The Cloud of Omaha?

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Last week I spent in Omaha. You can see that there are lovely fields of corn and a sense of peace here. The craziness of Silicon Valley is forgotten after a few days here. What was interesting was how friendly open and fair people were. When there were two lanes that merged into one due to roadworks, the Omahanians would merge traffic lanes about a mile before. So you would get an empty lane and a full lane for a mile! People would proceed slowly in an organized fashion. Here is the Bay Area everyone would be racing into the empty lane so they could “’jump ahead”…causing a massive slow down for everyone.

I talked to about 40 people from different companies and divisions and I must admit that the Cloud as a concept does resonate well here. What was most interesting was a customer that just glared at me. “What do you mean by “Cloud””, he challenged me. “Show me what is real”. “Show me a Private Cloud that can burst into the Public Cloud”. Well, he got me there….hmmmm… I said…..most interesting concept…..can I take a VM image and automatically migrate to the EC2 cloud… well actually you can, I do believe that Enomalism has an application that does that… and so it went on. Many customers want to build their Private Clouds but want to make sure they can federate with Public Clouds such as EC2. Of course, once I started talking about the Gartner Hype Cycle this particular customer stopped glaring at me and waved away his security team who were about to drag me from his facility. “Talk some more”, he said.


Well if you look at the Gartner Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, you will see that the term “Cloud Computing” sits atop the ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’ and is about to roll into the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’. Wow, what genius at Garner came up with those grabby terms, it almost makes computing sound like fun, Bravo!

So being an Oraclite, what is real? Well, take a look at the ‘Slope Of Enlightenment, what do we see there. Concrete computer science foundational pillars of The Cloud. Virtualization, IaaS, Grid, SaaS, Utility Computing… Basically building blocks that you can create Private Clouds with. A lot of these technologies have been around for years, but the marketing for Cloud has got ahead of itself. Although today, you can swipe your credit card and get some Infrastructure, many customers want to deploy infrastructure internally because they are afraid of letting their data see the light of a Public Cloud. They want to take their existing IT department and turn it into an internal IaaS facility for the benefit of the entire corporation. IT costs can be dramatically reduced and business customers can start to see some real business agility out of their ever shrinking IT budgets.

Oracle wants to make this transition for IT departments as painless as possible. Whilst not at the point of a turnkey solution, a lot of the pieces are there. You just need a good architect to help expound on the gaps and how to fill them. I’m sure in say, 3 years the market will have many such internal DIY cloud-in-a-box offering. Until that time, we need to concentrate on making these technologies work with each other and build out our foundation. I will expand on these architectural patterns in upcoming posts. If you would like to hear about foundational concepts that are not on the Gartner ‘Slope of Enlightenment’ then do drop me a line.



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