In BSMdigest's exclusive interview, Alistair Croll, Principal Analyst at Bitcurrent and Content Chair of Cloud Connect, talks about the cloud market and the Cloud Connect event.

BSM: In a BSMdigest article entitled "Reporting Live from Cloud Connect" Skydera CEO Lecole Cole said he expected 2011 to be the breakout year of the cloud. Looking back, has this prediction come true?

AC: This is definitely the year that enterprise IT has realized clouds are here to stay. For startups and new companies, clouds have been here for some time — in fact, the way that clouds replace up-front investment with pay-as-you-go economics is partly to blame for the current tech boom.

But for more traditional companies — the kinds with mainframes in their basements, the kinds that battled Y2K bugs a decade ago — IT has tried to ignore the impact of utility computing. They've tried to convince themselves that simply embracing virtualization was doing enough. In 2011, it became obvious that this wasn't the case, and that clouds were in fact an important new tool in the IT toolbox.

BSM: Have you seen more cloud adoption since your conference earlier this year, or is it slowing down?

AC: Definitely more. We try hard to put enterprises on stage that are willing to talk about their adoption, and the companies we've had are railroads, real estate firms, biotech companies, heavy manufacturing, and more. There's no doubt that every company in the world is trying to figure out how to use clouds.

The big change is the realization that clouds aren't for cost reduction — in fact, they may cost more than a well-tuned on-premise data center for the short term. It's that clouds are for agility, and faster experimentation.

BSM: What is the most interesting development you have seen in the cloud market since Cloud Connect 2011?

AC: There's a big move up the stack. Clouds aren't just "rented metal", though you might have thought so if you only believed the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) message. But there isn't a lot of value to business users wrestling with individual machines, whether they're physical boxes or virtual ones.

Instead, it's much better to just write the code. Salesforce's Force.com platform and Google's App Engine have been proponents of this Platform as a Service model; but with the arrival of Microsoft's Windows Azure, and interesting offerings from Red Hat (OpenShift) and VMWare (Cloud Foundry) I think 2012 will be the year that enterprises realize IaaS was just a stepping stone, and that they'll be delivering platforms, not machines, to their customers.

My good friend James Duncan (VP of Product Development, Joyent) observed that firing up a machine to run a program is like calling the Hoover Dam and asking them to turn on a generator so you can make a cup of tea. Soon, business users will realize they don't want computers — they want computing.

BSM: Many surveys are indicating that companies are moving to the cloud, in spite of the fact that they are not sure how to manage applications in the cloud. What is your advice to these companies?

AC: Well, the first question is: what kind of cloud? The concerns about clouds are extremely different if you're talking public or private, infrastructure or platform.

For example, if you're talking public clouds, you're probably not prepared for the security and governance issues. If you're talking private, then you're more worried about cost efficiencies of your own data center versus Amazon, Terremark, or Rackspace.

Similarly, if you're talking an infrastructure cloud — where you can "see" the boxes — then you're worried about virtual machine sprawl and keeping track of it all. If you're talking a higher-level cloud like PaaS or SaaS, you instead lie awake at night thinking about lock-in and whether you can repatriate your application if you don't like your provider.

My advice to these companies would be to pick a few projects whose workloads are both suitable for a cloud — portable, architecturally agnostic, and resilient to changes in performance — and beneficial to move to a cloud, and then move those to a cloud and learn from that. Cloud computing isn't a switch you throw, it's a gradual evolution.

I would also strongly suggest that CIOs stop thinking of clouds as banks of virtual machines, and instead see them as sets of services. Amazon has well over 20 cloud services, and only one — EC2 — involves machines. Virtualization vendors are eager to sell the idea that if you have automated virtualization, you have a cloud, but that's a dangerous lie that seeds a false sense of security.

BSM: Do you see cloud providers becoming more open to providing application performance metrics to their customers?

AC: Not performance, yet, because there are so many components to manage. They're being more public about availability, and companies like Salesforce, Amazon and Google have been early proponents of public dashboards to show the world the health of their services.

There's an arms race coming, however. For fifty years, the performance equation has been something like this: the more users an application has, the worse the performance. The more capacity the application has, the better the performance. That changes with clouds — capacity is essentially limitless, as long as you can pay for it. So rather than saying, "how performant is my app?" we say "what performance can I afford."

I don't know of any tools, either from providers or third-party vendors, that can solve this equation. Cloud providers have an incentive to show users their performance, because in the cloud world, that report is called something else: your bill.

BSM: What do you find is the biggest misunderstanding about cloud management?

AC: If you have to reboot a cloud, you're in trouble. That's because most “cloud” models rely on machine images, snapshots of systems. When a cloud architecture starts up, it has to learn as it boots — what are my services, where do I connect, what are my credentials, and so on. To get this right at scale, you need an “infrastructure programming language.”

The Devops movement, and projects like Chef, Pallet, Puppet, and StackIQ, embody this. But it's a real change from traditional server or image management. Much as the move from procedural to object-oriented programming, or the shift from circuits to packets, alienated a generation of IT professionals who couldn't make the leap, so this transition will leave many folks behind.

BSM: Any predictions on how Cloud Connect – and the cloud market – will change by 2012?

AC: We'll see a lot more about applications that alter their behavior depending on where they are, to comply with governance or control costs. We'll also see more about data — after all, availability is really about information, not computing. And some of the things I've mentioned above, like SOA and platforms, will become more obvious.

BSM: What are the plans for Cloud Connect 2012?

AC: Well, the show doubled from the first year, and we expect to continue our role as the thought leader in the industry. Steve Wylie will be joining me to shepherd the event, and we have some of the world's sharpest cloud critics and pundits organizing tracks on security, data, compliance, economics, and more.

We'll also see more behind-the-covers information from providers as they try to open the kimono a bit and win over enterprise customers.

Cloud Connect 2012 takes place at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California on February 13–16, 2012.

Click here for more information on Cloud Connect

About Alistair Croll

Alistair Croll is the Content Chair for Cloud Connect, the industry’s largest cloud computing event; Founder of Bitcurrent; an executive at CloudOps; a partner with startup incubator Year One Labs; an advisor to various technology venture firms; the founder of the Bitnorth conference; and the founder of theHuman 2.0 blog on emerging technologies.

Prior to Bitcurrent, Alistair co-founded startup accelerator Rednod; web performance management firm Coradiant; and Networkshop, a research firm. He has also worked as a product manager for 3Com Corporation, Primary Access, and Eicon Technology.

Alistair is also the track chair for cloud computing and the Enterprise Cloud Summit at Interop, and the co-chair of O’Reilly Strata.

Alistair is a frequent contributor to a range of technology publications. He has taught at industry conferences such as Web2Expo, IGT, Interop, Structure, Enterprise 2.0, Velocity, Mesh, and eMetrics. He is also the co-author of Web Operations (2010, O’Reilly), Complete Web Monitoring (2009, O’Reilly) and Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks (1999, Prentice-Hall).