James Governor's Monkchips

Linux and The Enterprise Cloud: A Canonical Gig

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Earlier this week I was lucky enough to present to Canonical customers and prospects about what’s going on with the enterprise Cloud market. I was a little nervous because Simon Wardley was on the same agenda, and his cloud presentation is a masterpiece. Luckily he came after me though.

My basic thesis is that Amazon Web Services remains the de facto standard for cloud computing. There are three kinds of economics you can’t compete with – Open Source, The Web, and Simplicity. Well: AWS embodies all three of those economic justifications. So what can the enterprise learn from Amazon?

Here is my deck:

While I left the sales job to the chaps at Canonical, the commercial arm of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, I would say that the decision by Ubuntu to mirror AWS for the enterprise using the Eucaluptus architecture, based on Amazon’s AWS APIs, makes a great deal of sense. Rather than delivering more complexity to enterprises for their enterprise needs, Ubuntu is essentially saying: keep it simple. This is opinionated web oriented ops, rather than all singing all dancing all enterprise knobs and dials enterprise ops we’re hearing other vendors pitch. The demo by John Willis of the new Canonical Landscape monitoring and provisioning tool spoke clearly to less is more. More on that later.

Canonical paid for the speaking engagement and is a subscription client.

19 comments

  1. James Governor’s Monkchips » Linux and The Enterprise Cloud: A Canonical Gig http://bit.ly/3jaoU7
    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  2. @monkchips brilliant use of a zombie Alfred E. Newman for your “Concerns” chart. #whatmeworryaboutcloud? http://bit.ly/3jaoU7
    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  3. […] Canonical Cloud road-show in London – around 40 people – James Governor did a keynote on cloud computing. […]

  4. Tactically, mimicing the EC2 APIs makes sense, even if how AWS S3 does file move and copies is wrong -they should have copied WebDAV instead of hacking something in to a header.

    Strategically, using the EC2 APIs limits you to following the EC2 feature set -you will end up always being behind. So why do it? tooling. But there are differences, which I see on the Typica mailing list. Different error messages, different timezones confusing authentication, other quirks. Its the undocumented bits that get you in the end.

    1. steveloughgran i’d certainly agree with you about the difficulty of tracking an API under someone else’s control. that said – given we’re on the verge of a huge API proliferation challenge, it could be that tracking one API set well is not as impractical as managing a geometric level of complexity. http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2009/11/12/2010-predictions/

      your point is well made, but it could even be that Amazon takes steps to foster an inclusive approach to its API

      david- thanks for your kind words. coming from you I will consider them high praise indeed. i think you just like a man with a ‘tache 😉

  5. James Governor’s Monkchips » Linux and The Enterprise Cloud: A Canonical Gig / http://bit.ly/vvo5j
    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  6. It was a good little presentation by Mr Governor and Canonical. Because of the quality of desktop Ubuntu, there is a lot of goodwill towards these guys. Well, usually.

    The point about being a slave to EC2 API, made above, is correct – there are and will be version problems. Simon Wardley’s response to the issue is the practical one – AWS is the defacto standard, we follow in their wake – but one wonders what this tethering will cost in the long run.

  7. @noahgk- 99% of redmonk zombie references should be credited to @cote – this one was no exception. source should be in the last slide.

  8. #Cloud #CloudComputing – Linux and The Enterprise Cloud: A Canonical Gig – By James Governor – http://ow.ly/CgZr
    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  9. economics you can’t compete with http://tinyurl.com/ybztpj5 brilliant by @monkchips
    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  10. James, Steve is being too polite. I think what’s he’s saying is that EC2 has no independent test suite therefor interop doesn’t really exist – no specification without testification.

    I do think this is *very, very* important for those promoting cloud interop, that they focus on a shared test set, and not just protocols and data formats. This is an important factor got syndication out of the weeds.

    I now pass it over to sogrady 😉

  11. Canonical/Eucalyptus’ decision to copy Amazon’s APIs may be a sensible (if risky) business decision but it’s not to be confused with open.

    If the industry doesn’t want to be led by the nose by a single vendor again (VMware on the private side & Amazon on the public side) then we need to work hard now.

    Don’t say you weren’t warned…

    Sam

  12. Interesting points raised in the slides. (I’m sure your live presentation was even better!)

    There are lots of advantages to cloud computing, which you outline. The point that some of the comments make around API compatibility is an interesting one. However, I am not convinced that Amazon will be determining the de facto standard, especially since the competition (Google App Engine, Microsoft Windows Azure, etc.) are different types of services (PaaS vs. Amazon’s IaaS), which might make having a standard API impractical.

    However, Amazon seems to be offering more PaaS-style features lately, with their new RDBM and .NET SDK, so I can’t help but wonder if the future of the industry is leading more toward PaaS, which would make a standard API *slightly* more possible.

    (I am contracted by M80, working with Microsoft to promote Windows Azure)

  13. > Don’t say you weren’t warned…

    You have been diligent in warning us.

    And how is OCCI going?

  14. RedMonk: Linux and The Enterprise Cloud: A Canonical Gig http://digbig.com/5baqrm
    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  15. […] and continue with slides from James Governor I earmarked this week because of this stance: “There are three kinds of economics you […]

  16. There are three kinds of economics you can’t compete with. Open Source, the Web and Simplicity. http://digg.com/u1H2JK
    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  17. @benlamothe thanks so much for the referral! @lakey hello – what kind of audience is it? here is a recent talk i gave http://bit.ly/3rJuT2
    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  18. There are three kinds of economics you can’t compete with – Open Source, The Web, and Simplicity. http://tinyurl.com/yjw4h3m #yam
    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

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