Thoughts on CloudWorld '09

CloudWorld is about to wrap up and I thought I'd share my thoughts on the event. First, the overall tone of the event was somewhat subdued. Maybe it was due to the timing - coming near the peak of the summer holiday? I just didn't feel the instant buzz I anticipated given the noise around all things "cloud" and the roster of speakers and sponsors.

Nonetheless, that feeling didn't correlate to the session quality as measured by the audience questions and the hallway conversations I had or noticed going on. If anything, there was more time needed for audience interaction, which often is where a lot of real-world and useful information is shared.

That being said, I think the presentation by RightScale's CEO, Micheal Crandell, was quite good. His talk titled "The Reality of Cloud Lock-In" made a strong case for their platform and approach to application portability. The RightScale Platform allows you to operate at a level above the underlying infrastructure due to the layered approach to their architecture. Using their ServerTemplates you can manage the content and behavior of virtual machines giving users the ability to deploy cloud-ready servers fairly easily and quickly.

Now, Crandell's presentation probably wouldn't have left as big an impression on me if it weren't for a follow-up presentation where he was joined by Brian Gentile, CEO of Japsersoft. Together, they described their creation, along with partners Talend and Vertica, of an integrated business intelligence stack that runs on top of RightScale. They called this "Agile Analytics in the Cloud" since it combines best-of-breed software - literally through a series of mouse clicks - deployed as Software as a Service (SaaS) using the RightScale platform. Basically, it gave credence to the concept of cloud computing and reinforced it with four real-world customer examples, including a large financial institution and a global Systems Integrator (SI). And, they gave a live demo that actually worked and was equally impressive.

At the same time, it fit in nicely with what Timothy Chou described in a panel discussion, at the end of day one, where he commented that there are probably thousands and thousands of business processes sorely lacking software automation. And it is precisely the flexibility and speed at which you can assemble applications in the cloud that could unleash a whole wave of "custom" application development. Think the "long-tail" of software. I thought this was a great point, but I'm not sure people really connected with it. They probably would have if they'd seen more like the RightScale-Jaspersoft demo.

The panel also included James Urquhart (Cisco, CNET), Sam Charrington (Appistry), and Joe Weinman (AT&T). I found their round-table entertaining as they debated the definition of cloud computing, including the more contentious issue of private or internal clouds. Sam Charrington gave a great example of how FedEx created a private cloud using Appistry's solution. Another real-world example that drove home the possibility of what you can do with the cloud. And that's really where it's at.

Finally, Lew Tucker, VP & CTO of cloud computing at Sun Microsystems, started the final day off by asking, "If Cloud is the Answer, Then What's the Question?" After another level-setting exercise, he described the importance and value of separating the applications from the infrastructure, predicting an era of "specialization in operating systems" or "just enough OS" for apps and the data center OS for operations and services. He mentioned a couple of examples worth checking out further, like the new RightScale-Jaspersoft solution and the work rPath is doing in application delivery. He really got going when describing a near-future where applications are "increasingly responsible for self-provisioning" in response to demand, or failure recovery, or any predetermined set of requirements or SLAs. Check out Tucker's video on ZDNet.