Last but not least in my series of interviews from last month’s Cloud Summit at OSCON I present to you my conversation with Simon Phipps. Simon, who until earlier this year was the chief Open Source officer at Sun Microsystems, recently joined the start-up ForgeRock as their chief strategy officer. Here is what Simon says:
Some of the topics Simon tackles:
ForgeRock offers access management and authentication software based on open source code that was developed at Sun.
Since the software is open source you can download it for free at ForgeRock.
ForgeRock makes its money by selling subscriptions that provide various grades of SLAs.
Even though they are 4 mos old, they already have 20 customers including the world’s largest gambling exchange.
At OSCON last week I ran into a compadre from a previous life, Fred Kohout. Fred is now the CMO at UC4, a pure play software automation company, and he, like I, was in Portland to attend OSCON and the Cloud Summit.
At the summit Fred did to me what I’ve done to so many others, he got me on the receiving end of a video camera to talk about where Dell plays in the cloud and how we see the cloud evolving.
You can check out Fred’s blog from the Summit where he posted my video as well as the interview he did with another former compadre, Peder Ulander, CMO at cloud.com.
Don’t touch that dial
If you’re interested in OSCON be sure to stay tuned. I’ve got four more interviews from the event that I will be posting soon.
Today Rackspace and NASAannounced OpenStack, an open source cloud platform that they are collaborating on and building a community around. Last week the inaugural OpenStack design summit was held here in Austin with 20 companies from around the world, including Dell, participating.
During one of the breaks I grabbed sometime with Rackspace’s cloud president, Lew Moorman to learn more about the effort and get his thoughts:
Some of the topics Lew tackles:
What is OpenStack (an opensource set of technologies for building clouds…)
Why Rackspace decided to opensource their code .
How Rackspace got hooked up with NASA and what each brings to the party.
Taking Nebula’s core foundation and adding some elements from Rackspace’s side in order to put together a release candidate that should be available to the community this Fall.
At the inaugural design summit for OpenStack, an open source set of technologies for building clouds, Nebula’s chief architect Josh McKenty played a prominent role in leading the assembled folks. I caught Josh during a break and chatted with him about Nebula and NASA’s role in the newly announced OpenStack project. Here’s what he had to say:
Some of the topics Josh tackles:
What is Nebula (hint: NASA’s, primarily IaaS, cloud computing platform)
The history of Nebula and how it morphed from nasa.net.
Why NASA wants a cloud – and the importance of having an elastic set of resources.
NASA and Nebula’s use of open source and how it has evolved (they don’t simply fling tarballs over the wall anymore and they can use licenses other than the “NASA open source agreement”)
A match made in heaven: NASA has put together a strong compute platform and was looking to building a real object store, Rackspace had a strong object store and work looking for a new compute platform.
Yesterday at the GigaOM Structure conference here in San Francisco, I ran into Marten Mickos, the recently appointed CEO of Eucalyptus systems. Eucalyptus is one of the key ingredients in the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud that is being certified to run on Dell’s PowerEdge C systems as part of our cloud ISV program.
Marten, the former CEO of MySQL took the helm of Eucalyptus about three months ago, and was at Structure both as an attendee and participant, sitting on two panels at this two-day cloud-a-polooza. At the end of the day-one I got some time with Marten and asked him about his new gig.
Some of the topics Marten tackles:
How he made the decision to go to Eucalyptus. (Hint: he asked the question, what’s bigger than Open Source)
What is Eucalyptus and whats it based on?
How will Marten’s experience at MySQL and Sun help him in his new role at Eucalyptus?
MySQL was a disrupter of the old whereas Eucalyptus is an innovator of the new.
Sun’s company culture was phenomenal, the technology was phenomenal, the business…um…
Following on my entry from yesterday, here is something pretty cool I learned while doing research on what’s happening in public sector cloud computing: Forge.mil
From their FAQ they explain:
Forge.mil is a DISA-led activity designed to improve the ability of the U.S. Department of Defense to rapidly deliver dependable software, services and systems in support of net-centric operations and warfare.
What really surprised me was the emphasis they place on “early and continuous collaboration” and their embracing of open source software. In fact, in an October 16 memo, the DoD’s deputy CIO, reiterated the fact that open-source software “meets the definition of ‘commercial computer software,’” and can “provide advantages” given DOD’s need to “update its software-based capabilities faster than ever.” (source: Wyatt Kash’s article)
Here are some high level stats on Forge.mil’s usage since it started last year:
4,000 Registered users
170 hosted projects
Produced more than 500 software releases
The service itself is broken into two cloud-based offerings — SoftwareForge and ProjectForge. Here are the highlights:
Software Forge
A free service, open and community source DoD software
Default is open view access
Project Forge
For fee, non-community source
Default is private
Originally limited to Army & Navy but on Jan 13 it was made available to other military branches and DoD civilian employees and contractors
Tom Henderson and Brendan Allen of ExtremeLabs published a great walk-thru of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) last week in NetworkWorld. Canonical, the commercial sponsor behind Ubuntu, is one the first members of our Cloud Partner Program and we will soon be offering UEC running on top of our PowerEdge C line accompanied by reference architectures.
If you’re not familiar with UEC, which leverages the open source Eucalyptus private cloud platform, here is a quick backgrounder:
Basically, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud can be deployed on internal hardware to run job/batch applications. The idea is to initially allocate storage, then rapidly build multiple virtual machines to process data, collect the data, then tear down the infrastructure for re-use by a subsequent purpose.
Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud provides internal cloud control methods that closely mime what can be done on Amazon’s public cloud infrastructure. Its tools can be used to process recurring jobs or one-shot distributed applications, like DNA analysis, video rendering, or database table reformatting/reindexing.
Walk this way
The Review, which is a concise 3 and a half pages, steps you through:
Getting started
Installation*
Setup/configuration
Image Bundles
Usage/Monitoring
*My favorite line from this section is: “Installation was very simple; we inserted the Ubuntu Server CD, selected Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, and drank energy drinks.”
If you’re interested in learning about UEC this article is a great place to start.
Extra-credit reading
If the above whets your appetite, you may want to dig into the following:
Last month when I was out in the Bay Area for our launch, I was able to catch up with Rich Wolski, founder and CTO of Eucalyptus. Eucalyptus is one of the key ingredients in the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud that is being certified to run on Dell’s PowerEdge C systems as part of our cloud ISV program. Here is what Rich had to say:
Some of the topics Rich tackles:
How Eucalyptus started at the University of California at Santa Barbara. They wanted to show how old-style large scale computing (NSF super computer centers) could be combined with new large-scale computing (in the form of Amazon) in the service of science. Wanted to also include 4-6 university data centers.
They put the code out as open source and got deluged by science and commercial industry about potential applications. Grew too big to continue as a research project so they brought it outside.
Working with Canonical and Ubuntu and how the relationship began. UEC and what part Eucalyptus makes up.
How NASA is offering a production Eucalyptus cloud to NASA researchers and other governmental agencies.
Where Rich sees Eucalyptus going in the next two years. The importance of the open source community and their continued focus on private clouds in the enterprise.
At last week’s Dell Launch, “Solutions for the Virtual Era,” we unveiled the first three systems in our new PowerEdge C line. These “hyper-scale inspired” systems are based on designs that we have built for our largest scaled-out customers such as Windows Azure, Facebook, Ask.com and Tencent.
The PowerEdge C line is targeted at both Public and Private cloud builders as well as HPC, Web 2.0, gaming and large scaled out web farms. In the video below, Dell solutions architect Rafael Zamora walks us through the PowerEdge C6100, C1100 and C2100.
Upcoming posts
In the days to come I will be posting individual walk-thrus of each of the three systems. I will also be posting interviews I did with executives from our cloud partners Joyent, Aster Data, Greenplum and Eucalyptus (who’s not a partner but provides a key component of our partner Canonical’s Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud).
My favorite cosmonaut-coder Mark Shuttleworth stopped by our offices this morning for a visit. Mark is the founder of both the Linux distribution Ubuntu and its commercial sponsor Canonical. Mark and I sat down in the lobby and caught up. Here is a short interview we recorded.
The 10.4 Ubuntu release Lucid Lynx and what to expect: a strong cloud focus on the enterprise side and a lot of shiny new bling on the desktop as well as making the desktop “social” (e.g. Tweet straight from your desktop)
What Ubuntu is doing in the Netbook space
What excites Mark the most in technology today and why cloud is like HTTP in the early 90′s
With today’s post, I’m right at the mid-point of my series of video interviews from Cloud Computing Expo. Today’s post offers a two-for-one special, Gluster CEO Hitesh Chellani along with Jack O’Brien who heads Gluster’s product management.
Some of the topics Hitesh and Jack tackle:
Gluster as a general-purpose open source cluster platform that runs on top of commodity hardware like Dell.
Their goal to transform the storage market the way Red Hat transformed the server market (Gluster employs a subscription model just like Red Hat).
What would you do after spending time at Lawrence Livermore National Labs putting together the second fastest super computer in the world? Hitesh thought he’d distill the experience and apply it to the storage space.
Some of the performance-driven verticals Gluster started out in.
The new hot area of virtual storage next to virtual servers.
Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and the head of Canonical, the commercial entity behind the popular linux distribution, is currently making his rounds in the States. Yesterday he was quite busy, taking the stage at both the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco as well as at LinuxCon up in Portland Oregon.
Today he popped by Dell here in Austin to chat. I grabbed him for a few minutes right before lunch. Here is the result:
I first met Chander Kant, CEO of open source cloud back provider Zmanda, last year at the MySQL conference. At that time we did an audio interview. Just like Jonathan, this time around I caught him on “film.”
On the first day of Open Source World/Cloud World/Etc World I attended Brian Aker’s talk entitled “Drizzle, Rethinking MySQL for the Web.” For those not in the know, Drizzle is a reworking of the MySQL database to slim it down and make it more appropriate for web-infrastructure and cloud computing . I caught up with Brian after his talk to learn a little bit more about Drizzle, where its come from and where its going.
Some of the topics that Brian tackles:
Looking at what customer needs were not being addressed by MySQL.
Stripping stuff out of MySQL and setting up Drizzle as a microkernel design that modules can be added to.
One of the main goals was to allow greater community involvement in the development (currently Sun folks only make up 6-7% of those making contributions).
Is Drizzle production ready?
What cloud bits have been contributed to the project?
The concept of community is one that has been around for quite a while (see image at left).
Originally at least partially defined as a group that shared a common physical location, this term over the last decade, with the help of the Internet, has vastly expanded to include virtual communities. (Obviously other media before the Net like radio, TV, snail mail and smoke signals have helped to knit together physically separated individuals, however the Net has simply done it on a much larger and more immediate scale).
Powering Software and Presidents
As for its power, it was the Community that became the central driver behind a “new” model of Software creation, Free and Open Source Software. No longer was code solely written by a group of engineers holed up in a room and fed pizza by sliding it under the door. It was written collaboratively by a community of mostly volunteers located around the world. And in a very different arena, it was the power of community that recently helped propel our current President to the White House.
Now with tools like Twitter and Facebook new communities are being created by the minute and companies and causes all want to know how to harness and leverage the power of community. Marketing guru Seth Godin has even jumped on the bandwagon with his book “Tribes” an inspiring but content lite work discussing how ideas, people and leaders can be brought together to accomplish big things.
“I’m in charge here” doesn’t work for a Community
Although it may be obvious to some, the most important thing to know about a community is that its about influence and not control. You can’t direct a community to do anything. What you can do is provide great products, ideas etc that your community can get behind, promote and help make better. Its about acknowledging their help and providing the tools and resources to help them help you. As Max Spevack, the former Community Manager for Fedora Linux once told me, “It’s about the power of persuasion and ‘thank you.’” Or as the motto of Obama’s field campaign states: “Respect. Empower. Include.” [Note: this paragraph is recycled from a previous entry]
Learn How to Community
If you want to learn more from the folks actually doing it you may want to check out The Community Leadership Seminar that is being held on July 18-19 in San Jose, CA. The event is the brainchild of Ubuntu Community manager Jono Bacon and is supported by O’Reilly events. As the website says
The event pulls together the leading minds in community management, relations and online collaboration to discuss, debate and continue to refine the art of building an effective and capable community.
In true community fashion the majority of sessions will be an unconference format where the topics for discussion will be decided on the day and will be characterized by discussions as opposed to lectures.
And the cost — FREE. So if you’re heading out to OSCON, which runs from July 20 to 24th, you may want to come out a couple days early. Or you may just want to attend the event. Its got an amazing list of attendees already signed up.
I’m attending Enterprise 2.0 here in Boston and although it’s relatively small, I’m finding it pretty interesting. Case in point, James Duncan, Joyent‘s Director of platform strategy. James is staffing Joyent’s pod at the event and an hour ago I dragged him away for a quick podcast.
Some of the topics James tackles:
How James got into the cloud in the first place.
From Fotango to Zimki to Canon to Ski bum (and his connection with Canonical’s Simon Wardley).
How a bad experience with Ruby and an epiphany with the Git version control system made him “Reasonably Smart“
What he see’s happening in the cloud in the next 12-24 mos.
How he enjoys the immediacy the cloud brings of taking a concept from idea to deployed app in hours rather than days and how, at the push of a button, it allows you to “hang your bits out for judgement.”
At Austin Cloud Camp on Saturday I ran into Ubuntu linux developer and Canonical employee, Dustin Kirkland. Dustin is on the server developer team at Canonical and, as he explains it, focuses on various aspects of virtualization, the plumbing layer below cloud computing. I grabbed Dustin for a few minutes and chatted with him about last week’s release and what he’s been working on.
To get some insight into the release and what it means, I grabbed some time with Simon Wardley of Canonical. Simon, who joined Canonical near the end of last year, is the person tasked with looking into cloud computing for the company in order to figure out what it means for them, what it means for the industry and ultimately, determining what Canonical should be doing about this change that’s occurring in our industry.
Simon Wardley, setting the controls for the heart of the cloud.
Some of the topics Simon tackles:
How did Simon get his present job and what was he doing before?
When looking at adopting cloud computing three risks need to be evaluated
The risk of doing nothing (which should be balanced against the next two)
Transitional risk
Out sourcing risks
Cloud standards will emerge through the marketplace rather than via committee
Why Ubuntu went with Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus.
Today’s release is a technical preview, “a starting point in a journey.”
For the “Karmic Koala” release due in October, they will be focusing on persistency, policies and portability. They are also working with a bunch of management tool providers to allow users a choice of how they want to manage their environment.
Whats coming next year in the cloud space:
A hybrid model: Private clouds that allow bursting between them and public clouds.
Portability between providers will become a big issue.
A lot of standardization at the infrastructure layer of the stack
An explosion of innovation
The IT department will face real governance issues
Open source will continue to be critically important
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.
The great thing about cloud-based applications is that it doesn’t matter what they’re written in or how they’re constructed, all that matters is that they do what you need them to. What’s the back-end of your phone system written in? Odds are you don’t know and don’t care.
That being said, there are group of folks, lets call them “developers” who are interested in what goes on behind the curtain. For that group of people and others who find this kind of thing interesting and informative, read on.
What to build Blueprint out of?
When the team first started developing Lombardi Blueprint, they began with Java on the back-end and a combination of HTML and Flash on the front end. When, due to plug-in issues, this didn’t work they moved to pure HTML and JavaScript using Dojo. This too had its issues, namely performance and a lack of visibility.
Around this time Google Web Toolkit (GWT) 1.3 was released and the team decided to give it go. This turned out to be the right choice. GWT, which compiles Java code into JavaScript as you go, enabled the team to write both the back and front ends in 100% Java.
GWT, which was originally released in May of ’06, is 100% open source licensed under the Apache License 2.0.
Here’s a good entry posted by Olivier Modica, the Blueprint engineering manager that simply lays out the advantages that GWT provides the Blueprint team: How GWT is enabling Blueprint’s agility.
Gory Detail and Extra-credit reading
If you really want to dive into what the team did with GWT and Blueprint, check out the video of the talk Alex Moffat, lead architect on Blueprint, and Damon Lundin gave at Google I/O back in May.
Posted by Barton George 
