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.
1) Cloud means 1,000 different things to 1,000 different people. Even inside of a company cloud means different things to different people. For some it’s just hosting VMs. For others it’s hosted desktops. For others it’s something like VMware Lab Manager. That’s the first thing you need to find out is what are you trying to do with cloud. Once you get a common definition established you can probably service that need with stuff that exists and is known today.
2) Everyone wants cloud today. Actually they want it yesterday. I though my conversations would go something like I show them the vision and they say that’s nice but we’re waiting a while. It’s just the opposite. We share the vision and it aligns with the customer’s vision and direction and they want it NOW. So many meetings end with the CTO asking what he/she needs to buy and essentially handing over a blank check. I haven’t had this much fun since the early days of VMware.
3) No one trusts external clouds and yet everyone wants to use them. There are major trust factors to the external cloud for enterprise customers. They usually center around compliance issues (HIPAA, PCI, FDA, etc) more than straight security concerns. Of course the business need is so large for cloud that people are overlooking these concerns and just doing it anyways. Take a project that I was just involved with where the customer needed to do some processing on large datasets for a couple of months. This would involve the need to turn up 1,800 servers. The customer isn’t going to buy 1,800 servers for a few reasons (no space, acquisition time, and they’ll never need them again). This is just one of the many use cases for cloud.
4) Absolutely everyone is ignorant on cloud. Really there are only about 20 people in the world right now that truly “get it”. Well, maybe more than that but not many more. Some people pretend they know which actually works pretty well. Cloud is at a stage right now that you can pretty much make up a story and as long as you talk to it with conviction people will listen and believe you. That’s also the danger right now. There’s a lot of marketing stuff, hypothetical stuff from academia, and all of these “standards” bodies starting up that it makes understanding cloud and cutting through the BS that much more difficult.
All of this leads me to the conclusion. I need to blog more. I need to share all of the details on what’s going on not only at VMware but with customers and service providers and standards and everything in between. I have a new mission in life and that’s to provide an inside look at what’s going on with cloud from the perspective of an engineer that’s helping enterprises and service providers build clouds on a daily basis. I guess I just need to cut out some of the 4 hours of sleep I’ve been getting in order to do all of this. 
There’s a fair warning to all of this. Cloud is in flux. Standards don’t really exist. Everyone is labeling everything from toaster ovens to BMWs as “cloud enabled”. The information I share can and will change. Some of it will become obsolete. Some of it may seem very scary like no one has their act together. That’s just the nature of cloud at the moment. Everyone in the industry is stumbling through this together. In the end it’s all going to be worth it. For now though sit back, keep reading the posts, and prepare to get your butt kicked by the cloud.
March 28th, 2009 at 10:32 am
Great article Mike. I would love to chat with you more about what VMware is doing with External Clouds and where I can go to get some of the information you have gotten already. I currently work at a VMware Partner Integrator and am interested in researching if we can start providing External Cloud services to our current customers (some who are already asking for it) and see what would be involved in getting this setup. You can reach me on twitter at @wolfbrthr or via email.
March 28th, 2009 at 11:21 am
Lane,
Thanks for commenting. I just reached out to you via email to schedule a little chat.
March 28th, 2009 at 11:28 am
As another one of the 20 (could well be less) I'd suggest the most interesting thing going on in standards right now is the Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) working group at OGF. Love to see VMware involved somehow but in any case you should keep a close eye on it.
Interesting times ahead for sure – VMware to play a key role in migration from legacy to hybrid to cloud over the next few years I'd say… can't wait to see what you're cloud infrastructure service will look like
Sam
March 28th, 2009 at 11:41 am
Yup. You're definitely one of the other 20. I thought we were already involved with OCCI. I'll have to ping Winston about that again since we just talked about that in the halls at corporate this past week. Hmmm….
March 28th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
Can't wait for the upcoming posts Mike. Getting more interested in the whole concept, and so are some of my customers.
March 28th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
Just be careful when talking to customers. I haven't met a customer yet that doesn't want what we talk about and that's makes people like us VERY busy. Welcome to the butt kicking!
March 29th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
[...] jason on Mar.29, 2009, under Virtualization Mike DiPetrillo wrote a nice piece yesterday entitled The Cloud is Kicking My Butt. This has helped put my mind at ease. Those of whom I talk to might recall that I’ve been [...]
March 29th, 2009 at 8:00 pm
The Cloud’s Kicking Mike D’s Butt…
Mike DiPetrillo took the job of global cloud architect at VMware in January, and has been pretty light on the blogging since then. I follow him and a group of virtualization-cloud-network-datacenter folks on Twitter, so there’s not been a total……
March 30th, 2009 at 12:09 am
Yeah tell me about it, I had two customers that almost jumped me cause they wanted it a month ago. Some already started a huge project which they were willing to put on hold.
March 30th, 2009 at 8:14 pm
Mike,
Great post and I am looking forward to reading more from you on VMware and The Cloud.
I can't even begin to imagine the Cloud whirlwind you are going through these days. I'm having a hard time trying to figure it out in my spare time. The wheels are constantly turning as I try to see where it will fit into what we do and where it will be able to take us in the near future.
I am currently getting a nice high level overview right now as I listen to Paul Maritz's talk at EMC Corp's Strategic Forum for Institutional Investors.
Michael Hubbard from VMware is presenting on “Evolving from VI3 to VDCOS to Cloud” at my VMUG meeting on 4/1.
Keep up the great work.
Rod
March 30th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
Paul gives a good talk on this stuff for sure. It's awesome having him as our CEO. Michael Hubbard is also a good guy. Worked with him for a while now. Glad to see the VMUG is going strong and that you'll be covering some cloud stuff there.
April 11th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
Mike –
Glad to see you blogging. It sounds like things are going well. Point #4 from your article struck a chord with me…reminds me of virtualization in 2003. I think the cloud market is evolving in a similar way…lots of FUD, some early adopters, but not alot of enterprise success stories. There are going to be some big opportunities in this space and I'm glad to see VMware's best and brightest are working on them.
April 11th, 2009 at 9:14 pm
[...] about cloud computing and has a very unique perspective as one of VMware’s cloud architects (the cloud is kicking his butt!). I’m very happy to see he is blogging and I’m looking forward to some strong [...]
April 15th, 2009 at 7:38 pm
[...] I turn, everybody’s talking about cloud computing. And I agree with Mike DiPetrillo, very few people understand what the cloud is today and what it could and/or should be [...]
May 5th, 2009 at 6:48 pm
[...] Plain English Cloud Computing in Plain English PART 2 from GoGrid.com BrightTalk: Cloud Computing The Cloud is Kicking My Butt What is the Cloud? A conversation Recent Cloud Postings EMC 2009 Strategic Forum – Paul Maritz and [...]
June 30th, 2009 at 10:36 am
Mike,
From a networking POV, how exactly would a federation from one DC cloud to another DC cloud actually work? Are you thinking dedicated VPN, SSH tunnels, SSL VPN's? How will performance SLA's be upheld?
July 5th, 2009 at 10:05 pm
Networking will work different ways for different clouds. There's a
lot of clouds being built up with private links right now. This helps
solve some of the SLA issues as well as security concerns. That's the
most logical way for enterprises to start getting into the cloud. A
lot of the telcos and providers that terminate a lot of links see this
as a real chance to expand on what they already offer with customers.
Of course that doesn't prohibit customers from using cloud services
over the Internet. Amazon and others have already shown that to be
quite popular. Some of the same people offering private link access
are also offering public link access (Verizon, Terremark, etc).
July 6th, 2009 at 4:05 am
Networking will work different ways for different clouds. There's a
lot of clouds being built up with private links right now. This helps
solve some of the SLA issues as well as security concerns. That's the
most logical way for enterprises to start getting into the cloud. A
lot of the telcos and providers that terminate a lot of links see this
as a real chance to expand on what they already offer with customers.
Of course that doesn't prohibit customers from using cloud services
over the Internet. Amazon and others have already shown that to be
quite popular. Some of the same people offering private link access
are also offering public link access (Verizon, Terremark, etc).