M-A-O-L

GCE explained quick and dirty: The Google Cloud Platform Q&A:

While the bulk of the attention at Google I/O last week, at least in terms of keynote airtime, was devoted to improvements to user-facing projects like Android and Chrome, the Cloud team had announcements of their own. Most obviously, the fact that the Google Compute Engine (GCE) had graduated to general availability. Both because it’s Google and because the stakes in the market for cloud services are high, there are many questions being asked concerning Google’s official entrance to the market. To address these, let’s turn to the Q&A.

Roll Your Own Hardware and The Disruption of the Enterprise Server Market:

In December of 2004, Adam Bosworth wrote a seminal essay entitled “Where have all the good databases gone.

Now it’s time to think about the servers… because the cloud businesses cannot sustain the high margins of Dell, HP, Oracle & Co.

Exclusive: Buyout firms team up to take BMC Software private – sources:

Private equity firms are joining forces in the auction of BMC Software Inc, four people familiar with the matter said on Thursday, making it more likely that the business software maker will be taken private in a deal that will top $6 billion. [...] Activist investor Elliott Management argued last year that management was neglecting a huge opportunity to use their large installed base to expand into Internet-based business software, a market then dominated by the likes of Salesforce.com Inc. The world’s largest providers of software for enterprises, including Oracle, SAP and Microsoft, had already begun investing heavily in that market.BMC needed a board with a fresh approach in order to keep up, Elliott argued. The investment firm also pointed out significant scope to trim headcount and create a more efficient business.

What if they combined forces with the private Dell?

IBM Makes a Big Bet on OpenStack In the Cloud:

The open source software for running cloud computing installations just got a big new name in its camp: IBM. Big Blue announced today that all of its cloud services and software will be based on an open cloud architecture.

Do we have a winner yet in the Open Source cloud stack camp?

Cloud’s risks spur ‘notorious nine’ threats for 2013:

The top three threats this year are data breaches, data loss and account hijacking. In 2010, the top three were abuse of cloud services, insecure interfaces and APIs, and malicious insiders. Those three are still on the list but have fallen (7, 4, 6, respectively) in 2013.

All IT threats except #8 Insufficient due diligence!

Why Amazon Hired a Car Mechanic to Run Its Cloud Empire:

James Hamilton is one of the key thinkers charged with solving such problems, striving to rethink the data center for the age of cloud computing. Much like two other cloud computing giants — Google and Microsoft — Amazon says very little about the particulars of its data center work, viewing this as the most important of trade secrets, but Hamilton is held in such high regard, he’s one of the few Amazon employees permitted to blog about his big ideas, and the fifty-something Canadian has developed a reputation across the industry as a guru of distributing systems — the kind of massive online operations that Amazon builds to support thousands of companies across the globe.

Good piece about James Hamilton, whose blog I love to read (but isn’t available right now).

Lyatiss Comes Out of Stealth, Aims to Make Networks Easy to Manage:

You hear a lot these days in networking circles about “software defined networks.

Lyatiss isn’t French for IT’s holy grail, but maybe it should be:

Lyatiss, a startup that came out of a French research consortium wants to create a new communication layer designed for the cloud and the upcoming world of federated apps.

Taking it to the next level, this sounds great for customer who are running on a multitude of cloud locations.

Cloud databases, or database on the cloud?:

NuoDB has today kicked off that debate with the launch of its Cloud Data Management System and 12 rules for a 21st century cloud database. NuoDB’s 12 rules appear pretty sound to me – in fact you could argue they are somewhat obvious.

Monash has a less favorable view on the 12 rules, or maybe just marks his disagreement in stronger words… an interesting read anyway, as he compares it against Codd’s 12 rules for RDBMS.

However the key piece is Matt Aslett’s note about Cloud databases, this difference is one I’ve been struggling to sell in the enterprise:

Either way, I believe that this is the right time to be debating what constitutes a “cloud database”. Database on the cloud are nothing new, but these are existing relational database products configured to run on the cloud.

In other words, they are databases on the cloud, not databases of the cloud. There is a significant difference between spinning up a relational database in a VMI on the cloud versus deploying a database designed to take advantage of, enable, and be part of, the cloud.

To me, a true cloud database would be one designed to take advantage of and enable elastic, distributed architecture. NuoDB is one of those, but it won’t be the only one. Many NoSQL databases could also make a claim, albeit not for SQL and ACID workloads.

That’s the thing worth thinking about. How much of the technology making a DBMS a Cloud databse is actually new, and how much is just old technologies put to new uses in mainstream DBMSs?

What HP’s cloud chief wants you to know about HP’s cloud. All good and well, but is anybody still listening? HP will have to deliver, then we can talk again.