Ynema Mangum: The Human Cloud

~John M. Willis does a nice interview with a man from Cloud Camp Toronto about his exploration of different cloud providers for his Web video service startup.  There are pros and cons with RightScale, 3tera, Elastra, Mosso, Amazon Cloudfront, etc.  I think he said his name is Mark Bobson, but Willis doesn't tag it.  Hope I got the spelling right!

(By the way, John, I enjoyed this interview, but I think your Science Logic You're on my Fedora video was a riot... )

~Another interesting one is on the up and coming whurley cloud computing blog on Infoworld has him discussing the costs of downtime for the cloud.  Will this be a barrier to adoption?  I wondered why all the research I've been reading misses availability as a top barrier, and whurley nails it.

~Is the relational database doomed?  You tell me.

~IBM is tapping AWS. 

~Here's something to stimulate the cloud economy.  Mark Cuban's offering funding for startups, as long as you're totally open.

Happy Valentine's Day and President's Day to everyone!

~Y

 Sharing an interesting article in Newsweek:

Today’s Forecast: Cloudy

Newsweek, Daniel Lyons; November 1, 2008

Newsweek discusses the technology trend of cloud computing, noting, “Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems used to call it "the big friggin' web-tone switch" ("Web tone" being the digital successor to "ringtone"). IBM dubbed it "on-demand computing." Others have called it "grid computing" and "software as a service." The latest name is "cloud computing," and it's the hot new dance craze—er, tech trend—that's sweeping the computing industry.” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, speaking at a conference recently, said of the cloud phenomenon, "Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane.” The basic idea is simple enough. Instead of storing your data on your PC, you store it on a server on the Internet. You don't know, or care, where that server is located. Your data might, in fact, be scattered across a bunch of different servers. It's just all up in the sky someplace (hence the name "cloud").

The "big friggin' web-tone switch"?  Go Scott!