Past week I flew to Lisbon to participate in a Cloud Computing Event from IDC: “Managed Services, Outsourcing & Cloud Computing”. The place they chose to host it was the “Centro Cultural De Belém”, which is located on a beautiful neighbourhood. If you don’t happen to know Lisbon, as I don’t, I can promise you will be surprised :).

My talk was a pretty conceptual one covering the following topics:

1. The deep economic forces that drive this paradigm shift. A clear understanding of them is key when we want to design a successful business strategy in which Cloud Computing Services or Technologies might be involved.
2. Demystifying technological adoption processes. No matter if you are a believer or an skeptic. It is a complex phenomenon that we all have to understand to be able to filter out information about markets.
3. Looking into the future to figure out the role of Cloud Computing.
4. Look inside the Technologies involved. No matter which role we have on this game: we need to know.

Here you have the slides of my presentation. Hope you like it and, as usual, don’t hesitate to comment whatever you consider relevant. I would love to hear your feedback!

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Cloud Computing has been a buzz topic for a while. I understand it: it promises exciting benefits and, therefore, everyone wants to be there. Obviously, that’s not new. Nevertheless, I happened to attend several Cloud Computing events recently and I couldn’t help having a strange feeling of “déjà vu”:

• both Skeptics and Believers keep saying the same things over and over again.
• there seems to be some confusion or lack of understanding about how different concepts and components relate to each other.
• a broad set of diverse offerings and their respective confusing marketing messages don’t help to understand the context.

That is why I’ve decided to sort out my ideas and tell you my own vision about this subject. But, before going on, I would like to point out some important nuances:

• I am a Believer with huge respect on Skeptics points of view.
• This is a complex phenomenon with many interrelated and relevant perspectives that have to be analyzed both individually and also as a whole.
• I believe that this is a never ending learning process. In fact, I have invested a quite significant amount of time listening, reading, thinking and discussing about this matter. So, this vision is inevitably connected to what I’ve learned and, of course, is the reason why I have waited so long to write this down.



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Today I would like to recall a really nice conference I saw last January: “Infrastructure in the Cloud Era”. This presentation was performed at O’Reilly Velocity Conference 2009 by Adam Jacob (Co-Founder at OpsCode) and Ezra Zygmuntowicz (Co-Founder at EngineYard).

They cover the theory of how you should be thinking about building a Fully Automated Infrastructure classifying their analysis in the following areas:

• Bootstrapping: Corporate Approvals, Agile Approvals, Cloud.
• Configuration: Manual, Ad-Hoc, Infrastructure as Code.
• Command and Control: Manual, Ad-Hoc, Framework.

They conclude, in the context of a Cloud Infrastructures, that the appropriate way to answer the issues an challenges on each of these categories is: Cloud (IaaS), Infrastructure as Code and a Framework for Command and Control.

There exist a clear positioning around Open Source on the hole talk. In fact, they mainly propose Open Source Tools for an Open Source Environment:

• Bootstrapping > Cloud: Amazon Web Services
• Configuration > Infrastructure as Code: Chef, Puppet, cfengine,  Bcfg2, AutomateIT.
• Command and Control > Framework: Nanite, Capistrano, ControlTier.

“You need an API” is the underlying message. You need an API to cover these three layers and manage your Infrastructure as a hole.

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