Conditions continue to be cloudy

Went to my inaugural CloudCamp event last week in London – a gathering of various industry types, with five minute pitches by a handful and a gong to see them off stage if the talk gets too much like a sales pitch, or is simply rubbish, I guess. And free beer and pizza! These CloudCamps have been running for years now, so it’s not about discussing what the Cloud is all about – thought that’s still what it boils down to in my eyes.

So, yes, they’ve done public versus private, security in the Cloud etc, etc, years ago, and now we’re in the era of Container versus VM and which app frameworks to use. Dockers haven’t been so talked about since QEII was being constructed (Docker is an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications) and yet, there is still no real sense of getting a single view of what the Cloud is – which kind of makes sense, as there is no one definition. VMware’s Joe Baguley, who co-presented the event in his opening gambit, where he declared that it’s not a case of whether we use VMs (though he obviously needs people to!) or containers, which devopps method, App frameworks etc – but that ALL of them will be used.

This is the correct answer. So it’s back that golden oldie of clichés – horses for courses – and ne’er has it rung more true that with cloud app development. Of the presenters, and talking of applications, the most interesting pitch came from Rhys Sharpe of new (UK) kids on the block Fedr8. Rather than focusing on developing new apps, Fedr8 is all about making sure your existing applications will actually work in that environment in the first place. Kind of akin to avoiding the scenario where you buy a large American car before you measure the size of your garage.

The product itself, Argentum, provides compatibility analysis and optimisation for in-house applications, prior to cloud delivery. It provides organisations with a suite of tools that can access, analyse and optimise existing applications, enabling organisations to design successful cloud projects and migrate applications without even thinking about the pain, system, effort and time in attempting to do it manually. Or simply guessing...

To date Argentum has been piloted on Open Source applications developed by companies including Netflix, Twitter and IBM, so no big names there then! How, then, does it work? In layman's terms it analyses the source code of any application, in any programming language, and then provides actionable intelligence to help a company move those existing apps into the cloud - hence "federate" the services! So, what's in a name? Lots it seems -) At a slightly more technical level, code is uploaded to the Argentum platform where it undergoes a complex analysis and is split into objectified tokens. These tokens populate a meta database against which queries are run. From this, out pops a visualisation of the application and actionable business intelligence to enable successful cloud adoption.

Definitely one to come under the test microscope, so watch this space!

Meantime, for me at least, the Cloud definition continues to be, well, cloudy...