Thursday, September 15, 2011

The Cloudcast - Eps.19 - "Who Manages the Clouds?" + Show Notes

Date: September 16, 2011
Guest: George Reese (@georgereese, CTO/Founder of enStratus; http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/429 [blog])


Prior to jumping into our discussion, George told us about the history of how enStratus evolved from a set of tools to allow his prior company to scale on the web into the Cloud Management platform that exists today.

Questions:
  • We've heard enStratus be called a “Cloud Management” platform, a “Cloud Governance” platform, a “Cloud Broker”. Lots of tags. How do you best describe what enStratus provides for customers?
  • Do you compete with OpenStack or vCloud or Cloud.com?  Is there overlap?
  • Who do you find is typically the customer of a platform like enStratus? Is it IT, or do the lines of business see this as a simpler way to have more control over their environments?
  • For many businesses, the potential of moving to Cloud (public or private, or a hybrid mix) is very enticing from a business perspective. But the technology can be somewhat overwhelming to existing IT groups. How much does the enStratus platform abstract for them, and how much still needs to be in place (servers, storage, networks, security, etc.)
  • In your opinion, how does a customer choose between Public/Private/Hybrid? Is it customer comfort level or technical reasons?
  • Does a customer with only one cloud need EnStratus?  What are the management benefits of the product with one underlying cloud vendor
  • How do you handle the challenges of the underlying cloud vendors?  Do you code to each individual API or do you code to a least common denominator for instance?
  • How much of the sysadmin and customer user interfaces do you abstract from a cloud vendor?  Is there ever a need to go to each cloud vendor’s interface once EnStratus is in place?


Appendix - References from the Show: