The Cloudy Bit

Remember the first time you drew this on the whiteboard (obviously in your own hand drawn style)?

What exactly did you mean by that cloudy bit? Well, what I usually meant was, a place where stuff that I needed to get done, would get done, without me knowing exactly how. I guess I mostly meant the Internet.

Move ahead until today and now hundreds, if not thousands of people (and companies) have tried to define the “cloud”. One company even tried to trademark it. The problem is, what many of these definers fail to remember is the basic premise of the cloudy bit - automatic satisfaction.

Here’s what I mean by that. Today, most of the cloud definitions that I read seem to define something more like this.

Unfortunately, a large majority of today’s definitions of the cloud are basically defining are a new form of hosting environment where the major innovation is “infinite” capacity, that you can enable in a very short time period, and that you pay for by the hour versus by the month. It is an new hosting environment where people and management software must still by employed to make the "cloud" operate.

What these definitions absolutely do not describe is a reality where “hardware need satisfaction” happens automatically. And, they certainly do not reflect my first notion of the cloudy bit. If you want to check out another (fun) perspective on today’s definitions for the "cloud" check out James Governor’s, 15 Ways to Tell Its Not Cloud Computing.

The question for me is why this new form of hosting is being passed off as cloud computing when the promise of the cloudy bit is, things you need to happen, happen automatically?

The short answer is hype.

So, since the hype is already overwhelming and many people and companies have defined the “Cloud”, what I want to do instead is define the “Cloudy Bit”.

James Duncan and I, mostly because of developing the Reasonably Smart business plus James’s past experience with the zimki platform, have spent a great deal of time thinking and talking about the “what exactly is the cloudy bit”. The purest example we have come up with is a SaaS application.

Applications like Salesforce.com’s CRM system or Google Docs are truly delivering functionality and real value based on an architecture diagram I first drew on the whiteboard. The user accesses the functionality and data on their computer and the things that make the application work really happen in the cloudy bit. No investment of effort or time on the user’s side is required. The user can make assumptions about where the data is housed, where the application is being served from and how the hardware is configured but, more and more, they would be wrong (especially when it comes to SaaS applications provided by today’s smaller companies and start-ups).

If you look at the components of a SaaS application (from the simplistic perspective) you will see that the “cloudy bit” looks like this:

The application code is the part that links the user to the functionality and enables the usable transfer of data.

At the platform level exist the operational components, including things like the load balancer, web server, virtual machine, message queue and data store, that make the application run (and scale). The operational platform handles things like security, session management, information distribution and interacts with the servers.

And, then there is the hardware which is basically the OS, machines and infrastructure pipes that provide the power and store the data.

The entire stack is the “Cloudy Bit”. Why? Because the user operates the software without ever considering any of the layers in the stack.

So to be a true "Cloudy Bit" provider you really need to be providing the entire stack. More precisely you need to have the capability to run an application (yours or the customer’s) without the customer having to do anything to make it run – at any point of the application’s life cycle.

So far my point is that SaaS applications are truly representative of the cloudy bit and hardware providers, unless they can automatically scale machines as an application’s consumption requirements change, are not.

Now, let’s look at where Platform as a Service companies like Reasonably Smart, Google App Engine or Force.com fit in. Is a PaaS company a cloud provider?

To analyze we can start at the bottom of the stack. What needs to be asked here is do these companies provide the hardware required by their customers automatically? The answer is yes. A person running an application on Reasonably Smart, Force.com or Google App Engine never needs to ask the provider to add or subtract machines to meet their requirements - it happens automatically (from the user's perspective).

Moving up the stack, the second question is, do PaaS companies provide the operating platform in a way that the customer does not worry about it? And again, the answer is yes. A developer creating on any of the aforementioned platforms does need to know how the platform is structured or what component parts are used. In the case of Reasonably Smart, the developer can know because of its open source model but needs to do nothing with this knowledge to make their application run.

Where it gets interesting is when you ask, do these companies provide the code that enables the application to function – the last piece to the cloudy bit definition. In this case, the answer is no. However, what the PaaS providers do give the developer is the foundation on which to create the entire cloudy bit by offering the environment where they can write code and once finished the result is a full blown SaaS application - without any investment in building the platform or hardware infrastructure layer.

And the really exciting part about this is the developer has just leapfrogged traditional SaaS providers like Salesforce for their CRM solution and Google for Docs because today's SaaS companies actually have to manage their infrastructure everyday - regardless if they run on their own hardware or if they run it in the "cloud". If you write on a platform you never will.

So, when you are considering building an app that leverages a cloudy bit architecture you may want to consider a Platform as a Service to minimize your long term costs and potentially out smart your competition.

If you need more information on this topic we would be more than happy to discuss it further.

Will Reasonably Smart be cheaper than EC2?

In response to James's post Ning shuts down WidgetLaboratory, Chris Holland asked if the Reasonably Smart Platform (RSP) would be cheaper than Amazon's EC2. It's a valid question that deserved its own blog post as a response.

So, will RSP be cheaper than EC2? The short answer is maybe.

The long answer needs to be looked at from a couple different angles.

1. Should the pricing of the two companies even be compared given the businesses they are in?
2. If they are in the same business will Reasonably Smart be cheaper than EC2?

In their own words, Amazon, through EC2, delivers a true virtual computing environment, allowing you to use web service interfaces to requisition machines for use, load them with your custom application environment, manage your network's access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as you desire.

In other words, they let you rent servers and bandwidth in shorter time frames then what was available from traditional hosting companies. Plus they make it "easy" to increase and/or decrease the number of machines you are renting quickly.

In our words, Reasonably Smart's mission is to develop and manage the open source Platform-as-a-Service that enables web application development in a Peer-to-Peer cloud/utility computing environment and empowers collaborative, efficient, industry transforming web application creation.

In other words, we provide an environment for you to develop and execute web applications.

The major differences between the two being that on our platform you can develop your web application without concerning yourself with:

• Creating, managing and scaling a database
• Creating back-up routines and load balancing between servers
• Developing an execution environment
• Managing security patches
• Hiring and managing system administrators
• Engaging (and paying) cloud computing management system providers
• Figuring out how to be "at the edges of the network"

A couple of other pieces of added value within the RSP platform over and above EC2 are the integrated distributed version control and the core philosophy of open source.

So the first answer to the question "will RSP be cheaper than EC2?" is that they are difficult to compare because there is much more value being provided by RSP than EC2.

Now, if you completely discount the Platform as a Service (PaaS) value proposition then the question of who will be cheaper comes down to the vision of the two companies for the (hardware) cloud.

Amazon has huge buying power, and can reach economies of scale that are difficult for others to attain. However, the RSP has been designed to be completely hardware-provider agnostic. Therefore, our hardware layer options could include EC2, IBM, Dell, EMC, any hosting company, our own datacentre, the server under your desk or all of the above. This makes the answer to the question most easily broken down like this:

1. If RSP utilizes EC2 as its hardware layer then RSP will not be cheaper than EC2
2. If RSP utilizes several data centres (EC2, EMC, IBM, Opsource) then RSP might be cheaper than EC2
3. If RSP reaches its "blue sky vision" of leveraging the world's excess server capacity then it is likely that RSP will be cheaper than EC2

Fundementally we believe that someone needs to start identifying the difference between a hosting provider and a cloud computing environment in light of all of the misrepresentation in the market and media. What Amazon are doing with EC2 is fantastic, and makes renting computing power more straightforward than ever before. They are, undoubtedly taking away the need to plug in server, and wire it up to the network. But don't forget, there is a difference between being in the cloud and being the cloud.

Hopefully this addresses both the question about who will be cheaper and starts to illustrate more clearly some of the differences between ourselves, and other "cloud" computing companies.

Quite A Week

Since getting the "alpha" version up and available, reasonablysmart.com has had quite a week. It all started with Tim O'Reilly's keynote. From there the interest has grown quickly. The site has seen significant traffic everyday and it's coming from all over the world. There has been a number of writes ups and the CIO article has been reprinted in many online publications. James is receiving much appreciated feedback on the platform. There have also been interview requests. V good for the first week with no money.


Now it is time to get serious and raise the required capital to make a business out of what we have started. We have already written a overview of the business plan and today we will finalize the financial forecasts. We should be ready to talk to potential financial partners by Friday.


If anybody is interested in finding out more about our exciting new venture please contact me at bbogens1@gmail.com.