“Causal Consistency”

I just keep getting questioned: “What’s big in cloud and what’s really happening?” You see people saying the cloud market is a hundred bazillion whatever, most of it unsubstantiated. When you drill in, you find they were making numbers up, top down. Enterprise markets are trillions and trillions, so it’s got to be some percentage right? So we’re trying to go from the bottom up to see if it makes more sense.

From a 2013 Gartner press release: The use of cloud computing is growing, and by 2016 this growth will increase to become the bulk of new IT spend, according to Gartner, Inc. 2016 will be a defining year for cloud as private cloud begins to give way to hybrid cloud, and nearly half of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017. New IT spend gobbled by cloud by 2016

This anecdote sums up an annoying problem on cloud marketing (and product management): At the break I chatted with a somewhat bemused attendee who had come in the hope of learning about whether he should migrate some or all of his small company’s server requirements to Azure. I explained about Office 365 and Azure Active Directory which he said was more relevant to him than the intricacies of software development.

Gartner, in its “Magic Quadrant for Integrated Systems” report, a copy of which was reviewed by CRN, estimated the market for integrated systems, which includes single-vendor and multivendor converged infrastructures and hyper-converged infrastructures, will grow more than 50 percent in 2014 over 2013 to reach $6 billion. Converged infrastructure to grow to $6bn in 2014

For one, it looks like HP Helion OEM’s SwiftStack, which is a nice partnership. Two, their CEO points towards going after enterprise storage: SwiftStack founder and CEO Joe Arnold said all enterprise applications will eventually rely on object storage to keep up with growth of data and access points required by users. ”It’s the only way enterprises will be able to compete today and in the future,” he said.

Recently we have seen Docker cluster management projects appearing which are predominantly focused on managing clusters in a single provider’s environment. Clocker is designed to deploy and manage Docker clusters in a portable and cloud provider agnostic way. Clocker can even be used on-premise exploiting an enterprise’s virtual or private cloud environment. Along with things like MesoSphere and PaaS trying to reinvent itself all the time, this injection of Docker into the “how do I run a cloud?

My colleague Jay Lyman and I wrote up Red Hat’s recent OS release, RHEL 7. Of interest to us, of course, is the work Red Hat is doing with containers. Clients can read the full report, and here’s the 451 Take: In order to differentiate and draw enterprise interest for RHEL 7, Red Hat is wise to look to new technologies, such as containerization, and make them enterprise-ready. The company will need to find new sources of growth beyond Unix conversion and Windows defection, so its effort to link to other technologies and products – cloud computing, RHEV, OpenStack, OpenShift and devops – will be critical.

VMware to build converged compute and storage hardware