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As cloud computing matures -- meaning it is being used by increasingly larger companies for mission critical applications -- companies are shopping around for cloud providers with requirements that are more sophisticated than merely price and ease-of-use. One of these criteria is performance.

Performance has consistently been one of the main concerns enterprise buyers have had about cloud computing, as indicated from the chart of the responses to a survey conducted by IDC in Q3 of 2009.

There’s a long running debate about the true role of Virtual Machines (VMs) in cloud computing.  In talking with CTOs at the large vendors as well as the “Clouderati” over the last two years, there seems to be the desire to eliminate the VM from cloud computing.  A colleague of mine, Simeon Simeonov

Today Rackspace announced it is open sourcing its cloud platform and releasing it as a project called OpenStack together with others. The code should be available for download (if not now then in a few hours) on http://OpenStack.org. From the official press release:

This week Rackspace Cloud, in conjunction with the NASA Nebula project, open sourced some of their Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud software. This initiative, dubbed ‘OpenStack’, should have a dramatic impact on the current dynamics for building cloud computing infrastructure. Previously there have been two major camps: Amazon API and architecture compatible and VMware’s vCloud.

On June 17 I gave a lightning presentation at the Open API Meetup, along with Evan Cooke of Twilio and Oren Teich of Heroku. It was a really nice event, well-organized by Sam Ramji and Shanley Kane of Sonoa/Apigee, and hosted at Twilio's beautiful new digs.

Bernd Harzog recently wrote a blog entry to examine whether “the CMDB [is] irrelevant in a Virtual and Cloud based world“. If I can paraphrase, his conclusion is that there will be something that looks like a CMDB but the current CMDB products are ill-equipped to fulfill that function. Here are the main reasons he gives for this prognostic:

Hidden deep within an article on scalability was a fascinating insight. Once you read it, it makes sense, but because cloud computing forces our attention to the logical (compute resources) rather than the physical (hardware) it’s easy to overlook.