Monthly Archives: May 2010

Beatniks in the Cloud

I’ve always been a fan of the Beats. Back when I was young and cool, I played bass guitar in a band called the Subterraneans, inspired of course by Kerouac’s novella of his relationship in decay, set inside the jazz underworld of San Francisco. Just as punk rock was to the music of the 70s, the Beats were a necessary reaction to society and the literature of the time. They had an influence, though sadly their image has been reduced to little more than the media-drawn caricature of the Beatnik.

Beatniks, however, are a great vehicle for satire. I was greatly flattered when David Linthicum sent me a link to this video, which riffs off a blog post I did titled Visualizing the Boundaries of Control in the Cloud.

This video is one of a series that Novell has put together looking at real issues in cloud computing. There’s another great episode that picks up on a post Linthicum wrote considering the weighty topic of fear of multi-tenancy.

Well done, Novell. You have redeemed the Beatniks for me.

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Live From New York, It’s… The Cloud Power Panel

Well, not really live, but definitely from New York. Just before the recent Cloud Computing Expo, Sys-Con asked me to join their 2010 Cloud Computing Power Panel, hosted by the multi-talented Jeremy Geelan. The panel consisted of me, Greg O’Connor, CEO of AppZero; Tony Bishop, CEO of Adaptivity; and Marty Gauvin, CEO of Virtual Ark. We did in fact film right above Times Square, using the Reuter’s studio. The facility was amazing, the crew was top notch, and the resulting video looks great.

You can watch the Cloud Power Panel here. We covered a range of topics, from why enterprises will inevitably end up using the cloud, to how they must think differently to be successful out there. We even found time to consider something called Father-as-a-Service (FaaS).

The Top 5 Mistakes People Make When Moving to the Cloud

Cloud is now mature enough that we can begin to identify anti-patterns associated with using these services. Keith Shaw from Network World and I spoke about worst practices in the cloud last week, and our conversation is now available as a podcast.

Come and learn how to avoid making critical mistakes as you move into the cloud.