The cloud computing world is growing up. Last year, we were still discussing taxonomies. This year, Amazon’s CTO, Werner Vogels painted a world of “everything as a service” at the very successful Cloud Connect conference.

It’s a new-found pragmatism, and while there’s still a lot of deflating to do with the hype machine, most companies now recognize that on-demand computing plays a role in their future. We’re adapting this year’s Enterprise Cloud Summit at Interop, too, with a series of “deep dives.”

Interop’s longevity is in part due to its focus on content that IT professionals can take home and use. Many attendees rely on it as the place where they can find out what’s new and return home with a shortlist of vendors that meet their needs. And at this year’s ECS, we’re helping them compare cloud offerings with new sessions we call “Under The Covers.” We’ve given eight public cloud providers and four private cloud providers a set of questions. They each have ten minutes to answer them, using our slide deck.

Here’s what we’re asking public cloud providers:

• Main elements of your service: What are your main service offerings (i.e. the top 3 technologies, services, or APIs your subscribers use?)
• Pricing: How are those services priced? (i.e. what is the unit of measure, what do you charge, do you have an elastic pricing model based on usage?)
• Security and certifications: What security or similar certifications do you have? (i.e. FIPS, SAS-70, PCI)
• Data centers and zones: Where are your data centers or availability zones (i.e. Europe, US, China)
• Customers: What are three companies building things on your platform? (One slide per customer profile is OK here)
• SLAs and compensation: What SLAs do you offer (i.e. data recoverability, uptime, latency?) and how do you compensate those (i.e. service refund)?
• Architecture: How is the system architected (i.e. what underlying stacks do you rely on?) A couple of diagrams are OK here.
• Portability: How can people move things onto and off of your platform (i.e. are there APIs? Portable machine image formats? Private stacks they can run?)

And here’s what we’re asking private cloud providers:

• Service library: What cloud services does the stack offer? (i.e. virtual machines, code execution, large-object storage, message queueing.)
• OS, language, and API support: What operating systems, languages, or APIs can the user employ? (i.e. Python, any OS, etc.)
• On what stack is it based? (VMWare, Xen, KVM, etc.)
• Requirements & limitations: What are the underlying hardware requirements or constraints? (i.e. pairs of machines; Intel quad-core processors; sub-10-ms latency between nodes)
• Portability: Is the stack portable to other stacks, or to public cloud provider environments? (i.e. can you move an AMI to Amazon?)
• What standards or de-facto standards does it support?
• How is it priced? (i.e. by core, by user, open source with a support contract, etc.)
• Included tools: What management tools do you offer? (a screenshot or two is fine here)
• Capacity, performance, availability: What are the capacity, performance, and availability constraints? (i.e. scales to a maximum of 20 nodes)
• Global distribution: Can it work in a distributed, multi-city mode with additional redundancy?

Until recently, it’s been hard to get an apples-to-apples comparison of cloud offerings. While there’s still a lot of variance in pricing, services, and technologies, we’re hoping that ECS can at least get us down to a fruit salad.

 

Within the Cloud track of Interop’s general conference, we’ll also be spending time on a lot of these real-world themes. I’m particularly excited about a new formal-debate format we’ll be running this year, in which two sides will be trying to convince the audience whether or not clouds are secure called, The Great Debate: Are Clouds More Secure.

 

In all, Interop has a comprehensive look at cloud computing through the lens of enterprise IT. People who’ve been coming to the conference for a decade to learn how new technologies affect their business are now relying on it to understand the shape of the cloud ecosystem as well. 

Tags: cloud computing, Conference, Enterprise Cloud Summit, Interop, interop las vegas