#cloudbeat

Mherman - Moods

I'm still at CloudBeat. I moderated the final session yesterday, refereeing a discussion involving Mårten Mickos of Eucalyptus, Randy Bias of Cloudscaling, Alex Freedland of Mirantis, and Ben Carpenter of Eucalyptus customer Rafter. Jordan Novet did a good write-up, and Michael O'Donnell has some nice pictures.

The conversation was great, but a little truncated by the time available. We should do it again, and take some more time to go deeper.

As moderator, of course, I had no opinions of my own (right?). But I can't help thinking that some degree of AWS compatibility would be nice to have. Interoperability (writes someone who once had 'Interoperability Focus' as a job title) is always worthwhile if it doesn't introduce too much complexity or delay into a process or workflow.

But, although it's nice to have, I'm unpersuaded that AWS compatibility is essential. If the majority of customers valued AWS interoperability as much as we sometimes suggest, Eucalyptus (an AWS-compatible purveyor of private cloud software) and Cloudscaling (an OpenStack-based private cloud solution, which makes much of its AWS compatibility) would surely completely dominate their market segment? 

I'm at CloudBeat today and tomorrow, moderating a few sessions, talking to a load of people, and generally feeling pretty good about an event that's taken months to put together. If you're in town, there's still time to register for this afternoon and tomorrow...  :-)

Lots of the talk is about APIs, and the importance of offering them or using them in building rich and compelling sets of interconnected services.

That I get, and the rhetoric is mostly pretty compelling. But contrast that with something Bechtel's Christian Reilly said at dinner last night - every enterprise thinks it's special, and different. Every enterprise takes an application like Oracle or SAP and tweaks, modifies, adjusts, and generally messes about with it.