GigaOm Structure: Private Clouds

Posted on June 26, 2009 | Leave a comment

Celeste LeCompte wrote up a great piece on the panel about private clouds I participated in yesterday at GigaOm Structure 09. I’m happy to have contributed the line that became her headline.

George Gilbert moderated an absolutely power-packed panel that also included:

  • James Urquart, Tech Strategist from Cisco
  • Chuck Hollis, VP and CTO of Global Marketing at EMC
  • Stephen Herrod, CTO and SVP R&D VMWare
  • Kia Behnia, CTO of BMC
  • Brandon Watson, Director of Azure Services Platform, Microsoft

Have a look at Celeste’s article, which also has the video of the event. I must say, I was really impressed with the GigaOm show. It was completely sold out (when was the last time you heard that happening?) and the level of organization of the tracks was really high. I’ve never spoken anywhere where they confiscated my phone before I got on stage (and for good reason–the production quality on the sound and video was top notch).

I was chatting briefly with AT&T’s Joe Weinman, who was the MC for the event (and whose dry-as-dust delivery was brilliant, BTW). He likened it to the Academy Awards for all the buzz and tech-celebrity attendance. Definitely the best show I’ve been to in recent memory.

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On Twitter, Social Media, and Privacy

Posted on June 9, 2009 | Leave a comment

The greatest threat to our own privacy remains ourselves. CNET reports that a twitter user believes that his home was robbed because he tweeted about being on vacation. Couldn’t see that one coming…

This is a huge problem with social media. So much of it is a thinly veiled conceit, and few think about how this information could be used against them. Sometimes the exploits can be quite subtle. The article on CNET makes some really good points about determining someone’s location through geotagged flickr photos, including where they live and when/where they are out of town.

We spend a lot of time with legislation around privacy (e.g. HIPAA) and infrastrcture that enforces privacy policy, but in the end we are our own worst enemies.

Right now, I’m at home. Sharpening my knives.

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Podcast: Security, Management & Compliance in the Cloud

Posted on June 9, 2009 | Leave a comment

This is the week for publishing podcasts. Here’s one I did recently with John Moran. We spoke in detail about what cloud governance really is and how this evolves out of your SOA governance program. Have a listen and give me your feedback.

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Pirate Radio Evolves with the Times

Posted on June 8, 2009 | Leave a comment

I’ve always been intrigued with the idea of pirate radio. There’s a subversive glamour to the 1970s/80s-era image of a radio station run from international waters, not subject to the usual governmental controls over content (or, I suppose, royalties). It never really took off here, although I do have an acquaintance who taught a course in building, um, unauthorized FM transmitters.

According to New Scientist, pirate radio is still alive and kicking in the UK. Localized FM broadcast is still viewed by the pirates as critically important because it taps into the marketplace of people walking around on the street with FM capable cell phones. It’s a good reminder that conventional broadcasting  is still important and viable.  This will continue until bandwidth costs become so negligable that I can reasonably stream to my iPhone as I walk around. In many markets (hello, Canada) this sure isn’t the case.

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eWeek: Managing Identity in the Cloud Podcast

Posted on June 8, 2009 | Leave a comment

I did a podcast recently with Mike Vizard of eWeek. Mike had some excellent questions around all the issues is managing identity and trust relationships in the cloud. This is one of those under-reported issues around cloud computing. Security always comes down to trust, and this is going to be the significant issue business faces as it moves applications out of it’s corporate network.

Listen to it here.

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Hayes Produces Apollo 11 Manual

Posted on June 4, 2009 | Leave a comment

Hayes, the venerable publisher of automobile maintenance books, has produced a manual for the Apollo 11 spacecraft. Like my earlier post on Lego’s architecture series, it’s nice to see a mainline company leverage their great brand and think out of the box to access a new market.

I have an old Hayes manual somewhere around for an 80’s Honda Civic which I owned many years ago, and at least one Series Landrover manual which I don’t own. Yet. (Fortunately my wife doesn’t read my blog.)

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Video 2/4: Practical Operations Governance of SOA

Posted on June 2, 2009 | Leave a comment

Here’s the second video in the series we did. I’m actually wearing my headphones as I embed this and it struck me that the sound quality is really good on these. Once again I highly recommend working with Media2o if you are doing anything similar.

Now if I could only change the freeze frame of all of these videos. It always seems to catch me in some awkward mid-breath.

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What Will Be The Future of Application Development in Cloud Computing?

Posted on June 2, 2009 | Leave a comment

Peter asks this important question over on the eBizQ forum. This is a topic I’m really interested in, and my rather long winded answer is here.

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Economist: Unlocking the Cloud

Posted on May 29, 2009 | Leave a comment

The Economist is now reporting on the cloud. They’ve picked up on the very real concern of vendor lock-in because of proprietary standards. The article focuses on data portability between SaaS apps, but the same issue arises in IaaS (different proprietary virtualization formats, despite what the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) promises), and in PaaS (google app engine extensions to Python which are hard to ignore and lock you into their platform).

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Video 1/4: The Challenges of Web 2.0 Security

Posted on May 29, 2009 | Leave a comment

I did a series of videos in the fall of 2008 about Web 2.o, SOA, entitlements, etc. These were on the Layer 7 home page until recently, when we went through another re-design. The videos still exist on YouTube, but we did nothing to promote them so they haven’t been seen by too many people. I’m going to re-post them here over the next week for posterity.

This is the first time I had done this kind of media. I spent the day down at Media2o in Gastown. Bradley Shende and his crew are real pros, and I really enjoyed the whole experience. But I do have to confess: it’s a lot harder than it looks. I’ve done loads of talks at conferences, web casts, etc, and I honestly went in believing that I would knock it off in one take each and be out in time for lunch.

Was I ever wrong. Even with the aid of a teleprompter, it took hours of video to get these four short pieces. We were all pretty tired by the end of the day. I learned an important lesson here. You just can’t underestimate how a different media will impact how you perform. I can still barely watch these without cringing.

Hopefully I’ll get a chance to do this again. And I’m going to practice a lot more in front of a mirror this time…

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