  While they have not yet released final pricing, allow me to put on my pointy tin foil hat and talk about what might come to pass.  GOOG knows exactly how much it costs to run their infrastructure, and as such could hand developers a bill for the resources which they consume.  However, GOOG doesn’t have AMZN’s problem.  Their traffic is mostly linear, and going up and to the right.  It’s probably logarithmic at this point, but who’s counting?  In any event, since they have little variability in their traffic patterns, they don’t have to get into the load management business.  By allowing developers to build applications on their infrastructure, they are incurring unnecessary costs.  Their motivations, however, are driven by their business model.  Each new app that is plugged into the infrastructure ads new data to their data set, and creates new opportunities for page monetization.

Think of the case where GOOG shows up to a developer and says, “hey, moboganda.com - how are you doing?  That’s a great app you put up on GAE.  We’ve been going over the data and we figured out that if we ran AdSense on your pages 20% of the time, we could actually recoup the cost of running the infrastructure for you.  In fact, you don’t even need to do anything, since we own the infrastructure, the feature is already in there.  You can turn it off with a JavaScript include.”  As the young CEO of a web startup, this could sound like a pretty cool deal.  Free infrastructure and they didn’t have to do anything to get that turned on.  Not bad.  Let’s take this game of what-if one step further.  The GOOG guys come back in two months with the following, “hey buddy, that app of yours is performing really well.  You made more money on those 20% ads than we thought.  What we would love to do is run ads 100% of the time.  Of course, you are free to sell that ad space yourself.  I’m sure you have a full time ad sales force.  We’re only a multi-billion dollar company focused soley on monetizing pageviews, but feel free to go it alone if you want.”  To the developer, this could be music to your ears – focus on building the application, and GOOG does the monetization for you.  If you really wanted to go crazy, one could imagine a world where GOOG says to their developers, “$5 bounty for all new GOOG accounts created through your app.”

Bottom line: GOOG is motivated by feeding the GOOG beast and monetizing pageviews.  That shines through in the design of their app delivery vehicle, the tight coupling of the services, and the expected design patters of the applications to be built on their infrastructure.

Microsoft

With all of the above points in mind, hopefully you can start drawing some pretty good conclusions about the potential future directions of the competitive cloud platforms in the market.  As for MSFT, there are plenty of things I could say, but let me simply state what I believe to be our motivations.  We are a platform company.  We very much believe that we are in the business of delivering the best platform and tools to developers to build great applications.  Our on-premise stack has proven to be extremely successful over the last several decades.  With the release of the Azure Services Platform, one of the core design tenets was that we would like to achieve parity between our on and off-premise stacks.  The entirety of the Azure Services Platform is designed to enable experienced MSFT developers to be combat effective on day one.

However, the platform, from my point of view, is but a part of the engine.  The heart of the engine is the application that you plan to build.  GOOG very much believes that the web is the platform, and thus the web browser is the only delivery vehicle for applications.  We have a divergent opinion.  It seems absolutely crazy to me that a person carries around more computing power in their pocket today (cell phone) than was available a scant 15 years ago in the high end desktop computers, and GOOG believes that those processor cycles should be shunted aside.  Our software plus services strategy really is about enabling developers to deliver the right experience to their customers, on the preferred end point device, at the right time from a single piece of infrastructure.  We are motivated by our developers building great applications, and Azure is the final leg of the software plus services strategy.

Just when you thought it was safe to start thinking about putting together all of those services into a composite app, the dreaded siren call of “whose neck do I choke” beckons.  If you ever plan to have an IT manager look at your application, get used to hearing that one.

I’ve been off for a few weeks launching a little thing called Azure Services Platform.  Did you miss it?  There are plenty of videos over at the PDC 2008 site.  Here’s a great video of Steven Marx doing a walk-through of the Windows Azure code.

I will post my in depth thoughts on what we released at another time.  The coverage has been impressive, as you can see from these search results to the techmeme run.  I will revisit the topic later when I have something new to add.

The topic I did want to cover is the coming need for SLAs and trade agreements between trading partners who may not know that they exist in an application with one another.  Imagine a developer building a composite application through the use of multiple web services, each of them running via a different hosting provider.  The myriad of problems which can, and will, arise, have yet to be adequately addressed by the cloud providers.  One thing that any enterprise IT buyer knows how to say is “who’s throat do I choke?”  What they are referring to, of course, is the notion that should something go wrong with their applications, they need to know that there is someone whom they can call, scream at, and from whom they can expect a late night visit of the monkeys to the cages to fix whatever errant process is running amok.

When you have a composited application, who exactly are you going to be calling?  How can you even begin to diagnose the root cause of the issue.  Further, what if QoS (quality of service) is the culprit?  You calls are failing because the data is getting to you too slowly.  It eventually gets there, it just gets there too slow.  Is that factored into your agreement with the service providers?  Or were you only thinking about SLAs?  Either way, you still have the problem of who to blame, the ingress or egress traffic provider.  What happens when this is a duplex, synchronous transfer?  The real challenge for anyone looking to build composite apps will be ensuring that the service is uniform from each of their providers, which could be compounded by the fact that those providers may very well exist in different hosting facilities in different parts of the world.  Want yet more complication?  What happens when your cloud provider has multiple datacenters and has the ability to move your code around based on their need (read: not your need)?

As you can see, we’re just now starting to scratch the surface of what’s possible with cloud computing, but also just starting to understand what can go wrong.  Without proper planning and thinking, we are going to be digging ourselves some real holes in terms of end customer sat, partner sat, and developer sat.  Anyone have any thoughts?

(graphic courtesy my buddy responsible for Archinect Travels - a fantastic travel video blog wittily chronicling arcitecture across America)