A few weeks ago I was able to catch up with Randy Bias, CEO of cloudscaling, in Seoul, Korea where he is currently camped out for a large engagement his firm is working on. It was really early our time, and really late his time, but Randy was a good sport and gave a wonderful interview. I even had most of it recorded until the last two seconds when my Audio Hijack Pro crashed and zeroed out the audio file. Good thing the recording wasn’t running after that, otherwise I would have had to excise lots of expletives. There’s a lesson to be learned in there somewhere. Anyway, being a great individual, Randy participated in the interview again and it’s attached to this blog posting.
One of the first things discussed was “what is cloud?” and Randy described it simply as “self service IT delivered through automation.” So what does this mean? Ultimately, there are three different layers to the cloud stack: software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). So, when you consume any of these, whether it’s an application, a platform somewhere to load your code and go, or whether it’s infrastructure to get servers or storage on demand — it’s really the whole experience of being able to get what you want, when you want it, and on your own terms.
In the rest of the podcast, Randy talks about a number of other great topics such as:
- what kinds of businesses are using cloud
- how you should go about evaluating it
- how to avoid being outsourced as an IT department
- what are the barriers to adoption; monitoring in the cloud (near and dear to our hearts)
- designing applications for failure awareness
- where he thinks the cloud is going
It goes without saying that Randy is extremely experienced and I learned a lot from this podcast. You can get more information about Randy here at cloudscaling.
Alex
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Tags: cloud computing, cloud computing podcast, Cloud Monitoring, Systems Management, up.time, uptime, uptime software
ShareThis
Subscribe to this post's comments
Great interview – thank you. I found a 10 min video with David Chappell on this topic where he covers others issues such as:
- IaaS vs PaaS
- Private vs Public Cloud
- Applications that are not a great fit for the Cloud and those which are.
- The threat of Public Cloud to IT departments
see: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/David+Gristwood/Conversations-with-David-Chappell-about-Windows-Azure-and-Cloud-Computing/
thoughts?
hope that helps,
-cn