It's been an interesting year so far for cloud computing "enablers" such as my firm Enomaly. It's certainly not what I was expecting. The mood for big business investing in large enterprise "cloud" infrastructures has all but disappeared. But there is another market segment quickly picking up steam. Recently I've seen a significant amount of interest from the smaller traditional VPS style hosting firms looking to create what I call "mini clouds". These mini clouds are similar to traditional virtual private servers, but instead of using dedicated servers made up a container based virtual machines. They instead provide an EC2 like interface with a specific set of virtual applications. Unlike EC2, the focus is purely on the quick deployment and scaling of speciality applications such as Zimbra or SugarCRM or specific niche industries such as not for profits, with the a... (more)

The Hybrid Cloud Multiverse (IPv6 VLANS)

Christofer Hoff has proposed an interesting idea earlier today. He asked, "How many of the cloud providers (IaaS, PaaS) support IPv6 natively or support tunneling without breaking things like NAT and firewalls? As part of all this Infrastructure 2.0 chewy goodness, from a networking (and security) perspective, it's pretty important." His post actual was a kind of epiphany which lead me to think that one of the great things about cloud computing is in its ability to virtualize everything. The cloud is a kind of "multiverse " where the rules of nature can continually be rewritten using quarantined virtual worlds within other virtual worlds (aka virtualization). The need for a traditional physical piece of hardware is no longer a requirement or necessary. For example VLANs don't need to differentiate between IPv4 and IPv6; the deployment is just dual-stack, as Ethernet i... (more)

Miro Gets A Makeover

Miro, an open-source HD video player we wrote about in 2007, launched Miro 2.0, an updated, re-designed, more powerful video player. Several new features have been added to spruce up Miro, including faster performance and torrent downloads, the ability to stream shows from websites like Hulu and YouTube on the sidebar,and the ability to play videos in a separate video. Similar to the 1.0 version, Miro allows users to search for and download video podcasts from sources but Miro is offering a greater selection of video podcasts for users. Miro, a BitTorrent-enabled, Firefox-like open-source application was built by non-profit Participatory Culture Foundation and boasts of more than 4 million downloads in 2008. Miro is in direct competition with video player Joost and lists all of its advantages over its rival here. Perhaps the recent make-over of Miro isn’t just an u... (more)

The State of the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum

This message was posted on the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum today, it's meant to be a kind of "state of the union" address outling a vision and direction for the group. ------------------------ Considering the myriad of great discussions recently on the CCIF, we figured it was time to bring everyone up to speed on some of the things going on behind the scenes. First we'd like to thank everyone for your enthusiasm, participation, support. It's been amazing to see how quickly the cloud interoperability movement has taken off. A few have pointed out that the CCIF appears to be the act of one person, I'd like to assure you this is not the case. Although I am the "instigator" and most vocal member, the CCIF has an excellent leadership team made up of my partners from CloudCamp, (Jesse Silver, Dave Neilsen, Sam Charrington) as well as a significant number of major... (more)

Introducing Open Webnesday

Every few months over the last four years that we've been in Vancouver, I've kept having random discussions with friends about coordinating some kind of regular free software/open source/electronic frontier/open Net professional development meeting. While it made for relaxed after-dinner chatting and the occasional off-topic boardroom jam, the idea never really got legs - after all, someone would need to plan the meetings, promote the group, find speakers and so on. One of these hypothetical persons now seems like me - for the first time in years, I'm not constantly traveling (as I try to cut my carbon footprint down to a sustainable level) and I've cut my working hours down to something near 40 or 50 hours a week. Also, it ties in beautifully with my Mozilla Foundation work, my VanPHPUG and OSI volunteering, and my general interests. I'm also hoping that my friend... (more)

Mozilla Foundation Report for Week 7 of 2009

I was only minimally effective in my Mozilla activities for this week, as much of my attention was consumed by personal matters. I continued work on the Mozilla Net Effects Video program, stayed on top of my correspondence and drafted upcoming blog posts. However, I won't be billing Mozilla for this week. ... (more)

Mozilla Labs Bespin

Bespin is a Mozilla Labs experiment on how to build an extensible Web code editor using HTML 5 technology. ... (more)

Apple, threatening customers isn’t a good way to grow one’s market

I was reading the post Apple: iPhone jailbreaking violates our copyright by CNET’s Tom Krazit. If Tom’s post is correct, it reminds me a bit of the saber rattling that the SCO Group used early in its campaign to assert ownership of UNIX. The SCO Group actually filed suit against Auto Zone claiming that the [...] ... (more)

Where is Twitter's WordPress?

Blogger is a centralized free hosting service created by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan. It suffered from many of the same scaling issues in its early days as Twitter, but now that Blogger has been owned by Google for a long time, the scaling issues are gone. But it's not the only blogging service -- there are many others. And I can if I want, host my own blog on my own server, using software like WordPress or Movable Type. I've written my own software for Scripting News. I use Twitter, but I also remember fondly the days when Twitter was smaller, when I followed 50 people instead of 800. And I knew most of them. I still like Twitter, but it's way different, and I see a role for a smaller blog-sized Twitter, a companion to Scripting News, like Leo's TWiT Army. A clubhouse where we work on stuff that's of interest mainly to this community, where I follow 20 or 30 peo... (more)

Draft Agenda for DC Cloud Computing Interoperability Workshop

March 23, Hyatt Regency Crystal City, Virginia Morning Session: Standards Groups (8:00 - 12:00) 8:00 - 8:30 NIST - Tim Grance (NIST Cloud Program Manager), Peter Mell (Senior Computer Scientist) 8:30 - 9:00 Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum - Reuven Cohen Leader, Founder & Chief Technologist, Enomaly Inc) “Defining an End-to-End Cloud with Web Architecture" 9:00 - 9:30 Open Cloud Consortium - Robert Grossman (Leader) "An Overview of the Open Cloud Consortium" 9:30- 10:00 Open Grid Forum - Craig Lee (President) "Distributed Computing Scenarios: What this Means for Interoperability" 10:30 - 11:00 Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium -Krishna Sankar (Leader of Cloud Computing Team) ”Vectors in Federal Cloud Computing” 11:00 - 12:00 Interactive Panel and Q&A; with all Standards Group Speakers ======================= Afternoon Session: Companies (1:00 - 6:00) 1:00 - 1:30 ... (more)

Could Google Open Source Their Rankings?

Google has been asked if they could open source their search engine algorithms before, and have pretty solidly said that they can’t because it would lead to even heavier gaming once everyone knew what really drives Google rankings. Of course there’s probably a business reason there too, it’s likely Google thinks that if their competitors could see their code, they would have a leg up on improving their own search engines. I personally think that even though it might be tricky, it’s possible to do an open source ranking algorithm, or at least partially open. However, it would depend on reworking the way that the web works, the basic problem is that the anonymity of the web makes knowing what pages can be trusted a very difficult problem. Currently Google solves this issue through a lot of hacks that get around the anonymity problem: looking at trusted pages and wher... (more)