Last month Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu Linux, CEO of Cannonical Ltd and First African in Space,announced that Ubuntu was going to be making a big push into cloud computing with their release slated for October. This will add to early cloud support that’s debuting in next month’s release, Ubuntu 9.04. (BTW, For a good backgrounder on Mark and Ubuntu, check out Ashlee Vance’s story in the New York Times from January).
I was interested to get some more details so I reached out to Mark to find out his master Cloud plan, his thoughts on Cloud Computing today and where he thought it was going. This is what he had to say:
Mark and myself at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Boston at the end of ’07 (Mark’s the one without the “Barton” name tag.)
Some of the topics Mark Tackles:
Ubuntu has picked two anchor points for its cloud strategy: Amazon EC2 and UCSB‘s (go Gauchos!) Eucalyptus. Eucalyptus is for those looking to create “private clouds” on their own and on the Amazon side they are making it easy for users to plug into EC2 as well as offering folks the ability to run Ubuntu-based machines on their cloud.
Why they went with EC2 and Eucalyptus. On the Eucalyptus side it has to with it being Java-based, which meshes nicely with the work Ubuntu did with Sun to get the Java stack “straightened out” on Ubuntu for app servers.
The constraints that EC2 imposes actually make it more interesting by providing discipline, much in the same way that http applied the discipline of being completely connectionless.
We haven’t yet seen the “definitive cloud” in the way that Google came along and captured the spirit (and revenues) of the web. It will still be 5 -10 years before the cloud computing is nailed.
Portability in the Cloud is key if we want to avoid gross lock-in issues. People are trying to tackle this in a variety of ways but it makes sense to look at the way http came to dominance.
Any truth to the rumor that Google is planning on using Ubuntu as a Netbook OS? (listen how Mark deftly responds
Last time we spoke, back in August, Mark said he was looking at profitability in 18 months to two years, is he still on track?
Pau for now…
Update: Here is the Register article based on the above podcast.
On the second day of Cloud Connect I caught up with Kevin Gough of Google. Kevin leads marketing efforts for Google Apps, website search, enterprise search and geospatial products and we chatted a bit about the evolution of the Google Apps team.
To watch in High Quality: after clicking play, click the “HQ” button that will appear on the bottom.
Some of the topics Kevin Tackles:
Growing the Enterprise team from less than 20 to over 500.
The evolution from Search -> Maps -> Earth -> Google Apps (Google’s thrust into the cloud for businesses)
Python and App Engine, going with what’s familiar and plans to expand
A couple of weeks ago Alex Moffat, chief engineer for Lombardi Blueprint, jetted out to Mountain View to record a video at Google headquarters.
The video, which is in YouTube’s new 16:9 aspect ratio (the only way you want to watch Lawrence of Arabia or Blueprint demos), is part of a series of developer videos Google is doing to show the cool things that can be built using Google Web Toolkit (GWT).
What you’ll see (and what you’ll get)
In the video, which is only a minute and 16 seconds, Alex shows how business users can enter info in outline form which then generates corresponding boxes in an adjacent map view. These boxes can be easily moved around via drag-and-drop. Additionally, at the push of a button this high-level view is auto-magically converted into a process flow diagram. As Alex points out, thanks to GWT, all of this happens completely within any browser without the user having to download any plug-ins like Flash etc.
I came across the following short video featuring Jeff Keltner a Business Development Manager for Google Apps. The video is from TechWeb from mid August and it looks like it was taken at an event featuring various “Cloud Players” (I noticed Amazon’s VP of Amazon Web Services, Adam Selipsky is sitting on the couch while Jeff speaks).
For those who prefer reading, here is a quick summary of Jeff’s talk:
He starts with two positives for Cloud Computing
From an IT perspective: He cites the Gartner statistic that only 20% of the total cost of ownership for software is the purchasing of the software while 80% of the cost comes from the ongoing maintenance. He cites the centralized nature of the cloud as a way of reversing that trend and actually flipping the relationship.
From a user perspective, we are shifting from personal to group productivity and shifting towards a single instance of an application and collaboration which the cloud supports.
He then focuses on the Myths
It’s not secure: Jeff argues that an enterprise with the size and scale of an Amazon, Google or Salesforce.com is much more secure than most. He also rightfully points out that you can’t assume that today’s in-house model is zero risk. (This seems like an obvious point but one that people often miss when comparing the two models).
It’s not proven (no one’s done this before): He talks about how cloud began with services like ADP payroll and then rolled out to other vertical apps like Webex and Salesforce.com and has continued from there.
It’s not for the enterprise: He points to the large scale of Google support and infrastructure.
Who doesn’t love a David and Goliath story? Looks like General Electric has chosen India-based Zoho over Google to supply its cloud-based desktop suite on 400,000 desktops. Zoho is a 600 person company that has never taken venture funding and currently generates $40 million a year.
According to Daya Baran’s blog “A GE spokesperson who did not want to be identified said their decision was based around issues of personal and corporate privacy, functionality, support, features and Zoho won hands down.”
Posted by Barton George 
