I arrived at the MySQL Users Conference just in time for the The Great Open Cloud Shootout.
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Kaj Arno was asking questions to the invited panelists shown in the picture above. Here is a partial discussion:
What is cloud ?
| Thorsten | Fully automatbale computing infrastructure, changes the way production scale deployments operate, saves time/cost, increases reliability |
| Chander | Elasiticity is an important aspect, Can “shoot for the moon without shooting foot”, accessing a pool of resources which is infinite from an individual/organization perspective |
| Monty | Much like electricity/network bandwidth, applying that same model to computing resources |
| Jeremy | Virtualization is an important piece |
| Lew | Not new technology, rather a new way of delivery. As a developer, provision the application through the code. |
Who is it for ?
| Monty | It’s for you |
| Thorsten | Amazon launched, mostly for geeks. 2007 -> Amazon skeptical and RightScale gets VC funding, 2008 -> some common usage, 2009 -> Top-down from CIOs. Basically everybody, cross-organiation, vertical |
| Mike | Horizontal technology opportunity, starting to see mainstream applications including ISVs/primary line of business, interest/adoption is growing |
| Chander | Definitely growing for ISVs, makes backup sexy, “Even though running a backup company, expected to be entertaining” |
| Jeremy | Power outlets are shaped differently, technology has not matured enough. Next few years standardization will happen. |
| Monty | People will never notice it exists, but able to access the information |
| Prashant | Putting/Sharing the data on cloud |
Why use the cloud ?
| Monty | All of a sudden facebook traffic, leverage a collective of people who are already investing in an effort |
| Lew | Cloud computing based on virtualization |
| Mike | More & more enterprises moving in the cloud, gain durability & resilience which was not an option because of a single data center |
| Jeremy | Legacy apps are easiest to move into cloud, they are better understood and can scale easily |
| Prashant | Cloud is the right approach/dream, not there yet. Traditional apps can be moved into cloud. |
| Thorsten | Flexibility in development and tests, DBA clone another slave server with exactly the same setup to test out schema changes |
| Monty | Spin up EC2 instances, run the tests and shut them down … everything in approx $1. Give it back to the cloud and make it more efficient for the world in general. |
| Lew | We are making it so affordable, cost can be 10% of what it was before. |
Cloud adoption barrier
| Chander | Performance, a customer requested a refund where they were trying to shove a 1TB in an hour. US is 6Mbps, needs to significantly increase before it can be utilized. |
| Thorsten | Compute needs to move where the data is. |
| Chander | Most businesses will find bandwidth/redundancy limited. Customer always need to customer where not to use cloud and set expectations accordingly |
What apps will never move to cloud ?
| Lew | Financially sensitive applications, owning your own data center |
| Chander | Trust and privacy, it’s more about education though. Encryption is going tobe a key. |
| Jeremy | Competitiion, unless other companies battle it out and making it easy to to migrate from one service to other, it’ll be difficult. Avoid vendor lock in. |
Are there cloud standards ?
| Mike | Based on open industry standards, no deep rooted concern in the user community |
| Thorsten | Way to operate across different clouds, API is not the most important level. What is a server ? Can I hibernate it, mount it, how much storage volume is allowed, cross-data center boundary are a better abstraction. |
| Lew | Very early to lock the standards, everybody is currently in a stage of experiementation |
| Monty | Potential downside to premature standardization, too early to jump to standards |
| Chander | Open standards are a definite key to success. S3 fostered innovation. |
| Thorsten | S3 is a good standard but not an open API. It will be doubly nice if it’s “free” or “open” or whatever the word is. |
| Mike | Standards dont really matter if the performance cannot be met. When innovating at a rapid rate, it’ difficult to make everybody agree upon standards. |
| Lew | At least publish the API where everybody can use them. |
| Chander | Showing backup to Sun cloud, Sun has S3 compatible APIs, also compatible to WebDAV. |
Cloud Business Opportunities
| Monty | You can |
| Mike | Very unique and compelling business opportunity. Amazon Dev Pay: Buy infrastructure on demand, setup your software on AMI, set your own price and then customers can use it, “Software as a Innuity” |
| Chander | Traditional backup vendors will be worried. |
| Prashant | Database on the cloud |
| Lew | Seeing an explosion in the amount of data/compute required, accordingly analytics. Tremendous amount of opportunity when Cassandra & Drizzle are cloud-enabled. |
| Mike | More ISVs in the cloud. |
| Jeremy | How to do performance tuning and optimizations in cloud, do that for major cloud infrastructure. |
| Monty | Freedom to work from anywhere, don’t need to be physically at the datacenter, enables multinational consulting |
| Chander | When more clouds become available, it’ll be explosion which will happen later this year. |
How is cloud measured ?
| Jeremy | CPU time in terms of use, storage centric clouds pay for integrity |
| Lew | Creating Data centers with loading docks. |
| Monty | Paying for CPU cycle, like mainframe model. |
| Thorsten | Cloud is like mainframe but very elastic. |
| Chander | Billing is not a challenge, storage clouds are better because of pricing, compute is challenging |
Databases & Clouds
| Thorsten | Flexibility of moving to the next volume, master, slave makes is very refreshing |
| Monty | Start out thinking M x N problems, never think about one database instance in cloud, there will be X > 1 |
And the shootout had to be shutdown because the timing estimates were slightly misjudged 
But all in all, an interesting discussion!
Come meet us at the GlassFish booth in the Exhibit Floor. Or you can stop by at room #205 for the Whisper Suite for a more personal and 1-1 conversation.
Technorati: conf mysqlconf mysql santaclara glassfish cloud
thank
Comment by neon — April 26, 2009 @ 2:01 pm
thank
Comment by neon — April 26, 2009 @ 2:02 pm
thank
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Comment by hikaye — May 2, 2009 @ 6:05 am
Dear sir,
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Kind regard,
marwan Fadhel
Taiz rep.of Yemen
P.o.Box 55741
Comment by Marwan Fadhel — September 13, 2009 @ 9:49 pm
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Kind Regard,
Marwan Fadhel
Taiz Rep.of Yemen
P.O.Box 55741
Comment by Marwan Fadhel — September 13, 2009 @ 9:57 pm