Randy Bias is the Founder of Cloudscaling. He most recently served as the Vice President of Technology Strategy at GoGrid, and was responsible for providing tactical and strategic vision around all technology for the GoGrid cloud computing platform. Randy has been deeply involved with IT, Operations, and 24×7 service delivery since 1990. His long history with service providers includes a number of ISPs, MSSPs, and cloud computing providers.
Randy's 18+ years in Silicon Valley covers involvement with a number of startups. Successes have included the Valley's first co-location/hosting company, one of the first datacenter companies, the first on-demand vulnerability scanning service, and one IPO.
At Kalpana (acquired by Cisco Systems) Randy built and ran one of the first fully switched Ethernet LANs in the world. He played a key networking role at Internex Information Services, an early ISP pioneer that was acquired by Tier-1 ISP XO Communications. The InterNex network and network engineering team became the XO communications backbone. Later, Randy built another MSSP offering for datacenter company iAsiaWorks, including the first on-demand security vulnerability scanning service, and relocated to Hong Kong just after iAsiaWorks' successful IPO in late 2000. In returning to smaller ventures and more technical work, he was one of the first two employees at Kozoru, a bleeding edge Question & Answer search engine technology company. He was instrumental in architecting their FreeBSD-based diskless appliance cluster nodes. At NetEnrich, he created a high-availability clustered appliance. Most recently, at CloudScale Networks, Inc., he designed and led the development of the world’s first multi-cloud, multi-platform cloud management system.
Do ‘private’ or ‘internal’ clouds deserve to be called “clouds”? Prominent cloud thought leaders including Sam Johnston and George Reese think not. Some say, to truly be considered “cloud”, a solution must be outsourced, use virtualization, and billed by the hours used, like a power utility.
If those who hold this view are right, then it’s impossible for an internal private cloud to be “cloud”. I disagree. In fact, the most disruptive, game-changing events in the rise of cloud computing may emerge with internal clouds behind the corporate firewall.
Co-Founder and CTO Randy Bias on how web-scale cloud is the only way to be successful in the cloud. Carriers have a huge opportunity in the cloud, but only if they embrace the disruption of web-scale cloud and adopt a two-cloud strategy in the short term.
To be successful, you must also build and deploy web-scale cloud in the model proven by Amazon Web Services and other cloud pioneers. To capture the huge total addressable market available in mobile, web apps, and emerging markets, web-scale cloud is the only path forward.
The good news for carriers is that implementing a two-cloud strategy is a low risk move that will deliver much more favorable cost and deployment metrics than they’ve been trained to expect.
Dr. Donald Ferguson knows about IT complexity.
The father of IBM’s Websphere and current CTO of CA Technologies was recently quoted in a BBC interview saying, “IT departments spend 75 to 85 percent of their budgets just to keep existing IT environments running; that leaves little room for innovation.”
Ferguson explains that a primary driver of this cost profile is that modern IT systems are too complicated, over-designed and, in the end, expensive obstacles to innovation.
Cloud Computing = Simplified IT
Cloudscaling CTO, Randy Bias, says telcos should take a more Internet-centric approach to cloud computing by using commodity hardware and getting to market quickly.
A podcast interview of Randy Bias with Michael Coté of Redmonk. A PDF transcript is available on the website. It’s a lengthy conversation, so this is a text version, with key comments underlined and bolded.
The Founders of Cloudscaling and Blue Mountain Labs discuss the Amazon Web Services crash and how some data was irrecoverable. They also talk about how the federal government is embracing the cloud and more.
Randy Bias, CTO and co-founder of cloud consulting firm Cloudscaling, joins Cloud Cover TV to share his thoughts on "enterprise clouds." Spoiler alert: he thinks they're doomed to failure. They also discuss Cisco's purchase of NewScale and the new "dedicated instances" from Amazon Web Services.
A couple of weeks ago I posted about Amazon’s continued rapid release cycle and tallied up their releases by year. I think it’s even more interesting to look at where these feature releases are happening by service.
This new technical whitepaper is a follow on to Cloudscaling’s IaaS Builder's Guide and talks at an architectural level about building scalable networking for infrastructure clouds. Infrastructure clouds are complex and challenging engineering problems. Covering the topic in detail would take years and several books. Meanwhile, the best practices and state-of-the-art proceeds apace. This 30 page technical piece goes into some of the details while remaining broad to share information and foment discussion.
The Founder of Cloudscaling, Randy Bias, argues against the notion of ‘enterprise clouds.’ Unfortunately, one point of confusion is the term “enterprise cloud.” When some people hear that term “enterprise cloud”, they think ‘private cloud’ or a ‘cloud for enterprises’. What it means is an infrastructure cloud built using ‘enterprise computing’, not ‘cloud computing’ techniques. Here is a way you can test if an infrastructure cloud, public/private or internal/external, is built using enterprise computing instead of cloud computing: It has more than 2 ‘brand name’ enterprise vendor’s products; allows for complex networks and routing topologies; focuses on allowing migration of unchanged (‘legacy’) applications from existing enterprise datacenters; has an expensive price tag; doesn’t take credit cards, instead requiring contracts and monthly invoices; provides you an arbitrary ‘pool’ of ‘resources’ to carve up any way you want. In this keynote Randy arguing that these ‘enterprise clouds’, regardless of whether they are public or private, are currently losing against the non-enterprise clouds. He provide some great real-world data points about why this is.
Recently Netflix announced something incredible: their 24x7x365 video-on-demand streaming service, the largest of its kind in the world, had moved from their own datacenters onto Amazon Web Services EC2. Randy talks to the Cloud Architect at Netflix, Adrian Cockcroft, about why Netflix chose to take this route, examining business drivers, and asking what they would tell others who would like to follow in their footsteps.
Some view grid as a pre-cursor to cloud while others view it as a different beast only tangently related. This really comes down to a particular TLA in use to describe grid: High Performance Computing or HPC. HPC and grid are commonly used interchangeably. Cloud is not HPC, although now it can certainly support some HPC workloads, Amazon's EC@ HPC Offering. No, cloud is something a bit different: High Scalability Computing or HSC.
Here is a candid look at some of the trends, thoughts, and insights that occurred to me while engaging with customers, vendors, and the greater cloud community. Topics include Disconnects in Telco/SP Cloud Strategy, Hybrid Cloud Still Causing Confusion, Public Cloud Hits a Tipping Point, and Enterprise IT Governance.
The Rackspace Cloud, in conjunction with the NASA Nebula project, open sourced some of their Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud software. This initiative, called "OpenStack", should have a dramatic impact on the dynamics for building cloud computing infrastructure. Previously there have been two major camps: Amazon API and architecture compatible and VMware's vCloud. Now there is a third that could not only be a viable alternative to these two approaches, but more importantly, a fantastic option for service providers and telecommunications companies that face unique challenges.
The CEO of Intellum sits down with the Founder of CloudScaling, Randy Bias, for a discussion on Cloud Computing. They talk about leveraging the cloud for startups, SMBs and Enterprises, Fears and Concerns, the Future of Cloud, and more.
The Private Cloud Myth is misguided because it assumes that all cloud computing is a financial model rather than a technology or service model. Providing a public utility service requires cloud computing, but cloud computing does not have to be delivered with a predetermined financial model.
This paper is targeted at anyone building public or private clouds who want to understand clouds, cloud computing, and Infrastructure-as-a-Service. It highlights some of the important areas to think about when planning and designing your infrastructure cloud.
Create them now and stifle innovation or create them later when it's too late? That seems to be the breadth of the discussion on cloud standards today. Fortunately, the situation with cloud computing standards is not actually this muddy. In spite of the passionate arguments, the reality is that we need cloud standards both today and tomorrow. Here is an overview of the Cloud standards landscape.
An infrequently talked about, but very important aspect of cloud computing performance is "oversubscription". Oversubscribing is the act of selling more resources than you actually have to customers on the assumption that the average usage will be equal to or less than the actual resources on hand. This has been a common practice within the hosting and service provider market from the start.
There will soon be two major paths for cloud computing providers: commodity and premium. This means that we will have a large bifurcation in the cloud computing space with two very different kinds of solutions.
It can be confusing to understand how to scale computing systems, but there are really only two main axes of scale: out and up. Closely related to the axis of scale is the general type of architecture: centralized or decentralized. Randy briefly revisits scaling and then talks about centralized vs decentralized architectures.
Every commercial web service of any kind needs to be differentiated in order to be interesting and attractive to customers. This leads to needing a secret sauce of some kind. It varies widely from application to application, but even between applications of the same kind there is a need to be differentiated. More and more frequently cloud computing systems are used for types of secret sauce that require some kind of batch processing. Taking a look at some examples will help to understand.
This four part series outlines Randy's views on how the cloud computing industry will take shape. It's clear that the marketplace will continue to become increasingly competetive and this is a survival guide for weathering the storm.
This four part series outlines Randy's views on how the cloud computing industry will take shape. It's clear that the marketplace will continue to become increasingly competetive and this is a survival guide for weathering the storm.
This four part series outlines Randy's views on how the cloud computing industry will take shape. It's clear that the marketplace will continue to become increasingly competetive and this is a survival guide for weathering the storm.
This four part series outlines Randy's views on how the cloud computing industry will take shape. It's clear that the marketplace will continue to become increasingly competetive and this is a survival guide for weathering the storm.
They discuss Randy's thoughts on the general direction of infrastructure clouds: distribution, pooled resources, and virtualization across compute, storage, and network.
This document describes how to grow a web-based Internet business with a focus on using GoGrid cloud computing infrastructure to achieve maximum scale. It provides high level descriptions of what scalability is, how web applications scale, how cloud computing helps, and why GoGrid is uniquely positioned to help businesses succeed.
Where ever you stand on "free markets", there is no doubt that market forces play a major role in technology adoption. In this case it means that not only can cloud computing be open, it will be open because of market pressures.
As a new market or technology emerges there is always a search for new, hopefully better, nomenclature to explain and differentiate. Cloud computing infrastructure is as much a victim of this search as anyone else. We're starting to see the various infrastructure providers provide some new and interesting terms that can be slightly confusing. There are important differences between these new terms and Randy explains them and why they matter.
James and Geva are back with Randy and Michael of GoGrid. They talk about the destinction between a Cloudcenter and Infrastructure Web Services, and the different approach GoGrid is taking to cloud computing compared to Amazon Web Services. They also discuss Cloud Computing Standards and what is the correct approach for achieving them and more.
There is still a lot of confusion around cloud computing and it's definition. The cloud community has even attempted to create standards and/or a cloud taxonomy. The fundamental problem is that "Cloud" covers so much ground it's pointless to try a one-size-fits-all approach. To start Randy covers the infrastructure aspects of cloud computing.
Earlier this week, Eric Windisch (@ewindisch) of Cloudscaling presented an alternative mechanism for OpenStack Compute (Nova) RPC. For those who are new to OpenStack or simply haven’t had time to delve into it’s innards, Nova uses a core asynchronous RPC/messaging … Continue reading ... read more >>
When we first began supporting the OpenStack project, we saw in it something that other open source cloud software projects did not have. OpenStack offered a path forward for companies that wanted to launch open cloud infrastructures in the model … Continue reading → ... read more >>
On Saturday morning, an article I wrote went out on GigaOm entitled “True or false: Citrix is more compatible with AWS.” Reactions were generally very positive, with only a a small minority reaction, mostly from Citrix or Citrix fans. Some … Continue reading → ... read more >>
UPDATED: link added to actual Citrix announcement; clarification re: story sources added at end; clarification of “contributor community” in 8th paragraph. As I write this, Citrix is preparing a big announcement tomorrow. The details are sketchy, but apparently they are … Continue reading ... read more >>
UPDATED: to provide clarity on key sections and fix poor wording choices I applaud Joshua McKenty’s recent Open Letter. Cloudscaling has had similar concerns about the OpenStack Foundation governance model. We participated in a variety of discussions including the recent governance … Continue reading → ... read more >>
Reposting is not something we do often, but this was too good to pass up. Jesse Robbins of Opscode gave an exceptional 20-minute keynote at Cloud Connect last month. Check out the video of his keynote on the Opscode blog. … Continue reading → ... read more >>
Automation is one of the more tricky disciplines. If it were as easy as it looks, then we would have had cloud years ago. In recent years the DevOps movement as striven to take automation to the next level. One … Continue reading → ... read more >>
All cloud systems are inherently complex, and complexity is inherently evil. You can’t avoid complexity, since the size and scale that drives efficiency also adds complexity. However, you can choose how complex to make your basic system. A winning strategy … Continue reading ... read more >>
Below is the presentation I gave at this year’s 2012 Cloud Connect in Santa Clara. It was extremely well received. Better than I expected really, given it’s last minute nature. For some, I think a lot of the architectural and … Continue reading → ... read more >>
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