IT Management and Cloud Podcast #40 – Cloud Hoopla, The ITSM Quandry, Model-driven IT

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This week, John and I are back on Skype for That Fine Audio Quality. We spend most of our time talking about all the cloud news this week:

• Manifesto Gate – John gives an overview of the hoopla around the The Open Cloud Manifesto. It’s trying to level the playing field and why would people like Amazon who have the high hill want to level down? The Conspiracy Theories fly! Microsoft vs. IBM vs. The Grays!
• This gets into a brief history lesson on cloud standards: OVF virtualization container stuff at the DMTF, Elastra XML markup, 3Tera, the CCIF.
• Would the CCIF transform into some sort of Cloud Foundation? All things aside, John says this was a very productive week. They seem to be putting together a legal entity and a website. Also, you outta sign up for the CCIF Google Groups thing, the Cloud Forum.
• This draws out a comparison from me to the open document world where you get down to subjective arguments about complexity and openness.
• What’s the IP for APIs? This gets us into a side-discussion about IP in IT. Principals or profit? We get into a long discussion about the “morally right” thing to do with IP in software. While we do an elephant’s load of arm-chair lawyering, we predictably get nowhere but more loads.
• We discuss the IT Skeptic’s recent comment on private clouds, namely, his pointing out the need for re-training for the private cloud: “Great: when cloud techs are two a penny, we’ll look at it. Not only do we need to retrain our developers to rearchitect our existing core systems, and our testers to test stuff they can’t see and which is different every time they run a test, but we also need to retrain our operations staff to manage an environment that isn’t even onsite or owned by the same organisation. Now there’s a learning curve.”
• Speaking of, Rob England of the IT Skeptic has much books online. I am liking Owning ITIL.
• Enterprises like to customize things. They still regard all the separate layers as things to standardize on: OS, application… and thus don’t seem to like appliances where there’s many different OS versions running around. We discuss this layer addiction, gold images, and other things.
• What the hell is the goal of all this cloud, SaaS stuff in context of IT Management? A simplified IT environment, driving towards SaaS stuff. Compare everyone having a server to SalesForce’s mythical 1,000 servers.
• ITSM/BSM quandary preview: how do you manage something that doesn’t exist, like an “IT service.”
• Quick overview of the HP Cloud Assure stuff: see white-paper. Looks like it uses “80 global points” around the world to scan (public?) cloud stuff – white-paper says it requires “no installation of software or agents on the networks or servers where your applications reside.” Also, see the HP Software as a Service stuff they have. It seems like they rolled that in/used it for Cloud Assurance. We need to follow-up more on this, esp. since RedMonker Stephen O’Grady was at their recent analyst day.
• ControlTier and Puppet reference case – this gets me into a long overview of the model-driven approach to IT, or the “developer/operator workflow.”
• Preview of living off a Netbook, sponsored by Zenoss!
• It’s John’s birthday. He’s now the “Wised Cloud to everyones silver-lining.”

Disclosure: see the list of RedMonk clients for clients mentioned.