A feeling of the web of clouds at a recent cloud meetup in London
I had the chance to present CloudBees at the London Silicon Roundabout Meetup on September 8th. It took place at the Hackney Community College and University Technical College, a very nice campus on Hoxton street, with great facilities. In his welcome speech, Ian Ashman, Principal, shared some very interesting plans to provide access to technical and media training for young students and to develop further the apprenticeship model in the College's programs.
Such meetups are great ways to meet and interact with people interested in what CloudBees does or will do, either from a business or technology standpoint. Another benefit is about keeping oneself up-to-date with some very interesting cloud-based solutions that usually resonate quite well with CloudBees. Many thanks to Ian Ashman for hosting the event and to Shawn, from TechMeetups, for organizing it and lining up very complementary cloud presentations. I think there were approximately 50 to 60 people attending the whole event.
- Steve Caughey from Arjuna started the meeting by offering a great overview of the dynamics of the cloud and explained how this was leading to an accumulation of service providers, each specializing on its own domain of expertise. For a consumer of these services, namely enterprises and, increasingly, individuals, this means that, when you'll need a clear SLA for your global cloud solution, you will need to find ways to handle all these distributed services and see them as one unique service with a single, measurable and consistent SLA. Arjuna introduces the concept of federated clouds and proposes a solution, named Agility, to address these new challenges. Given Arjuna's deep background in transaction management, they have definitely lots of skills and experience to leverage from! In CloudBees' world, this is a very interesting idea to explore further in the context of our Ecosystem program for instance, and I see other opportunities too.
- I was the second presenter and my main message was around CloudBees' unique ability to provide a full coverage of the application lifecycle, serving both developer needs through DEV@cloud and production needs through RUN@cloud. Last but not least, this DEV-RUN unique combination allows developers to create fully operational Continuous Deployment environments, either for testing or production purposes, in a few simple steps. I reused the last great diagrams from Spike Washburn, VP of Engineering. They are really very efficient for such presentations, thanks Spike!
- Next on stage was Alvin Richards, from 10gen, the company behind MongoDB. Since Alvin, in a previous life, had spent 20 years immersed in relational databases, including not less than 16 years on the Oracle kernel, he has some credibility -to say the least- when he speaks about the limits of RDBMS and explains why noSQL solutions like MongoDB solve new types of issues in the cloud, namely related to data scalibility and volume increases. It also simplifies the life of developers, DBA and IT in general. In the Q&A session, Alvin made a good point about noSQL solutions having to relax some constraints addressed by RDBMS solutions, namely around transactions, in order to provide new benefits. NoSQL is already empowering some very large cloud applications. At CloudBees, beyond our native MySQL services, we have an ongoing partnership with Cloudant, a SaaS based on CouchDB, and we have announced in August a new partnership with MongoHQ, a SaaS based on MongoDB.
- Then Richard Davies from ElasticHosts, a cloud hosting company with operations in the US and the UK, shared with us best practices in web applications, namely when you have to deal with real big traffic increases. This was a down-to-earth presentation, always refreshing in the sometimes hyperbolic and fuzzy world of IT. Among other sites, ElasticHosts manages the famous Oxford-Cambridge race website which, obviously, on the day of the race, has to scale in a very extreme way. I think ElasticHosts represents quite an interesting type of partners for us in the near future, by providing added-value services around our PaaS technologies. They are also close to their customers and have with a strong understanding of enterprises' technical requirements and SLA expectations for web applications.
- Last but not least, Kjetil Olsen from Elance introduced us to the world of the human cloud or, like his presentation title said: The elastic workforce. This is all about the ability to find the best resources at the best price wherever they are located. It is mainly designed for remote knowledge workers. The idea is not necessarily brand new but Elance is showing quite a nice ability to implement it end-to-end. They are definitely supporting a fundamental shift in the way many people will work in the future. Well, actually, how people already work, this is happening now! Interestingly, CloudBees has been recruiting since day 1 on that principle of employing the best people, wherever they are. That's why our team is distributed in many different parts of the US, but also in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Switzerland and France. It helps us address business opportunities in a way that very few companies of our size can dream of. And it also created a truly global mindset from day 1.
These five examples of cloud companies, including CloudBees, show how cloud services can complement each other and help establish a new model where technological and commercial partnerships create new opportunities for both IT vendors and customers. It's like a web of clouds taking shape in front of us. This ongoing creation and integration of such services is what makes the cloud more and more compelling every day for enterprises, far beyond the economies of scale of infrastructure.
