Open source will more than likely be used as a stop gap whilst the CC vendors build out their business and expertise. This is more so when one considers the degree of integration required across management domains (provisioning, config, monitoring,…). Open source projects typically target a particular domain or aspect (if narrower in scope) and are not interested in the bigger picture which is left to customers.

Eventually the CC vendor will replace the OS stack with their own specialized solution(s) tailored to their own needs, business and strategic vision. I believe this has already been shown to be the case in one of your previous blog entries (Rightscale? Puppet?).
anyone other than the CC vendor.

William

Actually most of the auto scaling solutions have built in monitoring. Most are using things like Collectd, Monit, God, etc …. Rightscale is using CollectD under the covers. I agree that most of these groups will not go to monitoring directly. However, for example, if they have a Ruby based application they might decide to swap out something like Monit for GOD. Or some similar hack for other languages.

IMO, the important factor is that Autonomics needs provisioning, configuration, and monitoring to cooperate and they are not likely to go to Big 4 for those solutions.

Thanks

Before you can achieve a goal you must first believe it is possible even though the reality might indicate otherwise – fake it until you make it which I am sure will happen.

What I like about CC is that the bar is set so high that even if we get half way there in the near term we have already overcome many obstacles that have not been challenged today.

William

John these sound like the type of individuals who would not necessarily be interested in monitoring solutions – open source (i.e. free) or not.

It is hard enough getting core IT management teams putting in place proper SLM and CM processes. What hope it there with marketing/media departments with a small development team.

The market is not there at least not the way you see it at this moment in time.

William

I also don’t foresee a wholesale rewrite of enterprise apps to use partitioned MySql databases; the jury is also out as to how applicable that architecture is to enterprise workloads (I remember the shared nothing debate raging back in the 90s… Guess who won? Oracle, the shared disk vendor.)

So I tend to agree with William that elasticity is a tricky case in the enterprise, given how apps work today. If anything, I think the benefit is more about finally having a way to truly impove utilization thru virtualization AND cloud elasticity.

I think the real value of the enterprise cloud is split between (as you point out) first, a retail outsourcing channel, whether it’s rogue or not, has a very low barrier to entry (though shared hosting providers have helped rogue marketing and biz depts this way for a long while), and second but more importantly, reduced lead times to enact change at some level of your IT infrastructure. The latter comes down to putting software and APIs in front of what used to be a ticket, or form, or whole project..

It’s funny, all the cloud vendors I talk to assure me that they have enterprise customer’s using the cloud. However, they can not disclose. I am constantly talking to my enterprise customers and the only thing “cloudy” going on are utility virtualized provisioning. Until last week I could not connect the dots. What I found out last week is that the BU’s are subversively moving apps to the cloud (1-off’s) “Do now ask for 4givness later”. Groups like marketing/media departments that have thier own IT liaisons. Those were the type of people in the cloud class.

The bottom line is that I have been looking in the wrong places. The IT infra guys are not really moving to the cloud (from my small view of the world). I talk a little bit about this in my last two CloudDroplets podcasts.

I think that as more of these subversive projects keep occurring the “glass” house will have to come up with comparable offerings.

Sorry to say, enterprise use of the cloud still seems a little cloudy to me…

Thanks
John

What percentage of enterprise IT spending corresponds to one-off projects with short lifetime and no (or very limited) backend integration such as the examples you describe?

From you discussions with these “enterprise” people, did you hear about other use cases for EC2?

The “Animoto is on fire this week” and “I rented half of Times Square for a day” scenarios make really good success story situations for EC2. But how representative are they?

Once people get a taste from these scenarios, do they come up with compelling ways to use EC2 for more conventional IT tasks? Maybe you can ask during the next class?