Archive for Dave Roberts

A few weeks ago at Cloud Connect in Chicago, my friend Scott Bils debuted the results of a study put together by Everest Group and Cloud Connect. The study results concluded that security concerns still top the list of barriers cited by enterprises for moving to cloud computing. That result is consistent with other surveys…

Ron Tolido, SVP and CTO of Applications, Continental Europe, for Capgemini, wrote a great blog post the other day about how the IT industry has adopted agile principles, hook, line, and sinker. It's all agile, all the time these days, whether we're talking about agile infrastructure, agile development, or agile operations (aka "devops"). Ron writes Guys (and girl):…

I was interested to see a recent InfoWorld post by David Linthicum discussing the rise of bare metal cloud offerings, "Going native: The move to bare-metal cloud services." In the article, David says I've been saying for some time that virtualization and cloud computing are not mandatory partners. Certainly, virtualization is a tool that makes…

In eastern philosophy, "yin yang" is the concept that polar opposite forces are really interconnected and interdependent. These forces exist in relation to each other and cannot exist in isolation. There are many examples from the natural world, including darkness and light, male and female, and cold and hot. These forces are opposites but not…

Customers frequently ask ServiceMesh what we think is the best way to build an IaaS cloud. "Well, you need more than just a hypervisor," we say. "That just gives you the basic virtualization layer. You also need a cloud layer that organizes those virtualized resources and exposes them to the outside world as a cloud,…

Today, Gartner issued a press release outlining "Five Cloud Computing Trends That Will Affect Cloud Strategy Through 2015." Sometimes analyst firms seem to watch the world through a rear-view mirror, but this time Gartner stepped up to the plate and delivered some aggressive, forward-looking advice that every organization needs to listen to and take action…

The second most popular session at Cloud Connect was titled Applications and Scale. Dan Bartow (SOASTA), Eric Boyd (Centare), and I each talked about the challenges of dealing with applications at scale. Interestingly, the session title, "Applications at Scale," was a bit ambiguous. Dan and Eric discussed the challenges of scaling an application. Dan described how you…

Back in mid-February at Cloud Connect, I had the pleasure of presenting a case study about Commonwealth Bank of Australia's (CBA) use of private clouds over the last several years. The session was well attended and well received, highlighting the industry's overall hunger for in-depth case studies. (UPDATE Mar 8, 2012: It turns out this session was the fifth most popular at Cloud…

Everywhere I look, I see clouds and virtualization mentioned together. They seem to be the peanut butter and jelly of the technology world. Certainly, clouds and virtualization taste good together, but surely we can separate them, right? Can you build a cloud without virtualization? Does peanut butter taste good without jelly? The short answer is,…

The Road Not Taken Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim…