GigaOM Structure 2010 Puts Cloud Computing on Display

Beware the “false cloud” Werner Vogels, CTO and VP of Amazon, picked up on a theme from Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff and debunked the myths that he said were thrown up by the “false cloud.” During an address to several hundred attendees at the UCSF Mission Bay campus, Vogels countered the FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) being used to slow adoption of cloud technologies, telling the FUD origin story. As related by Vogels, IBM countered Amdahl’s entry into the mainframe market using FUD to undercut the more reliable, less costly new entrant. He went on to counter some of the FUD aimed at cloud computing, seen in this slide as “the cloud is all or nothing,” “the cloud is not reliable,” “the cloud is not secure,” “in the cloud cost is all that matters,” “When Christmas comes …” and “the cloud locks you in.” See more on Vogels’ comments in this story by my eWEEK colleague Chris Preimesberger here.

Reinventing Core Internet Technologies Mick McKeown, professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University, explained the basic tenets of the “software-defined network.” It was jarring to hear an exposition on fundamental changes in the hardware and software of data centers at a cloud conference. However, just as temperature, air pressure and water vapor are the stuff of real clouds, cloud computing does at the end of the day run on hardware and software. See www.openflowswitch.org and noxrepo.org/wp to get more information on Prof. McKeown’s work.

Malik and Benioff Om Malik, founder of GigaOM, engaged in conversation with Mark Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com, during the first keynote address of the Structure conference. Benioff continued the line put forward earlier by Amazon’s Werner Vogels in warning participants to beware of the “false cloud” while enumerating the key characteristics that he says defines cloud computing, including that it be mobile, social and democratic (meaning usable by small, medium and large companies).

StrataScale Among the technology companies on display at Structure 2010, StrataScale showed off its architecture for delivering enterprise-class managed server hosting options.

RightScale I talked with representatives from RightScale about automated management services that they offer for workloads running in the cloud. The service is focused on Amazon, but the company has interesting ideas about providing managed interaction with workloads that IT managers will likely find interesting.