Yesterday at the SugarCon 2009 event, Sun CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, and Cloud Computing CTO, Lew Tucker disclosed that Sun is indeed going to enter the Cloud computing arena with its own Cloud offering. 

You can see some of the coverage from Infoworld and InternetNews.com.

We're being mostly mum on details, but promise more details at CommunityOne East in NYC on March 18.  The agenda is being built right now, but one should expect Lew Tucker and the head of Sun's Cloud Computing BU to be at the event.

 More to come.

Here is the link to download a .pdf copy of the presentation Dave Douglas, the head of Sun's Cloud Computing Business Unit will be talking from for his chalk talk today at 1:00p Pacific.

Russ

Does anyone else find this type of story in Computerworld tiresome?  I mean does this story really help anyone with anything?

I know that writers at Computerworld seldom write their headlines, but give us a break.  I guess we were warned when the first person quoted had their comments lifted from a blog.  The real payoff was the quote, "There will be things for the enterprise that will completely make sense and things that won't."

 I'm blinded by the light on that one.

Can we please get some more meaningful stories on this topic?  Not a list of things that have gone wrong with an area that's essentially new.

Like a lot of people I've been eagerly following the conversation between Hugh Macleod, Tim O'Reilly and Nick Carr on the nature of Cloud Computing and the possibility the market can be dominated by some large vendors.  The posts and the comments are fascinating and certainly thought provoking. Even some well known analysts like James Govenor and Stephen O'Grady of Redmonk have weighed in.

I realize there might be as much of a first mover advantage for commentators as there is for market entrants, but this does seem like a lot of traffic on a market that's really quite young.

That said, I'd like to pose two questions that came from following this topic.

First, does everyone assume that one cloud is pretty much like any other?  I realize there's segmentation around IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, but even then,  are these clouds really going to be mostly the same?  I suspect how you answer this question will color your thoughts on the topic as a whole.

Second, on the economies of scale notion, at what point do diminishing returns kick in?  Does anyone really know or are some of the really, really big data centers being built right now an experiment in finding out?  I recall a while back that some very large semiconductor fabrication facilities were built and only after they were completed did they find out that the planned savings didn't pan out as intended.

As always, I'd love any thoughts that might be had.

I was intrigued by a story in The Register that promotes Java as a likely candidate for a cloud operating system.  Working at Sun, I'm always happy to see Java recommended for anything.  So I asked on Sun's cloud researchers, Mark Hodapp, what he thought about the notion.

In talking with Mark, it seems that Sun's looking in to this via Project Caroline, a Platform as a Service research project.  But there's a hitch, “When we talk to potential users, says Mark, “they like the idea, but invariably they seem to have some native code that they wanted to bring along.  Either that or there's a set up environment that assumes something that's incompatible enough that they'd have to do some sort of a rewrite of their launch and management scripts/code.”

So I went on to ask with developers if they are faced with a trade-off between a rewrite and working with a familiar EC2-like environment, does the higher level notion lose out?  Mark said, “For now, but I can see that the market will progress to the point where the subset of users who want to write to a higher level notion like Java will be a lot more interesting.”

All in all, I got the notion that there's a lot to like about Java as a cloud operating system, but that we'll need more people using clouds from a variety of vendors before this happens.

Hello there.  I've been bitten by the cloud computing bug here at Sun, so I'm going to focus on that for a while.

As this chart from Google Trends show, the volume of traffic on Cloud Computing is growing fast.

As I've gotten involved, I've been struck by the number of traffic that is “defining” cloud computing.
At the recent SD Forum event there was a lot of defining the technology in the presentations.  Type in 'cloud computing definition' into your favorite search engine and you'll see what I mean.

As this video suggests, there's really no set definition. 

With all this, does the definition really matter?  When the buzz cycle hits like it is for cloud computing, there's a natural tendency to want to help by defining.  But like Web 2.0, or web services, or grid computing the definition the we end up with, if one ever resolves, will likely be to high level and vague to be much specific use.

Sure, the term will get you in the general area of what you might want to discuss, but when a segment of the market thinks that cloud computing means they have to give up the rights to their pictures stored on a 3rd party website and another segment wants to have a discussion about APIs, then spending time on a definition is fruitless.

So having said this, its clear that something big is going on with cloud computing.  There are too many people who want to take advantage of a different kind of economics around computing for this to be a fad.  Whatever the definition.

That's enough for now, I'd love your comments.