Archive for Dave Roberts

Yesterday, I wrote about the trends pushing developers toward PaaS solutions and away from IaaS. The simple analogy is that IaaS is the "assembly language" of the cloud world, while PaaS represents a higher level language. With IaaS, developers have complete freedom to build and configure anything they want, from the operating system on up,…

In my Cloud Expo presentation a couple of months ago, I went through a progression of infrastructure provisioning systems over the past decade. I noted that while we have certainly accomplished a lot over that time period, business-unit (BU) users are increasingly discovering that they don't want to provision and access resources at the infrastructure…

Old and busted: Cloud management and automation New hotness: Enterprise cloud governance Lately, cloud governance is getting some visibility. A couple days ago, James Urquhart wrote "Regulation, automation, and cloud computing" for CNET. I gave my thoughts on James's points yesterday. Also, yesterday, Phil Wainewright wrote "Time to think about cloud governance" for ZDNet, graciously mentioning…

Back at Cloud Expo in June, I had the chance to sit down with Jeremy Geelan from SYS-CON for a short interview. If you'd like to understand ServiceMesh and the Agility Platform in a bit more detail, this is a great way to cover a lot of ground in 6 minutes and 45 seconds.

James Urquhart wrote a good piece for CNET yesterday, titled Regulation, Automation, and Cloud Computing. In it, James comments on a blog by Chris Hoff discussing some of the downsides to automation. Originally, Chris had pointed out that heavily automated environments don't leave a lot of room for human intervention when things go wrong and…

When we talk about cloud computing, those of us "in the biz" often go on and on about clouds themselves. But ultimately, IaaS and PaaS clouds don't do anything themselves. They are merely a substrate on which to build other things, the infrastructure plumbing for the application development and deployment that we really want to…

Cloud is intimidating. If you're a Global 2000 IT department just starting your journey toward the cloud, you'll find yourself faced with a lot of opinions about what you should do. Vendors, press, analysts, and consultants are happy to weigh-in. Most of what you'll hear is theory. In contrast, ServiceMesh is actively working with Global…

A couple months ago, I was having a discussion with a customer. The customer was currently using VMware for virtualization and wanted to know why they shouldn't simply buy into the VMware cloud story and base his internal cloud project on the VMware tool set. "Well," I answered, "VMware makes a great hypervisor, vSphere. If…

Why? It's a simple question, but it's one we don't ask very often. In the IT business, we spend a lot of time talking about what we do and how we do it, but rarely do we step back and really think about why we do the things we do. We worry about all manner…

Can you "do cloud" if you aren't agile yourself? Many large vendors seem to think so, but customers are increasingly skeptical. At a recent 451 Group event, Bank of America Merrill Lynch architect Rupert Brown said… ...he thought that lack of agility was a big problem, and that this was the result of the companies…