A few days ago, I published some 2012 Cloud Computing predictions from Warren Heffelfinger (CEO – GoGrid), James Urquhart (Cloud Writer for GigaOm & VP of Product Strategies at enStratus) and Larry Warnock (CEO of Gazzang). The beginning of any year is critical to not only reflect back on what transpired, but also to gaze into the future to see what is to come. With Cloud Computing, to quote an over-used phrase, “the sky’s the limit” and while there are some similarity within these and the previous predictions, there are also some distinct opinions as to where we are all headed in the cloud.

In this article, I have compiled more insightful predictions from another stellar list of cloud experts, namely:

• John Keagy (Chairman & Founder – GoGrid)
• Carson Sweet (CEO – CloudPassage)
• Antonio Piraino (CTO – ScienceLogic)

Below are their predictions so read on to see how they stack up!

John Keagy (Chairman & Founder – GoGrid)

1. There will be less use of the word “cloud” generically and more of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS or “cloud infrastructure, cloud platforms, and cloud software.” Folks are starting to understand the difference between Salesforce.com and GoGrid / Amazon. In fact, folks that really know IT are starting to cringe at folks that talk about cloud computing without understanding that Salesforce and GoGrid are quite different. We can expect some more specific dialog even from the mainstream media.
2. More vendors will be called out for “cloud washing.” Duh. No longer can you confuse outsourcing with on-demand.
3. The market will become more educated to the differences in VMware vs. XEN clouds. XEN offerings will emerge as more differentiated and cost-effective and equally secure.
4. On-prem / off-prem cloud bursting will be debunked as a primary use case. Although we may actually see cloud bursting in the wild 2012, the network costs and latency will not make it compelling. Lots of pundits will theorize boldly about how great it is from their blogger pulpits but the folks living in reality won’t see success.
5. Amazon will shine brighter than ever as the beacon of the future of computing. Thank goodness for Amazon. They are defining a new future and giving it credibility. Trouble is, other than GoGrid, no other service provider takes responsibility for building the technology of the future. And cloud = service. Hmmm.

Carson Sweet (CEO – CloudPassage/GoGrid Partner)

1. Delivery of SaaS via virtual appliance (a.k.a. privately hosted cloud instances) will take hold.
   As mid-market and large enterprises consider the pros and cons of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, a large contingent with be dis-satisfied with the level of transparency and control provided by SaaS providers. At the same time, they will seek the ease of ownership, instant access and low effort offered by SaaS. Concerns about multi-tenancy will also continue to hold back a large contingent of potential cloud users, especially for more sensitive applications. Software delivery using hosted virtual appliances will strike an attractive balance for these potential users, offering on-demand access and scale while delivering superior control and reducing concerns about multi-tenancy. The demand for virtual appliance software delivery will drive IaaS providers to migrate towards (but not into) a PaaS model. Conversely, SaaS and PaaS providers will offer more flexibility and control over how their service offerings are deployed.
2. IaaS services will continue to coalesce around combinations of managed hardware, pure cloud infrastructure, and in-line access to software and services.
   As cloud deployments continue to grow, large cloud enterprises will hit scalability issues. IaaS providers will suffer migrations from the cloud back to collocated hardware, and IaaS providers will respond to protect the large enterprise business. Established infrastructure providers will leverage their legacies of large-scale, heterogeneous infrastructure management to offer access to combinations of multi-tenant cloud, dedicated private cloud, and traditional collocated hardware environments. Through acquisition or heavy investment in R&D, providers will leverage highly automated virtual infrastructure provisioning and delivery. The most successful will deliver a very wide variety of cloud infrastructure and virtual appliance services in a high-margin, self-service format. This will enable them to retain large-scale cloud enterprises while continuing to capture the large population of self-service, mid-market/business unit customers in a self-service approach. As the total field of cloud-hosted SaaS and consumer startups grows dramatically, IaaS providers’ ability to capture and service smaller customers at scale and grow some portion into hybrid hardware/software cloud environments will be a differentiation and competitive advantage.
3. IaaS providers will seek to differentiate and diversify to become “one-stop-shops”, and some will reach the critical mass needed to capture the emerging large-enterprise cloud services market.
   IaaS providers will seek to differentiate through partnership ecosystems that allow customers integrated access to supporting services (e.g. security, domain naming services, directory services) and application deployments (e.g. WordPress, Hadoop, Apache). The best providers will offer integrated orchestration of infrastructure, supporting services and applications (e.g. RightScale, Chef, Puppet). Providers will quickly move to increase market penetration and retention through the addition of integration, customization, training and management services. Some providers will establish stronger positions in vertical markets by packaging infrastructure, services and software to meet the needs of specific industries (e.g. regulatory requirements, specialized computing use cases, workload variability). Those providers that build the critical mass needed to obtain and retain cloud infrastructure services with large enterprises will become dominant market players; others will follow with focus on the mid-markets, and will rely more heavily on cloud broker / aggregation channels.

Antonio Piraino (CTO – ScienceLogic/GoGrid Customer)

1. Cloud management rules – Logistics usually trump management when it comes to new technologies, and the cloud is no different. Now that cloud providers have brought their platforms to market, having visibility into and control of those cloud resources will be paramount in 2012: A centralized view into performance across physical, virtual and cloud-based resources is a requirement for delivering optimal business services.
2. Security gets serious – Security breaches are nothing new but in 2012, cloud’s relative immaturity and high profile will likely motivate a serious attack. The silver lining will be that cloud computing service providers and their customers will come away stronger. Security and disaster recovery plans will be taken more seriously.
3. Acquisitions will be horizontal – Acquisitions in 2012 will be based more on the technologies needed to round out portfolios rather than simply buying smaller firms to boost market share. Look for telcos, social media firms, large system integrators and managed service providers to partner or buy out the cloud onramp providers, orchestration technologies, security technologies and IT monitoring/management firms.
4. Cloud defies the laws of demand – Cloud will act as a “Giffen Good” in 2012, meaning that people will consume more of it even as the price rises. Lower budgets make cloud’s ability to break down costs into smaller increments a more attractive prospect. As cloud service prices increase, it will take a larger portion of the already cut budget, which will mean there is less budget remaining, further driving the cost-cutting measures of cloud computing adoption. Cloud service providers tempted to decrease prices should take note.
5. Cloud wars commence – The most renowned consumer cloud environments such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Salesforce.com will start cloud wars based on price and economies of scale. And, since these companies are bringing enterprise grade services to federal and local government institutions as well as corporations of all sizes, the wars will pull in the managed hosting and data center collocation providers too. The majority will only be successful when they identify niche markets where they can deliver new services. Cloud wars will create coalitions leading to more holistic and innovative cloud solutions and differentiated service catalogs rather than traditional price wars.

Be sure to read Part 1 of this series on 2012 Cloud Computing Predictions.

What are your predictions for Cloud Computing in 2012? Any thoughts on the ones from our cloud experts above? Leave a comment and let us know.

In January and February of 2011, GoGrid polled over 500 IT professionals, CTOs and developers and asked for their thoughts on cloud computing, how they currently use the cloud and where they think the industry is headed. The results of this survey shed new light on how the cloud stands in 2011 and what we can expect as we move towards 2012.

We have taken the key findings of the survey and created several interesting charts and graphics. Because of the extensive nature of the survey, we will be releasing the findings in topical blog posts over the coming months, but you can download the full survey results data at any time by clicking here.

With much speculation and debate about what cloud computing is, the first questions we asked the industry is what they believe cloud computing encompassed – Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Infrastructure as a Service (SaaS).

Question: When you think of “cloud”, what does it mean to you? What does the “cloud” encompass?

As seen in the responses to this question the majority of IT professionals are in agreement that all 3 services make up cloud computing, but emphasized Software as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service. More importantly, we wanted to know what percentage of the IT industry actually uses cloud technology for their business. Most people are familiar with SaaS (e.g., Gmail and SalesForce). But interestingly, IaaS seems to be almost on par with SaaS according to respondents.

Questions: Using your answer from question #1, are you currently using the cloud?

According to our respondents, 65% of IT professionals surveyed use cloud computing services. These findings highlight the fact that the industry is growing more accustomed to what cloud computing is and are beginning to migrate to using cloud services in their work and daily lives. This could be from a purely experimental perspective, or project-related. Others are implementing pure cloud infrastructure as a replacement for bare metal environments. And yet others might be creating hybrid hosting infrastructures as well. Obviously, the possibilities are countless.

To learn more about our survey methodology or to see all the results and data, please download the GoGrid Cloud Survey Report.

The word “cloud” has become a bit of a buzzword in the IT industry. Well, let me rephrase that, it has become a HUGE and overused buzzword not just within various tech sectors, it has also infiltrated the lives of us all. A year or two ago, if you mentioned “cloud” or even “cloud computing” to the average passerby, they might have looked back at you with a cloudy look on their face (sorry). Terms like “public cloud,” “private cloud,” “hybrid cloud” and “false cloud” are currently thrown around and peppered throughout conversations. And now, especially exemplified by Microsoft’s recent ad campaign, the phrase “To the cloud!” seems to have brought clouds to everyone, including the general public.

We are being bombarded from every angle. So what do they mean?

Some seem to be useful in our everyday lives:

Others seem to be a bit ominous (as is seen in this tweet from Marc Benioff – Chairman & CEO of SalesForce.com):

But even with everyone talking about “clouds” now, they are still confusing.

The truth is, clouds can take on many different forms, shapes, sizes and characteristics.

“Cloud” is one of the most confusing terms currently in the computing world, but we aim to clear up this nebulous term. Today we release a new white paper titled “Skydiving Through the Clouds” which explains what clouds are, how they work, who uses them and why they are becoming of growing importance within the IT industry.

Download “Skydiving Through the Clouds”

Over the past few days, I have seen a lot of articles, tweets and commentary about how the recent failure within Danger (who was purchased by Microsoft about a year ago) of data for the T-Mobile Sidekick was “the Cloud’s fault,” and this really bothered me. As Microsoft is poised to do something with the Danger brand (“Project Pink“) as well as soon release their Cloud Computing Platform called Azure, this could not have come at a worse time for them. There is obviously a lot of attention being paid to the cell phone market place as the Android platform is trying to make a positioning move to attempt to dethrone Apple’s iPhone. The Danger (now Microsoft) Sidekick was a device that provided great functionality “back in the day” (I actually went through quite a few generations of Sidekicks – from the B&W version up to a few color ones a few years ago). The Sidekick has a tiny market share and the user demographic is really much younger (e.g., teens) than the iPhone/Android/Blackberry crowd.

Last week, the Danger data network started experiencing some degradation of service where users were unable to access their data. A quick side note about the Sidekick, unlike other data-containing cellphones, the Sidekick stores all of the data (contacts, appointments, pictures, etc.) in a network datastore and not within the device itself. Most users rely solely on this service and don’t back up their data to a local computer. Other “smarter” phones like the Blackberry and iPhone rely on data synchronization with a physical computer or an Exchange Server to reliably back up their data. In my opinion, this is where the failure of the Sidekick started – single remote source of data only.

Details on the data issue are still being revealed (recently, there is a discussion about “dogfooding” or even “sabotage” where Microsoft may have wanted to replace the existing technology with their own – I will let the conspiracy theory experts battle that one out) but my understanding is that Microsoft wanted to upgrade the SAN (Storage Area Network) that powered the Sidekick data network and contracted with Hitachi to get the job done. Unfortunately for reasons unknown, no backup of the data was performed prior to this upgrade attempt (Failure #2). The upgrade of the SAN proceeded without a backup in place and the data was “destroyed” resulting in thousands of Sidekick users stuck without their data. As of this writing, some users have actually been able to recover data (e.g., if they didn’t power off their device or if they did a “reverse sync” from their Sidekick back to the Danger servers – I don’t have details on this so please don’t try anything without doing any research first).

This brings me back to the title of this post: this fiasco is NOT a failure of Cloud Computing, it is simply a failure of not following standard IT practices, ones that even an average computer user knows. Back up your data, your servers and your infrastructure regularly and store it securely in different locations.

It is somewhat understandable (and unfortunate) that mainstream media and even the tech community jump so quickly to the conclusion that the Cloud is at fault here. Cloud Computing is relatively new and as with any new technology or service, people are looking for any and all holes therein. The same could be said about the launch of eCommerce back in the mid-1990′s. There were failures, fraud and other issues associated with it and the naysayers were quick to point out only the negatives of the movement. Today, people use eCommerce for everything and could not live without it (there are still issues with fraud and security but the technology has evolved and stabilized). Cloud Computing is now going through a similar hype-cycle and we are in the phase where many are adopting and using it wholeheartedly but others are sitting in wait, hoping for some sort of a failure to point out the disadvantages of it.

With recent Gmail failures, users were quick to blame the Cloud. Gmail is a great example of a SaaS application (which many, including me, call a “Cloud Application”). However, Gmail has been around longer than the term “Cloud Computing” so have we simply compartmentalized it into a Cloud Application category? It is not a huge issue if we have. However, what DOES bother me is when a failure happens therein and people simply say “oh, it’s the Cloud’s fault”. Sorry, but what would we have said if a similar failure happened 4 years ago? “Oh, it’s a failure of SaaS” and “SaaS is evil”?

Let’s face it, hardware fails. It is not bulletproof. Power outages happen. Generators don’t turn on. Code has bugs (after all, to err is human and hardware and software are created by humans). We know this as facts and there is no way to avoid it. What you CAN do is work to minimize your risk, downtime and disruptions by following standard IT practices. And, you can even use the Cloud as a means to help your achieve reliability, stability and uptime.

Here is a list of 5 things you might want to consider part of your IT “Best Practices”:

1. Backups – Back up often. Set up automatic as well as manual backup procedures. Store your data locally AND somewhere completely geographically distinct from your infrastructure. On GoGrid, for example, you have persistent storage within your VM. That can be 1 place for a backup to reside. But also use Cloud Storage (which is a redundant SAN-like device) to store other backups. Lastly, and I always recommend this to any GoGrid users (or anyone who has a website or web-application for that matter), have a 3rd party backup solution. There are many out there, some are free, and some cost. Remember that you really do need pay a premium in order to ensure reliability and dependability.
2. Redundancy – Physical servers AND virtualized servers do encounter issues. You would never put all of your eggs in one basket so why do it with your infrastructure! You should ensure that you set up a “high availability” (HA) infrastructure where you have 2 (or more) of everything, whether they be all active or as hot or warm standbys. That way, if something fails, you can use the other hardware (virtualized or physical) to minimize disruption. I participated in the writing/testing of this article (“How to Set Up a Load Balanced and Redundant LAMP Web Application on GoGrid“) on our GoGrid wiki which is a great starting point for setting up an HA environment.
3. Failovers – Unfortunately, having a failover environment comes at a premium as well. Most people, unless they are hugely successful, decide to put off setting up a Disaster Recovery (DR) environment due to costs and the time it takes to do so. That is, until their primary site goes down for hours or days (hey T-Mobile/Microsoft…what happened here?), then DR suddenly moves to the top of the list. GoGrid, for example, has partnered with Stratonomic to provide DR solutions that won’t break the bank and provides you with some definite peace of mind.
4. “Hybrid Hosting” – One of the unique and market-first offerings that GoGrid provides is “Cloud Connect” which is the ability to connect cloud front-end infrastructure with physical back-end infrastructure. The advantage of this might not be immediately apparent to many users, however, as a “best practice” sometimes you need to think “outside the box” whether that box is physical or virtual. By setting up your front-end environment using the cloud (scalable, dynamic, elastic, etc.), you can optimize your web server environment for traffic and redundancy. Using physical boxes in the backend allows you to have additional services (like managed backups or security enhancements), thus making your infrastructure more secure and reliable.
5. Due Diligence – Regardless of your infrastructure, datacenter or hosting environment, take some time right now to figure out your IT strategy and Best Practices. Have you covered the 4 points listed above? The Cloud might not be the end-all solution for you but it does provide an alternative to traditional methodologies and practices. If you are only in the Cloud, think about putting some of your data or services on physical hardware or backing it up to a remote location. If you are using purely physical servers, you might want to think of using the Cloud as a failover or secondary site. One way or another, look to diversify your infrastructure.

Failures will happen, Cloud or not. My hope, however, is that before people start blaming Cloud Computing for issues that are obviously NOT actually related to the Cloud, they sit back and think about what they are saying. It’s easy nowadays to find a scapegoat and to blame something that is relatively new. In my opinion, by not fully understanding the complexity of the issues and immediately jumping to conclusions, users actually are doing themselves a disservice and come off sounding inexperienced or lacking full knowledge or even the entire picture. The Cloud is not a crutch, nor a panacea for all things IT. It is, however, a viable option or strategy that IT professionals should seriously consider when evaluating their offerings and re-architecting their solutions for resiliency.

I just read an article in ITworld titled “P2P bill could regulate browsers, cloud computing” by Grant Gross that got my brain churning a bit. Is Peer-to-Peer really considered “Cloud Computing?” And, if it is, how would it be classified? Cloud Application? No. Cloud Platform? Nope. Cloud Infrastructure? Uh…No.

After reading the P2P Bill, what concerns me is the extremely broad and loose definition of a “peer-to-peer sharing program”. H.R. 1319 (otherwise known as the “Informed P2P User Act”) does not seem to clearly define this term. (You can view the full text of the Bill here.) The definition of a “peer-to-peer file sharing program” is defined within the Bill as proposed as:

(2) the term ‘peer-to-peer file sharing program’ means computer software that allows the computer on which such software is installed–
(A) to designate files available for transmission to another computer;
(B) to transmit files directly to another computer; and
(C) to request the transmission of files from another computer.

In a response delivered to Representative Bono Mack, the sponsor of H.R. 1319, the CCIA (Computer & Communication Industry Association), the NetCoalition, TechAmerica and the Internet Commerce Coalition stated:

“As currently drafted, however, H.R. 1319 would broadly apply to many different applications and Web sites that appear to be beyond the intended scope of the bill.

For example, in Section 4, the definition of “peer-to-peer file sharing program” could be interpreted to apply to email providers, Internet access services, instant messaging applications, social networking sites, cloud computing services, space shifting technologies (e.g., Sling Box), and Web browsers.”

I agree with the concern expressed by the various Internet Coalitions as defined in their letter. You can view their full letter here. The definition is too broad and could potentially lump a variety of services that aren’t even related to Peer-to-Peer in the same category, Cloud Computing potentially being one. I do agree that there should be some warnings regarding privacy, especially when it comes to users sharing data. I also think that the Consumer should have a clear definition of their own privacy from the standpoint of ISP’s looking at their network traffic, throttling bandwidth for P2P, even if using it legitimately (and yes, there are plenty of “legal” ways to use P2P).

So, while I agree that the definition of “peer-to-peer” is a bit vague and broad, I believe that those of us in the Cloud Computing industry should not have to worry that much. But, in case any Legislators or Media are reading this, here is why I stated: Peer-to-Peer is NOT “Cloud Computing”

Let’s briefly think about the qualities that make up Cloud Computing in general.

P2P is NOT a Cloud Application

Cloud Applications (SaaS) typically reside within a company’s organization as it is a product. It is a method to provide functionality usually found within an installed application but via the web, without the need to update or maintain the software (from the end-user side). Interestingly, Wikipedia does lump “Peer-to-Peer/Volunteer Computing” under the Cloud Application section. I warrant that this is incorrect. For Peer-to-Peer to work, an end-user must install an application that hooks into a distributed network, specifically a networking protocol. It is NOT a web-based application. It is not much different than a web-browser using the HTTP protocol to retrieve HTML, just that with P2P, you can aggregate sources.

P2P is NOT a Cloud Platform

Cloud Platforms typically deliver web application frameworks from a controlled environment. These frameworks (like Ruby, Java, .NET or Python) are maintained by a Cloud provider. Since P2P simply utilizes a networking protocol and not a web application framework, I do not consider it to be a Cloud Platform.

P2P is NOT Cloud Infrastructure

With P2P, you don’t get a server, load balancer, firewall or storage, for example. You use you own computer with software to access the distributed network, configure how you want to download and share and store locally on your own machine. There is nothing within Peer-to-peer that remotely resembles Cloud Infrastructure.

What is Peer-to-Peer Anyway?

The graphic above represents two networking environments: Client/Server and Peer-to-Peer. Most of us are familiar with Client/Server. You need only think about your web browser accessing a HTML page on a server somewhere to know what that is about. When you go to Google or Gmail, you are hitting a particular server. If you think about Cloud Computing, it’s no different than a traditional hosting environment, your “Central Server” exists in the Cloud (in a datacenter) as one or many server instances.

With Peer-to-Peer, there is no “Central Server.” Peers, or distributed clients, simply connect to each other through a specific networking protocol. This is how BitTorrent, a common filesharing service, works, and this is the concern that is under new legislation. Because there is no centralized server, it is difficult to track, regulate or control what information, files or data is being passed, thus compounding the difficulty of enforcing privacy and/or copyright usage and violations. Being de-centralized means that P2P is more scalable, organic and much more difficult to track.

Note: You can actually use peer-to-peer in conjunction with the Cloud. For example, if you host a file on Amazon’s S3 service, it can be “shared” via P2P (see this Amazon documentation). But obviously, they are not the same.

To further simplify, with the Client/Server scenario, if you want to download a file, you attach to a central server that hosts the file and download from there. With P2P, the file is distributed and de-centralized. In fact, the file is chopped up into different segments and you download segments from different clients or peers.

What about Content Delivery Networks?

If anything, Peer-to-Peer can be considered a type of hybrid CDN (Content Delivery Network). Will CDN’s fall under this broad definition? I feel they are much closer to P2P than Cloud Computing is. So, perhaps Akamai, CacheFly or even Amazon (CloudFront) should be a bit more concerned with this bill than others.

Too Loose of a Definition

However, the definition as it stands, could be broadly applied to the software controlling various Clouds. One of the advantages of the Cloud is the ability to dynamically scale one’s software, web applications and even infrastructure. Since that process frequently involves the “transmission of files” back and forth between servers or nodes, does this fall under the loose and vague definition of P2P outlined in this Bill? It seems to me that it does potentially and should be refined considerably. Also consider the various Cloud Integrators or Extenders like RightScale, SkyTap, Appistry and others whose business it is to move applications, files, frameworks and other data objects back and forth within clouds and to different cloud providers.

I’m not a lawmaker, nor a Lobbyist (aside from the fact that I market and discuss Cloud Computing and our own Cloud product, GoGrid), but I’m concerned that when lawmakers don’t fully understand a concept, especially when it comes to technology, that assumptions and mis-definitions are made a bit too easily. I do hope that whatever committee is tasked with debating the Bill as it stands will do some research and investigation and as a results of their due diligence, will have a much more elegant and refined definition of what truly is a “Peer-to-Peer” application and environment.

What are your views on Cloud Computing, Peer-to-Peer and “H.R. 1319: Informed P2P User Act“? I asked a few of my peers on Twitter, you might be interested by the comments. I’m sure these are just the tip of the iceberg!