Musings of Rodos

This was too good to not share. Video with people defining cloud computing.



Rodos

P.S. Thanks twitter fiends for pointing it out

Okay, you are heading to VMworld and its your first time. You need to know how to behave in a crowd of over 10 thousand people and interact with the hoards.

Here are some of the possible questions/statements you might ask whilst you are there. There are also some things NOT to say.

The good ones are at the top, the fail ones are at the bottom, try to avoid the fail ones!

1. What does your product/service do for me in my role as [insert job title here]?
2. What customers have benefited from your product/service?
3. Why would my CIO/CFO/CEO and/or my end users like your product or service?
4. Do you have any ROI/TCO case studies I can review?
5. I last looked at your product service [insert time here], what has been change/updated/removed since then?
6. Can you give me a quick demonstration of your product/service?
7. Do you support all versions and forms of VMware and its related product set? Are there any limits or restrictions I should be aware of?
8. How do you service people in my city/state/region/country?
9. What is your support policy?
10. What is your pricing model?
11. How are you different from your competitors?
12. Here is my business card, could you send me some details after the show?
13. Have you seen Chad Sakac anywhere?
14. Do you have any free T-shirts?
15. I have no relationship with you or your company and don't want to but do you have a free party on and can I have a ticket?
16. Do you have anything thats free?
17. Twitter is for my little sister.
18. Can you send me something thats free?
19. That vExpert had no idea what he/she was talking about, I sucker punched them with a question on the 3rd command line option for a depreciated function from 2.5, looser!
20. Do I have to be here for the draw to win?
21. I follow the yellow brick road, do you?
22. Do you know where there is a booth that does have free stuff?
23. Oh, I am sorry, I thought you were Scott Lowe. Anyhoo, have you seen Chad Sakac anywhere?
24. No I did not bring business cards because I am not really interested in after show interaction and value, I am just here for the free stuff on the stands.
25. I am looking for Gabe, well I was actually hoping he would have Brenda with him.
26. Who is Foreigner?
27. Well you are wearing a T-Shirt, can I have that one?

Add any of your own to the comments.

Rodos

At the Australian Architecture Forum this week I asked the panel the following question.

Given the ease of singing up to Software as a Service Cloud offerings, combined with eager business unit managers with a credit card, does this leave any room for Enterprise Architecture within IT? Is the only role for Enterprise Architects to come along afterwards and clean up the mess?

It was a leading question but I was surprised by the answer, the panel generally thought it was not that big a deal, EA would still be involved and they need to stay engaged with the business. However one of the panelists made the statement that the Cloud (and we are referring mainly to SaaS here) could be the new Microsoft Access of IT. I felt at the time the panel may have had their head in the clouds a little bit and not quite see the fearful reality of eager credit card holders within the enterprise spinning up new services because they could just not be bothered with Internal IT who always want to turn everything into a hard and complicated effort.

Then last night at CloudCamp Sydney someone asked essentially the same question. What do we do about people inside the Enterprise consuming Cloud outside of the controls of IT. Now I know that this person works for one of the largest Enterprises and IT consumers in this country, so if they are thinking about it then it really is a reality. So I might be onto something here. There was a little bit of interesting discussion around it, again coming back to the idea that users would get so far but would then come back to IT for help eventaully. However with the increasing ease of mashups etc this may take longer than people think.

I sent a twit on this topic.

Is the #cloud the new MS Access of Enterprise IT? Crack for users to start with and final headache for Enterprise Arch in the end.

@rodos disagree if done properly, people need to architect first, build second vs. the typical opposite approach

@rodos make your own DB -> write your own reports -> create your own SharePoint site -> provision your own cloud server - god help us!

I am certainly of the view that EA needs to be involved in Cloud initiatives inside the Enterprise. My fear is they are never going to know or be involved until its to late. Cloud will be like the MS Access of IT in the early days, but eventually people will come to their senses, using it as useful took inside EA. Hopefully it will also force IT to deliver in ways that their userbase requires.

What do you think? Post in the comments.

Rodos

Tonight was the first Australian Cloudcamp. I rocked along not really knowing what to expect but with an open mind.

Here is a run down.

It was directed by Dave Nielsen who flew in for the day, great effort. It was held at the Google offices and was organised by Samuel Yeats of Rejila Cloud Services and Milinda Kotelawele of Longscale.

There was a bunch of Lighting Talks which occur for 5 minutes only. These were (in the wrong order)

• Alan Noble, Google
• Milinda Kotelawele, LongScale
• George Reese, enStratus
• Samuel Yeats, Ultra Serve / Rejila Cloud Servers
• Dr. Anna Liu, UNSW
• Dr. James Broburg, University of Melbourne
• someone, Unisys
• Stu Andrews

The talks were fine. Some were to marketing based, especially the Unisys one, not the crowd for such a pitch.

Stuart sang a song about the cloud which you can see below.



After this was the unpanel time. It started with selecting a panel and then throwing up a question. Dave asked for people who were cloud experts to start with to come up for the panel, like anyone is going to offer themselves up for that. Then he said okay, if people come to you to ask cloud questions then put your hand up. Well not being shy and it being true I had to jump in at this stage.

The questions thrown up were (thanks @artr for noting them down).

• Is the OS still relevant in the cloud?
• How should dev tools change to be optimised to the cloud?
• What are people willing to pay for in the cloud?
• Why do we use security as an excuse for not adopting cloud?
• What jurisidctions are relevant to the cloud?
• What should devs tell the Rugby Player?
• How long until it all gets insourced again?

The panel could then choose a topic to answer in 60 seconds. I took the what will people pay for question. My answer was that people would pay for something that was less than what they were paying now. That is if they were currently paying $X to run something not in the cloud, and they could move it to the cloud for 20% less, that that is something that they would pay for. Also people would pay for things then need on the cloud. Examples of things they need are security, SLA, those higher level services. Did have not much time to think of the answer and it sounded okay as it got referred to a few more times during the night and on twitter.

Here are some bad photos of me in the unpanel.





After this topics were suggest and breakout rooms decided. People then went off to their topics of choice and discussed. There were two rounds of topics at 45 minutes each. At the end there was bit of a summation and then off to the pub.

So what did I think of the event?

• It was good to see so many people there, I think it was about 100.
• There was a variety of communities represented, developers, vendors, end users, enterprise. Yes I was wearing a suit but I came straight from work.
• There are a lot of people still trying to get their head around cloud. I think a few of the people who are a bit longer in the tooth around cloud would have liked some deeper discussion, however with the whole unconference method or whatever it is I suppose its majority rules, speak up or suggest a topic thats really relevant to you.
• I do think the format works, Dave had to do a bit of explaining of the process which probably annoyed any people who had been to other events like this but helped us newbies. Now that the first one has been run this part can probably get a lot less as more will be familuar with the process.
• It was good to talk to some interesting people who are working in the space.
• Was amazed that three people said they knew me from my blog, never expected that to ever happen! Ran into one guy who works for the same company I do. Also ran into a customer who was at an event the other week which I was the speaker for, on Cloud.
• Next time I should take a notepad and take notes (which I normally do) as there were some interesting statements which are now lost.

Some linkages. Twitter search. Evernote summary from @artr. Kate's blog post Camping in the clouds #cloudcampsyd. Some good photos.

My recomendation. Find a http://www.cloudcamp.com/ in your area and give one a try!

Rodos

P.S. Its now 1:30am. This is a great test of me being at VMworld next week. Full days, out at night and then trying to get some interesting record of whats occurred out before I forget it all. However next week I will have my computer with me, my camera and my flip video so content should be a lot better. Lets see how it goes.

Reflex Systems have become the first vendor to achieve the technical certification for VMsafe.

Aaron Bawcom revealed the achievement on his blog and other details can be found in their press release.

Certification is important to such products. You do want that assurance that VMsafe integrated products have undergone a rigorous testing scheme and controls, after all they operate in a privileged manner underneath your workloads.

To me VMsafe brings two important things. First it allows security at scale, which may be critical for Cloud implementations. Second and more importantly, its yet another thing (and a big one at that) which make a virtual machine better than a physical machine. You can do things with VMsafe that are not possible with a physical server, making the virtual machine no longer the second class player of data center workloads. Now we are starting the see the virtual machine being the best and potentially safest way to deploy a workload.

I would recommend dropping by the Reflex System stand at VMworld and seeing what all the fuss is about, I know I am.

Rodos