Thursday, October 22, 2009

Ubuntu Live Cloud Roadshow.

Over the next few weeks, I'm speaking at a couple of Canonical events on the subject of cloud computing. The first event is in New York, aimed at large businesses and I'll be looking at the question of public or private clouds.

The agenda for the evening covers Canonical's cloud strategy and an introduction to cloud computing in general. Both John Willis and I will be speaking there.

There are few tickets still available, if you're interested in coming along.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Trading Amazon Instances.

The problem with predictions is not the knowing of what but the knowing of when.

I spectacularly failed to predict the current financial crisis having expected it to occur several years earlier. I'm also expecting that my 2007 prediction of when cloud computing brokers will appear (along with exchanges in computing resources, futures and swaps in resources) will also fail.

This became clear as soon as Amazon introduced reserved instances. The only thing preventing the formation of a trading market in EC2 instances, is that reserved instances are not transferable. As soon as that changes, we will quickly move from reserved instances and the spot price to a commodity exchange and the usual paraphernalia of derivatives to spread betting.

Whilst I predicted that "six years from now, you'll be seeing job adverts for computer resource brokers", it now seems likely to be earlier.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Why cloud vendors lie ...

I was a last minute speaker on IPExpo's schedule last week. Despite a severe bout of speakers nerves, the talk went well. Unfortunately, it wasn't recorded and hence I've made my own video.

Why Cloud vendors lie and how they steal your money
(approx. 43 mins)