In the blog post announcing the service, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said that;

Today AWS launched an exciting new service for developers: the Amazon Simple Workflow Service. Amazon SWF is an orchestration service for building scalable distributed applications. Often an application consists of several different tasks to be performed in particular sequence driven by a set of dynamic conditions. Amazon SWF makes it very easy for developers to architect and implement these tasks, run them in the cloud or on premise and coordinate their flow. Amazon SWF manages the execution flow such that the tasks are load balanced across the registered workers, that inter-task dependencies are respected, that concurrency is handled appropriately and that child workflows are executed.

Have no doubt – this is PaaS in all but name. Which leaves a big question as to how AWS will message this move to it’s large number of customers who are PaaS providers – Both Heroku and EngineYard are large consumers of Amazon IaaS.

It’s now almost impossible for Vogels to credibly claim they’re not focusing on moving up the stack as fast as possible, which leaves some of the other services with some choices to make.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there aren’t late night meetings going on in the board rooms of a number of PaaS providers – determining the best way to differentiate themselves whilst still on AWS infrastructure, or alternative arrangements if Amazon really goes nuclear on PaaS.

One of those conversations is no doubt occurring in Heroku’s offices and they have the benefit of being owned by Salesforce. Even before this announcement I would have predicted Heroku being available on multiple infrastructure layers in the near future. Now I’d not be surprised to see Heroku rolled into Salesforce’s own data centers to leverage the independence of Salesforce infra along with the obvious connections between Heroku and Force.

Netflix too is in an interesting situation. One of AWSs largest customers, and the creator of a number of platform components many of which have been open sourced to the community. It’ll be interesting to see their response to this as well. CloudFoundry? There’s another interesting story… Oh to be a fly on the wall….

Interesting times – meanwhile Amazon contiues to innovate in pretty amazing ways.

As the amount of data available increases however, there is a need to intelligently manage what data is available on different devices to ensure security, but more importantly appropriate fidelity for the context of the particular employee.

This is where a new development from content collaboration vendor Huddle comes in. Huddle Sync is being dubbed an “intelligent file synchronization tool”. Essentially it utilizes aggregate data from employee usage patterns to determine which files are most relevant to users and these files are fully synchronized between devices – the idea is to save bandwidth and precious storage on mobile devices and also to offer users a faster collaboration experience.

In making this move Huddle is shooting over the bows of two distinct groups;

1. Other business collaboration tools like SharePoint and Box.net whom it seeks to differentiate from with a smarter system that is tailored to individual use
2. Consumer synch tools like iCloud and others that don’t have the security and flexibility that enterprises demand

In a nod to the demands of enterprises, Huddle provides IT with full transparency of where data is stored, who has synced what files and full audit trails, it also has a remote wipe capability, so that should a device be lost or stolen, or an individual leave the company, data can be remotely deleted from the endpoint.

Huddle has some IP locked up in the intelligent sync offering – they weren’t prepared to go into too much detail but did tell me that;

the engine works uniquely for each user and will consider who you are and your permissions, the files you access and how often, who you collaborate with and how often you access their shared files, and much, much more in order to measure relevance. Then relevant files are automatically delivered to your Huddle-enabled devices so that you never have to manually locate and download them. And as time goes on, the engine learns from your workflow and becomes more accurate at delivering the most important content. Of course, if Huddle Sync didn’t anticipate the need for a file, you always have the ability to manually download it.

Even more interestingly, the tool has the ability to go beyond a users own files and be exposed to data that they didn’t even know existed. The example Huddle gave me went as follows;

if you’re working on a cancer research project and there is useful (but siloed) research data spread across branches of your organization, Huddle Sync locates those relevant files (which you may not even know existed) and delivers them to you

That’s a pretty compelling proposition, and it will be interesting to see how much traction the new feature gets once it comes into general availability.

It’s been interesting the way Xero has developed its community of interest over the past few years. they have a wide spread of stakeholders – from partners building products in the ecosystem, to account practitioners, to end users. Over the past few years there have been a number of different initiative that they’ve taken in terms of the community – UserVoice groups for development prioritization, a LinkedIn group for end users to share and discuss issues on, meetups, conferences and roadshows.

So it’s good to see the next stage in the Xero community initiative, the launching of the Xero Community, an end to end service that sits within the support section of the Xero site that aims to bring together all the different threads of community. There are already some interesting Xero community initiatives, there is the independent Xerousers created by Adrian Pearson, then from the company perspective there is the vibrant LinkedIn group with some 1600 or so members, mainly practitioners but some end users also. I asked Xero if this new offering would replace other imitative and their reply was that;

Xero Community is an extension of our popular Help Centre and complements our other social channels. It’s a place where Xero customers and partners can ask and answer questions and share knowledge.

It’s a smart move, it’s a way for Xero to not only reduce their own support costs (by enabling users to help each other with problems, ideas and issues) but it’s also creating a central hub of thought leadership, similar to the Zendesk blog (disclosure, I previously contributed to this blog) that aims to be the go-to place for customer support thought leadership.

Reducing support costs, building customer engagement, helping channel partners engage with their own customers and building a thought leadership position – all smart moves that should richly reward the investment in creating the community.

In what was I suspect an effort to create a provocateur outside of themselves, Gillmor and Taschek engaged me in a discussion that reflected both on the recent arguments about the risks of an ultra powerful social media cartel, and a perspective on the democratization that the iPad is bringing to the world.

It seems to me that my two buddies on this call have been busy quaffing on Silicon Valley kool aide. Gillmor in particular waxed poetic about the iPad and the stratospheric success it’s seeing in the marketplace. I call BS on that.

Yes I was in attendance at Salesforce’s DreamForce event last year and heard the CEO of Burberry wax poetic about how the social enterprise is transforming her business. But that simply doesn’t cut it for me – my view is that the iPad (and other devices but I focus on the iPad as a foil to the fan boys exuberance) is a proxy for the real benefits of accessible data.

My perspective is simple – think of Joe Citizen who is a process worker for the Acme Widget Company. Joe spends his day on a large industrial machine, one that has been churning out widgets for decades. Does it make a difference to Joe that the sales execs in the company have iPads? Well, beyond perhaps managing the output of the machine better and tailoring it to demand, the “iPad revolution” means nothing to Joe.

So what will actually make a difference in the real world? And why is Apple’s hegemony a threat to that?

What will make a difference is the web of things. That hallowed ground where data isn’t just about primarily visual devices creating and displaying information, but rather about a connected series of devices that feed countless pieces of data in a greater whole. So Joe’s machine is connected, and constantly sends a stream of consciousness out to the ether about what it is doing. Joe’s machine also consumes a string of data from a myriad of different sources – raw material supplier’s machinery, inventory systems, sales systems, energy utility’s system – all with a view to making highly granular and incremental changes.

Apple’s hegemony is a threat to this ideal because it silos data in one operating system, tailored for one particular perspective on data consumption and creation. It’s also a risk because, as Lord Acton famously said, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. Any provider that has the virtual keys to the way people create, view and consume data is a potential vector for corruption. And I’m not just singling out Apple here – there are a number of other vendors that have the potential to shoehorn themselves into a position where their dominant position can be used for nefarious gain.

Open Standards and the API – Saviors in the Fight Against Evil

I am buoyed by the fact that a lot of people in different areas are fighting for “Open”, whatever open means to their particular area of interest. From the Open Cloud Initiative which aims to ensure consistency around the way cloud infrastructure is consumed and used, to Diaspora and its attempt (however viable that attempt may be) to create a different kind of social medium that doesn’t use people’s information for corporate gain.

I’m also buoyed by the very existence of the open API – a technology that forces the notion of data interchange to become real. Sure right now it’s too hard, and there are all manner of ways in which vendors manipulate what should be open to achieve their own aims, but the API is our equivalent of Excalibur – and it too has the ability to deliver us from evil.

As I said when talking to Taschek and Gillmor – the economic models are being rewritten, in a world where consumers don’t directly pay for a service but rather use it and have that very use converted into revenue by the provider, we need to change our thinking around the risks and threats of a kind of grand incumbency. While Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg may wax poetic about his vision of a utopian ideal where people are connected with others and his service facilitates the finding of meaning across the globe, that utopian ideal can easily be subverted.

You see utopias have a sneaky habit of changing into dystopias once they gain incumbency. George Orwell’s book 1984, and the real world example of communism in practice should be a warning to us about all of this. The process starts with but the best of intentions, making the world a better place for all. But in the same way that Orwell’s elite quickly subverted this aim to one of gaining and holding power, so too could we see one of the technology incumbents – Apple, Facebook, Google or some as yet unknown – be put to purposes evil rather than good.

So next time we wonder aloud at how many amazing things an uber-powerful Facebook can deliver, we should think on those sage words of Lord Acton, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.

An interesting discussion occurred on the CloudU LinkedIn group recently. It was started by an awesome post from James Urquhart admonishing people to accept the fact that Cloud is complex and to simply deal with it. The inimitable Sam Johnston posted an interesting response, the essence of which was that, while Cloud is undoubtedly complex, the great thing about third party cloud providers is that they conceal this complexity behind interfaces, as Sam says;

Cloud computing is, simply, the delivery of information technology as a service rather than a product, and like other utility services there is a clear demarcation point (the first socket for telephones, the meter for electricity and the user or machine interface for computing).

A ha, the old utility chestnut again. While it may seem like a purely semantic discussion, it is one that I believe is important for those of us in the industry who genuinely believe that Cloud can offer significant benefits to organizations. Too much time spent articulating the various complexities of the beast, and not enough time spent talking about benefits can simply muddle the water for folks and lead to a kind of analysis paralysis where organizations simple decide to keep the status quo.

Urquhart responded to the discussion by agreeing that users should be shielded from much of the complexity by strong automation but to accept that we live in a heterogeneous world and to start treating Cloud components as parts of a larger, more complex system. A point that is eminently valid but that misses what I believe is the opportunity as espoused by Peter Coffee;

If all you do is cloudify the complexity you have, you actually increase your complexity in return for only superficial economies of scale. In the long run, this does not win. If you start, instead, by ruthlessly pruning bad complexity out of the system… you’ll discover that you can now upgrade 3x/year instead of once every three years; that you can adapt capacity to workload on a feedback loop of hours or minutes, rather than weeks or months. This is not simple, but it is very good. Does total complexity go down? Unlikely. Does reducing complexity, per se, create value? No. Is there strategic value in taking merely distracting and costly complexity off the agenda? Believe it.

Or in other words, focus on the value, abstract as much complexity as possible and let IT (and the organization at large) focus on what really matters – achieving the best outcomes for the business as quickly as possible. Cloud done right should reduce the complexity that is visible to the end user, and in doing so allow them to drive real enhanced value to the organization.

So. Key takeaways for organization actually looking at the do-ing rather than just conceptual talk-ing: Yes, Cloud is part of a large and complex system with multiple moving parts that need to be bashed together. Yes we are still in the early days of the Cloud so the tools to ease that bashing together (standards, interoperability, clear APIs etc) are a little lacking. But on the flip side, we’re seeing more innovation and an incredibly high rate of change in Cloud than in other parts of the industry and Cloud is delivering real value right now. That value, alongside the clear indication that things are going to become more standard, less complex and, quite simply, better, gives us all a pretty clear message that Cloud is the way of the future. Complexity notwithstanding.

Case in point is the launch today of a mashup between Desktop Virtualization company WorldDesk and DropBox. Essentially the integration marries desktop virtualization with a DropBox accounts so that users can carry their virtual desktop around with them, on a USB stick, smartphone or iPod, sign into their desktop and have all their files ready for them in a nicely integrated DropBox folder.

According to WorldDesk, The beta solution launching today allows users to access, through their Dropbox folder, a full personalized desktop experience on any 32-bit Windows 7 machine. Plans are afoot to roll this out to other devices and cloud storage platforms.

Of course virtual desktops are, in my view, a kind of old world solution to mobility and access. But, just like IE6, they’re a solution that has ongoing proponents for some strange reason…

Anyway, it’s by no means a DropBox specific proposition, but it’s another interesting use case for cloud storage and, since it is Valentine’s Day after all, WorldDesk has made this somewhat corny video to celebrate their new union. Enjoy

Subscription billing is a massive area of opportunity as organizations look to gain increased flexibility and agility when it comes to selling their products in new and creative ways. This opportunity has not gone unnoticed and there are a number of vendors who can roughly be split into those providing a comprehensive product set for top shelf customers (Zuora, Aria Systems, Vindicia etc) and those providing a more lightweight offering suitable for startups (Recurly, Chargify etc). OneBill’s take is slightly different in that they’re focusing on tight integration with social networking sites for their offering.

The idea behind OneBill Subscription Commerce is to provide an integrated subscription platform to manage a subscription services company’s core business functions by connecting internal departments from marketing, sales, operations, and technology to the provider’s external customers, influencers, and prospects. They do so by providing specific functionality to different departments;

Marketing:

• The OneBill platform allows for the creation of unlimited pricing combinations, via the OneBill Pricing Designer
• Integration with social commerce sites including Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, SalesForce, Foursquare mean that OneBill customers can promote and sell service offerings
• Marketers can analyze the business trends using OneBill Business Intelligence to recognize customers’ buying trends by optimizing revenue channels and ROI

Sales:

• OneBill Order Manager converts quotes to contracts through integrated workflows
• Interact with core corporate systems via OneBill Connectors

Operations:

• The Customer Self Care portal within OneBill allows a company’s customers to manage their subscriptions, orders, invoices, payments, renewals

IT:

• The OneBill platform is designed on an integrated SaaS delivery model
• The OneBill platform integrates with provisioning and usage metering systems through OneBill platform’s connectors

MyPOV – OneBill is telling a good story but I’m really not seeing anything remarkable here – the previously mentioned subscription and billing vendors already do this stuff and have existing traction in the marketplace. I’m also not impressed by a vendor that launches themselves claiming to be the “first subscription commerce platform” – at best that’s wrong, at worst it’s a barefaced lie that does nothing for the credibility of OneBill itself or the industry as a whole.

I haven’t taken a deep dive with OneBill so can’t comment on specific functionality – but at this stage I’ll remain cautious about their ability to have much impact in the space.

This new version extends the Director product on five fronts:

Extensibility: Nimbula Director can be augmented by third parties who can provide network, data, PaaS or other cloud services. Those services and their custom logic are embedded into the cloud, are run and managed as if they were written by Nimbula, and inherit all of Nimbula Director’s high availability, multi-tenancy and network security functionality.

MyPOV – this move speaks to building partnerships with other small providers looking to differentiate themselves from the other cloud operating systems – it’s a strategic move that looks to win approval from customers who want a more modular approach to building their own clouds.

VMware Support: Nimbula Director 2.0 is now open to VMware customers with its support of the ESXi hypervisor. In addition, Nimbula Director 2.0 will support VMware’s Cloud Foundry PaaS solution, and Nimbula is now a member of VMware’s Technology Alliance Program (TAP).

MyPOV – On two fronts this is smart. VMware is a dominant player within data center virtualization and this move therefore opens up an entire new market of potential customers, those who want to keep using a hypervisor they’re already comfortable. it’s also a recognition of the fact that PaaS is growing rapidly and that CloudFoundry is gaining significant mindshare. Nimbula hopes to attract customers who opt for an end-to-end VMware product base.

Application Management: Nimbula Director is extending its management from the control plane up into the end user application space. Customers can now orchestrate the provisioning of complex applications and have the system monitor and manage applications over their lifetimes.

MyPOV – I predict that more and more customers will seek to abstract as much of the complexity of their operations as they can. This move sees Nimbula extend its breadth higher into the cloud stack and will appeal strongly to organizations with an existing application base who want to automate not only the underlying infrastructure but also the provisioning of the applications that sit on top of it.

DNS and VPN services: This release rounds out the IaaS networking feature set, which also includes DHCP, NAT, firewall and VLAN services, providing a complete set of networking services required for running real world applications.

Enterprise Readiness: Nimbula  is introducing a scalable distributed backend database, using an SELinux base for its node software, commissioning a deep external party security audit its code, introducing more enterprise systems management functionality, and adding quota management as well.

MyPOV – both of these moves strongly speak to Nimbula’s strategy of providing a complete end to end offering – either through partnering or by creating their own products.

Summary

I have long wondered how Nimbula will remain competitive and compelling in a world that increasingly seems bifurcated between organizations that want to use public cloud services, and those who are compelled by the strength of adoption that OpenStack is seeing. Today’s release gives Nimbula some ammunition in their attempt to differentiate from other players – most notably with organizations strongly invested with VMware. Whether it is enough for Nimbula to truly build market strength remains to be seen.

That’s where 6fusion comes in. 6fusion is a provider of cloud management software and they’re releasing today a resource meter for vSphere, VMware’s cloud computing operating system. Apparently 6fusion has a patent over a particular metering algorithm, the Workload Allocation Cube. The WAC (of course there had to be a three letter algorithm);

dynamically blends the critical compute resources required to operate practically every x86 based software application, yielding a single unit of measurement. It’s called a cube because a cube has six sides and there are six compute resources that comprise a single WAC unit: CPU, Memory, Storage, Disk I/O, LAN I/O, and WAN I/O.

The WAC is quite an interesting concept really. There has been much discussion about how cloud computing should be charged – and the concept of the WAC is to set a stake in the ground to find a kind of mid-point that is fair to all. Now of course there will be people who say this methodology of averaging resource use into one single unit of usage is to blunt an instrument, but it’s kind of an interesting concept. According to 6fusion, the WAC drives benefits because;

• It makes consuming cloud resources simple
• It enables cost profiling pre-cloud migration
• It inspires global interoperability
• It allows data center managers to measure and optimize the cost of supply
• It creates an exchange value to drive supply and demand

Like I say, a really interesting idea for those trying to wrangle this problem. With 6fusion’s product, vSphere shops can;

• Meter any workload running on either physical or virtual servers (including web applications or traditional client/server applications)
• Access “real time” WAC consumption information for the entire system
• Gain cloud resource meter data in real time through the vSphere Client interface (along with short-term historical data)
• Log into 6usion’s UC6 web based console to access longer-term data as well as run and export reports
• Use UC6 console to view what is being metered versus what is running live in the cloud

Interesting. 6fusion’s Cloud Resource Meter will be available for download on the VMware Solution Exchange and 6fusion’s web site upon final release. vSphere users can pre-register for the tool here.

CloudU Notebooks is a weekly blog series that explores topics from the CloudU certificate program in bite sized chunks, written by me, Ben Kepes, curator of CloudU.  How-to’s, interviews with industry giants, and the occasional opinion piece are what you can expect to find.  If that’s your cup of tea, you can subscribe here.

The interesting thing about disruption is that when it occur there are both opportunities and threats – opportunities for those who are prepared to stand on he edge of whatever the disruption is, and threats for those unable or unwilling to adapt. As I posted the other day, Cloud Computing is fundamentally changing the shape of the IT job. It’s undeniably disruptive to the IT industry, but this disruption extends beyond simply a threat/opportunity vector for IT, it effects more general roles as well.

Wanted Analytics, a real time business intelligence company, recently posted some statistics round the hiring for cloud computing skills. They found that recruiters, over a 90 day period, posted over 10000 online job ads that included a requirement for cloud computing skills – that’s 61% more than he same period a year ago. The graph below shows this growth.

The interesting thing here though is that these aren’t all in technical roles – there’s  bunch of marketing and sales roles, along with customer service and even cargo and freight agent positions that are all demanding a competency in cloud. It’s kind of analogous to typewriters. It used to be that only people who were looking for jobs in a typing pool needed to know how to type. Nowadays pretty much everyone needs some typing skills as a core competency for their role – so to with cloud skills. That’s our reason for creating the CloudU program, and even more so the CloudU certificate – they’re an attempt to give people an entry level introduction to Cloud Computing, something to whet their appetite and to give them a grounding.

Life is about ongoing skill-building. I’m a big fan of lifelong learning and the great thing about the disruption coming from cloud computing is that it means there is a real impetus to build skills in this particular area, and those skills in turn will make people more valuable to current and prospective employers. Feedback from course participants (and we’ve now had nearly 1500 people sign up for the certificate and going on 300 graduate) is that what we’re doing is on the right track. As recent graduate Melissa Huebener says;

Cloud is the future of technology. This Certification serves a springboard for continuing education in this area. It supplies a wonderful indication to employers that I am willing to learn, change and grow in my career as technology advances forward.

We’re also getting great feedback from other educators. Steve Mallard from the Tennessee Technology Center wrote an unsolicited email thanking us for the program and said that;

CloudU is an excellent resource for anyone wanting to learn about Cloud Computing.   As an instructor of information technology, the certificate provides a great learning tool for the planning, deployment and  logistics behind cloud computing.

And without wanting to blow our own trumpet too much, someone also pointed out to us recently that we’ve been named one of the top 10 Cloud certifications in the industry – that’s pretty awesome praise!

CloudU is an exciting development and one that I’m really proud to be involved with – we’d love to have you join in the discussion!