Guests:
- James Segil, President of Edgecast
- David Hornik, General Partner, August Capital
- Uri Budnik, Rightscale

Twitter: @twicloudcomp

The show started with a discussion about the different definitions of ‘what Cloud Computing is’. Uri felt it was infrastructure as service; James thought it was a return to centralized mainframe computing and David thought about it more broadly, including the application layer in his definition: software as a service, such as Salesforce.com, are ‘cloud’ in David’s opinion. However, everyone agreed that Cloud Computing is ‘an inkblot word’ which many people use in many different ways.

The conversation then moved to ‘The Mark-laughlin Group’ where Mark brought four issues to the discussion in the format of the popular PBS show:

Issue 1:
One of the promises of Cloud Computing is that it frees you from the need to create your own datacenter. No more getting your hands dirty with physical machines and wires and racks! Also, you don’t have to pay a systems person to maintain all that hardware, never mind to harden your systems against hacker attacks. In short: you are now free to focus simply on your application without hardware headaches, and this is cheaper because of economies of scale. Question: Is cloud computing really cheaper?

Issue 2:
There are many big players claiming to offer ‘Cloud Computing’. From IBM to Google to Microsoft to Amazon, everyone and their brother is seeking to dominate this new paradigm.
On a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 representing zero possibility and 10 representing complete metaphysical certitude Will one player rise and become the dominant force in cloud computing?

Issue 3: How do I know cloud vendors are actually providing me with the unshared processing, memory and bandwidth they say that they are? How do you benchmark cloud services against one another?

Issue 4: Is the cloud more vulnerable to hacker attack? Case in point: Google in December suffering a massive attack in China.

Then the ‘Cloud? … or Not Cloud?” segment began … it did not go exactly as planned, but several insights fell out:
a) The Cloud is very good for short term, very large deployments
b) Facebook, Twitter, etc. do not use the cloud, they build their own datacenters. Therefore, it is not completely mature yet.

Last was the news. Stories covered:
- Cloudkick Launches Cloud Monitoring
- HP in several news stories cloud-related
- Is the death of the data center exaggerated?
- Are private or hybrid clouds the first step to full-cloud implementations?

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