Mike D’s Blog

Yesterday marked a huge day of history in the world of cloud computing. The Open Cloud Manifesto was finally released to the public. You might ask, “What the heck is an open cloud manifesto”. I’m glad you asked. Basically what happened is someone to 6 pages to basically write that cloud interoperability should be based on open standards. Wow! Shocking, isn’t it? Stop the presses!!! Someone in the computer world wants open standards around something.

There’s a lot I have to laugh at when looking at this whole manifesto. First there’s the name. Manifesto is usually used in the political arena to talk about your stance on a certain topic. OK. That’s certainly the point here. However isn’t this a little bit of a majestic or more to the point strong name for simply saying you want some standards in an emerging IT field? I mean it’s pretty much given these days that if there’s something interesting happening in IT then someone is going to declare that it should be open and free for the masses. The whole problem I have with that is a guy’s gotta eat. Not everything in the world can be free. At some point companies have to make money to pay the employees so they can eat and be well nourished so they can complain that things aren’t free. As Dane Cook would say, “It’s a vicious circle”. This is probably why people like Microsoft and Google and Amazon didn’t sign the document.

I also find it interesting that a manifesto about openness was done in a closed environment. This is the reason the CCIF pulled out even though they helped author the document in the first place. There’s some poetic justice there somewhere.

So here we are probably 500 blogs, a few dozen news articles, and countless thought cycles later with the “major” news that we need some open standards in cloud interoperability. I really question why we needed a document like this anyways. The IT industry and standards bodies were already working on this problem in an open way. You already had CCIF, OCCI at the OGF, SNIA, and probably DMTF before too long. How many different open standards can you really have going on at the same time anyways? So great, Manifesto crowd, now we’re going to have open standards just like you wanted – 20 of them. Well, there’s always tomorrow when I’ve heard the Proprietary Capitalism Manifesto will be released with Microsoft, Citrix, Amazon, and Google as the original signers. Can’t wait to read that one!

I recently came across a blog post from Cassatt saying that virtualization isn’t required for the cloud. What a stupid topic I thought to myself. Of course it’s required. After reading through the post (which was well written) I thought that I’ve been in the virtualization space for so long that maybe I’m missing something. Then I started to think about the cloud implementations that I’m currently doing with 3 of the largest service providers in the world. Sure all of them have virtual and physical servers. All of them have lots of other devices (networking, storage, security, etc) in the datacenter as well. Do you really need to virtualize everything in order to stand up a cloud? The answer is no. What is this? A VMware person saying you don’t need virtualization? If you’re my boss then stop and read on before you fire me.

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Many of you reading this have probably been wondering where the blog posts have been. I’ve been silent for a long time now and so much has been going on worth writing about. The fact is that I transitioned over to be the global cloud architect for VMware starting on January 1 this year. At first I thought this was a good move since cloud hasn’t taken off, it’s immature, and everyone is trying to figure it out and will be waiting for a year before doing anything with it. I thought this is great because I’ll get to stay home with the family some more and finally have time for other things in life. Boy was I wrong!

For the first month on the job I read a lot and talked to a lot of people to figure out what cloud is, how people are defining it, if it’s even important, and who the players are. It took a while to come up to speed but I can now say that I have a PhD in all things cloud. Around Feb 1 I started going out and talking to customers about VMware’s cloud vision, our roadmap, and asking questions about what the customer’s vision of cloud was and what they’d like to do with it. I’ve spoken to just over 200 enterprise customers to date and about 60 different service providers on cloud related topics. Below are my findings in no particular order. I think after reading you’ll see why I’m getting my butt kicked.

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I just got notified that my session on Building the Datacenter of the Future got accepted for Virtualization Congress 2009. Originally I got asked to do a panel but logistics just didn’t work out so I’ll be doing a session instead. Just looking through the session list it looks to be a great event. I hope to see a lot of people in Vegas in May.

Building the Datacenter of the Future

Today’s datacenter has become a complex environment of open and closed systems; distributed and centralized resources; and a huge cost center and bottleneck for the business. IT needs to change and it needs to start in the datacenter. In this session we’ll talk about what the industry is doing to change the way the datacenter works and how it’s designed. The good news is you don’t have to throw everything out to get there. Come learn how to take what you have now and transform it into a highly efficient service platform for the future.

It’s time to take a break from virtualization and cloud computing for a minute and do something much simpler to help out Mother Earth – turn the lights off. Earth Hour started in Sydney, Australia in March 2007. This year it will be held on March 28, 2009 at 8:30 pm local time wherever you are. It’s stupid simple to participate – just turn everything off from 8:30 pm – 9:30 pm in your local time zone on March 28. Spread the word so your neighbors and friends now and then put it on your calendar.

For more on Earth Hour and to participate go here.

It was a busy week last week in Cannes. I had a great time meeting everyone and talking about the exciting stuff that VMware is doing in the cloud space. It was especially nice to see all of the great cloud demos during Steve Herrod’s keynote on Wednesday. The keynote really showed off what VMware and our partners are doing in the cloud space. It also showed off the power of the VMware vCloud API. If you’re interested in the vCloud API then now is the time to visit the cloud site and register for the beta program (it’s over to the right) which will be launching soon. There’s a short survey to walk through and then you’ll be notified when the beta goes live. Until then you can stop back by here where I’ll continue to dive into the VMware cloud offerings and blog about the details.

Now it’s back to catching up on all of the exciting things I saw last week at VMworld and post them on this blog.