A basic introduction to the Cloud

I've been getting requests recently to give a high-level overview of "The Cloud". What it means, why people are excited, and what they should care. I decided to put together a basic introduction of the Cloud (embeded below). Feel free to use parts of this in your own presentations, and I'd love to hear feedback on this:

The Cloud - An introduction

View more presentations from Lenny Rachitsky.

Top presentation of the day on Slideshare!

How to Trust the Cloud

Next week I head off to Beijing, China to speak at Cloud Computing Congress China. Below is a sneak peek at the talk I plan to give (let me know what you think!):

Cloud photos for presentations and documents

I've been working on a talk I'm giving at Cloud Computing Congress in China and (I'm not ashamed to admit) I spent a lot of time looking for just the right cloud photo. I thought I'd share the best photo's I came across, in case you ever need to give a talk about The Cloud (or just love photo's of clouds).

Note: These photos are all be licensed under Creative Commons, and came from a combination of Flickr Creative Commons search and Google Images (manually excluding non-Creative Commons images).

The photos are divided into four sections:

1. Simple clouds


2. Dark clouds


3. Powerful clouds


4. Unique clouds

Simple clouds

Dark clouds

Powerful clouds

Unique clouds

You can find all of these cloud photos here. If you have other favorites and are willing to share, please add a link to them in the comments.

The top 7 most overused cloud metaphors, sorted by weather pattern

Along with innovation, agility, and efficiency cloud computing has brought us a bevy of clever metaphors around the cloud concept. Unfortunately these play-on-words headlines are quickly becoming cliches. Below is a list of the most common metaphors I've come across, and headlines that use them. I hope this list will force us all to be a bit more original. (Note: Sorted by weather event chronological order)

Partly Cloudy

1. McKinsey's Cloud Computing Report Is Partly Cloudy
2. The 'partly cloudy' network: Amazon's new partial clouds via IPsec VPN
3. Cloud Computing's Partly Cloudy Future?
4. Partly Cloudy - Blue-Sky Thinking About Cloud Computing
5. Future of computing: Forecast calls for partly cloudy

Dark Lining

1. A look at cloud computing's dark lining
2. Multi-site bug exposes cloud computing's dark lining
3. Cloud Computing Has Dark Lining
4. Bill: Cloud Computing's Dark Lining
5. Amazon’s S3 Cloud Has a Dark Lining for Start-Ups

Dark Side

1. The Dark Side of the Cloud
2. Recent Foibles Expose Dark Side of Cloud Computing
3. The Dark Side of Cloud Computing
4. 5 lessons from the dark side of cloud computing
5. The Dark Side of Cloud Computing

Bursting

1. Bursting the Cloud
2. Cloud computing to burst in next year: Gartner
3. If The Clouds Burst
4. Microsoft predicts cloud computing will burst with growth, opportunity
5. Cloud Bursting Scenarios For Small Companies

Rain

1. Can Cloud Computing Rain on Your Business?
2. Security Issues Rain On Cloud Computing
3. Can Amazon's Cloud Computing Make Rain?
4. Will Cloud Computing Rain On IT's Parade?
5. How Microsoft could make cloud computing rain dollars

Clearing the Air

1. Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing
2. Ellen Rubin is clearing the air in cloud computing
3. Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing: Insights from Ten CIOs
4. Cloud Computing, Part 1: Clearing the Air
5. Clearing The Air On Cloud

Silver Lining

1. Not Every Cloud has a Silver Lining
2. Is Integration Cloud Computing's Silver Lining?
3. Not every cloud has a silver lining
4. Is Google Chrome OS cloud computing's silver lining?
5. Cloud Computing Is Silver Lining in Tough Economy

Bonus: aaS

1. Which “aaS” is Right for You?
2. Is Everyone an aaS?

Have you come across any others? Let me know and I'll update this post.

Advice for Rackspace on communicating status updates

To the hard working employees of Rackspace:

Your hosting rocks, your customer service is consistently impressive, and your colleagues are extremely talented. Here's my concern. If I'm a customer, and I'm seeing issues with my Rackspace servers/apps/cloud, I have to quickly determine which of the the following places will tell me what's going on:

• Rackspace Status Twitter account (http://twitter.com/RackStatus)
• The Rackspace Cloud System Status (http://status.rackspacecloud.com/)
• Rackspace Email & Apps System Status Page (http://status.apps.rackspace.com/)
• The Official Rackspace Blog (http://www.rackspace.com/blog/)
• The Rackspace Cloud Blog (http://www.rackspacecloud.com/blog/)
• Rackspace Cloud Twitter account (http://twitter.com/rackcloud)
• Rackspace Twitter account (http://twitter.com/rackspace)

I presume there is a rational explanation for this. I even see a hint of method to this madness. Unfortunately when your customers are in a rush to figure out why their website is collapsing, they won't be in the mood to think about this rationally. Rackspace may be one of the the most experienced companies on the planet when it comes to dealing with frantic people. I would suggest taking some of that experience and putting it to work in raising the bar industry-wide for communicating status updates to your customers. To get you started, here are some ideas:

Suggestions to get you started

1. Consolidate all of your status updates at a single destination. Possibly at http://status.rackspace.com/? If nothing else, have a page there that points visitors to the best place to get updates for their specific service. Link customers to this page from your front page, support portals, and blogs.
2. Work to get Google/Yahoo/Bing/etc to point to this page for searches such as "rackspace status", "rackspace cloud status", "rackspace health", "rackspace uptime".
3. You're going in the right direction with the the Email & Apps System Status Page. I would follow this model for your entire service suite (versus the simple blog style).
4. If you want to differentiate from your competition, you have a number of options. Read this, this, and this.
5. Continue tweeting, blogging, and Scobleizing. The more communication channels and approaches the better. Just don't make people have to hunt around in a time of need.

You guys are doing all of the hard parts well. You are also in a unique position to understand the benefits of transparency and communication. With a little bit of work, you have the opportunity to create more fans, reduce support costs, and push the industry forward in an important area.

Update: Within 5 minutes of posting this, Robert Scoble pointed me to a Twitter list merging all of the Rackspace twitter accounts:

A great resource, though clearly not something that would be easy to find quickly.

Real-time timeline of cloud health status updates

Putting the combined cloud health status feed mentioned in the previous post on a timeline offers us convenient way to tell what's been going on with each of the cloud providers, and with the cloud in general:

It may be useful to break out each cloud into a separate feed/timeline as well, if you're hosted on a single cloud. If there is interest, I'll post those as well.

Cloud health RSS feed

You may have noticed I've added a new module to the right side of this blog. This is a new feed I created (using Yahoo Pipes) combining the status update feeds of all of the major cloud providers (who offer feeds), in affect creating a single stream of cloud health status. Feel free to play with the pipe and add anything I may have missed.

Update: Improved on the original pipe by prepending each cloud feed with it's name, to more easily tell which cloud is reporting the problem:

Zoho opens up their kimono and the blogosphere applauds

Big news from Zoho (provider of online applications and services that compete with Google and Microsoft). As of yesterday, they have reached the next level in uptime transparency by launching Zoho Service Health Status! As Raju Vegesna states in their big announcement, "This initiative is yet another step to being more open and transparent with our users." Kudos to Zoho for recognizing the need and delivering. They join Amazon AWS and SalesForce as the three large service providers offering a very public health dashboard of their services.

I'm really excited to see that the blogosphere gets the significance of this move:

Mashable:

"One frequent problem with web applications and services - and thus the whole web 2.0 phenomenon - is lack of communication when something goes wrong. Sure, it’s nice to have your online e-mail client available from every computer, but what happens when it goes down? Often, it’s just you in the dark, waiting for problems to be resolved, with little or no official information on what’s happening to ease your mind...

This is a great idea. If something goes wrong with any one of Zoho’s applications, you can quickly check out if the problem is on your side or theirs. Of course, I’m sure that the folks at Zoho will continue to inform their customers about problems, updates, downtime and similar issues via blog posts, but being able to see what’s wrong for yourself, at any given time, is an advantage Zoho’s customers will certainly enjoy. All other web startups take notice: this is the level of transparency we’d like to see from everyone, not just Zoho."

WebWorkerDaily:

"After taking a look, I’d say that all applications hosted online could benefit from this level of kimono-opening."

CNET:

"Web application specialist Zoho has joined the growing ranks of companies willing to share detailed information on how well their online services are holding up.

This move toward transparency is increasingly important as potential customers consider relying on such services...

Publishing the performance measurements for online services is catching on as cloud computing grows more serious. Going hand in hand with that is offering service level agreements (SLAs) with specific uptime commitments."

Who's next to open up? I'm looking at you Google!