Kevin Gibbs Tech Lead & Mgr Google App Engine, Google App Engine
Yousef Khalidi Distinguished Engineer, Microsoft
Werner Vogels CTO, Amazon.com
Getting started - just some background
EC2 in africa? No commitment.
Google app engine - supporting python. This year, new run time - not announced which one.
Run XP apps in the cloud? It depends - with MSI install, no. App that stands alone/ web application, especially when written against asp.net - it's straightforward.
Use your own solutions? Amazon: yes - needed to build for ourselves. To build a virtualized infra platform that we could use internally. Amazon favors self? Absolutely not.
Google - google moderator uses app engine. Jaiku.
With app engine (google) we're trying to be opinionated. Make it easy as possible, but restrict to ensure reliability and scalability of app. Eg. facebook/ iphone - apps potentially scale much faster. (eg no support for joins, stateless clients)
MSFT has numerous internal app devs that getting to market was onerous (buy servers, connectivity, etc)
Security (financial services, health) - appliance in the future? Amazon, no plans - have vertical-specific clouds (eg hipa (?) , socs, pci certified/ compliance). Google - overwhelmingly you should trust the security of our data. Google leverages it's practices for app engine.
Secruity - MSFT - no answer right now, but we're a S/W company. Expects evolution from public to private clouds.
What trends/ challenges of use are you seeing? Amazon -1. automation of everything. 2. how to make apps horiz scalable. Google - challenge: learning how to build scalable apps (eg consistency, latency). MSFT - people spending too much time managing apps. MSFT focused on automation. See selves between EC2 and app engine.
Concern over vendor lock-in - open standards. Amazon - EC2: there are no lockins. "we constructed the solutionto be tools". Standardization: "how many cloud providers do you know?" Goog - concerned with lock in. Want to make it easy to move on and off of app engine.
What % of code to rewrite to move to other providers? MSFT: let you use your fav stack. Lock-in: private lots to be hosted by others - will be demanded.
Responsible computing/ green computing. Amazon: we're a retail company, it's all about efficiency. No common measurement between clouds. Goog: we have billing, you can pay us. Pay for use drives efficiency. Is it green? Overwhelming yes, we have our own data centers. MSFT: look at costs of data center: cooling and power. Mother board: pay more for hardware to run cooler.
Domain specific protocols. Amazon: we don't do it, but our customers. Google: HTTP - aren't a lot of problems.
Rackspace/ sun - hybrid sun/ own servers. Amazon: seeing DBs local, apps remote and vpn between. But mostly during transitions. MSFT: customers are asking for this. A lot of stuff won't move to cloud: legacy and core ent data.
Evernote - what % ent/ corp accepting. Amazon: enterprises see capital expenditure savings. Goog: google apps for your domain as precedent. These data centers are well managed. MSFT: Yes - ent are looking hard. Which stakeholders, which loads? Supply chain yes, core data no. Amazon: proof of concept -> staging env.
Is the cloud profitable? Goog: it's too new. Amzn: if there wasn't money to be made, we wouldn't be in the business. Won't address cloud service profitability for amazon. MSFT:
Anything on HPC (high performance computing)? AMZN: increasingly more imp. GOOG: Focused on web apps -> not right now. MSFT: Don't need to answer - can see who MSFT has been hiring (must be HPC people).
Done.