So I am speaking at an event tomorrow being run by Huddle and FutureGov.  Huddle is a UK software company trying to bust the Sharepoint market open, while FutureGov is a social business consulting firm set up by my friend Dominic Campbell.

I have been invited to give a view on what the public sector can learn from the private sector about the Cloud. Given the cloud’s current confusion around public, private and hybrid, it seems a reasonable idea to bring me in. I mean to talk about this multi-dimensional matrix, with added confusion in terms… is that a public cloud, or a public sector? Should the public sector only use the private cloud, or is that the wrong way around. I plan to try and make things as clear as I can – which means talking about developers, developers and developers.

The overall agenda looks great – with some really great speakers, notably Mark O’Neill, James Stewart and Stuart Lauchlan If you haven’t signed up yet I am afraid its sold out. But that’s good, right?

If you don’t know Dropbox you should. Its a wonderful service for sharing files between multiple people and machines. Its like magic, frankly. Most Web developers and designers I know use it. Why FTP when you can Dropbox? It spans native and the cloud beautifully- so a folder on your desktop is perfectly synchronised with a cloud back end. A few years back I coined the term Synchronised Web – because sync is so crucial in a world where we use multiple services and clients. Dropbox delivers it.

Anyway this morning came news Dropbox had changed its terms of service, making it clear that it would comply with US government requests for information, without requiring a warrant.

I would prefer Dropbox required a warrant but I understand business pressure, certainly in the Wikileaks world.

Anyway, I was quoted extensively in CloudPro magazine on the issue, and this is what I said:

While neither a surprise, nor unusual, it is still disappointing. To be frank Dropbox has little choice, given I understand it runs on Amazon Web Services, which would give up the data if asked anyway. Most US web companies would rather comply than argue with the Feds. When Amazon turned off wikileaks the issue got a lot of attention. Twitter has been a good citizen in this regard- at least it asks for subpoenas, and it seems dropbox is following them. I do believe there is a disconnect in terms of promising security.

Dropbox’ decision won’t hurt it with small or independent companies so much as big ones. Thus for example an IBM employee certainly shouldn’t use dropbox to hold IBM-related information. Corporations prefer to make their own arrangements with legal jurisdictions. Of course small agencies, a key dropbox client base, may find their clients have issues with use of the software.

I am disappointed but I still love Dropbox. It’s a truly great service. This just seems to be the way the wind is blowing at the moment.

 

update: As I should have said when I posted this earlier, the onus is on the user now to encrypt their own files for extra confidence. There is a great article here about encryption vs deduplication, a core part of how cropbox works, explaining some trade offs and implications. You should read it.

update 2: I got a tweeted pointer from @danielchow77 that another service called JungleDisk allows the user to define their own encryption key. Some googling and it appears Mozy from EMC is the same. But then neither actually do what Dropbox does. Magic or security- your choice.

A few months back I attended BusinessCloud9, a really excellent event run by my old mate Stuart Lauchlan, looking at cloud-based business applications. It was the least dorky Cloud show I have been to by some margin- the room was chockful of suits, with budgets.

Anyway – one story really stuck with me…  because it utterly nails the benefits of the Cloud model for business applications.

Zack Nelson, CEO of Netsuite summed up the value of the model: Value Added Tax or VAT.

During the teeth of the financial crisis the UK government cut VAT by 2.5% to stimulate businesses. For companies running traditional on premise business applications this was a total nightmare. Didn’t matter whether you were a small business running Sage or a FTSE100 firm running Oracle Financials this was a painful change to make. Retailers were in a tough spot. How were they supposed to make all their systems compliant with the rule change.

Unless, that is, they were using hosted Software as a Service (Saas) applications. With the cloud, a change like this can be rolled out to every customer overnight- as easily as Google rolling out a new service.

So next time someone asks what’s the Business Value of cloud you can just say read my lips – Some. New. Taxes.

My efforts at cloud definitional work began with 15 Ways to Tell its Not Cloud Computing. In the intervening time the forces of complexity and, yes, pragmatism have triumphed. We’re now making the long transition from simple and public to complex and private – hopefully some simplicity will make it through the process.

Talking of simplicity, one of the problems in any tech wave is the problem of language. Cloud, like SOA before it, suffers from being everything and the kitchen sink. Funnily enough my name is an anagram of Removes Jargon, and in that spirit I just wanted to amplify some home spun wisdom from our very own Michael Coté.

The other day I was reading some of his notes and came across this line of beautiful simplicity.

a simple mapping:

• IaaS = servers, storage
• PaaS = middleware
• SaaS = applications

There now, that wasn’t so hard was it? Now that is what I call a burger. The next time someone tries to take you through 30 slides explaining the cloud you can just nod sagely, and say… “ohhhh. you mean servers, middleware and apps. Yeah I get it.”

CloudCamp London rocked: around 250 people showed up, and the applause for the speakers was surprisingly generous from a geek UK audience; its clear there is a hunger for information in the space. The format wasn’t perfect, but it was still a very good effort, even if there were no dead dragons lying bleeding afterwards.  

Reuven Cohen, CEO of enomaly, the guy behind the original CloudCamp San Francisco, kicked off proceedings by saying that the event series was going global- in the next few months we’ll see New York, Chicago, Boston and Paris all hold their own. Like BarCamp this isn’t a top down phenomenon- anyone can get involved, as a speaker, sponsor, attendee, or whatever. Check out www.cloudcamp.com for more info. We’re working on governance ideas now….

The first speaker was Simon Wardley, otherwise known as the *AAS Master. Unlike some of the other speakers he actually stuck to the Lightning Talk format’s 10 minute limit. Key phrase: “Yesterday’s hot stuff becomes tomorrow’s boredom“. His presentation was the usual mashup of ducks and horror movie stills. The essential argument- unless open source standards emerge, cloud will just be another round of industry lock in. One take on that argument is that customers always vote with their feet, and they tend vote for something somewhat proprietary – see Salesforce APEX and iPhone apps for example. Experience always comes before open. Even supposed open standards dorks these days are rushing headlong into the walled garden of gorgeousness we like call Apple Computer.

Next up came Adil Mohammed, co-founder of entrip, with his take on why the cloud is perfect for startups. Adil made some good points, though others felt like motherhood and apple pie – startups want reliability (try telling that to Twitter, which almost seems to benefit from downtime).

“Cloud Computing has leveled the playing field with enterprises.”

I was also a bit worried by the numbers he pointed to for Animoto, an example of scale via cloud. People are really liking animoto, thought its not without problems. But according to Gojko, Mohammed pointed out that:

Animoto, which grew from 25000 users to 250000 users in three days, scaling from 50 to 4000 servers in that time and growing at peak 20000 users per hour. The cloud deployment made it possible to do that, since growing that fast on a dedicated infrastructure would simply be impossible even if already purchased the hardware.

Wait. wait. wait… just a second here. According to my calculations that’s a new server for every 63 users. Cloud or on premises that’s not exactly an impressive scalability number.  I guess I need to know more.

Other speakers were not as generous to the community as they should have been, frankly. Brevity for the win. Given that fact the middle part of the evening felt more like marketing – particularly the Gigaspaces pitch, which was the same ol same ol’ virtual tiers presentation with one or two cloud mentions for good mention.

I thought Martin Buhr of Amazon did OK, though, and announced European hosting buildout (which should be good for network bandwidth costs and data protection legislation).

I think Will Fellows of the 451 Group did an excellent job of putting foward a cloud taxonomy. Really I was very impressed with the work he has put in. I would strongly advise you to ping him and ask for a free copy of the report his talk was based on (the offered one to cloudcamp attendees.

Last up was Alan Williamson. summarised eloquently here:

“His main message was that with cloud infrastructures problems don’t magically go away, they just shift. You don’t have scalability or storage problems any more, but you need to constantly monitor the cloud and your application in it. Alan pointed out examples when Amazon’s cloud failed and their applications got cut off from the Internet. As a solution, he proposed deploying the application on more than one cloud so that you have resilience. This requires writing the application in a way that can be easily ported to different providers, which in itself might be a challenge. One idea that was really striking was their analysis of getting off the cloud to a dedicated infrastructure again — apparently it would take them about three weeks of full-bandwidth transfer to download the data that they have in the cloud, making it virtually impossible to go back.”

Nice- so much for “freedom to leave“. The service might support it, but with massive data sets, portability ain’t so easy… Mi compadri Stephen O’Grady recently posted some good thoughts on Cloud Standards but its also worth considering the physical limits of data portability (we might be talking about flowing a terabyte of data, not just an email address). To often we assume everything on the web is instantaneous. We’re talking about the Physics, rather than the Economics of Data Portability. Data volumes will certainly be a key challenge for data portability, which is one reason my money is on the Synchronised Web. 

Well perhaps not everything is instantaneous: as Will Fellows said, he was talking to a middleware vendor who said he wasn’t losing sales to Cloud Computing… but it was elongating the sales cycle. Not sure how that fits into 15 Ways To Tell Its Not Cloud Computing… I know there were quite a few suits at CloudCamp.

Final Thoughts:

The event was a success, but the key takeaway is that the format needs more user participation. The sponsorships were frankly not expensive enough to justify vendors using them as marketing spiels. CloudCamp needs to be more about the community, as Alexis Richardson, the point man for the London event, explains better than I could:

“Which brings me on to the ‘Open Spaces’ aspect of the event and the lightning talks. Putting it about as politely as possible this is the area ‘most in need of improvement’ for next time. We’d set a limit of ten minutes per talk which of course everyone effortlessly broke. This was entirely my fault for not bringing a stop watch and baseball bat. Next time, all lightning talks will be ruthlessly limited – possibly using an Ignite format. Admittedly some speakers were so engaging that the time flew by and the questions could have gone on all night. But – that’s why we brought beer and pizza.
Secondly this was the first Open Spaces event for many people who came. I must confess to having been nervous about this beforehand, and on the web site had asked people to propose talks or topics. About twelve people were enthusiastic or sympathetic enough to offer talks. I figured this would be enough to motivate others to step up from the audience but, aside from one or two fluent folks such as Mark Masterson, it just did not happen. Argh.
At the SF event there were many talks and many people who like to talk. Was London CloudCamp making people laconic, or worse yet, shy? Based on the fantastic atmosphere throughout, and the great conversations people had till late in the evening, I don’t think so. I think we can make the format much better. One idea is to have more smaller rooms and start with an hour or two of Open Spaces unconference, then mingle over beers, and have a few really rapid fire talks after that. Please do comment on this blog if you have suggestions!”

Special thanks to Skills Matter for being the operations people behind CloudCamp London. I believe the phrase is “we couldn’t have done it without them.”

picture credit Chris Purrington. He says “all rights reserved” but I am sure he’ll consider this fair use.