Three years of cloud computing (in one page)

Someone asked me to give him an overview of Cloud Computing in “a one pager”. I think I failed, but I tried

Cloud Computing is the most important trend in the IT Industry. Even the biggest critics seem to agree that – in spite of some over-zealous marketeers – Cloud Computing is one of the most important paradigm shifts of the past decades. But what is it all about? Where did it come from? And what is there to be expected?

There are probably as many definitions of Cloud Computing as there are self-acclaimed Cloud Specialist. Most of those definitions include pay-per-use, instant availability,  scalability, hardware abstraction, self-provisioning, virtualization and internet. A short but safe summary would be “Cloud Computing is a new way of delivering IT services: end users can deploy the services they need when they need them. Many of those services are available over the internet and users are only charged for what they consume.” The Cloud Computing market is typically segmented into public clouds (services offered over the internet), private clouds (internal enterprise) and hybrid clouds (a mix of both). The Public Cloud market is often sub-segmented into IAAS (Infrastructure as a Service), PAAS (Platform) and SAAS (Software).

Cloud Computing found its origin in the success of server virtualization and the possibilities to run IT more efficiently through server consolidation. Soon, visionaries came up with idea to bring virtualization to a next level by implementing some early storage and network virtualization techniques and thus making abstraction of the hardware in the entire data center. Add to this self-provisioning and auto scaling, and Cloud Computing was born. At the time it was called utility computing, however, and only Amazon – a bookstore – was good at it. Amazon saw a growing popularity of its EC2 (compute) and S3 (storage) and the Amazon API was being used by thousands of developers and many more customers to deploy and run infrastructure in the Cloud.

The first BYOC (build your own cloud) products that were brought to the market came from companies like Flexiscale (UK), 3Tera (US) and Q-layer (BE). They aimed at the ISP’s – who had an urgent need for innovation: ISP’s had entered into a price war amongst themselves and their market was now also threatened by newcomers like Amazon, Microsoft and Google. The first new services those ISP’s offered were nothing more than virtual machines – allowing them to run their facilities more efficiently and still charge the same prices to their customers. Soon, companies like Savvis, GoGrid and Rackspace added interfaces that enabled end users to control their own infrastructure. In early 2009, Sun Microsystems launched the Virtual Data Center (VDC), a graphical interface with drag&drop that enables users to create and manage a full virtual data center in the cloud.

In the meantime, the battle has moved to the Private Clouds. Enterprises seem to be ready to cloud-enable their infrastructure either in a purely Private or a Hybrid (enabling cloud-bursting to Public Clouds for certain services) environment. All the leading software providers have announced their products and I expect an important role for integrators and telcos to help enterprises to pick a best of breed for their own implementation.

Implementing a private cloud affects the entire business, including the entire IT infrastructure (hardware, software, services) but also most business processes (e.g. regulatory compliance). As none of the big software providers have teams with experience in all those fields – except maybe IBM – enterprises will  have to rely on integrators to build their clouds. I do expect, however, that quite a few enterprises will build their clouds all by themselves (e.g. Wall Street banks).

So what is the benefit? What is the promise of Cloud Computing? That really depends on the point of view you are taking. The CIO should be able to serve his customer more efficiently. The user at home will probably not be aware but they already use Animoto, Gmail, Flickr and Facebook – all of this not possible without Cloud Computing. The test engineer in an enterprise will be able to deploy his servers in seconds – not minutes. The CFO will be able to negotiate better conditions with his energy supplier thanks to more efficient metering of energy consumption. The are plenty of scenarios of how Cloud Computing benefits users and providers. In my opinion however, it all comes down to using new technologies to really abstract the hardware and to make, supply and use software independently from the hardware it runs on.

I’ll try better during tomorrow’s keynote at CloudCamp Munich

Cloud Ecosystem

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an ecosystem grow as fast as the Cloud Computing Ecosystem. It’s both a great challenge and a hell for product marketeers who constantly have to stay up to date with the market.

I just browsed Jeremy Geelan of Sys-con’s list of 150 Cloud companies. In 6 months it grew from 100 to 150. He’s done a great effort – I can’t think of a better list – but still he misses quite a few important ones:

Abiquo: enterprise and isp cloud builders

Aserver: private cloud builders (and much more)

Casdex: (compliant) archival in the cloud (!)

SymetriQ: public cloud

Aicache: Web application acceleration

B-virtual: build storage clouds (dispersed storage technology)

Aptana: IDE for web app development

MokaFive: virtual desktops in the cloud

ThePlanet: cloud storage

Mozy: online BU

ZumoDrive: online storage

Dropbox: online sharing

Sugarsync (sharpcast): online backup & sync

Wuala (Lacie): online storage + social networking

Box.net: online collaboration

Drop.io: real-time sharing

Jungledisk: online storage, BU

Elephantdrive: online storage, BU etc.

Allmydata: online storage, BU etc.

And given AT&T is there, I bet every Telco will claim they belong to the list.

Don’t get me wrong, I support Jeremy’s efforts – just trying to make his case stronger: this ecosystem is growing at an immense speed!

Oh and … my list is not complete either !!!

Twitter in the news

I’ve just read the TechCrunch Twitter article (thank you, Eikke). It’s disgusting. I’ve doubted on whether I should actually blog about this, as this kind of gives TechCrunch what they wanted: more attention, but then again, it’s not that the select group of readers of this article will make a difference

I’ve been working in tech startups for a bit over 10 years now. I don’t want to claim I know the industry inside out, but I kind of know how it works. I also know how marketing and PR work – after all that’s my job – so I know how the two interact. The industry needs the magazines and the magazines need the industry. Symbiosis? Probably – but in some cases more like two parasites living off each other. Does that exist?

More than once I’ve been disgusted by the way how press works. No pay, no fame. An example of how poor press can be is how one of Belgium’s most famous IT journalists consistently refuses to write about anything that comes out of this Incubation Center because he doesn’t really like the founder or so: How can one possibly write an article about what Oracle will do with Sun’s cloud strategy without mentioning that a big chunk of Sun’s cloud technology is the Belgian Q-layer?

But I’m going off topic. I’m trying to put myself in the shoes of TechCrunch and their now famous journalist. So you get this e-mail that contains the most sensitive information about the industry’s hottest company. That information has obviously been obtained illegally. What do you do? Obviously they chose to publish. They chose to go the Daily Mirror or The Sun way (the magazine ) and be the tabloid of the Industry. After all, tabloids get readers and the more readers you get, the more money you get to ask for advertising. I assume – I hope – they at least had a meeting before publishing the data. Let’s try to reconstruct:

“Hey boss, look at what I got in my inbox”

“Wow, have you informed the authorities? that’s illegal”

“No boss, we should publish this”

“Uhm, that could put us in a lot of trouble – let’s have a meeting”

“blahblah”

“Ok, let’s see what the pro’s and cons are”

“We’ll get many hits. I’ll get famous”

“It’s not ethical”

“Readers means money for the company”

“We could destroy Twitter – we don’t want to do that do we?”

“Money for the company  means bonusses for us”

“Ok, let’s talk to our lawyers and publish”

Ok, this may not actually be what happened since, they made an online hype of it first (very smart). So let’s have a look at TechCrunch’s arguments and see if I – on my own – can counter the arguments of what probably comes from the full staff and lawyers team of TechCrunch:

_____________

Wow, that’s quite a reaction to our post earlier this evening saying that we will publish some of the confidential Twitter documents we’ve been forwarded. Nearly 200 comments in a little over an hour, mostly saying we shouldn’t publish. Hundreds of Tweets, and it has become a trending topic. There’s even a poll asking people if we should post the documents or not.

*** I have to admit: Very smart to use the other party’s own weapons. Very smart to start a hype …

Let’s put aside the highly sensitive documents that we aren’t going to publish, but which will likely end up on the Internet anyway.

*** So if I see an unlocked car, I can take out the fancy radio because someone else probably will?
*** And this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the highly sensitive information involves companies with much more money to pay lawyers than Twitter?
*** How do you distinguish sensitive from highly sensitive?

We’re not going to post that information whether we have the legal right to or not. No discussion is needed.
But we are going to publish some of the other information that is relevant to Twitter’s business, particularly product notes and financial projections. Many users say this is “stolen” information and therefore shouldn’t be published. We disagree.
We publish confidential information almost every day on TechCrunch. This is stuff that is also “stolen,” usually leaked by an employee or someone else close to the company, and the company is very much opposed to its publication. In the past we’ve received comments that this is unethical. And it certainly was unethical, or at least illegal or tortious, for the person who gave us the information and violated confidentiality and/or nondisclosure agreements. But on our end, it’s simply news.

*** Freedom of speech is undoubtedly one of the most important rights people in democracies have. But so is privacy, both for individuals and companies. Magazines who insist to walking this thin line are (1) endangering the freedom of speech right (as each time freedom of speech is to be discussed, we risk losing some of it) and (2) causing a lot of damage. Not only to their direct victims, but also to those people and companies who suffer additional fear of seeing things published about them against their will.

If you disagree with that, ok. But then you also have to disagree with the entire history of the news industry. “News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising,” is something Lord Northcliffe, a newspaper magnate, supposedly said. I agree wholeheartedly.

*** So hereby TechCrunch vows to never let their articles be influences by how much advertising money they get form companies. They will never be so arrogant to ignore press releases from small startups who will for sure never be able to pay them advertising money? Also, with this statement, TechCrunch confirms that 80% of what they publish is just advertising (’cause I’ve seen many many “regular” articles on TechCrunch)?

That doesn’t mean we are entitled to do anything we like in order to get to that information. But if it lands in our inbox, we consider it fair game. And if we have reason to believe it will be widely published regardless of what we do, the decision isn’t a hard one. We throw out the information that is sensitive or could hurt an individual, and publish what we think is newsworthy.

*** Well, TechCrunch did a lousy job on deciding what could hurt Twitter and what could not. Actually the only ones who could decided on that are Twitter. Obviously they have not been consulted, ’cause from the parts I read (I admit, I did not read all of it), Twitter is toast now.

In the end, this is no different than, as an example, this 2006 post where we posted confidential Yahoo documents showing their valuation of Facebook in a proposed acquisition.

*** Good I didn’t read that one. (Eikke, why did you never send me that link?)

Nor is it any different than the WSJ publishing this internal Yahoo memo, which was also “stolen” in 2006.
And I believe it is significantly less of an ethical issue than Gawker’s posting of Sarah Palin’s private emails.
It’s not our fault that Google has a ridiculously easy way to get access to accounts via their password recovery question. It’s not our fault that Twitter stored all of these documents and sensitive information in the cloud and had easy-to-guess passwords and recovery questions.

*** Again, it’s not my fault car windows break that easily, so breaking into cars should be legalized …

We’ve been sitting in the office for eight hours now debating what the right thing to do is in this situation. We’ve spoken with our lawyers. We’ve spoken with Twitter. And we’ve heard what our readers have to say. All of that factors in to our decision on what to post or not to post.
We are always in the delicate position of balancing what’s right for the community with publishing insider news that helped build this site into what it is today. We don’t sit around and republish press releases, we break big stories.
I feel bad for Twitter and I wish this had never happened. But it did happen and the documents are out there and they are going to be published somewhere on the Internet. Hopefully the embarrassing and sensitive stuff about individual employees will never see the light of day. And hopefully this situation will encourage Google and Google users to consider more robust data security policies in the future.

*** Very touching!

_____________

Maybe TechCrunch should have looked at it this way: we’re in the worst economy ever (I’m starting to believe the dotcom crisis was nothing compared). Twitter happens to be one of the success stories people needed to hang in there. Like a young girl being rescued 10 days after the earthquake. This event may or may not destroy Twitter. Twitter may still be successful, be acquired for a lot of money etc. But it will be a lot less a success than it could have been. And the worst is that TechCrunch did not just reduce the chances to success of Twitter, it put a bad light on the single most important thing that gives entrepreneurs hope and courage to move on in spite of the recession. An it’s only thanks to those entrepreneurs that we will get out of the recession. Thanks a lot TechCrunch, so now, how do I remove you from my rss feed?

Michael gone to heaven – good for the clouds

Again, it’s been a long time since my last post, but I’m sure everyone forgives me my being careful with red and blue tainted news or even my ignoring that part of the game. Nothing to report on JavaOne? Well there was plenty to report on but a broken laptop and a (well-diserved) holiday right thereafter prevented me from blogging. I guess it’s a bit too late now: it was a great show, emotional at times, with lots of promising innovations for the future. But most has been written (hint: google on JavaOne ) I guess. 

 

Jump forward to today: it’s been quite an interesting day actually. Famous people passed away and apart from the actual facts, many media are issuing reports on how this affects the internet: Twitter down, Google thought they were hacked and many popular sites just couldn’t handle the loads. It’s always a shame if people die, but I’m sure no one will blame me for making a little case out of the internet side effect.

 

So, just when everybody thought we had seen everything and that all this everything was under control, we learn that a simple news fact can still take down the servers of sites that are supposed to have a 100% uptime. Without wanting to restart the “is cloud computing a hype or not” discussion, I think this shows how important the paradigm shift is that we are going through. 

 

They way we are using the Internet, conventional architectures are just not good enough. We need the highest level of flexibility and scalability on every moment, cause any time, any moment the most unexpected news can break the fragile architecture we use today. And we’re obviously not there yet, because even the newest cloud applications such as Twitter (I know, many will argue that Twitter is the worst example of cloud computing because of their poor architecture) have trouble with the faintest peak. At times where load balancers are standard equipment and where bringing new (virtual) machines live takes seconds, websites still go down a lot more often than they should. Large media enterprises seem not to be there yet … 

 

So in spite of the so-called cloud train being on the move and everybody having to hurry to jump or stay on that moving train, I hope everybody takes their time and re-thinks the stuff they are working on to make sure it actually solves problems. Instead of making announcements just to stay on the radar of analysts and the press, the world of cloud builders should make sure that the stuff their are working on actually changes the way how we work. Preferably for the better.

 

In the light of all this it’s good to see the bigger players embracing this paradigm shift. IBM and Oracle (there, I mentioned Red) were – cloud-related – in the news and I believe this shows that all those pioneers and innovators who have been preaching cloud for over a year now, had a vision. They were not just creating a hype. The internet has become as important as electricity and water and if we didn’t need electricity to run the internet, the net would be even more important…. 

A good cloud week

It’s been a hectic week last week. All this to learn that Sun is doing the right thing and the market is waiting for both the Sun Public Cloud and (in a next phase) Sun’s software and services to build clouds – public and private.

The week started with an ACDC concert in Germany on Sunday. But that’s probably irrelevant information. Starting the week tired with a brutally early morning flight to Prague does affect one’s mood though and when I arrived in the Hilton Ballroom where Cloud-Expo Europe (the original) took place, I couldn’t hide my initial disappointment: no internet available yet (how do you access the cloud?), an allegedly changed agenda and more vendors and industry specialist than buyers.

However, as problems got solved, the program moved on and conversations started to take place on the exhibition floor, the event become more and more interesting. Top moment of the day (Day One) was Subra Kumaraswami from Sun (of course ) who did a presentation on security & cloud computing. Based on the number of questions after the presentation, it was a straight hit. Very promising for imminent publications from this business unit.

This blogger found Subra’s preso  interesting too: “There were a lot of talks focused on Security, which is going to be key in moving to the cloud. The building blocks are all out there in the cloud though, encryption, certificates, keys, firewalls etc., what is missing as the security expert from Sun pointed out, is some sort of federation so that you can don’t hand all your keys over to your cloud provider.”

Day two was d-day for me personally: a duo presentation with Arseniy Kuznetsov, director of engineering at Sun and a live demo. As al efforts at Sun are focussed on JavaOne these days, it was hard to get our hands on a decent demo environement so our stress level was a bit higher than usual. The demo was a hit though. While a Q&A can be quite embarrassing if no one has any questions, this one was a marathon. We went on for a great part of the lunch break just to learn that there expectations for Sun’s VDC and the Cloud and it’s API’s. We were happy to hear from the Sys-Con organization that our intervention caused by far most enthusiasm and we were even more happy to hear our vision confirmed during the afternoon “specialists” panel: quite a few of the currently available solutions scored bad on openness, security and user-friendliness, and most of what is left to be desired today will become available in the near future.

For the second part of the week I needed to move to Barcelona and sacrifice my bank holiday of Thursday. Don’t ask me what the occasion of the bank holiday was, but it seems to be the only holiday that bank-holiday champion Spain does not celebrate. Bummer. The opportunity to attend Sime Barcelona though, meet an awful lot of entrepreneurs and sit in a cloud computing panel attended by 200+ entrepreneurs were convincing arguments.

Sime (and the locally organized startup events that ran in the same building at the same time) was well attended. Given the severeness with which the crisis hit Spain, this shouldn’t be a surprise. What did surprise me though, was that the ventures panel was not all that positive about cloud computing. Did someone lose too much money on cloud already or are VC aware of how cloud computing gives entrepreneurs more freedom, especially in the earliest stages? The entrepreneurs at the event did show large interest in cloud computing and I heard some interesting, innovative ideas about which I hope to be able to write soon.

Next week is CommunityOne and JavaOne in the Moscone in SFO. I’m looking forward to hearing the big announcements that will be made.

So Oracle it is …

The circle is round: 5 years after leaving the Oracle ecosystem and 12 years after entering that ecosystem as an Oracle migrations specialist, it looks like I’m back there: based on what I read here it seems I’m officially an Oracle employee now.Let’s hope I have a few more of these circles ahead ’cause it’s been an interesting one, including 7 acquisitions, a few SMB’s, quite a few enterprises now and of course some exciting startups, one of them bringing me here …

Given the freshness of the news, I will not make comments until I’ve received more information through the official Sun channels, but stay tuned: as soon as everything is more clear, I will add some more comments. For now, let me summarize my thoughts in 2 words: excited curiosity. If that makes sense to anyone.

Just for your convenience, the news:

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., April 20, 2009 — Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) and Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt.

“We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle’s earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle’s non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined,” said Oracle President Safra Catz.

“The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system – applications to disk – where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.”

There are substantial long-term strategic customer advantages to Oracle owning two key Sun software assets: Java and Solaris. Java is one of the computer industry’s best-known brands and most widely deployed technologies, and it is the most important software Oracle has ever acquired. Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle’s fastest growing business, is built on top of Sun’s Java language and software. Oracle can now ensure continued innovation and investment in Java technology for the benefit of customers and the Java community.

The Sun Solaris operating system is the leading platform for the Oracle database, Oracle’s largest business, and has been for a long time. With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle can optimize the Oracle database for some of the unique, high-end features of Solaris. Oracle is as committed as ever to Linux and other open platforms and will continue to support and enhance our strong industry partnerships.

“Oracle and Sun have been industry pioneers and close partners for more than 20 years,” said Sun Chairman Scott McNealy. “This combination is a natural evolution of our relationship and will be an industry-defining event.”

“This is a fantastic day for Sun’s customers, developers, partners and employees across the globe, joining forces with the global leader in enterprise software to drive innovation and value across every aspect of the technology marketplace,” said Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s CEO, “From the Java platform touching nearly every business system on earth, powering billions of consumers on mobile handsets and consumer electronics, to the convergence of storage, networking and computing driven by the Solaris operating system and Sun’s SPARC and x64 systems. Together with Oracle, we’ll drive the innovation pipeline to create compelling value to our customer base and the marketplace.”

“Sun is a pioneer in enterprise computing, and this combination recognizes the innovation and customer success the company has achieved. Our largest customers have been asking us to step up to a broader role to reduce complexity, risk and cost by delivering a highly optimized stack based on standards,” said Oracle President Charles Phillips. “This transaction will preserve and enhance investments made by our customers, while we continue to work with our partners to provide customers with choice.”

The Board of Directors of Sun Microsystems has unanimously approved the transaction. It is anticipated to close this summer, subject to Sun stockholder approval, certain regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.

There will be a conference call today to discuss the transaction at 5:30 a.m. Pacific time. Investors can listen to the conference call by dialing (719) 234-7870, passcode 923645. A replay will be available for 24 hours after the call ends at (719) 884-8882, passcode: 923645. A live audio webcast of the call will be made available at www.oracle.com/investor and a replay will be available for seven days after the call ends.

Blogging on the plane

It’s been a busy week: we had an offsite that was actually an onsite, as it was at Menlo Park – Sun’s main offices, but still an offsite for me (for obvious reasons). With the busy I don’t specifically refer to us – although we were kind of busy working on the next steps after Sun’s CommunityOne East announcement on cloudcomputing. No, the busy refers to what happened outside that. Many people were giving their thoughts about Sun’s potential acquisition by IBM, some cloud events happened (Cloud Computing Expo) that cost more money than it was worth and there was the boycott of some large cloud vendors against an attempt towards standardization and open clouds. I was a bit too busy with the real important stuff, so I failed to read all the details online (don’t go shooting me if I got it all wrong ) But if I understand the whole situation well though, some large vendors like Microsoft, Amazon and Google (Salesforce.com too?) opposed against an attempt by some cloud enthusiasts – backed up by a couple of cloud vendors including Sun – for all kind of reasons. No need to dig into those reasons as they would say anything they consider smart marketing talks. I know marketing when I see marketing The way I see it though, it is not all that dramatical. At previous CloudCamps we’ve heard people say they were concerned that the whole cloud paradigm would never work as there is no way to move from cloud to cloud, to have clouds interact etc. In other words, those people were in favor of cloud standards and open cloud technology. The recent announcements of Sun were the response those people were waiting for. So the screaming loud out against cloud standards initiatives, I’m not sure if that is a smart move by these guys. True, they are big and they have some power in the market, but aren’t they going to rule themselves out of the cloud market? Aren’t they spreading the wrong message? To me it sounds like they are afraid open clouds will make it harder for them to retain to their market shares. They prefer proprietary clouds, which to me are no clouds at all … What we need to convince the market to move into the clouds is a a choice, both when starting to build a cloud offering but also at later stages. I thought we had learned our lesson about proprietary systems by now. Openness gives choice. Openness creates opportunities. Openness stimulates innovation. Openness is good. But hey, I’m just a guy trying to kill time on a plane. I’ve probably got it all wrong.

CloudCamp NE Yesterday Scotland today

Just a very quick congratulations to the team organizing yesterday’s CloudCamp in NewCastle. The room was well-filled, I found over 50% of the lightning talks educational and the panel was great! Good networking too. I plan to have a closer look at EmailCloud, Arjuna and Evercity (of course). Follow my twitter feed for live comments on tonight’s event.

CloudCamping with Webhosters

Last Thursday there was another European CloudCamp. The first one in Europe mainland since Barcelona in December. Not that there is no interest in doing more events, we just want to ensure good content. And the content was good if you ask me: close to 15 different companies contributed to the program, a full room during most of the day (yes, it was a full day) and lively discussion on topics that had not been discussed enough in the past.

We kicked off the day with an interactive keynote by Kristof De Spiegeleer, who spent good part of his time on the recent Sun Cloud announcement, but who also did an interesting Q&A on what more we can expect from cloud computing and what this future brings to hosting companies, a market he is very experienced in.

Next was the “Visionary Panel”, a very interactive session moderated by me (:-)) and a rich panel composed of Tony Lucas (Flexiscale), Robert Rosier (Itricity), Matt Rechenburg (OpenQRM), Jari Koister (Groupswim) and Martin Buhr (Amazon). Martin did his best not to make it an Amazon session and we ended up with some very interesting discussions on various topics where especially Tony and Matt showed that there is more technology out there than S3 and EC2.

Thanks to the efforts of two enthusiastic Sun interns, the great facilities we got from the WebHostingDay organizers and modern technology, we even got some questions from people following the live streaming. Duncan, thanks for spreading the word! Much to the despair  of my Facebook followers (I have disabled the twitter app, folks), the twitter accounts of those present where extremely active too.

The afternoon session started off with a number of unconference sessions. The first session, “Hosting in the Cloud”, was moderated by Arvid Fossen and Duncan Malcolm. We learned that hosters in Europe are aware about Cloud Computing but they are not particularly concerned about it. The next session, “Public vs. Private Clouds” (me and Michael Crandell – who came over for this event from NYC and missed the panel because of a delayed flight) gave similar impression.

As the audience was very interested in all what we had to say but a bit reluctant to actively contribute, Wiliam Louth and Matt Rechenburg adapted their sessons (“Metering in the Cloud” and “Cloud Computing and Open Source”) to a more visionary presentation (William) and a cool demo (Matt). Wiliam’s session became even more interesting as Tarry Singh – who was following the live stream, brought the discussion to a next level with some very to the point questions. Metering in the cloud is definitely a topic that needs more attention in future camps. If not, how are we planing to monitize the cloud?

The nicest demo of the day was brought to us by Kurt Glazenmakers, CTO Europe from Terremark. He explained us in much detail how Terremark built its own cloud based on available virtualization technologies and many years of experience running datacenters. A live demo showed us how simple it can be to manage a cloud.

Next on stage were Michael Crandell with a somewhat longer lightning talk (to make up for the missed panel) covering his vision on Cloud Computing and Max Robins who brought us a final unconference session “Complex application hosting made simple”. We believe there is potential for AiCache!

Last man on stage was Martin Buhr from Amazon, who did a lot of effort to bring a closing presentation with a high educational value rather than an Amazon Pitch. Believe it or not but the once so quiet audience suddenly started to ask questions: we finished the day just like we started it, a visionary man on stage, challenged by an enthusiastic audience …

I’m sure no one cares about my not covering the pitchy lightning taks

It took us 6 rides on the Black Mambo rollercoaster to free our minds from a full day of Cloud Computing. Looking back, I think CloudCamp was a big success. Europe may not be as impatient about Cloud Computing as the US, but there is a growing awareness. Next year this time, I expect a much more critical audience and even more enthusiastic campers.

For those who wish to attend CloudCamps in Europe: We have Amsterdam and Antwerp coming up on April 2nd and 9th, Berlin April 30th and more will follow. Stay tuned here

Sun Announces Cloud Strategy!

Tomorrow – or the day after; timezones are so confusing – we will be announcing the Sun Strategy:

In Europe, Kristof De Spiegeleer will reveal some information in his Keynote at CloudCamp HWD. An large Sun delegation will be present at WHD to brief more attendees. Demos can be scheduled on site …

In the US, Dave Douglas and Lew Tucker will unveil details about Sun’s public cloud service during the opening keynote of the CommunityOne East Conference:
-When:  March 18, 9:00 a.m. ET
-Where:  New York Marriott Marquis, Salon 1 & 2
1535 Broadway, New York, NY
-Registration:   http://developers.sun.com/events/communityone/2009/east/
-CommunityOne East website:  http://developers.sun.com/events/communityone/2009/east/

And cloud wouldn’t be cloud if there wasn’t a web event:

-Rich web event at sun.com/communityone including a live chat and live and on-demand webcasts of CommunityOne content.
-Where: www.sun.com/communityone (Page goes LIVE at 9 a.m. ET on March 18.)

CommunityOne East Web Event Agenda – (all times are EDT)

9:00 a.m.  General Session featuring Dave Douglas and Lew Tucker, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
10:10 a.m.  MySQL and PHP – State of the Union, Hans Zaunere, New York PHP, LLC
11:10 a.m.  Open Storage with OpenSolaris, Peter Buckingham, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
12:40 p.m.  NetBeans 6.5 and Glassfish v3 – The Synergy for Pragmatic Java EE 6 Development, Adam Bien, Consultant
1:40 p.m.  Analyzing PHP Web Applications with DTrace, David Soria Parra, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
3:00 p.m.  The Third Wave of Open: Open Source and Business Models, Simon Phipps, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
4:00 p.m.  Persistent Clouds: New Models for Data Storage, Geir Magnusson Jr., 10gen
5:00 p.m.  Cloud Panel discussion, moderated by David Berlind