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The 2009 Cloudies Awards
By John | December 23, 2009
This is the second year of the “Cloudies” award and still only one judge (me). However, there are things in the works to make the “Cloudies” a more official and non-tongue-n-cheek next year. I did solicit some tweets this year for awards. Please don’t be offended if you are not in this list. This list represents my radar and is somewhat of a goof. I am a one man show and not a global organization. If you don’t agree with me please post a comment and if you have a good argument I will create an updated post. Here goes:
Cloud Hero of 2009
Beaker Chris Hoff
I predicted this early in 2008 (see And the 2009 Cloudie Award Goes To…)
Most Influential Cloud Bloggers
randybias Randy Bias of Cloudscaling
Randy has done some fantastic blog posts this year on cloud computing. There are few people out there that can match his total understanding of infrastructure computing.
Love him or or not, his blog always has in depth coverage coverage of the latest announcements on cloud computing. It is one the first places I go to figure out the impact of something new in cloud computing.
Top IaaS
Sorry folks, no one even comes close to these guys on the IaaS.
Despite a few missteps here and there, these guys are the only folks on Amazon’s radar.
Top PaaS
Still the one-and-only on-ramp to the cloud (IaaS)…
I am sure there are a lot of other great PaaS’s out there; however the “Cloudies” is not a democracy. Every customer of these guys raves about their service.
Top SaaS
Blah, Blah, Blah
I guess you could call them the Amazon.com of SaaS.
Best Private Cloud Vendors
Running in Nasa, Eli Lilly and a few other places puts them in the lead at this point.
A close second to Eucalyptus. Backed by Canonical with Ubuntu server and KVM it makes for a great story…
Best Cloud Application Providers
They got clowns the the left and jokers to the right. RabbitMQ stuck in the middle with you.
They have a great story down at FedEx and Bob and Sam are some of the nicest guys you will ever meet.
Best Cloud Orchestration Tools in the Cloud
Zenoss is to Nagios as Chef is to Puppet. Oh yea I am an adviser for Opscode.
What can I say, Puppet is the Nagios of open source configuration management.
Best Monitoring Tools in the Clouds
Zenoss is the Zenoss of open source monitoring. They added some great cloud (Amazon) monitoring features this year.
The dirty little secret of cloud monitoring. Rightscale uses CollectD for monitoring.
Best Security Solutions for the Cloud
First is usually best. Plus you gotta luv the CohesiveFT dudes…
Best of the rest.
Best Cloud Builders
Elastic Server gets it done in 09.
Best Cloud New Comers
Very cool new PaaS.
CoudchDB as a Service.. Ya gotta luv it.
Best Open Source in the Clouds
This project is where Eucalyptus was about 1 year ago.
Best Languages used in the clouds
Ruby
Java
Biggest Cloud Disappointment in 2009
Congrats… Two years running.
Best Killer Apps in the Cloud
350k eFile’s in 22 hours all on AWS… Tough to beat these guys.
Zero touch movement of enterprise legacy application to Amazon EC2. Sounds like a winner to me.
Best Cloud Startup Success Stories
These guys are paving the road for the avg folk like me to do “Big” things with data.
Best New Cloudy Terms
“Not Only SQL?”
Give me an API or give me death.
Worst Cloud CTO
Best Cloud CTO
I am biased; however, I think Chef from Opscode is the most exciting thing to happen to “enterprise systems management” in many years. Adam and Jesse have assembled a freaking great team.
Best Cloud Analysts
Best Cloud Innovation in 2009
Best David vs. Goliath Cloud Vendor
Best Cloud Tweet
Best Cloud Arguments
New Awards in 2009
Best Cloud Presentations
Simon Wardley – Cloud Computing Why it Matters
Chris Hoff - The Frogs Who Desired a King: A Virtualization & Cloud Computing Fable
Rookie of the Year
Best Cloud Argument (Redemption)
George was right.. Austoscaling doesn’t matter.
Best Cloud Philosopher
Best Cloud Evangelists
Best Agile Infrastructure Dudes
Honorable Mention
Topics: cloudies, other | 12 Comments »
December 23rd, 2009 at 4:13 pm
John,
It’s been great to read and hear your thoughts and insight throughout the year regarding cloud computing. Looking forward to your views as 2010 unfolds.
BTW: Suggested category addition – Cloud Computing Program of the Year Award from Channel Insider – lists Zoho, SugarCRM and Salesforce.com as the best bet for resellers looking to join the cloud computing game.
Resellers were critical for the growth of sales in traditional software and systems. I don’t see why that would change as companies move more and more to cloud computing.
Cheers,
John
December 24th, 2009 at 3:01 am
[...] The 2009 Cloudies Awards | IT Management and Cloud Blog Zenoss wins for "Best Monitoring Tools in the Clouds" (tags: zenoss cloud) [...]
December 24th, 2009 at 10:21 am
Oh gosh!!
How many EGOs you have been crushing by not including some “prolific tweeterers” in this list; I can already think of a pair people that are going to have a very sad X-Mas this year…
BTW: all the best for the new year and better luck for those who did not qualify!
December 26th, 2009 at 1:05 am
“This is the second year of the “Cloudies” award and still only one judge (me)”…this sounds unusual but it is a novel initiative and very interesting too.
thanks for sharing, keep it up
December 28th, 2009 at 1:30 am
Hi
Interesting list. Of course we all can agree with some and disagree with others. We are kind of surprised by some of these entries, especially the ones that were not generally available products in 2009. We were also disappointed that New Relic (full disclosure: I work there) was not represented. We have more cloud customers using our management tools than all other management vendors combined and we are adding about 10 new cloud customers a day. So maybe think about us next year. Good luck.
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