James Staten – Forrester Research keynoted today at the SDForum.
UPDATE: The presentation has been posted in the resources of the SDForum archives here
I along with others Tweeted about the session. Here is a quick summary of his key points:
James started off with Forrester’s basic Cloud definitions and the different types of ..aaS
then the meaty stuff discussed who is using it, what the trends were
- IT vs. Business is in conflict about the cloud, Business wants it now, IT wants business use case and requirements
- Clouds are still maturing for example:
• SLA proof of plus-99.99% uptime will still be needed (the cloud is providing this, but are you as an app or tool on top of the cloud?)
• SAS 70 audits – SaaS apps (like SFDC) are already compliant but are you?
• Security and compliance services (HIPAA, SOX) – can your procedures and policies use the cloud?
• Your Enterprise customers will be hesitant because they will wonder if their peers have done it before (and be references) - Cloud may be disruptive,and business wants it, however IT as a compromise will propose bringing the cloud in house (virtual private clouds). Forrester’s survey says only 4% are trying Internal Cloud building
• 3tera, Sun, Zimony, Elastra have offerings
• IBM – Blue Cloud, • VMware – vCloud • Citrix Systems – Xen system also - If attempting this how does IT account for the capital expenditure internally. It is not an elastic pool like the cloud? At some point CloudBursting will take place – where the internal cloud has links to external or a move is made towards making it external
- Interesting fact: Amazon can run at 90+% capacity and can turn off machines when they are not using them. Not something corporate IT can do. Amazon accepts failure in that they have higher predictability. 50 to 100 drives fail every day. Does Corp IT handle that level of failure?
State of the Cloud Today
Traditional
• ASP/MSP – packaged app managed for you,
• IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) – Hosting to VM hosting to elastic VM hosting
• PaaS (Platform as a Service) – hosted deployment models for traditional
• Storage Clouds (Amazon S3)
New Thinking
• SaaS – multi-tenant (SFDC, WorkDay, SuccessFactors)
• Scale0ut PaaS – platform built to be spread across 1000s servers, divorced from VM concept underneath – AppEngine, Force.com
• New storage concepts data/info models and services ). BigTable, Live Mesh, Google Research Data sets James says “If you are a DBA, you are out of work with these technologies as DBAs are not needed, no relational”)
A key issue will be easing the onramp to the new thinking. Companies need to go from the comfort of “Tastes like Chicken” to “Transformative Game Changing” – most people dimmiss Google apps as not serious development today, but they should pay attention.
BTW, majority of programmers cannot do multi-threading well. The new models alleviate this. Programmers/Developers should start playing with Map Reduce!
Two architecture models underlie:
- VM-based cloud (like leggo blocks)
• More VMs needed to scale
• Physical limits of the underlying servers
- Web-based cloud
• Means of scale: spawning
Conclusions
o IaaS will dominate in the short term (Virtual private clouds)
o SOA APIs very important for any Cloud offering
o Proven security model SaaS 70 type II strong SLA will be required
o Clear integration w/Internal clouds (OVF, WSAPI etc) will be important
o Geographically dispersed data centers (APAC, EMEA, 2 in the US minimum) will be necessary for large corps
o Large ISV partners will be needed to support the ecosystem
o Enterprise will build inferior internal clouds
o PaaS with IaaS will domate long term
o Hype for the cloud will die off in 2010
What should you do about it as a software developer as a traditional ISV?
• You need to offer IaaS style options and licensing terms
• Empower the ASP/MSP model on IaaS clouds
• Start rearchitecting or build a new version of your product (or die)
If you are a New Startup
• Start with web scale
• Prototype on a PaaS
• Determine if Hadoop can create new business value for you
• Think about what new business opportunities can web scale create?