Some of the ground Mark covers

• The cloud, Ubuntu and OpenStack involvement
• The developer story: connecting the dots between app work on the client and testing and then deployment on the other end.
• The world of DevOps and how JuJu fits in
• Apple’s iOS as a developer platform and where Linux might have the edge going forward

Extra-credit reading

• Mark Shuttleworth part one: UbuntuTV
• Hadoop World: Ubuntu, Hadoop and Juju
• What is DevOps?

To help you through the process, Crowbar lead architect Rob Hirschfeld has put together the two videos below.  The first, Crowbar Build (on cloud server), shows you how to use a cloud server to create a Crowbar ISO using the standard build process.  The second,  Advanced Crowbar Build (local) shows how to build a Crowbar v1.2 ISO using advanced techniques on a local desktop using a virtual machine.

Crowbar Build (on cloud server)

Advanced Crowbar Build (local)

Pau for now…

Some of the ground Mark covers

• Making the next version of Ubuntu server better for Hadoop and big data
• (0:34) What are “charms” and what do they have to do with service orchestration
• (2:05) Charm school and learning to write Juju charms
• (2:54)  Where does “Orchestra” fit in and how can it be used to spin up OpenStack
• (3:40) What’s next for Juju

But wait, there’s more!

Stay tuned for more interviews from last week’s Hadoop world.  On tap are:

• Todd Papaioannou from Battery Ventures
• John Gray of Facebook
• Erik Swan of Splunk
• Nosh Petigara of 10gen/MongoDB.

Extra-credit reading

• Ubuntu Juju Delivers Cloud Server Magic
• Ubuntu cloud update — OpenStack, Eucalyptus, Ensemble & Orchestra
• Hadoop cluster with Ubuntu server and Ensemble

Pau for now..

Some of the ground Rich covers:

• Eucalyptus’s major release which is coming out in the next 4 weeks
• [0:40] The RightScale myCloud integration that they announced yesterday (linking Eucalyptus private clouds with various public clouds)
• [2:01] Eucalyptus’s relationship with Canonical and how their interests are diverging
• [3:15] Where specifically Eucalyptus is targeted
• [4:25] What are some of their goals and product features they’d like to add over the next year

Extra-credit reading

• Ubuntu cloud update — OpenStack, Eucalyptus, Ensemble & Orchestra
• The Cloud is a marathon — Marten Mickos, Eucalyptus CEO
• Talkin’ to Eucalyptus Founder & CTO — Rich Wolski

Last Spring I visited Jimmy’s home to check out what he was working on in his “free time.”  Here’s what I saw (he keeps telling me he’s got much cooler stuff since I shot this so I may have to do a “geekquel”)

Some of the things Jimmy show us:

• The low-power chips he’s playing with
• His experimentation with user interfaces and superman glasses
• His mini rack of servers
• The various forms of desktop virtualization and OS’s he uses
• Laying out and designing boards by mail
• His micro recording studio

Extra-Credit reading

• Jimmy Pike: Back to the Future with Light Weight Servers
• Willy Wonka and the Dell Factory
• The Register –  Dell chief stuffs data center into suitcase

Pau for now…

Who cares?

Application developers and IT service providers and admins who are setting up cloud POC’s are perfect candidates for this pre-configured testing and development environment.  With regards to industries, areas where there is a lot of software development work like Hosters, Telco & Communications, Media & Entertainment and Web 2.0 businesses are prime markets for the Dell UEC solution.

So what’s in it?

The solutions’ basic components are Dell PowerEdge C systems plus a Dell-specific download of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (made up of the Ubuntu operating system and the Eucalyptus platform for private cloud computing).  To simplify getting the whole shebang up and running Dell and Canonical are providing the following:

• Reference Architecture: Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud on Dell Servers Stnd Edition
• Deployment Guide: Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud on Dell Servers Stnd Edition

Here’s a peak at the hardware that supports it:

The Dell UEC cloud solution pod.

• Cloud Compute Server – PowerEdge C6100 that embeds four discrete compute nodes in a single enclosure
• Cloud Front-end Server – PowerEdge C2100 server that acts as an all-in-controller and runs all shared UEC-related services
• Infrastructure Server – PowerEdge C2100 that runs two components of the cloud infrastructure:
  • Cloud Deployment and Landscape Management
  • Cloud Storage
• Network switch – PowerConnect 6248

And on the software side…

The architecture looks something like this:

The Dell UEC cloud solution architecture

The software components are:

• Cloud Controller (CLC) – the cloud portal
• Walrus Controller (W) – the cloud’s storage repository
• Cluster Controller (CC) – the controller for a up to 1024 compute cores grouped together as a cluster
• Storage Controller (SC) – the controller for cluster’s storage repository
• Compute Node (CN) – cloud’s compute node

And on the support side…

If you’re looking for systems management and support services with your order, you are in luck.  Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has put together UEC Assist, a support service built specifically for Dell customers deploying SE Edition and which is delivered by Canonical’s Global Services and Support team.

Its all about efficiency

From a Dell DCS (the group at Dell behind this) point of view, this offering fits in well with our strategy of bringing total solutions to market that optimize efficiency at every layer, from code to servers to storage.  The open source Dell UEC solution is tailor made to deliver a ready to go IaaS solution.

Extra-credit reading:

• Mark Shuttleworth’s blog: Private cloud “in a box” from Dell

• Mark Shuttleworth on UEC and OpenStack
• Ubuntu, the Cloud and the Future — Neil Levine
• The Cloud is a marathon — Marten Mickos, Eucalyptus CEO

Pau for now..

I was particularly interested in getting his thoughts on Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) which will be available this week from Dell as the Dell | Canonical UEC Solution (along with the UEC software, the solution is based on our PowerEdge C2100 and C6100 and comes with a reference architecture and deployment guide).   The other topic I wanted to get his insight into was OpenStack.

Here’s what Mark had to say:

What Mark talked about

• How Mark has settled into his role as non-CEO (he is still chairman).
• What he is focusing on these days: the cloud and product design e.g. Unity.
• [1:45] The thinking behind UEC and the combined Dell Canonical offering.
• [3:45] OpenStack and Canonical’s participation
• Working with both OpenStack and Eucalyptus and how both of these are central to the process of standardization that we are starting to see at the infrastructure layer of cloud computing.

Extra-credit reading:

• PowerEdge C powers OpenStack Install Fest
• Chatting with Eucalyptus Co-founder about OpenStack
• Ubuntu founder stops by Round Rock

Pau for now…

Eucalyptus allows enterprises to set up open source infrastructure-as-a-service private clouds.  Eucalyptus is also 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 Graziano had  to say:

Some of the ground Graziano covers:

• What goals do the Eucalyptus team have for the summit
• They’ve recently hired a community manager – Mark Atwood
• What are their goals for their next release

Extra-credit reading:

• The Cloud is a marathon — Marten Mickos, Eucalyptus CEO
• Talkin’ to Eucalyptus Founder & CTO — Rich Wolski

Pau for now…

Some of topics I tackle:

• How Dell’s Data Center Solutions Group is designing servers for high-end cloud computing
• How Dell is integrating hardware with software in cloud servers
• Coming soon: Dell Cloud Solution for Web Applications/Leveraging Joyent‘s software
• Dell’s cloud partner program – where Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, Aster Data and Greenplum fit in.
• Dell’s commitment to OpenStack

Extra-credit reading:

• Rackspace Partner Leadership Summit: Top 7 Day 1 Highlights
• Rackspace Partner Leadership Summit: Top 14 Keynote Highlights
• Meet OpenStack’s Community Manager
• What’s happening — A Dell / OpenStack Update

Pau for now…

Here’s what Neil had to say:

Some of the topics Neil tackles:

• The next Ubuntu release “Maverick Meerkat” and its geek-a-licious launch date: 10.10.10.
• Look for Maverick to make Eucalyptus even easier to deploy and use.
• Data processing and data analytics is one of the key use cases in the cloud and Canonical is looking to move up the stack and provide deep integration for other apps like Hadoop and NoSQL.
• What are some of the areas of focus for next year’s two releases i.e. 11.04 and 11.10.
• Project ensemble: what it is and what its goals are.

Extra-credit reading

• The Register: Canonical fluffs one-click Ubuntu cloud stack
• The VAR guy: Canonical adjusts Ubuntu linux partner strategy

Pau for now…

Last week I interviewed Rick on the first day of the inaugural OpenStack design summit and I wanted to catch up with him and get his thoughts on how it had gone.  This is what he had to say:

Some of the topics Rick tackles:

• How it went engaging a very large technical group (100+) in an open design discussion patterned after an Ubuntu Developer Summit.
• Some of the decisions he thought would be no brainers, turned out differently e.g. OVF (open virtualization format) and keeping the storage and compute groups separated.
• Since the summit involved representatives from over 20 companies, some of them competitors, how good were people at putting away their business biases/agendas?
• How far they got (hint they got requirements from everyone for the first release).
• They’ve already gotten their first code contributions.
• How they plan to build a community: actively looking to hire a community manager.   In the meantime its actively growing and in a week they’ve gone from 10 people in the IRC channel to 150 on Tuesday.

Extra-credit reading:

• New York Times Bits: The Recipe for Clouds Goes Open-Source
• The VAR guy: OpenStack Compute: The Next Cloud Standard?
• Forrester: As Cloud Platforms Battle For Credibility, OpenStack Is Pretty Solid

But wait there’s more…

I got back from OSCON last night with a fist full of videos.  In addition to the above, coming soon to a browser near you are the following interviews:

• Brett Piatt with more OpenStack goodness
• J.P. Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at BT — Nature doesn’t require SLAs
• Simon Phipps about his new company ForgeRock
• Neil Levine, VP at Canonical about what’s in store for Ubuntu.

Pau for now…

Rick talked to me about what he brought with him from Canonical as well as the details behind OpenStack Compute.

Some of the topics Rick tackles:

• What is the OpenStack Compute project (hint its a fully open sourced IaaS project)
• Leveraging what Rick learned from the Ubuntu community, including a regular six month cadence.
• Rick’s goals for design summit: develop a roadmap for the first release, spec out the software and spend the last two days prototyping and hacking.
• Why they went with the Apache 2 license and why not AGPL?
• The Rackspace API (NASA had already started to switch from the Amazon API before combing
• The project’s core principles: open, open, open

Extra-credit reading:

• Press Release: Rackspace Open Sources Cloud Platform; Plans to Collaborate with NASA and other Industry Leaders
• Blog: Introducing OpenStack — an open source cloud platform
• Blog: NASA’s chief cloud architect talks OpenStack
• Blog: Talkin’ to the project lead of OpenStack Object Storage

Pau for now…

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…
• What Eucalyptus is doing with Canonical and the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.
• What Eucalyptus is focusing on for the next year.

Extra-credit reading:

• Talkin’ to Eucalyptus Founder & CTO — Rich Wolski
• The Register article based on this interview: Ex-MySQL chief puts open source in its place

Pau for now…

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:

• Technical white paper: Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud Architecture
• Community Documentation:  Getting Started with Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud
• Eucalyptus Resource Center
• Eucalyptus Beginners Guide: UEC Edition

(The last 3 items I grabbed from Dustin’s Blog)

Pau for now…

]]> http://bartongeorge.net/2010/05/18/network-world-review-of-ubuntu-enterprise-cloud/feed/ 0 barton808 blackeubuntulogo http://bartongeorge.net/2010/04/21/our-new-high-performance-analytics-cloud-server/ http://bartongeorge.net/2010/04/21/our-new-high-performance-analytics-cloud-server/#comments Thu, 22 Apr 2010 02:14:51 +0000 Barton George http://bartongeorge.net/?p=3019 ]]> Last but not least in our tour of the first flight of servers in Dell’s PowerEdge C line is the C2100.  This was filmed last month at our launch right after we closed down our whisper suite.  Click below and join solutions architect Rafael Zamora as he leads you through the thrills, chills and spills of this cool new machine.

Spoiler Alert! A few Highlights

• This machine is a great high performance data analytics and cloud optimized storage server.  It’s perfect for use in conjunction with software from our Cloud ISV partners Joyent, Aster Data, Canonical or Greenplum.
• The entire front can be jam-packed with disk drives for mega storage.  You can get up to 24TB by loading twelve 3.5inch 2TB drives.
• While the C2100 has same system board as the  C1100, it comes with twice the real estate in a 2U form factor.
• There’s even a platform for two additional drives that you can use for a bunch of different purposes such as separating production and non-production traffic.

Pau for now….

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.
• Marten Mickos coming on board as CEO.  How it came about.
• 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.

Pau for now…

If you’re wondering about the funky game show-like setting, I shot this after hours on the day of our launch in the whisper suite.  Your guide, as before, is the incomparable Dell Solutions Architect, Rafael Zamora.

A few highlights

• The C1100 is a high memory, cluster optimized, compute node
• Dont let its slim pizza box looks fool you, upfront you can pack either four 3.5 inch drives or ten 2.5 inch drives.
• For high memory optimized compute you can get 18 DIMM sticks for 144GB of RAM.
• Comes with your choice of either Intel’s Nehalem or Westmere processors.
• Raf also gives a couple of examples of recent customers and how they’ve decide to configure their units.
• The C1100 will also serve as the cloud management server for the upcoming Joyent solution and the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.

Tune in next week when Rafael will take us through the PowerEdge C2100.

Pau for now…

Some of the highlights:

• The PowerEdgeC 6100 holds the equivalent of 4 systems which have been packaged into “sleds,” each containing boards, RAM and microprocessors.
• Upfront you can put a ton o’ disk drives, either 24 x 2.5″ drives or 12 x 3.5″ drives.
• Great for markets like HPC clustering and search engines where compute density is key.  (This is not intended for running general purpose apps like Exchange, SQL or Oracle).
• It will serve as the compute node in the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud solution from our partner Canonical.

Still to come, overviews of the C2100 and C1100.

Extra-Credit Reading:

• insideHPC article about the C6100 based off of the above video.

Pau for now…

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).

Extra-Credit reading

• eWeek: Dell Offers Cloud-Optimized Infrastructure, Services
• Information Week: Dell Offers Turnkey Cloud Computing Package
• The Register: Dell mainstreams cloud servers
• DataCenterKnowledge: New Dell Servers Target Cloud Customers

Pau for now…

Some of the topics Mark tackles:

• Where Canonical is currently working with Dell
• Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (to build your “own little EC2″)  and how its doing
• Passing the CEO mantle to Jane Silber in March
• 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

Extra-credit reading

• Article in the Register based on this podcast:  Ubuntu’s Lucid Lynx to Facebook and Twitter you

Pau for now…

Today he popped by Dell here in Austin to chat.  I grabbed him for a few minutes right before lunch. Here is the result:

Some of the topics Mark tackles:

• The release yesterday of Dell’s Mini netbook with Ubuntu Moblin Remix – Developer Edition. (More details on the release from the Dell blog.)
• Mark’s keynote yesterday at Linuxcon and the themes of cadence, quality and design.
• His kerfluffle with the Debian community around release schedules.
• The cloud-related goals for next month’s Ubuntu 9.10 release, Karmic Koala:
  • To be able to deploy your own cloud across 5-10 servers in 15 mins to an hour
  • Be able to enable private clouds that are completely EC2 compatible
  • Ability to create a library of virtual appliances that will deploy on EC2 or private clouds
• The announcement earlier this week of the 10.04 Long Term Support (LTS) release named “Lucid Lynx.”
• Mark’s thoughts on Windows 7 or as he calls it, “the wonderful Service Pack for Vista.”
• How long until profitability.

Pau for now…

Tuesday I listened in on the RighScale webinar: How to Build Scalable Websites in the Cloud.  This is part two of my thoughts and notes from the event.  (Note: it doesn’t look like it’s been posted yet but it should be available here soon).

The clouds providers that Right Scale works with.

As I discussed last time, RightScale acts as a management platform between cloud providers and Apps.

Which Cloud Providers do they work with?

If you double click on the IAAS bit in the yesterday’s slide you get something like the above.  Right Scale works on top of Amazon, coming soon to Rackspace’s Slicehost, Sun/Oracle’s cloud), Eucalyptus theEC2-compatible open source alternative that allows you to set up “private clouds” (BTW as anyone who attended Austin Cloud camp knows I’m using “private cloud” under duress, Gordon Haff does a good job explaining my heartburn) and VMWare.

Linux more robust than Windows

When asked about OS’s supported the answer was Windows as well as Ubuntu and CentOS.  Their CEO did admit that currently Windows support is not as robust as Linux.  They actually began with CentOS and according to one of their team have recently begun supporting Ubuntu more fully.   When I asked about other Linux flavors, Debian, SuSE etc. they said that there were “licensing issues” standing in the way.  I should have asked about OpenSolaris

Why do you look to the clouds?

During the webinar they polled the 200 odd attendees: “what’s driving you to the cloud?”  The results (as you’ll notice, you were allowed to vote for more than one):

• 80% Scalability
• 73% Cost Savings
• 59% On Demand access
• 28% Back-up and recovery
• 06% Other

Not surprisingly Scalability came in number 1.  As if to underscore the point they brought out everbody’s favorite case study of exploding demand, Animoto.  Thankfully they had another example of uneven demand, iFixit (see below).  As an aside, one example I’d like to see charted is the attendee who mentioned that their agency is responsible for posting election results and were “not prepared for the interest worldwide, for Proposition 8.”

It was interesting to see that cost savings came in a close second, its always hard to measure particularly over the long haul but the perceived cost benefit is definitely strong in most folks mind.

Right Scale fighting for Server voting rights

And in conclusion…I’m always intrigued with the way English language morphs and evolves so I thought it was really interesting how the word “vote” is being used in the cloud (or at least by RightScale).  Basically they use a “voting process” when scaling.  Here’s how one of their team explained it.

Once a machine hits the scale up threshold  it places a vote to scale up.  When enough machines vote to scale up i.e. 51% if that that is what the decision threshold is set at, then new servers are provisioned and configured.  The same goes for scaling down.

Don’t know if this usage is new or a throw back from mainframes or from some other industry but I like it.

Pau for now…

The presenters were their CEO, their head of marketing and a mini team of techies.  Below is part one of some of my thoughts and takeaways.  But first a slight digression…

Enter the Dolphin Master

One thing I noticed during the presentation and which warmed my heart was that MySQL played prominently in a bunch of the slides.  It was only today when I was poking around the RightScale site that I saw the press release from a few weeks ago announcing that Marten Mickos, former MySQL CEO and Sun employee joined the RightScale board of directors.  Its interesting but not surprising to note in the release that Marten calls out Sun and Canonical (the commercial sponsor behind Ubuntu) as two strategic partners helping to expand the RightScale ecosystem.

Where Right Scale fits within the tri-sected cloud.

Where they play in the Cloud(s)

RightScale positions themselves as a cloud management platform or as I like to think of it “a cloud tamer.”  If you split the cloud in three — software as a service, platform as a service and infrastructure as a service — they play in the last space. Basically Right Scale sits on top of Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) and can handle all the tricky bits so you don’t have to.

Choose or choose not to choose

For those who want more control over their infrastructure RightScale will allow you to “choose among a variety of development languages, software stacks, data stores and cloud providers.” For those less intrepid in the cloud they have server templates that you can start off with.

One of the key benefits they stressed was getting rid of vendor lock-in, “so that you never get locked in to a single provider.”  You’ll notice on the X axis above they show lock-in decreasing and portability increasing as you move to the right.  My question however is that with Right Scale aren’t you simply locked in to a different layer of the cloud?  Doesn’t the control point simply move up the stack?  Just wondering…

Tune in tomorrow for part deux!

Extra Credit Reading/Listening

• What is MySQL founder Monty Widenius up to post MySQL/post Sun? The Open Database Alliance and his MariaDB – May ’09
• An interview with Marten Mickos, the day the MySQL deal with Sun closed — Feb ’08.
• An interview with Marten Mickos after he keynoted Canonical’s first (and last) Ubuntu Live — Aug ’07.

Pau for now…

Some of the topics Dustin Tackles:

• KVM, Canonical’s hypervisor of choice
• Ubuntu’s next release and its focus on Eucalyptus to enable companies to set-up their own EC2 compatible “private clouds” based on Ubuntu servers.
• What Dustin likes most about cloud computing (hint: think green)
• What he likes most about working at Canonical

Update: And on a related note — Eucalyptus goes commercial with $5.5M funding round

Pau for now…

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:

My interview with Mark (9:51)  Listen (Mp3) Listen (ogg)

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.