Live Blog from CloudConnect: Amazon CTO Werner Vogels and the Scaling Cloud

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels is the lead keynote today at CloudConnect, an event that has sold out this year with about 3,000 people in attendance.

Lew Tucker, Cloud CTO, Cisco Systems and Cloudscaling CEO Randy Bias will follow Vogels.

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We’ll be looking for three key themes:

The Importance of an Open Infrastructure.
How the API Plays a Growing Role in the Cloud.
The Future of Compute, Storage and I/0.

8:59 a.m.: Let’s get started.

9:04 a.m.: Vogels says this will not be a sales talk. Yay! Very choppy video. Ugh. Vogels is talking about the ecosystem and the growth of mobile.

9:08 a.m. Cloud service terms are muddling the way we think about infrastructure and its impacts. The real importance is in the types of applications we build. Cloud services needs to exhibit benefits of the greater cloud. The service provider should be running the infrastructure so people can just use it. That is what the cloud looks like these days.

9:11 a.m.: Most important is to grow the ecosystem. Enterprise software was built for enterprise operations. This is leading to major changes. Startups are growing to bigger sizes than enterprise companies. With increasing competition, enterprises are becoming more start up like. He is mentioning companies such as Safenet that provide ways for the enterprises to interrelate with the cloud.

9:16 a.m.: Vogels is recounting a story he had with a potential customer that showed him a Garner Magic Quadrant. He was being asked about hosting. But the difference is really about how growth can be supported. Hosting architectures need to support high performing Web sites.

9:20 a,m. In this high performance environment, companies are leveraging the ecosystem. SAP, for instance, is using the cloud to measure carbon impact.

9:22 a.m.Sill getting very choppy stream. Hard to follow. Companies are using the redundancy of the Amazon server network. Companies are using EU region for hot loads with the US being cold but there in case the data load needs to be transferred due to an outage, for example.

9:25 a.m.: Business environments change radically. Companies need to continually update disaster recovery. He is citing importance of having a network such as Amazon.

9:27 a.m.: Vogels is going through the company’s announcements of the past year. Its goal is to make sure the ecosystem really blossoms.

Lew Tucker, Cloud CTO, Cisco Systems

9:31 a.m.: What are effective networks? It’s really about network entropy. It’s abotu decomposing and reconstructing into new configurations. Tucker is bringing up John Gage, who talked about the network being the computer. Today, we see the massive growth of TCP/IP and the world of networked devices. That movement has pushed us into the age of the laptops, mobile platforms and the future mesh that will transform how society functions.

9:35 a.m.: Cloud computing is arriving just in time, Tucker says. It is like a perfect storm. What we have learned is that the Web won and applications need to be built in its form. That means a unified infrastructure. But what do we do to push things forward so applications are independent of the underlying infrastructure?

9:42 a.m. Talking about joining OpenStack and Cisco’s commitment to open standards. Missed a bit due to poor stream

Now, we’re on to Randy Bias.

Randy Bias, CEO, CloudScaling

9:45 a.m.: CloudScaling build clouds. He is walking through how he and his company views about building clouds. What he is really referring to are the public clouds we see built. Private clouds are needed because there are ways that the enterprise needs to be serviced differently than Amazon. He sees two battles being waged. There are the commodity public clouds provided by Amazon and the enterprise clouds.

You have to ask yourself: Where is the enterprise cloud that compares to Amazon Web Services. Amazon, he notes, is taking off at an amazing pace. AmazonS3 is growing at 150%. That’s petabytes of data. Extrapolate and you see a scaling business.

9:55 a.m. For the enterprise cloud, the cost to build and maintain is far greater than commodity clouds. Amazon is winning and enterprise cloud providers need to consider how to compete more effectively against them.

10:07 a.m.: I’ve been following the interviews with Matthew Lodge of VMware and Matt Thompson, General Manager, Developer and Platform Evangelism at Microsoft. The fous is again om developers and the importance of infrastructures to support application growth. The focus is on programming the cloud and not the individual computer.

Kevin McEntee, VP of Ecommerce and Systems Engineering, Netflix

10:14 a.m.: In 1998, the company used a big Oracle database and a big Java programming environment. It crashed. They went to the cloud looking for high availability. They got that but they alo discovered new agility for developers and the business, too. Agility came with eliminating complexity. Accidental complexities came with adjusting to a Web environment.

10:22 a.m: Netflix culture fits with AWS programming environment. There is no CIO. There is no control.