Out of the GigaOM Structure cloud

At the end of June, I attended my second GigaOM Structure conference of the year and of my life. First was the Big Data soiree in NYC in the spring, and I have just been to the San Francisco-based Cloud love-in. Rather than do a play by play of the latest event, I'll put forth an observation that is still sticking with me, which is usually a good indicator of importance. Now, I know you are all on the edge of your seats in anticipation of what I noticed above all else. Similar to the Prius you see on the highway, our future is hybrid but, when it comes to the cloud, one size clearly does not fit all.

To start, Verizon announced their Terremark cloud, stating that a single type or size doesn't fit anyone, and the "hybrid versus public versus private" question generated the debate about which layer of the cloud is more important to whom and for what reason.

This blog is about cloud as a platform in general, and the importance of recognizing hybrid as the likely winner -- while now blatantly obvious -- does have application and IT-platform implications. For example, how will systems management products deal with hybrid clouds constructed in a multi-vendor way? Will an API that describes the management interfaces for virtual machine life cycle management emerge, or will vendors have to go cloud by cloud to determine the tools they need? That's just one example of many, and that is the sort of IT operations subject matter that was heavily discussed at the conference.

Then there are application mechanics to consider. Suppose an enterprise developer does some dev lab work in a public cloud and then wants to take it in-house onto the private side of the hybrid cloud (and that private place may really be hosted somewhere on dedicated virtualized infrastructure). The toolset needs to support whatever public and private cloud OS the IT crew has decided to support. This is part of the dev ops subject matter, and everyone needs to get along.

These thoughts continue whirling in my head a week later and with good reason. In all of this lies opportunities for leaders to emerge and provide focused enabling technology. Note that I didn't say "solutions," because that implies we have a problem (I'm so tired of hearing about pain points, aren't you?). We can compare this to the time when NOSes and server computing on commodity hardware were ruled to be safe for prime time, at which point an industry emerged based on the opportunity.  We didn't have a client-server "problem"; we had game-changing technology that was put to work in new and productive ways.  

It's time to get excited.

Frank Artale is a partner at Ignition, a venture capital firm, where he specializes in cloud, core infrastructure, networking, and security investments.  Follow Frank on Twitter: @frankartale. 

Neither Frank nor Ignition has any financial interest in any company or product mentioned in this post.