Speed, Scale and Commodity: Notes from The Morning at #Structure09
June 25, 2009
Filed Under: in Uncategorized
Author: James Watters
Welcome back.
Some great quotes so far this morning:
"Clouds help speed you from idea to IP" Bryan Doeer, CTO Savvis
"Enterprise IT has moved so slowly, now you can grab a credit card and have 1000k server cluster up and running during this panel." Joseph Tobolski, cloud computing director, Accenture
"The on-ramp to infrastructure for individual developers has been made much much simpler, its now what people are doing, just grabbing resources even if upper management doesn't know." Greg Papadopoulos. CTO Sun Microsystems
"Without open-source and commodity infrastructure... services like Wordpress wouldn't exist," Matt Mullenweg, founding developer, Wordpress
There is revolution in the air this morning at #structure09. The developer natives are restless! They want to build new, huge, scalable, social, world encompassing apps and the old process heavy based approach to IT provision and scaling cannot accommodate their demands. They will no longer wait for an IT department to slowly provision new servers and services to begin developing the next big thing.
Instead of a debate between the old/new almost every panelist and presenter has expressed the palatable inevitability of a shift in development platforms to take advantage of the best in clouds. Many of the larger vendor's panelists have danced around the change, segmenting it to public social applications outside of more "process driven business applications," however those social and end-user driven applications may soon consume the majority of server and network infrastructure in the world. The traditional infrastructure vendors need to regain leadership soon or they may face the revolutionaries in the streets.
They might want to keep in mind this statement from a panel today:
"People who have bet against general purpose computing have had a tough road." --Lew Tucker, Cloud CTO at Sun Microsystems
That's quite a shirt Om's wearing.
Talked to a couple folks that came out of the con today, said it was a packed house full of interesting folks.