 
Tune into the Cloud

The Story So Far

Copyright 2017

Gregor Petri

# Acknowledgements

Tune into the Cloud is a collection of the cloud computing blog posts that Gregor Petri published between 2014 and 2016 on the GBN, the employee Blog Network of his employer, collected here for convenient offline reading.

The Spotify Playlist of this blog is available at  https://open.spotify.com/user/gregorpetri/playlist/4ie7kKgHeRAeYXn75D03ZC

The original posts can be found at http://blogs.gartner.com/gregor-petri/.  
An FAQ on the policies of this blog network can be found at the Gartner Blog Network FAQ at: http://blogs.gartner.com/gartner-blog-network/

Please note:  
_A blog written by a Gartner analyst represents the personal opinion of the author. The views and opinions they express in their blog are their own, as stated in our corporate disclaimer:_

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[...]

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# Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

And then there were three...

Tune into: Software Defined Networking

Alors on Dance

Tune into: Creative Processes

Blow

Tune into: Putting Customers First

Locked out of Heaven

Tune into: Containers

The Billionaire Boys Club

Tune into: Go to market success

Dock of the Bay

Tune into: Containers

God is a DJ

Tune into: Cloud Services Brokering

Hello World

Tune into: Coding

Atlantic Crossing

Tune into: Building specific solutions, not generic technology

Cloud.forSale

Tune into: market consolidation

Price Tag

Tune into: cloud margins.

Thinking out (c)loud

Tune into: Cloud Migration?

Something Got Me Started

Tune into: the need for speed

Losing My Religion

Tune into: a cloud mindset

Ghost Town

Tune into: Hybrid

Simple Plan

Tune into: Cloud Tactics

Harbor Lights

Tune into: International data transfers

Imagine

Tune into: 2016

The Circle

Tune into: Social Privacy

The Times They Are A-Changin'

Tune into: the future

Space Oddity

Tune into: Economic Fall Out

Yes, we have no Banana's

Tune into: Hybrid Architectures

Total Madness

Tune into: Total Security

We'll meet again

Tune into: Brexit

Chain Gang

Tune into: Decentralisation

At the Hop

Tune into: Hype Hopping

Money for Nothing

Tune into: The Dark Side of Digital

Cheap Thrills

Tune into: A Faceless Cloud

Das Model

Tune into: Direct Container Costing

Closer

Tune into: Ecosystem Platforms

About the Author

#   ...And then there were three...

## Tune into: Software Defined Networking

When I was encouraged – back in 2013 – by our PR department to start writing a regular industry column in Dutch for the publication Cloudworks (cloudworks.nu) I decided to use music tunes and music albums as the central theme for my musings on cloud computing and the impact I expected it to have on both the IT industry and the IT profession. These are the English versions of these columns, as previously published on my employers' blog site: the Gartner Blog Network.

I did hesitate to start my first column with the title of a 1979 album. But he who does not understand his genesis (hint), will have difficulty understanding the future. That "third" out of the...and then there were three... is in the context of cloud computing of course the network. Thanks to Software Defined Networking (SDN , an acronym to remember) network capacity could – over time – just as cloud compute and cloud storage capacity before that - be consumed, allocated and even paid for in an on-demand and as-a-service fashion. Although being the third to the cloud party, understanding on demand networking can be very illustrative for understanding on demand computing as a whole.

Another major reason for the interest in SDN is that networking and communication costs made (and still make) up a relatively large percentage of the total global IT spending. Of the total 3.7 trillion dollars IT spending of that year about 46 % was spent on Telecom Services (while software was 8%, hardware 22% and IT services 25%). Any new technologies that can influence such a large part of global IT spend tend to generate great interest from vendors and customers a like.

Incidentally, in that same year, 13 of the largest telecommunications companies announced at the SDN World Congress in Darmstadt a joint initiative around " Network Function Virtualization ". This initiative encourages suppliers of network technology to increasingly enable their networking solutions to run on (clouds of) industry standard virtual servers.

The big advantage of a "software defined" network – just like any other type of "software defined" infrastructure – is that it no longer consists of dedicated and proprietary hardware boxes with names such as firewall, load balancer, router, etc. If an organization tomorrow suddenly needs twice firewals then load balancers ( or vice versa ) , they can do so through software. And as everything that is controlled by software, this can be fully automated and happen instantly. For end-users, this had (and has) major advantages, for example the time needed for network (re) configuration can be reduced from several weeks or days to a just few hours, or even shorter.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) today allows smart applications already to allocate the required storage and compute capacity in a flexible and elastic manner. And now the network could be included too. Despite the rapid advance of SDN in the last few years even now, in 2016 – the network is consistently one of the most difficult parts of the cloud to get right.

Ironically the transition to "as a Service" IT started for many organizations with the network. When they were asked to give up their traditional – fixed line based – Wide Area Networks, and replace them with shared packet-switched networks. Networks that were based on X.25, a technology first described in the Orange Book from 1976, three years before the classic Genesis album that gave this first Tune into the Cloud column its title came out.

... _And then there were three... (1978) was the ninth studio album of the English band Genesis. The title refers to the fact that after several switches, departures and new additions, the band now consisted of three remaining members. Below's melodical "Follow You Follow me" is one of the more well know tracks of the album._

Spotify: <https://open.spotify.com/track/0HdcunWW5FsRqKr3lwJOIo>

#  Alors on Dance

## Tune into: Creative Processes

The name Stromae is a verlan (a rehash) of the word Maestro, Stromea's naïve language is French, and that makes it- as for many French speaking cloud providers – harder to become an international success. Across Europe consumers and businesses still look first for national and second for Anglo-American providers. And that's a shame, because despite the language barrier – which is magnified by the very fast pronunciation in southern Europe – there are some very interesting developments and products coming from those parts of the European Community.

For example the French OVH – named after the nickname of its Polish- French founders but also the acronym for "On Vous hébergé " (We Host You) – has become one of the largest providers of hosted servers in Europe . With over one hundred forty thousand servers they come pretty close to American web giants. Long before Facebook started this, the engineers of the French start-up OVH designed their own servers and (often airco free ) data centers . But until recently – just like for Stromea – virtually nobody had heard of this French pioneer . In addition to private initiatives France of course also has several government-related cloud projects , such as CloudWatt and Numergy, who both arose from project Andromede . One of these suppliers recently announced a partnership for the Belgian market with Belgacom , which is also the country where Stromea comes out . His roots make its French a lot more accessible to northerners, although the spelling of a number as Papaoutai still requires some background knowledge (in school we would have written this as "Papa , Ou Est Tu").

The creative approach of Stromae , which he during performances – such as during TED Brussels – often shares with the public, is similar to the approach of modern cloud providers . In most cases he starts (obviously at the computer) his songs with a few simple primitives, which he automates. Next he adds more complex themes and variations (for an example see youtube : Stromae – Alors on Dance / How it was made), an approach also followed by various cloud providers.

Smart cloud providers start their offer with a simple storage or compute service. This is then – including the API programming interface – made available to both the market and to private developers so that both simultaneously can expand on these primitives. The advantage of this approach is that both the lower services can prove themselves in the market ( and can be improved where necessary ) while the various development departments of the cloud provider can build new services on top of the primitives . Recent research shows cloud providers can add new services three times faster than traditional providers . The approach of Stromae is however a lot more transparent than that of many cloud providers. In his performances he shows in detail how the number is created. Unfortunately, many cloud providers treat the way their cloud services are created as a kind of black magic.

A recurring theme for both is showing two faces. In Stromea these faces often have an androgen male / female theme, while cloud providers will show a consumer and a business face . The first side – also called commodity cloud – presents itself as a platform for public services specially designed to reach millions of consumers while the other side focuses mainly on supporting existing applications that were in most cases never designed to run on cloud computing. Question is who is more convincing in performing this somewhat schizophrenic task.

Stromae is a French speaking singer-songwriter and video performer of Belgian-Rwandan origin . With the very danceable "Alors on Dance" (2009 ) , he reached the top of several European radio and dance charts. In more recent songs like Papaoutai and Formidable – a song in the tradition of the great French chansons – he shows a very different side of himself.

Spotify: <https://open.spotify.com/track/6LXRvh3S8TB5P1PKy4lY1S>

#    
Blow

## Tune into: Putting Customers First

Once in a while there is a powerhouse that gives an entire industry a huge blow. An example of such a move is how Beyoncé released her latest album in what observers called a fan-oriented instead of an industry-oriented way. In the cloud such a role has been attributed to Amazon Web Services , who against logic and existing wisdom began selling IT compute infrastructure by the hour (as a service).

Amazon Web Services likes to talk about its customer-first strategy. According to Amazon they prefer focusing on providing what makes most sense for their customers, instead of on trying to achieve the most strategic position for their own company. All under the expectation that this will in the end also work out best for the company.

This may seem an obvious strategy , but unfortunately we often see the opposite. Just a few years ago a U.S. mobile operator decided to replace its popular $10 bundle of a 1000 text messages with a bundle of 2000 for $20. Not because customers had asked for this, but simply because their models indicated this would increase their revenue and margins. The end result of these and other ill conceived telco actions was the current evaporation of the text message market – until recently one of the most profitable communication segments. Customers were levying en masse for free or cheaper (cloud) alternatives.

Many SaaS ( software as a service ) providers also seem to have something different than meeting the needs of customers as their first priority. Many SaaS providers only offer three year contracts that in many cases can only be adjust upward, not downwards – even if there are no technical reasons, such as the necessity of putting up a dedicated server farm for each customer, for this. A way of doing business that is appreciated by investors, venture capitalists and shareholders, as it leads to predictable and stable revenue streams, but typically not by customers.

Forbes described the Go To Market approach of Beyonce with her new album , as "denying the logic that the music industry is based on" and sees it as "an approach that might work for powerhouses like Beyonce but not for most artists". An opinion not un-similar to how many traditional minds in IT still think about buying Infrastructure by the hour: "Desirable for services like Netflix , DropBox and Flickr, but not for mainstream enterprises" .

But also Amazon sometimes takes a less customers oriented apprach. For example, in response to the decision of Beyoncé to launch her new album for the first week exclusively on iTunes, Amazon decided- together with retail chain Target to – not to offer Beyonce's album at all. Which in turn inspired Beyoncé to organize several impromptu visits to challenger Wallmart. If these types of actions are indicative of what we can expect in the cloud industry, we have some interesting times ahead.

 Blow was (incorrectly) predicted to become the first single from the album that Beyoncé launched in one go, including all the video's and without any upfront promotion or publicity and surrounded by the type of secrecy that we normally see from companies such as Apple and Amazon Web Services.

Spotify: <https://open.spotify.com/track/6wwrYruEgWlowPDZMq5116>

#    
Locked out of Heaven

## Tune into: Cloud Lock-out

In the cloud lock-in is often a greater concern than lock-out*, but both should be top of mind for organizations looking to deploy cloud seriously, or better said, for organizations that want to deploy cloud for serious business

Lock-in is the phenomenon that it is often difficult (lengthy and expensive) for user organizations to switch suppliers, often because after some time the software becomes so closely linked with the way the organization works that saying goodbye to the vendor becomes virtualy impossible. It is no coincidence that there are only two industries (IT vendors and drug dealers) that routinely refer to their customers as "users".

As long as the supplier still has his sights set on expanding its market share, lock-in is often not a problem. But by the time the revenue from the installed base becomes more important than winning new customers, customers often start to encounter regular price increases, increasingly stringent terms of use and less responsiveness from its vendor. With cloud computing that tipping point is still far away (currently the cloud market makes up only about 3 to 5 % of total IT market spend), but it is also an industry where lock-in has a lot more impact that in traditional IT. In the cloud customers are – for the whole service stack (application, middleware and underlying hardware) dependent on their supplier. Unless when the application they use is also offered as a cloud service by other providers, but that is not a very common model for SaaS offerings. Today SaaS offerings can typically only be bought directly from the authoring organization.

But also in the cloud lockout must be avoided. Just imagine a scenario of a typical cloud provider, who controls the entire stack from application to hardware, unexpectedly going out of business (like a Nirvanix, that had a relatively soft landing and was able to give two weeks notice to its customers) or if that provider decides it does not want to serve a certain company or country anymore. Like how several cloud providers locked out Wikileaks after the first press leaks, or a vendor like Mega Upload, where regular customers lost all access to their data after a judge ordered them to shut down completely based on media industry accusations. But same can happen if a reputable large provider decides some of its products are no longer strategic. The big difference between the cloud and traditional in-house hardware and software is that as soon as the provider stops it service, the customer is immediately out of business. This is very different form traditional IT where resources could often still be used for years, even if the hardware is out of warranty and the software out of support.

Having a plan B and an up to date and easy to execute exit strategy is therefore much more important in the cloud than it was in the past. Agreeing upfront what parties will be allowed and enabled to continue the services if the original provider no longer can (or no longer wants to do so). At this moment this is only pragmatically possible for open source solutions that are already offered by multiple parties, but in some countries hosting providers are putting standard rules and arrangements in place ≈to move customers from one hosting provider to another, in case the need arises, including any commercially licensed standard software. But for traditional SaaS there is still a distinct risk f being "Locked out of Heaven". So for now the advice from one of my first bogs ever, still stands: Any good cloud strategy must start and end with an exit strategy".

* Locked Out of Heaven is an album by Bruno Mars, an artist whose popularity grew even faster than the popularity of cloud computing. But this album is not a collection of different songs. It is a compilation of several remixes of the same number, allowing the customer to choose the delivery method that he likes best for his situation.

Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/track/3w3y8KPTfNeOKPiqUTakBh

#    
The Billionaire Boys Club

## Tune into: Go to market success

Not too long ago, it took even the most successful entrepreneurs several centuries or at least decades to reach a valuation of a billion and thus become a member of the exclusive Billionaire Boys Club*. Families like the Rothschild's, the Walton's or the Brenninkmeijer's have indeed built up impressive capital wealth, but because it took them several generations, it often became quite diluted among brothers, sons, daughters, nieces, and even third-degree-nephews.

With the advent of first: IT; then the Internet and now the cloud, that timeframe has rapidly shrunk. Today companies with as little as 50 or even 13 employees reached valuations where reputable companies and world-renowned artists can only dream of. This acceleration is even more poignant when we look at applications in the heart the nexus of Social, Mobile, Cloud and Analytics (SMAC), such as Instagram , Tumbler and recently WhatsApp. And just like in the music industry there is a lot of interest in the tip parade: the list of runner ups; ideas and products getting ready to become the next mega hit.

Companies such as Spotify, Deezer and SnapChat are on the radar of many corporate investors and internal M&A teams, but predicting a SMAC hit is proving to be as difficult as picking the next number 1 album. Even industry experts often have no science that goes beyond general wisdom such as: " Good things arrive fast" or "You'll recognize a hit when you see it (it will smac you in the face)". For large companies this type of randomness is often not acceptable, which is why they try to institutionalize their success though more formal strategies.

One of those strategies is "Lean StartUp" (after the book: The Lean Start-up). Essence of this approach is to launch a "minimal viable product" fast and then rapidly evolve from there to a more complete or even to a completely new product. All in an extremely short amount of time. Other companies choose to create so-called " Digital Skunk Works", by setting up their own start-up, preferably as far away from the headquarters as possible, in which they – often in collaboration with partners from all walks of life – try to create a hit. The mantra in both cases is "Fail Fast". After all, if 99 out of 100 ideas fail, then it is better to have them fail quickly – before they have cost tons of money. And ironically that is something the agility and scalability characteristics of the cloud can help with.

This "Need for Speed" is however not just important only to technology companies. We are on the dawn of what we call the Digital Industrial Economy (DIE). An era in which more and more companies and organizations (in media, entertainment , finance, health and government ) will add value through digital moments. Moments where instant analysis of vast amounts of (often social and mobile) information is used to rapidly launch new digital services through and from the cloud. Hopefully services with enough potential to become an instant hit and move straight to the top of the charts and generate lots of "Software Defined Business".

* An artist who knows all about how difficult it is to create a hit is Pharrell Williams, the man behind the "Billionaire Boys Club" album tape and clothing line of the same name. An album which by the way did not include a single hit. It is not that Pharrel has no hit potential. Thanks to its distinctive voice and musicality that artists like Mika, Daft Punk, Britney Spears , Snoop Dogg and many others – often for the first time since many years – moved right to the top of the charts . Pharrels contribution to Blurred Lines (a song the record company did not even want to release at first, so much for corporate insight) enabled Robin Thicke to put "the summer hit of 2013" to his name (and thus, again not to Pharrell 's name). But there is justice, with the song  Happy from the movie Despicable Me Pharrels has now scored what some already call the biggest hit single of all time. And Pharrel's reaction? In various interviews Pharrel has expressed his surprise about the success of this song, he had not seen it coming.

http://open.spotify.com/track/5b88tNINg4Q4nrRbrCXUmg

#    
Dock of the Bay

##  Tune into: Containers

For this New Year's edition of Tune into the Cloud I spend a quiet, sunny morning sitting on the dock of a harbor bay – thinking of Otis Redding – to look at the incoming and outgoing streams into our little country called cloud. But basically I saw only one thing go by, namely: containers!

No trend is currently as hot as containers and particularly the popular container management system Docker. Although arguably just maturing, it has already reached almost mythical proportions of cloud hype. Docker would make virtualization superfluous, replace PaaS all together and thanks to unparalleled portability will put a final end to decades of platform and vendor lock-in. As a result there currently is no start-up or cloud provider who has not incorporated Docker prominently in its 2015 strategy.

But is Docker really the cure that heals all diseases? To answer that let's look at the problems Docker itself says it addresses. Docker talks about "Build, Ship and Run, Any App, Anywhere" analogous to physical shipping containers, which thanks to standardized dimensions and connectors can be used without any problems or adjustments on trucks and ships in every continent. In fact the logo of Docker is a whale transporting a large numbers of containers on its back.

By offering a standard container format Docker addresses one of the most frequent discussions between developers and IT operations. Namely: "But on my development machine it runs fine!". Now organisations may have had time for such discussions when they only took new developments into production once every quarter or twice a year. But for new methods like agile, scrum and continuous deployement, the logistics really need to be a lot more efficient.

The underlying problem of incompatibility is what the Linux community (Wikipedia) calls "Dependency Hell". A condition Windows developers may still remember as "DLL Hell". Any developer will aim to write as little code as possible and does so by using standard libraries (DLL: Dynamic Link Library) wherever possible. But in reality many of these "standard" libraries are not that standard. There are often several versions, which causes problems when merging code from multiple developers/companies or when moving code from a development or test environment to a shared production environment.

In the Windows environment this was pragmatically "solved" by placing each application on its own server (1 app per server). This caused the utilization(and thus efficiency) to decrease significantly. But thanks to virtualization we managed to somewhat address that. But with virtualization we were still running complete copies of the operating system for each application and we have to maintain, patch and update all these different libraries for each application. Back when companies still had a small number of fairly large and relatively static applications, this was acceptable. But when moving to thousands of micro services that need to scale daily from a few hundred to hundreds of thousands or even millions of users, then this method becomes simply to inefficient (it's no coincidence that Google is one of the first and one of the largest users of container technology).

The Docker approach (in combination with the container technology of Linux) offers a more elegant and efficient solution to this problem. Thanks to an ingenious (nested, read-only) file system everything shared exists logically only once, and thus only uses scarce resources – such as memory – only once.

Another advantage of this approach, is that developers can focus more on the application in their container, while the operations team ensures that at any time sufficient buoyancy (a.k.a. ships) is available for the containers in production. Docker is hereby used to distribute the various application containers conveniently and effectively over the available vessels. Incidentally, those vessels are often still virtual machines, mainly because of security. Putting individual containers a float on the (public) ocean is namely still somewhat too sensitive to piracy.

The super relaxed "Dock of the Bay" is one of the last songs of soul legend Otis Redding, it was recorded just before he and his backing band died in a tragic plane crash. Redding was a singer – analogous to Docker – who originally was especially popular in his own (soul / linux) scene. But as he became more known his popularity grew also in the more conservative and traditional (pop / IT) market.

http://open.spotify.com/track/4Y4Gd3ty8uut6Qw43c7yJc

#    
God is a DJ

## Tune into Cloud Services Brokering

Despite valiant efforts of the Dutch ICT association, the local ministry of economic affairs and tireless encouragement from (now former) EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes, my home country, the Netherlands, has been struggling to gain cloud momentum. Not an uncommon characteristics in Europe but a sharp contrast to the US, but also to Dutch progress in the music scene.

The music industry – especially the dance segment – is in fact increasingly being dominated by Dutch names. After Tiesto, Armin van Buren and Ferry Korsten now tracks from Afrojack, Dash Berlin, Nicky Romero, Fedde le Grand, Martin Garrix and Hardwell are storming the global charts. (Come to think of it, these names are not nearly as Dutch as the DJs themselves, but that makes their success not any less remarkable.)

DJs are the new rock stars, with lifestyles including perks such as touring the world in private jets and doing sets for amounts others can only dream off. But in cloud terms DJs are very similar to cloud service brokers: DJ's add value to standard products by aggregating, integrating and customizing these.

Regarding Cloud Service Brokering I get questioned almost every day – also by service providers – whether you can make a decent living wage from brokering: "Will customers really be willing to pay for a mix of standard products?" Undoubtedly a question that the parents of today's top DJs also contemplated, when their son (or daughter) spent another all nighter with their headphones and a laptop in the attic. This relatively modest need for capital investment to become successful is by the way also a striking similarity between Cloud Brokering and the DJ profession.

Over time I expect another similarity to emerge. Most DJs start by enriching tracks from famous stars, but in the course of time they take more and more the lead, creating their own tracks using virtually unknown singers, session musicians and open source samples.

I expect we will also see this trend in Cloud Service Brokerage. Most brokers begin by offering products with well known names such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft Azure or Office 365 or Amazon EC2. But after a while they will likely also produce services under their own name – a.k.a. private label products. The opportunities for cloud brokers here are not in competing head to head with well-known market leaders, but in choosing smart vertical or regional niches where they can make a difference. Such as by catering to workloads that cannot leave the country, or that must comply with local regulations or that need to adapt to local tastes and habits.

Our Dutch DJs have now discovered – also helped by the fact they tend to cooperate instead of compete with their peer DJs – that local flavors can travel quit well internationally. In fact many DJs are now more global household names than the artists who's tracks they started mixing on their road to fame. If only our cloud industry could follow suit.

And also from a historic perspective, brokering may very well be the cloud activity that best fits our Dutch tradition of international trade. Many of the required (now digital) trade routes are already available in the form of our excellent Dutch Internet Exchanges. Now all we need is the matching pioneering spirit.

" _God Is a DJ" by Pink (2003) (not to be confused with the same number by Faithless from 1998) begins with "If God is a DJ Life is a dance floor" and ends with "You get what you're've given , it's all how you use it". An appropriate reference to adding value to already available standard products, a.k.a. the essence of Cloud Service Brokering (and of our national DJs)._

http://open.spotify.com/track/528upPM5D1jiSGMoS7z1Pd

#    
Hello World

## Tune into Coding

Although programmers for decades have been starting their careers by writing a "Hello World" program, the phenomenon has remained as unknown to the general public as the song of the same name by Lady Antebellum. But the former is now about to change.

Programming is in fact the real "new way of working". For years education for the general public was largely confined to learning how to use computers. Thus we created operators rather than programmers. And today operators of all kinds are rapidly being replaced by automation. Just look at the big banks where people who "worked with computers" – in positions varying from cashier and teller to IT operator – are massively escorted off the property, while those same banks are currently struggling to find enough people who can make "computers work for them"(a.k.a. programmers).

However, the move from "operate" to "instruct" is not a simple one and therefore cannot be not started too early. Many countries have come to understand this. President Obama recently wrote his first program as part of the global "Hour of Code" initiative and the UK and Latvia have added programming as a compulsory school subjects (a significant step beyond the idea of "iPad schools").

But over the years the way students take their first steps on the path to becoming programming proficient has changed significantly. Personally, I started with a local PBS course about Pascal (secretly taped on an early Philips V2000 VCR). With this TV course in pretty hard core programming the Netherlands – at least in my recollection- was leading the pack in those days. Long nights I struggled with where to place points and where semicolons but – besides some brief success in the shareware world – my love for structured programming now only lingers in a Dijkstra inspired aversion to the use of GOTO.

In modern programming education, syntax is "so nineties". Nobody still needs to know: _Start;_ _LPRINT ("Hello World");_ _End._ The preferred way to learn coding nowadays is dragging graphic elements from a toolbox to a workspace. With just a few drags and drops you can create you first working game or animation.

One of todays most popular beginners environments is Scratch (scratch.mit.edu) which was developed by MIT. But also iPhython.org (the interactive version of Guido van Rossum's increasingly popular language), the Lego programing environment and making mods for Minecraft are outright hits among youth who are taking up programming. Although I must admit I have no idea what the latter would entail.

A lot of attention, across the world, has been given to enthuse and then keep on board girls for this relatively new discipline. A good thing, as programming – unlike many other professions – can give a career that girls can continue to pursue – across many cultures and different parts of the world – during different phases of life.

A relatively unknown phenomenon is that programmers often sleep worse than regular workers. Apparently the brain does not stop constructing (and especially debugging) algorithms after one turns off the screen. Perhaps that is the reason so many programmers prefer to pull an all-nighter instead of trying to force fit their creativity into a 9 to 5 schedule.

Just like programming the song "Hello World" of Lady Antebellum has not captured the hearts and minds of the general public yet. This unlike the much more known "I need you now" from the same album. A song about calling an old love while, you guessed it , pulling an all- nighter (It's a quarter after one, I'm all alone, and I need you now).

http://open.spotify.com/album/5RypFF6rN9MUxFe4aAWA28

#    
Atlantic Crossing

##  Tune into Building specific solutions, not generic technology

Atlantic Crossing the precursor to the next post "Cloud.forsale" published originally in Dutch.

When reading the title Atlantic Crossing readers of this 2013 cloudworks column may rather think of American cloud services coming to Europe, than of the 1975 album of the same name by English pop icon Sir Rod Steward. However, for the wide success of cloud services, there is a crossing that much more important than crossing an ocean. And that is the transition from a relatively small group of early adopters to catering to the needs of the much bigger early majority of the market. How difficult this crossing can be has been aptly described by Geoffrey Moore in his standard work "Crossing the Chasm "(1991).

Early adopters tend to pull new innovative products almost out of the hands of providers – even if it is not (yet) completely ready or reliable – and gladly change their way of working to accommodate the usage of the new innovation, if only because they could not bring their own products to market without the innovation. Think of services like the Flicker photo service, the Netflix video service or a file sharing service such a Dropbox, they gladly invented or embraced new methods (such as devops) to make optimal use of the new innovation called cloud.

However, the majority of the market is not that flexible and will only adjust its way of working if the innovation has become the generally accepted way of working. This is of course a catch 22 because if the larger market is not adopting it, it is never going to become the generally accepted and common way of doing things.

The way to bridge that chasm – still according to Moore – is by offering specific solutions that fit within the existing world of customers by addressing an existing, recognized problem. A long (very long) time ago – remeber the book first published in 1991 – Apple managed to successfully sell its then innovation (graphical desktop computers) to the hesitant enterprise market by providing a specific solution for internal print shops. Their specific solution addressed a known need (getting management reports – remember those pre-powerpoint hard copy documents? – out more quickly), it was sold as a full solution (including software and a compatible printer) and worked within the customers existing environment. The technology (in this case graphical desktops) could do a lot more, but the early majority of customers was not ready to accept it as anything more than a point solution.

Similarly for cloud computing. Large financial institutions will much easier (and much earlier) adopt a point solution in order to calculate their risk models, than flipping their complete ITIL-based data center strategy to make use of cloud servers (even though these cloud servers can run other workloads just fine). The next few years I personally expect much more growth of such specific, vertical cloud services – offered and packaged as a full solution – than a general transition to cloud as the new standard way to handle infrastructure. A market demand that incidentally provides viable opportunities for local, smaller and more specialized cloud providers.

Sir Rod understood how to cross into larger markets a long time ago and is now celebrating unprecedented success with new audiences. He did this – after the crossing the Atlantic to his new homeland – by switching his repertoire to the specific desires of his new audience with songs from the Great American Songbook (2002 onwards) but also with his rather sugary Soul Book ( 2009).

 https://open.spotify.com/track/6OuRbvP4PgbuzBIapVzmFJ

#    
Cloud.forSale

## Tune into market consolidation

Last time I looked it was still there. The domain name: cloud.forsale. And more or less against my better judgment, I contemplated putting a bid in. Cloud for Sale namely makes me think of the somewhat melancholic House for Sale (Lucifer, 1975) about two people who started in good spirits towards their new future, but then – when it did not turn out as expected – put out a for sale sign. And that is likely what we will soon see in the cloud market too. Providers that despite their best intentions and putting in a lot of energy and innovation, wont be able to make it and therefore will put their estates up for sale.

It's not like we could not have seen this coming. In 1991, Geofrey Moore already described in his inimitable "Crossing the Chasm" various phases that vendors of new technological innovations typically go through. When reading it today you would almost think he wrote it specifically for the cloud IaaS market. After bridging the chasm between early adopters and the early majority by offering specific, vertical solutions (see my earlier column "Atlantic Crossing), the market begins to realize that these are not a bunch of cool new point solutions but the dawn of a new way of doing things.

At that moment the market dynamics change completely. For the potential winners (Gorillas as Moore called them) the priority becomes only one thing, enabling massive growth. They typically do this by adding lots of sales people (often recruited from more traditional, now struggling competitors), by rapidly creating a ecosystem of partners and by ensuring their existing production systems keep running at full throttle while they are adding new capacity as fast as possible.

Employees of the gorillas of earlier markets booms have – besides a burnout or ulcer – in most cases some nice perks – such as a classic old-timer or a second home in an exotic location – to show for their outrages work effort and work ethics during these periods of extreme growth. But for the other market players, it is often the harsh end of an illusion. Some may squeeze some extra millage out of their offering by making it "plug compatible" with the market leader. Others reposition themselves as a niche provider (sometimes transferring their niche solutions onto the now leading infrastructure products of their former opponents) or they go through life as implementation, consulting or brokering partner of the winning product lines.

The signs of this coming soon are currently written all over the wall of the cloud market. It started with small providers being taken over by somewhat larger but also not overly successful providers (successful providers are too busy meeting their booming demand to take time for acquisitions). We also see in large organizations an increasingly rapid succession of a amazingly wide variety of leaders for the cloud initiative. While at the successful providers the same people remain in their roles, often for decades, becoming more and more successful as their product continues to grow and gain share.

House for Sale (without the dot as domain names did not exist yet in 1970) was the first song and also the first international hit of Lucifer, a Dutch formation with lead singer Margriet Eshuis and drummer , later TV Host, Hennie Huisman.

 https://open.spotify.com/track/4kXbcScK3ScRFrZVlBytnm

#    
Price Tag

## Tune into: cloud margins.

One of the most famous quotes of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is "Your Margin is My Opportunity". This illustrates nicely how in the world of Amazon (and in the words of UK's pop idol Jessie J*): "It's not about the money³, we do not need your money³, we just wanna make the world dance!"

In the cloud this – a bit unworldly – attitude is fairly normal. Think of Facebook buying WhatsApp for about $ 16 billion, only to make it available for free to large parts of the world via Internet.org. For more traditional competitors this kind of "semi-philanthropic" way of doing business takes some time getting used to.

Indeed, companies like IBM have been working diligently to improve their profit margins, quarter after quarter and year after year. Divisions that could not make the cut towards achieving double digit margins were divested, one might say without mercy. At IBM we saw this with first the divestment of the PC division and not much later the x86 server division to Lenovo, while internally more and more emphasis was put on the much more lucrative software area.

Although SaaS at first glance seems very similar to software, profit margins can be substantially lower. With traditional software – after recouping the initial development costs – any additional sales goes almost directly to the bottom line. Almost, as the cost of delivery (formerly 10 cents for a CD or now 1 cent per download) and of course the cost of sales still have to be subtracted. Cost of sales however typically do not get measured in cents, as many software companies employ senior sales staff (on equally senior compensation plans) or sell through partners, who need and expect significant sales margins. And then we did not even take into account any cost of marketing yet.

On the other hand, the significant costs customers typically incurred after buying software (acquisition of hardware, middleware, paying for implementation and installation services and off course ongoing operations cost and support fees) all came from the customers budget. These were not included in the license fees of the software vendor and thus did not impact its margins. With SaaS it's a different story.

When a SaaS vendor gets successful and sells thousands of user subscribtions, he must arrange compute, storage, network and (hopefully also some) backup capacity for all those users from his own pocket. The margins may still be better than on the typical sale of hardware (with Apple as the significant industry exception), but the cost of all this can quickly add up. And – perhaps contrary to what many believe – SaaS does not sell itself. SaaS requires comparable sales and marketing effort. So the move to SaaS won't really help traditional suppliers to preserve their margins, let alone increasing them.

Meanwhile the margins of traditional outsourcers and hosting providers are also under increasing pressure from the cloud. In traditional outsourcing and hosting deals the cost for hardware, licensing (middleware, databases, management tools, etc.) and for manpower, typically each accounted for about 30%, leaving a reasonable but not enormous theoretical margin of 10%. But cloud providers have a very different cost structure and are not averse to adjusting their prices accordingly. First, cloud providers define service almost exclusively as self-service, which saves them a significant amount of manpower. And also the delivery of anything requested through these self-service interfaces is largely automated (a one time development investment of which the cost quickly approaches zero at hyperscale). And also paying significant fees for commercial licenses and management tools is not in the vocabulary of most pure-play cloud providers. They prefer to use open source, or if that happens not (yet) to be available for a certain area, they are perfectly happy to develop it themselves. Finally, also in terms of hardware, it is a different story. Hyperscale providers are typically eligible for hyperscale- discounts. And more importantly – thanks to their scale – they can drive their hardware utilization levels to unprecedented heights.

By that time the theoretical 10% margin of traditional service providers has already largely evaporated, even if these hyperscale cloud provider maintain a fair – but not huge – margin on their offerings.

* "Price Tag" (2011) is a number of British singer-songwriter-performer Jessie J, who millions saw perform live during the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games in London, which coincided with the first official reunion of the Spice Girls, a group which – unlike today's artists – could still live from the sale of CDs.

 https://open.spotify.com/track/2fTsFCKRFQ5M0igJgabnLA

PS This column published in Dutch at Cloudworks.nu on April 16th, a week prior to the Amazon's earnings announcement in which it for the first time broke out Amazon Web Services revenue, operating margins and investments.

#    
Thinking out (c)loud

## Tune into: Cloud Migration?

Unlike in the current hit song "Thinking Out Loud" – where singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran declares his love to last to well into his seventies – it remains to be seen how long the love will last when it comes to "Thinking of Cloud". IT loves are often short-lived. In fact so short, we call them hypes. At Gartner we even created the hype cycle, a curve that shows how after a first spark (the technology trigger) many new infatuations quickly reach the peak of unreasonable expectations followed by a period of considerable disillusionment. In that hype cycle cloud computing is now at the beginning of the plateau of productivity (or as Sheeran would say more poetically: the beginning of lasting love). So cloud indeed seems to be a keeper. Which makes it an exception in IT land, many hypes never reach this plateau and leave by the side door, unlovingly labelled as "obsolute before productivity".

A platform that also proved to be a keeper and that is still enjoying a large loyal following – of which many indeed are approaching their seventies – is the mainframe. And although I know several mainframe veterans who claim that what they once built on their 360 architecture must have been one of the first true incarnations of cloud thinking, mainframe may seem out of place in a blog dedicated to cloud. But the transition from mainframe to what came next – the generation of distributed, RISK-based or open systems – may very well prove a model for how current workloads may migrate (or maybe not migrate) to the cloud.

The mainframe namely – despite the success of the new distributed generation – never disappeared. In fact the revenues of the sector are now bigger than in the glory days of the 360 and 370 architectures. The next generation did not grow big by the migration of existing application code to the new platform. The growth of open systems was fuelled by a generation of new applications – such as SAP R3 – that were simply only available or feasible on the new type of infrastructure. Not that there were no brave attempts at "lift and shift" migrations in those days. We even had a name for it: "downsizing" or in more politically correct terms "rightsizing". Many of these once migrated applications have since moved back to the platform for which they were originally designed (because they simply fitted better there) or replaced all together by new applications build specifically for the new architecture. Another major driver (maybe even the biggest driver) in this process was that these new applications were now almost always standard packages, and no longer custom applications developed specifically for the company using them.

If we take history as a guide for the upcoming transition to cloud, then we should expect cloud growth to be fuelled more by the uptake of a new generation of specially for the cloud-developed applications than by migration of legacy workloads (which indeed is what we have clearly seen in the cloud story so far). And these new applications will again be a different kind of applications. Namely multi-tennant – or rather multi-enterprise – SaaS applications. Multi-tenant applications share the underlying infrastructure and middleware across multiple clients. Multi-enterprise applications in addition share the data (content) and often the business processes across multiple clients. Think of examples like Google maps and LinkedIn. If Google maps only shared computing capacity and application code, but every user had to bring his own maps (including photos of every street corner), or Linked-In provided only its algorithms but every company still had the enter the resume's of each candidate and employee, these cloud services would not nearly be as useful or as popular as they are today. And we see the same with B2B applications offering shared purchasing, shared distribution planning.

Personally, I expect a lot more cloud growth from net new projects than from "lift and shift" cloud migrations. Although there will undoubtedly be some valiant efforts and many a service provider will earn a living wage accommodating these projects. But a few decades from now we wont remember the cloud because of these migration projects, our lasting cloud love will be based on the next generation of applications that came with it.

Singer songwriter Ed Sheeran achieved overnight succes and 6 times platinum with his first album in his native Britain. Meanwhile, he has conquered the world by creating new material for global acts such as One Direction and Taylor Swift and by performing himself his own songs such as "Thinking Out Loud".

 https://open.spotify.com/track/34gCuhDGsG4bRPIf9bb02f

#    
Something Got Me Started

## Tune into: the need for speed

By now it is widely acknowledged that cloud enables a fast (agile) start. But more important than a fast start is getting results quickly. We are talking then about high productivity platforms, a category of PaaS. Funnily enough, several cloud providers – such as Microsoft and Google – launched a PaaS platform first and only later – when they saw how quickly the virtual machine based IaaS services from Amazon were becoming popular – technically did a step back to launch a lower level IaaS service.

Achieving cloudiness aspects such as scalability, elasticity, pay for use and service orientation is however quit difficult if your building blocks consist of merely virtual machines and load balancers. Netflix is an example of a company that has developed this capability to an art form, but this was by no means easy to achieve (In fact Netflix has made many of the tools it developed for this available as open source offerings, so others do not have to reinvent the wheel, but even when using those tools this remains a complex endeavor).

Meanwhile we see most leading and some innovative cloud providers shift gears. Instead of asking customers to first develop their functionality in virtual machines and subsequently invest significant effort into making sure they have the right number of these machines running at any time, providers increasingly let their customers define functionality once, after which they as provider take care of managing the execution.

Good examples of this are Amazon's recent Lambda service and Joyent's already longer available Manta service. Here the user can define (for example in Javascript) what needs to happen when an object is saved or opened. For example the user can specify that each time a new photo is saved, automatically a thumbnail and a list of search terms should be created. The developer does not have to ask himself whether users will be storing 100 or 100 million photos per hour and whether he needs to have 1 or 1000 VMs in the air at particular moment to support that. That has now become the concern of the cloud provider.

In this architecture, the user simply defines micro services and specifies what events trigger a need for these services to be carried out. The rest (the execution) is on the provider. This demands a significantly different way of designing and developing applications. Some of us may remember this from the time of Visual Basic and Oracle Forms, where we directly linked functions to events (fields and buttons) in the user interface. In the cloud the events triggering these actions can be just about anything (an object being stored or opened, an IoT sensor firing, a log entry occurring, a new user joining, etc.).

**Look ma, no servers!  
** With this approach, users can quickly create largely 'serverless', event-driven applications to (eventually) run at cloud scale. And for companies that want to go even faster, there are über-platforms – such as Omnifone and Twilio – emerging. These often run on top of the large IaaS providers and are focused on accelerating the increasingly important 'time to market' aspect in their area. Areas such creating music applications (a la Spotify, the European music streaming app) or interactive social communication applications (a la Uber, the much talked about taxi phenomena).

They enable this by not just providing appropriate technology (such as music compression and delivery) but by also making relevant content readily available. Omnifone for example comes with predefined contracts with most music publishers and Twillio supports – out of the box – a large number of mobile telco providers across many countries. Taxi phenomena Uber is a good example of how much difference time-to-market can make for mind- and market-share and – not unimportant – for stock evaluation.Traditional cloud infrastructure providers who still think that they – by adding yet another VMs size or by switching to flash storage – can compete with these increasingly time-to-market acceleration focused cloud platforms, are in for a rude awakening.

The flip side of using these higher productivity platforms is however almost always significantly higher degrees of vendor lock-in. Customers must therefore ask themselves whether they are willing to give up a bit of their freedom in exchange for shorter time-to-market and higher productivity, just like Simply Red sung in "Something Got Me Started": "I'll give it all up for you? (3x) Yes, I would!".

With "Something Got Me Started" (1991) Simply Red – until then mostly known from the balads of lead singer Mick Hucknall – showed that they indeed could put it up a notch or two in terms of speed. Although the song – other than Simpy Reds earlier hits- did not make it into the chart top 10 , it did rule the club and dance charts for many months in a row.

 https://open.spotify.com/track/0DJnqFhVWoTDs58JPem5Zh

#    
Losing My Religion

## Tune into: a cloud mindset

One of the tenets of the cloud religion is that it should be possible – through the use of intelligent software – to build reliable systems on top of unreliable hardware. Just like you can build reliable and affordable storage systems using RAID (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks). One of the largest cloud providers even evangelizes to its application development customers that they should assume that "everything that can go wrong, will go wrong". In fact their SLA only kicks in after a minimum of two zones becomes unavailable. Quite a surprising but none the less a typical cloud approach.

Nowadays most of the large cloud providers buy very reliable hardware. When running several hundred thousands of servers a failure rate of 1 PPM versus 2 PPM (parts per million) makes quite a difference. And using too cheap memory chips can cause a lot of very difficult to pinpoint problems. These providers also increase the up-time by buying simpler (purpose-optimized) equipment and by thinking carefully about what exactly is important for reliability. For example: one of the big providers routinely removes the overload protection from its transformers. They prefer that occasionally a transformer costing a few thousand dollars breaks down, to regularly having whole isles loose power because a transformer manufacturer was worried about possible warranty claims. And not to worry, they do not remove the fire safety breakers.

With that we are not implying that the idea of assuring reliability at higher stack levels than hardware is no longer necessary. Sometimes even the best quality hardware can (and will) fail. Not to mention human errors (Oops, wrong plug!) that still on a regular basis take complete data centers out of the air (or rather, out of the cloud).

The real question continues to be what happens to your application when something like this happens. Does it simply remain operational, does it gracefully decline to a slightly simpler, slightly slower but still usable version of itself, or does it just crash and burn? And for how long? For end users bringing their own applications to the cloud it is clear where the responsibility lies for addressing this (with themselves). But end users who outsource their applications to a so called "managed cloud provider" may (and should) expect that the provider who provides that management takes responsibility. Recently several customers of a reputable IT provider – who earned his stripes largely in the pre-cloud era and who now offers cloud services from a large number of regionally distributed DCs – lost access to their applications for several days because one operator in one data center did something fairly stupid with just one plug.

Luckily we do see the rate of such human mistakes decline as cloud providers gain more experience (and add more process). Experience counts, especially in the cloud. But an outage like this simply is not acceptable. If a provider boasts it has more local cloud data centers than others, but then is unable to move specific customer workloads to those other data centers within an acceptable timeframe, it is not really a "managed" cloud provider. Simply lifting and shifting customer applications to a cloud instance without "pessimistically" looking at what could go wrong, is as stupid as putting all your data on a single inexpensive disk without RAID and without backup. And if reengineering the applications is too expensive to create a feasible cloud business case, then users should ask themselves whether cloud in that case is really the right solution.

In the words of R.E.M.: "I think I thought I saw you try" is really not enough assurance for success. The cloud is not about technology or hardware, it's about mindset. And providers who do not change their mindset may see their customers loosing faint in the cloud (or at least in their cloud). Quit quickly.

Losing My Religion (1991), was the biggest commercial hit of alternative rock band R.E.M.. The song was written more or less accidentally as the bandleader was trying to teach himself to play a second hand Banjo he bought on sale.

 https://open.spotify.com/track/74EV0g12ihUoOUXMprFpZB

#  [  
Ghost Town](https://tuneintothecloud.com/2015/09/29/tune-into-the-cloud-ghost-town/)

## Tune into: Hybrid

While American Idol finalist Adam Lambert's "My heart is a Ghost Town" is slowly moving down the international hit rankings, enterprises see something else slowly but surely turning into a ghost town. Namely their data centers.

For many IT managers, this is still a bit of a shock. Sure, most companies stopped a long time ago featuring their data center on a raised floor behind glass, right next to their reception area, but for many IT professionals a trip to the company data center still feels a little bit like coming home. I can still remember the disappointment of the IT operations manager of a financial institution located right in the heart of Amsterdam, when his brand new mainframe was delivered. That the new system only occupied barely half of the available floor space, was not what got him. It was the fact that the new million dollar plus system no longer came with enterprise-grade tokenring, but instead was fitted with literally the same Ethernet card as his just – in the context of an employee PC project – delivered home PC.

That type of consumerization (the use of technology originally designed for consumer use by enterprise organizations) is likely to continue for some time. The now increasingly common transition to SaaS is a good example. Consumers were the first to – instead of buying software which they subsequently had to install – simply access functionality via a browser (starting with Hotmail, Facebook, Linkedin, etc., etc.). Today the cloud roadmap of many companies consists largely of a long list of SaaS applications (Office365, Salesforce.com, Concur, Workday, ServiceNow, etc.). All of which – after implementation – free up some space in the company's data center.

The impact of SaaS on enterprise data centers is arguably greater than the impact of migration of existing applications to IaaS platforms such as Amazon or Azure. In fact this type of lift and shift migration is still pretty rare. And to make things "worse", we see less and less newly developed applications entering the data center. Mainly because more and more companies developing own applications are turning to using public cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure and Force.com for this.

And so the data center gets emptier and emptier, until the moment it get so small it is no longer economical to run it yourself. After which the remainder either is transferred to outsourcing or to a co-location facility (a third-party data center). The added advantage of the latter is that those colocation facilitates are "close to the cloud," as most of these offer fast and direct connections to leading cloud providers. Enabling companies to – instead of using the "scary, open" Internet – use private connections with large bandwidth to connect their legacy systems with their new shiny cloud apps,.

This may make you wonder whether there is not a possible scenario where old and new harmoniously work together (a bit like multi-talent Adam Lambert did last year, by going on tour with the legendary rock band Queen)? Well of course there is. Proponents of this approach even coined a fancy term for it: Hybrid. Hybrid can be interpreted in many ways: a hybrid combination of cloud and non-cloud, as a combination of private and public cloud or more pragmatic as any combination of a bit of this and a bit of that. If we look at cars we have discovered that hybrid vehicles, such as the here highly subsidized plug-in hybrids, often do not deliver on the efficiencies they promise _(at the time of writing this purely referred to driver behavior, many of whom refuse to load the battery and instead drive around on fossil fuels all day, every day)_ while in the IT space the whole idea of Hybrid is still largely a (yet to be proven) promise.

For true hybrid success the old and new will have to cooperate really closely, and just like established artists took a good number of years to accept the amateurs winning idols as true musical peers, we see traditional IT vendors struggle with the reality of a new generation of competitors coming from the consumer space. A new generation who – by the way – are more than happy to point out that any hybrid scenarios are best to be seen as a transitional strategy to a full cloud world.

Ghost Town (2015) is a track of Adam Lambert's third album, "The Original High". His second place in the 8th edition of American Idol (thanks to his rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody) was followed by several hits songs, a place as judge and mentor on American Idol 13 and 14 and of course the unique collaboration with Queen, where Lambert followed in the vocal footsteps of music legend Freddy Mercury.

 https://open.spotify.com/track/44aN5xKL3kGHvQ5bXVk6B8

#  [  
Simple Plan](https://tuneintothecloud.com/2015/10/25/tune-into-the-cloud-simple-plan/)

## Tune into: Cloud Tactics

The phrase that whoever "Fails to Plan" actually "Plans to Fail" also applies to cloud computing. Many organisations are therefor putting together a cloud strategy. The question is whether the establishment of a company-wide cloud strategy is the right way. After all, the use of Cloud is not an end but a means, or as the IT manager of a large Dutch retail organisation recently succinctly put it: "For us cloud is not a strategy, but a useful set of tactics".

Still, I get asked several times a week by various organisations to review their newly formulated cloud strategy. In practice many of these strategies read more like a cloud primer (What is cloud, what kinds of cloud out there, what are the potential benefits, etc.) than as a Cloud strategy. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but these documents rarely get to the unique or specific advantages the company aims to achieve by deploying cloud. In fact, it is actually doubtful whether it is useful to describe generic cloud benefits at the level of company business strategy. In many cases the added value of a pragmatic playbook (a.k.a. a simple plan), that describes pragmatically in what cases cloud computing should or should not be used, will be much higher.

We also still see too many organisations trying to formulate a cloud strategy before they actually gained any real life experience with cloud deployments. This resembles a person who wants to learn how to ride a bike, but who – instead of borrowing an old bike and finding a quiet parking lot to practice – starts with the reading a book and asking a consultant about cycling theory. In the past, with major projects such as the introduction of ERP, this may have been the only way to go. As it took years of time and millions of investment before you had something half workable and a representative test drive was simply not possible. The great advantage of the cloud is however that you can – at low cost and without major investments – directly get started. The quality of any formulated strategy (but also of any simple plans) will increase almost linearly with the amount of experience that the organisation has actually gained with real cloud deployments.

Another best practice in this area is to create a short list of simple principles. For example: some years ago a major player in the energy sector formulated a simple "cloud-first... unless" policy. Everything that could conceivably go to the cloud should indeed go there, unless.....the system was on the companies list of mission critical systems. Now these mission critical lists in the energy sector are often the size of a phone book, so in practice the policy declared most systems off-limits for any use of cloud. However, this approach greatly helped the organization move forward. It prevented lengthy academic debates about whether the cloud was safe or reliable. The clarity that these principles gave, allowed the organisation too move much faster and gain a lot more cloud experience than any of their competitors, resulting in a tangeible competitive advantage now they are ready to deploy more broadly. Any such list of simple principles can (and should) of course be updated regularly based on actual gained experiences and insights.

Organizations that, instead of creating a formal cloud strategy, begin with a simple cloud playbook, often move faster and are able to articulate better what exactly they want to achieve. The phenomenon playbook, mostly known from American Football and defined by Merriam-Webster as "a stock or usual tactics and methods" can serve as a good model, even though in European sports we often feel we should leave more creativity and freedom to the individual players. Reality is that when it comes to cloud many an executive sees unlimited freedom not as a good idea, hence the common question for a formal strategy, but as stated, a pragmatic playbook based on a short list of simple principles may often constitute a better approach.

With 53 million streams Simple Plan's biggest hit on Spotify is the catchy 2011 song "Summer Paradise" (My heart is sinking As I Am lifting up above the clouds, away from you"). A song inspired by the surf hobby of lead singer Piere Bouvier, who was making plans while waiting for the next big wave.

 https://open.spotify.com/track/7sziTn5nHwrWf4K7gISaaU

#    
Harbor Lights

##  Tune into: International data transfers

Travel broadens the mind, but data that travels too far can be stolen or snooped upon by foreign powers and that is something especially Europeans do not find amusing. This tune is about Safe Harbor rules. Or rather about the fact that these rules are no longer valid when it comes to governing international data transfers (see for more in-depth analysis see these earlier GBN blogs  and )

Now is discussing a news topic in a column that first publishes in traditional print (in Dutch) and only after that appears here, a bit risky from a news wordiness perspective. By the time the magazine is printed and distributed there might already have been a new set of safe harbor rules agreed with the US, making this essentially a non-topic. In hindsight we can however conclude that even traditional print presses still run significantly faster than the mills of European regulations and that no new rules have been passed yet.

Today the whole European cloud industry is anxiously awaiting new developments, especially as more rules mandating in-country (or even in-county) data residency could be the lifebuoy that the European cloud industry has been hoping for. Such regulation could significantly strengthen European Cloud providers when competing with the increasingly popular hyper scale cloud providers.

First a brief reminder on what is the issue. If a European organization's is processing privacy-sensitive data in a country that offers less privacy protection than EU countries, then the organization must ensure that the data there is adequately protected. This could be achieved through safe harbor (based on self-certification) but also through the use of standard (approved) contract clauses or by implementing "binding corporate rules".

The current issue at hand is that the European Court has determined – likely not completely unrelated to the revelations of Edward Snowden – that safe harbor does not offer real protection from foreign government snooping in such data. In theory the court has only declared safe harbor invalid, but it seems highly unlikely that the court would come to another conclusion regarding still valid administrative alternatives such as using standard clauses or corporate binding rules. And it would only take one of the 550 million European citizens to submit a similar complaint in order to get a similar ruling (but safe to assume this won't happen during the time it takes to publish this column).

At this moment the European commission is doing its utmost to prevent individual member countries (or even worse, provinces / counties / states) to follow in the footsteps of Schleswig-Holstein and issue new individual regulations. Meanwhile many industry players are holding their breath regarding another lawsuit. In this case a dispute between Microsoft and the American justice department regarding the handing over of email data from its European data center in Ireland with regard to a criminal investigation about drug trafficking.

European providers of cloud services are jumping all over this. A German ERP vendor (no, not the one you think, but a local SMB's focused player) started a mailing campaign in which they acknowledge ithis is a complicated issue, but that customers who want to play it safe are best advised to imply keep their data in Germany under supervision of a German service provider.

By the time you read this there are undoubtedly several other European service providers emitting similar messages while other European providers are leveraging the long term partnerships they developed with US-based SaaS and PaaS providers by taking the role of local data custodian for these global providers.

And what are (potential) European cloud users doing? They are consulting their lawyers and awaiting further guidance before taking action. A prudent approach but also an approach likely to slow down cloud adoption even further in Europe.

The slow starting track Harbor Lights – from the unforgettable album Silk Degrees (1976) – is number 10 on Boz Scaggs' most-played list on Spotify. The more farmiliar (and more up tempo) Lido Shuffle from the same album is listed as number one. Music travels easily than data, Boz lived several years in Europe before returning to the US (1968) to tour with the Steve Miller Band. More recently Boz toured with "blue-eyed soul performers' Donald Fagen (Steely Dan, The Night Fly) and Michael McDonnald (Doobie Brothers).

 https://open.spotify.com/track/5eZPJFk9QBjBM1I2idumCM

#

Imagine

## Tune into: 2016

By the time you'll be reading this, you will probably have the Christmas tree all lit up and it will have become clear whether the plan of Radio jock Stefan Stassen to – in response to the still unbelievable November events in Paris – vote John Lennon's idealistic "Imagine" to the top of the annual Dutch Top 2000 has succeeded.

It may seem a stretch to bridge from terrorism to technology as we do in this extra-long edition of Tune into the Cloud, but it is safe to assume that in the coming years technology and security will be more closely linked than ever. Just a few years ago futurologists would get enthusiastic about drones able to deliver a pizza, but today we read mainly about drones eliminating terrorists and let's all hope that the first headlines about suicide drones are still far enough in the future to leave enough time for – equally technology-based – countermeasures.

When extrapolating this trend, we may in fact come full circle. Not too long ago the majority of technological innovation was driven (or at least financed) by the military security and arms industry. Arpanet – the first implementation of TCP / IP technology and a predecessor of today's Internet – was build on funding from the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) of the US Department of Defense. Not too much later it was the race to the moon and the dream of space exploration that lead to many of the innovations that we still use today. After the freezing of these budgets, the enterprise sector took the role of engine of innovation. Do you remember where you saw your first color monitor, printer or laptop? Probably at the office of a bank, insurance company or other type of commercial enterprise. Today however, most of us have wider bandwidth, larger screens (with higher resolution) and faster processors at home than in our corporate offices. With the advent of broadband Internet, the role of innovation driver has been largely taken over by the consumer industry, with giants like Amazon, Facebook and Google leading the pack. It was in fact Facebook (and not an IBM, NEC or HP) that was the major driver behind the Open Compute Project. An initiative that – through the deployment of open source concepts – seeks to determine the future of the data center.

But as mentioned, pretty soon the security industry may pick up the baton again.  
As a result the traditional enterprise sector has less and less say in innovation and is destined to resolve their problems with the crumbs left over from the projects of the mentioned consumer oriented internet players. Cloud is actually a telling example of this. More and more companies that originally embraced the cloud as "a good idea that we are going to implement privately, because we are an enterprise and have enterprise-grade requirements" are now finding that the leading public clouds of today are actually more enterprise-grade than what they managed to build themselves. And the same goes for their traditional service providers, who said, "Oh, but if enterprises can not do this yourself, we do it for them, we are going to build hosted/virtual private clouds." Also these organizations are finding that competing head-on with mega-providers like Amazon and Azure has slightly suicidal tendencies and therefore they are turning en masse to offering to manage customer workloads on top of the clouds of hyperscale providers and launching added value services in areas such as access (network), management, governance and – yes there it is again – security.

Security as a value added service around hyperscale cloud providers may at first sight seem strange. Did we not just all conclude that hyperscale cloud providers (not to be confused with the traditional vendor on the corner who also offers some cloud services on the side) in most cases implemented better and more comprehensive security measures than most internal enterprise data centers could even dream of? The Federal CIO of the United States even compared storing data in government data centers with saving money in a mattress and storing data in the cloud with saving it in a professional banking facility. Now equations involving banks and safety in recent years have been awkward as the general public is confused whether they should be more worried about harm caused by bank robbers or by bankers. But the fact remains that the sentiment about clouds and security is rapidly changing. A trend that is likely to continue even if some large cloud disasters and break-ins – something that given the sharp increase in cloud use will inevitably happen – start to appear in the press.

In many of these incidents, the problem namely wont be the safety of the specific cloud. It will be the way in which this cloud was used. One of our official predicts for next year is in fact that "Through 2020, 95% of cloud security failures will be the customer's fault". In other words, customers should be more concerned about protecting themselves against phishing, skimming , social engineering and other operator errors than about robbers stealing data from the vaults of their hyperscale cloud providers. In addition, most companies use multiple clouds (for example the clouds of tens of SaaS providers) and protection across multiple clouds is becoming equally important as protecting a single cloud.

The product segment of the year (not an official category for us, so we can imagine it here on the spot) will likely be Cloud Access Security Brokers. We predicted recently that "By 2020, 85% of large enterprises will use a cloud access security broker product for their cloud services, which is up from fewer than 5% today". So this category of products is certainly worthwhile looking into during next year. The vendors are a mix of ripe and green (mostly green) with very diverse backgrounds. Some come from a network scanning angle, others from an identity management and single sign-on angle and still others have a history in encryption or in governance, risk and compliance (GRC). The products provide visibility (which cloud applications do we use), compliance (who can use what and where is the data), data protection (including classification and encryption) and threat analysis (including behavioral analysis). You'd almost think that we are talking again about the aforementioned military applications, but these are really tailored towards business users. Several large traditional vendors are therefore ready to enter this market, Microsoft recently acquired a CASB solution provider and IBM combined a number of existing and new solutions into a CASB bundle.

This leaves undiminished that the role of the enterprise in the technological landscape is becoming smaller. Last year we predicted already that by 2018 enterprises will only own half of the global DC infrastructure and we recently added to this that only half of the information technology spending in companies will reside under the IT department. The other half falls directly under the business departments. Incidentally, that percentage today is already 42%. And that in turn has significant impact on the role of the CIO in the coming years. Which will need to develop from "an internal service provider in charge of technology" to a "trusted ally" which operates on the basis of influence rather than on the basis of control. Also because – as we mentioned in our symposium keynote – influence is much more scalable than control. And scalability is becoming increasingly important. The fact that enterprises will own a minority of DC technology investments and that CIO's will control less than half of their technology spend, does not mean that enterprise technology budgets will become smaller in an absolute sense. It simply means that the new segments will grow much faster than the existing segments. You could compare it with the mainframe market, which did not disappear with the arrival of Unix or later with the advent of PCs, but relatively speaking it became a smaller part of the total.

Which brings us to another aspect of scalability, namely the scalability of consuming all that technology. We will in the future not spend more time sitting behind (or carrying mobile) screens than many of us already do today. Consumption of all these technologies will happen differently. Not through applications, or even apps, but much more proactive and at the same time much more behind the scenes, through direct advisory or even direct execution where necessary. This means that over time Google Now may become more important to Google than Google Search, Cortana may become more important to Microsoft than Windows and Siri more important to Apple than the iPhone. And yes, these are all cloud services.

Cloud services that will increasingly advise and even take decisions on behalf of their users ("I see you are flying to London this afternoon, you better get ASAP into your (self-driving) car, I checked you in on seat 4c. And do put your privacy filter on your laptop as diagonally behind you – on chair 5d – is the VP sales of our main competitor"). Besides these kind of personal – and rather privacy sensitive – services, cloud services will also increasingly be used to protect groups of us at the macro level. Let's hope that we manage to preserve a somewhat appropriate balance between privacy and protection in the process.

Imagine (1971) is the most famous solo song by John Lennon and according to Broadcast Media one of the 100 most performed songs of the 20th century. One of the most talked about recent performances took place last month on a mobile piano in front of the Parisian Bataclan theater and partly formed the onset of the (as we now know successful) local campaign to have Imagine lead this years edition of the Dutch Top 2000. So we can conclude with the words of John Lennon: "I hope someday you will join us, and the world will live as one".

 https://open.spotify.com/track/7pKfPomDEeI4TPT6EOYjn9

#    
The Circle

## Tune into: Social Privacy

Time for a blog about personal privacy, before we all have forgotten about the concept. The Circle is both the title of an 2009 album by Bon Jovi as a 2013 novel by Dave Eggers. A novel relevant for a cloud blog because it describes a future in which one company (the Circle) largely controls the nexus of information, social, mobile and cloud.

The use of a novel as medium for the communication of ideas regarding business or politics is not new. Think of examples as "The Goal" (about manufacturing management), "The Phoenix Project" (about IT Management), "Animal Farm" (about politics) and of course "1984" (about society). The Circle remind us of 1984, although in The Circle citizens opt-in voluntarily to life under an all seeing and omnipresent authority. An authority which, incidentally, is not a government, but a commercial social media and cloud services outfit.

The question is whether the outlined utopian (or dystopian) future – where people live their lives guided by slogans such as "Privacy is Theft" and under an absolute ban on removing any information once shared – is a realistic future scenario. But when realising that motorists in Russia have started to capture every kilometer they drive on video dashcams and most conference calls are recorded by default for "training and dispute resolution purposes" it does not seem that far fetched. And although most of us may not feel directly inclined to stream our whole life to the world, it is technically absolutely feasible to capture your entire (working) day to video. And simply recording everything – just in case – is significantly more convenient than trying to selectively capture the parts that may be needed later in handwritten notes. For sure once someone figures out how to efficiently and effectively search through large quantities of such captured materials (something several companies are working on). In Europe, where our "right to be forgotten" may collide with ideas like "Privacy is Theft", it may (again) happen a bit slower here than in other places of the world, but still.

The eye-opener of this book is not so much the extreme social sharing society it depicts. The thing that is much more realistic and scarier is the picture it paints of future work environments. An environment where everything – I mean literally everything – is captured, measured and compared. Right from the moment our protagonist starts working in the customer support department of the imaginary Circle, all her interactions, questions, responses, lead times, breaks are recorded and analysed. And of course every customer she deals with is asked to fil out a short survey and score right after. The target score that employees are measured against is BTW 100%. But as the scoring is not anonymous, going back to the customer to inquire "What was wrong?" when receiving a 95% or otherwise non satisfactory score tends to fix this instantly: "Sorry, my mistake, I changed it to 100%". Somewhat like how AirBNB and Uber customers are hesitant to score apartments or drivers too low in fear of not being accepted next time around.

Not that the staff of The Circle are assessed solely – as a kind of robots – on primary output. Participating in corporate events, forming a personal relationship with customers through social media and 'spontaneous' blogging and tweeting (in the book referred as zing'en) about personal and leisure activities also gets measured in detail. Amusingly each additional app that captures such activities is installed on a separate monitor, leading to our protagonist having about 8 different screens on her desk pretty soon after joining. To keep up with the expected timeliness of these interactions many of the Circles employees relocate to the campus, to more seamlessly merge work time and free time (by always being at work). An alltogether somewhat disturbing interpretation of the workplace of the future and the idea of telecommuting but never the less an amusing and thought provoking read.

Bon Jovi's album The Circle at first sight has no relationship with the book of the same name, although the song "Live before you die" may ring home for the protagonist who's so busy with social media that real live increasingly gets neglected. Any social media addict would better take Bon Jovi's opening and closing of the album to hart: "We were not born to follow".  
This Tune into the Cloud post was originally published in Dutch in July 2014 (following some vacation reading), but had enough signs of becoming more – not less – relevant as technology advances for a recircle.

 https://open.spotify.com/track/3cfDKXtbV3L0yPaA1XMuhJ

#    
The Times They Are A-Changin'

## Tune into: the future

As in other years, the Sunday Times bundled in February another issue of Racontuer's special "Cloud in Business" report with its print edition. As mentioned earlier, I had the honour of contributing to these special reports. We started in 2013 with "Cloud Spotting Is The Shape Of Things Too Come" where we observed "Ironically, uncertainty about the future is one of the main reasons for using the cloud". Followed in 2014 with "Cloud for Digital Business" which drilled int the role of the cloud for new – increasingly digital – business ventures. Last year we examined more broadly "The Role Of Cloud In Tech Trends", while this February we looked – with a slightly lighter movie and time travel inspired tone – at "10 Ways Cloud Is Going Back To The Future".

Now 4 years may seem long in cloud terms, but actually are just the final stages of the 10 year journey cloud pioneer Amazon Webservices embarked on back in 2006. For an overview of what they learned along the way have a read of Werner Vogels 10 Lessons from 10 Years of Amazon Web Services on his All Things Distributed blog. For a lighter Sunday afternoon look at what cool movie and other "change of the times" innovations the cloud has been enabling, have a read of:

10 Ways The Cloud is Going Back to The Future _(source_ Raconteur)

While businesses around the world come to grips with the impact the cloud will have on their future, it is enlightening to examine how cloud computing has already made many ideas from our favourite books and films a daily reality  
10 ways cloud is going back to the future

_1. Money crimes_  
Criminals and crime fighters in our favourite stories have always "followed the money". When William Francis Sutton Jr, aka Slick Willie, was asked why he kept robbing banks, he answered, "Because that's where the money is." As the money moves to the cloud in the form of Bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies, crime will follow – if not to steal it, at least to use it. The cloud will also help us protect our money through an allegedly unbreakable federated ledger technology, spread out across the cloud, called the blockchain, a technology many traditional banks are now investing in.

_2. Cloud surveillance_  
When we first saw Enemy of the State, starring Will Smith in 1998, many dismissed the intense and all-seeing surveillance by a national security agency as dystopian science fiction. We just didn't know how real those practices had become – in the cloud – at least until the 2013 release of thousands of secret documents by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

_3. Virtual reality_  
A cloud-based virtual world like The Matrix, with Keanu Reeves in 1999, was clearly science fiction up until this year. That is if you believe the reports coming back from the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where new 3D virtual reality (VR) goggles were all the rage. One review even predicted this year would see the first real-life VR casualty. Likely someone tripping over his living room coffee table while immersed in a virtual trip through a gaming combat zone.

_4. Social privacy_  
Social media gives new meaning to the word privacy. In his 2013 book The Circle, Dave Eggers gave us a taste of how it will feel to live in a world where sharing is the new mantra and privacy is considered theft. Maybe we all just have to get used to a cloud-based future where, as former Sun Microsystems chief executive Scott McNealy once put it so eloquently, "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it."

_5.Future of work_  
The "future of work" sounds a lot better than "no work, no future", but the realisation that cloud-based automation and smart algorithms will drastically reduce the demand for labour, and thus the opportunities for work, has even reached the Swiss mountains of Davos and this year's World Economic Forum. The 2008 Disney/Pixar Wall-E gives an animated, but still disturbing, impression of the inactive and consequently obese lifestyle that could await many, unless society finds a better way to allocate work and income.

_6. Robots at home_  
Lack of work outside the house might imply we will become much more active at home. But as we already saw back in 1962 in The Jetsons, produced by Hanna-Barbera, the fact that George Jetson's job consisted merely of pushing one button once a day did not stop him from hiring Rosie, the charming robot that travelled by public transport to the Jetson family home each morning. Our home automation and personal assistants will be more stationary, but largely powered by cloud-based intelligence.

_7. Time travel_  
Unlike the 1985 blockbuster Back to the Future, starring Michael Fox, in which the future actually was last year, the closest we've got to time travel is being able to generate better predictions about the future, like we do through evermore accurate weather reports. However, in the 2006 thriller Déjà Vu, we saw scientists cause the US Northeast blackout of 2003 to create a worm hole big enough to slip Denzel Washington through. So when the next big cloud outage hits, we may want to check what Denzel is doing that day.

_8. Streaming music_  
Not many artists are as vocal about cloud-based music streaming's "race to the bottom" as Taylor Swift, but nobody has proven as visionary as the late David Bowie about the phenomenon. Not only was he among the first, in 1996, to release songs online only, he even started his own internet service provider venture. He also predicted, long before anyone else realised it, that touring would be the only viable remaining method for artists to monetise their works and with perfect timing cashed in on his own music rights through a bond-based IPO.

_9. TV bingeing_  
Anyone with teenagers around them will be aware they can watch TV anytime and anywhere. Up until Netflix used the cloud to enable this new reality, the closest we got to binge-watching was sitting through all three DVDs of The Godfather in a row. The only kink still needing to be worked out is that the funding model of most of the world's TV programmes, namely commercials, is obliterated by the binge phenomenon.

_10. The name is James..._  
For some reason it is always the villains who are building the type of cloud-like globe or even universe-spanning megalomanic technological ventures, while our hero 007 depends on an endless supply of smart but largely standalone gadgets from his ever-reliable source Q. It's a romantic but unfortunately increasingly unrealistic scenario. Combining evermore data and evermore processing power – in the cloud, where else? – creates advantages that no solo hero, no matter how smart or sexy, will be able to combat.

The Times They Are A-Changing' is a 1964 song by Bob Dylan written during a time of significant social and societal change. It has subsequently been covered by artists varying form Nina Simone, Simon & Garfunkel, The Beach Boys, Phil Collins, Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen and our own "Dutch Dylan" Boudewijn de Groot and ranked #59 on Rolling Stone's 2004 list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Times.

WordPress Featured Image by JMortonPhoto.com & OtoGodfrey.com, CC BY-SA 4.0,https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44599375

 https://open.spotify.com/track/52vA3CYKZqZVdQnzRrdZt6

#    
Space Oddity

## Tune into: Economic Fall Out

By now the new year is already well under way, but for me it began with the realization that many things won't last forever. We unexpectedly lost David Bowie, the growth of the iPhone came to a hold and slowly the realization that the sheer endless economic growth we all grew up to, may not last forever.

Meanwhile a number of cloud-enabled innovations such as smart machines, the digital economy and algorithmic business are contributing to a growing disconnect ("Can you hear me, Major Tom") between growth and employment. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, one theme even was "A World Without Work". We know this future from dystopian films like Wall-E (2008) where increasingly obese people are doing less and less, and from animated series like the Jetsons (1962), where single earner George pressed one button once a day and still made enough to keep his housekeeper (Rosie the Robot) employed.

Traditional market thinkers see the disappearance of traditional jobs just as progress that accompanies change. People should simply adapt. After all, most of us no longer work in agricultural jobs, we moved on. And similarly the thousands of in-store employees of large retail chains – closing down one by one – should not be looking back but looking forward to new possibilities and opportunities.

Looking ahead and pre-empting change with radical transformation was something that David Bowie was a true master in. Not many pop stars – with a matching pop star life style – manage to exchange the temporary for the eternal with an estimated 100 million in the bank. Many of us are aware of Bowie's artistic transformations such as first to his alter ego Ziggy Stardust and later towards disco, a genre truly loathed by many of his contemporary colleagues but which brought him his biggest hit "Let's Dance". But even more interesting are his business transformations. Fortune magazine described aptly how Bowie early on issued his songs exclusively through the internet and even started his own Internet Service Provider. But also how he foresaw that streaming (from the cloud) would make earning a living wage from recording a pipe dream for most artists and suggested they better get ready to shift their earnings model towards life performances and tours. In a forward-looking financial move he even monetized most of his own music rights through the issuance of bonds (sold to investors who clearly had a less insightful vision of what the future of the music industry would look like).

For most of us such radical transformation to retain some form of employement will be difficult. With complete shopping centers, office parks and industrial estates being replaced by online shops, algorithms and 3D printers, there will simply be less and less work opportunities to go around. Dutch business magazine Sprout recently aptly demonstrated this in an infographic: During 2015 Dutch Amazon look-alike Bol.com and and Dutch Macy's equivalent department store chain V&D each generated about half a billion euros in annual sales, but traditional retailer V & D needed no less than 10,000 employees to do so, while online retailer Bol.com managed to the same with just 700 employees.

The responses of politicians to this dystopian future so far centered on education as the answer. Suggesting that if there will be no work future in production, distribution or administrative jobs than schools will just have to crank out more business developers, game and web designers and creative directors (and not lawyers or accountants as those are also expected to be largely automated away also). Training is important but simply cannot be the only answer. We cannot all work for the current or future Google's of this world (especially when taking into account the "certified propeller head requirements" the recruiters of such companies tend to look for).

And while on the topic of companies with high propeller head densities, management consultancy McKinsey has also been actively sounding the alarm about the dangers of exploding (youth) unemployment which coincides with a seemingly contradictory skills gap preventing companies from finding the talent they are looking for. But even better then just sounding the alarm they actually started an active program to address this: it's not for profit "Generation" program. Maybe we should all consider helping a hand there. As volunteers that is. Because the future of work for more and more of us will consist of just that: volunteering. The alternative is to sit at home all day binging movies, TV series and music. Binging from the cloud, of course.

David Bowie (1947 -2016) broke through in 1969 with "Space Odity" and concluded with the (as we know realize almost posthumous) Lazarus. Many called him a chameleon because he constantly changed his style , but unlike chameleons Bowie did not do so to fit in, but to stand out and lead the way

<https://open.spotify.com/track/72Z17vmmeQKAg8bptWvpVG>

#    
Total Madness

## Tune into: Total Security

It took some time but the need for Total Security Management is slowly starting to sink in. With regard to quality it took the western manufacturing industry several decades before it realized that a separate quality department – standing at the end of the production line to check which products did not meet the mandated specs – was a costly and disastrous path to take. And slowly but surely we are seeing similar thinking with regard to cyber and cloud security emerge.

Not that we are taking cloud executives on today's equivalent of a Japanese factory tour. A quality tour let managers firsthand experience it was everyone's responsibility to ensure quality and that everyone had the right (and the moral obligation) to personally halt the line when something went wrong. But that may be more because we are not sure yet where the contemporary equivalent of such a tour would need to take our executives. Would it be visiting the hyperscale datacenters of a Google or an Amazon (assuming our executives could get in). Or maybe a visit to the offices of various security start-ups in Silicon Valley and Israel? Or are the cyber control rooms of major telco's and big accounting firms a better wake up environment? The more courageous may even contemplate a trip to China, Russia or other emerging cyber hotspots, to encounter some of these modern threats in the wild?

I'm not a security expert but to me the similarities between total quality and total security management are very striking. The mantra "Zero Defects" can be easily exchanged for the just as catchy sounding "Zero Breaches" and "Design for Security" is today's equivalent of "Design for Manufacturing". With regard to quality it were guru's like Demming that led the path from expensive and ad hoc quality control at the end of the production line to continuous and iterative quality processes incorporated and embedded into the design and the process.

In the area of security the Jericho Forum already in 2004 pointed out the dangers of merely focusing on perimeter security. In 2013 this forum even deemed itself no longer necessary, in their own words "on the basis of proven success". Nevertheless it is often still scary what malicious things one can do once inside the firewall of many a company or organization. After complete de-perimeterisation you basically would not need a VPN to reach your applications and be protected from outsiders. Each application would protect itself and decide for each user what he is allowed to do or not do. But with the exception of maybe (web-)email and some SaaS applications, most companies have not come close to setting up the majority of their business applications in a way that they can protect themselves and are no longer dependent on a company perimeter defense.

The advent of micro-services is a good time to re-examine your current security policies. Not only because the security challenges around micro services will typically increase rather than decrease, but also because with the advent of the Internet of Things, security at the source is increasingly mandated and required. Ideally each micro-service will determine itself who does or does not get access to its services and should be able to adequately fence of access attempts by malicious external forces. Also because adding this type of security as an afterthought, on the outside of the service itself, is likely to be cost prohibitive, as many of these external security solutions are at least as pricy as maintaining after the fact quality control , like we did in the days that quality was still a cost instead of a benefit.

With regard to cost, total quality thinking does to reason in terms of an "optimal" rates of defects. A fictional point after which any further reduction of defects will cost more than is economically justifiable. In the end it is namely always cheaper to get things right the first time around, rather than having to return 5%, 0.5% or even 0:05% for repair. Or worse, having to compensate x% of customers for consequential damages (which can easily outweigh the cost of any production improvement). As a result the manufacturing industry no longer measures its defects in percentages but in the initially hard to imagine measure of PPM a.k.a. parts per million. And that iucreasingly in single digits, with a maximum of 1-9 parts per million produced products showing any defect

Now granted, security can be a little bit like health. No matter how healthy you live, you can be unlucky – statistically unexpected but nonetheless very devastating – and get seriously ill. Hence, security is increasingly extending on the one hand from preventive measures to keep out the bad guys, to ongoing monitoring of the current state for anomalies (similar to the active search for signs of a disease in a so-called health pre-scan) and on the other hand by taking measures to reduce the impact of any breaches by counter by being able to act appropriately and quickly when something does go wrong. And also for the latter it is necessary that the entire organization is involved with security, it can no longer be delegated to the department at the end of the hall.

Total Madness is the compilation album of the very British Ska revival band Madness. The song "Our House" is about a family that initially is kind of living apart together but that eventually come close together. The song achieved a global cult status in the Netherlands as theme song to the TV hit series "Divorce".

 https://open.spotify.com/track/3rOD3MfHaXawznE0vrjM5B

#    
Yes, we have no Banana's

## Tune into: Hybrid Architectures

Just like the earwurm "Yes, We Have No Bananas" seems to come back every decade or so, IT has a number of issues that seem on eternal repeat. One of these is the idea that once we have found a better way to do something, that we can just convert and replace all our existing investments. So we figured we would replace mainframes with distributed systems, distributed systems with client/server, client/server with web architectures and now Web architectures with cloud.

In the equally hype-centric world of dietetics (the study of diets) this would be comparable to switching to only eating bananas, after someone has discovered that bananas actually have quite a number of good qualities (filling , lots of carbohydrates, vitamins, cheap, long shelf life, etc.). Now there are of course diet gurus with huge influence (remember Atkins, Montignac , Agaston's South Beach or the now popular but anonymous "Military Diet" ), but nutricional patterns usually change only marginally and, moreover, very slowly.

After 10 years cloud, the total spending on cloud services companies still well less than ten percent of total global IT spend. So a cloud-only strategy is marching pretty far ahead of the rest of the band. Even a cloud pioneer such as Netflix only managed this year to moved its last server out of the door, and then only for its streaming business. The Netflix DVD business – yes, that still exist – is still running just on in-house servers. The average company therefore does well staying away from a "Bananas only" mindset. Throw everything out the door and start over is in most cases not an option. Imagine that governments would replace national infrastructure such as airports, highways and power plants every time the political make up (and hence the preferred approach) changes.

With regard to IT this makes seamless collaboration between the old and the new more important than ever. The term which the industry has adopted for this is – as previously discussed – Hybrid. The big question is: where do we place the cut. What we do best in the (public) cloud and what we do best internally. From compliance and data residency standpoint we see many organisations that would like to put that cut between data and processing. Having storage under our control and compute in the cloud.

But many of us will remember what we've discovered the hard way with classic client/server. Namely that if the compute (on fat clients) is just a little too far from the data, scalability goes out the window. Hence the introduction of three-tier architectures (and billions in Citrix-like server-based computing configurations), where processing and storage again stood close to each other, connected by a preferably the fastest and widest connections possible. Hence separation of data and processing in the cloud held a clear "Do not try this at home" label so far.

But there is hope. By putting private data not in house but in a colocation data center nearby – or even better inside the same building – as the data center infrastructure of the cloud provider, we overcome quite a few physical challenges and still maintain control of our sensitive information. In addition, companies can increasingly make use of the direct private LAN / WAN connections to leading cloud providers that an increasing number of communication and collocation service providers are offering as alternative to connecting over the (open/scary) Internet. And finally a number of vendors that have been supplying network acceleration software to SAN / NAS manufacturers for years, are workington making these algorithms and protocols available – in many cases simply via the market places and app stores of the supported cloud providers. And by combining these (moving data to a cloud near colocation facility, connecting directly to the public cloud of choice and accelerating the traffic) there are plenty of opportunities to get creative, while maintaining a good balance between the old and the new.

" _Yes, We Have No Bananas" (1922) is about a song about a greengrocer who simply sold what he had in the house, no matter where the customer actually asked for (sounds familiar?). It re-emerged in the thirties (as the anthem of Irish fighters for freedom of religion), forties (during the English WW2 banana import ban); fifties (as theme song of comedian Jimmy Durante), sixties (in a movie with our "Dutch" Dick Van Dyke), in an episode of the Simpsons (Bart's girlfriend) and this century in Australia after Cyclone Larry took out most of the banana harvest._

#    
We'll meet again

## Tune into: Brexit

Who would have thought? A Brexit decision!  
Time to have a look what the British may now change:

 Currency: The UK might get its own currency? (Oh, but wait, they already have that)

 Travel: I may need a passport to get into to UK (Uh, I already do)

 Time: They may move to a different time zone (Actualy the're already there, they may finally abolish summer saving time though)

 Weather: The UK may consider a climate change to mark the departure (Uh, seems already the case, and not just in UK )

 Traffic: The UK may decide to drive on the other (dare I say: wrong) side of the road (you get where we are going with this?).

 Sports: They may no longer participate in EU sporting events ? (Actually the UK already didn't, it is England, Scotland and Wales, and in addition they have their own commonwealth games, so again, no change)

 Food: UK may decide to no longer eat EU subsidized food like crooked banana's, and UK cuisine may become a thing? (Uh, unlikely?)

 Work: IT workers from EU will need a visa and a permit (but last time I looked most IT worker immigrants were not from EU but from above mentioned common wealth countries). Call centers with largely international staff may however consider relocating to Amsterdam or back to Dublin and bankers will simply do what they always do (follow the money)

 Cloud, Data-centers and IT: This is not the place (see our published/publishing research for more on this) but suffice to say the leading cloud providers already had announced opening up a local shop in UK before the decision

 Long story, short: Best case the UK relationship to the EU may become like Norway's, worst case it becomes like Switzerland's? The way Boris Johnson described it in this mornings Telegraph – as a partnership with free trade and free travel but no European laws and courts – may well be what most Europeans secretly (and not so secretly) longed for already.

 The morale of the story so far: If you happen to have an upcoming election, you may want to carefully consider what you wish/vote for, as you may actually get it.

But kidding aside, the way this will pan out is far from clear. And what is even more unclear is when this may all transpire. While all agree on "a 2 year transition period," there are vastly different opinions on when these two years may actually start (some even mention 2018) if ever. And although I told my British colleagues earlier this week: "Goodbye, it was nice knowing you and... Good Luck!" , the twist of taking longer is that the minority that lost this referendum (a.k.a. young people) may in fact be the majority by the time this transpires. So who knows – in the words of Vera Lynn – it may all come down to "We'll meet again – don't know where, don't know when – some sunny day".

" _We'll meet again" is a 1939 British song performed by Vera Lynn (born Vera Margaret Welsh) which was standard repertoire for many occasions where people said goodbye (including many a funeral). The song is praised for the distinct optimistic undertone, something distinctly missing from most Brexit analysis so far._

 https://open.spotify.com/track/2iAlDwRozfuIgjvqSJWsw4

#    
Chain Gang

##  Tune into: Decentralisation

More than with previous technological (r)evolutions a side effect of cloud computing seems to be an increase in the degree of centralisation and concentration, not just within company organisations, but particularly in the wider commercial market. This is the most obvious with Software as a Service, where providers such as AirBNB, Uber, but also earlier cloud services such as LinkedIn and Google Search quickly established a 'winner takes all' distribution of market share and thus market power. And also in Infrastructure as a Service, we see an quickly diminishing number of suppliers still having the illusion that they can keep up with the gorilla in this market.

My first scientific encounter with centralisation and decentralisation was during the early eighties of the last century – when Prof. Gert Nielen – one of the founders of the then just launched Business Information Science curriculum – stated that centralisation and decentralisation can best understood as a sponge. By squeezing the sponge (centralising the control) we expel waste and increase efficiency, for example by concentrating information storage and processing in one place and by all using the same standard way of working. But after a while squeezing the sponge harder does not bring that effect anymore, we must make room for new ideas and new ways of working and the best way to do so is by permitting a degree of decentralisation, by releasing the sponge and let many (decentralised) flowers bloom.

A technology that makes decentralisation possible in the cloud is the Block Chain. But so far block chain technology is mainly known for Bitcoins and the somewhat anarchic atmosphere that surrounds this phenomena. In essence, a block chain is a reliable journal (ledger) of transactions, which makes it possible – without a central authority and with no predetermined confidence (trust) in transaction partners – to still do business with each other. And no longer needing a central authority (such as a commercial or central bank, or a central provider such as a Google or AirBNB) also means that there is no authority that can indulge in censorship or market manipulation.

To understand why having such an authority can be a problem, we only have to look at the music industry. It seems almost every artist at some point during their career will run into a serious conflict or at least a fundamental difference of opinion with their record company. Would it not be much nicer if these artists could autonomically control their music distribution and IP transactions. And I mean not through free or even illegal downloads and streams but through a worldwide trusted network of micro transactions.

Now artists and musicians are a group that for centuries has been monetizing their skills and talent as independent contributors rather than as traditional salaried workers. But increasingly this may also apply to the traditional employee jobs of enterprise organisations that people like you an me are active in. Also here workers will be increasingly expected to string together a monthly income from individual transactions. In which case it is nice if the percentage of overhead and (government) taxes that is deducted from the incoming flow is somewhat limited.

And if these two small examples are not convincing enough to establish the need for block chain based solutions, consider the ultimate use case for decentralised low-cost but reliable transactions: the Internet of Things (IoT). Increasingly, these "things" do transactions with people, but also directly with each other. An example of the latter is a parking garage (a thing) that offers cheap parking at weekends to smart cars (other things) that are looking for a place to stay safe during the city trip weekend their owner is planning. Now from a privacy perspective it is pretty essential if both the cars and their drivers can remain anonymous and also that is possible thanks to block chain based technologies and its many associated initiatives such as ethereum.org. Not that block chain based technologies do not still have some hurdles to overcome (scalability being just one of the more well known ones) but the potential is quit promissing.

Decentralized architectures may seem complex but they in many cases also have proven to be very powerful and robust. Just consider the original architecture of the Internet (although that still some essential parts centrally arranged/agreed) or the power of bittorrent and other peer2peer applications, including the original version of Skype.

I don't expect the slight alternative or even anarchistic feel to blockchain will disappear in the near future, even though the growing popularity of books such as "Capital in the 21th century" by Thomas Pikety and "Post Capitalism" by Paul Masson and even the (temporary) emerging of a "socialist" with a remarkably young following in the US election is a sign that the world is starting to look at alternative models to organise, allocate and monetise traditional market-driven commercial activities.

Chain Gang (That's the sound of the people working on the "Chain Gang") is a song that Sam Cook wrote in 1960 about a group of inmates – chained together – that had to perform forced labor for a central authority. In most part's of the world Cook is better known for his much more optimistic "(What a) Wonderfull World.

 https://open.spotify.com/track/7v1858htfU0srTDwhxeka8

#    
At the Hop

## Tune into: Hype Hopping

About a year ago we tuned into "the need for speed" and how a concept as "serverless computing" was increasingly catering to this. We are now a year further and the term "serverless" is taking on unexpected proportions. With some even seeing it as the successor to cloud in general or at least as a successor to the clouds poorer cousin in term of revenue, hype and adoption: PaaS.

The question we need to ask is whether this constitutes an example of Hype Hopping: to effortlessly pivot to the next new thing once the previous one turns out to be just a bit less attractive and certainly a lot more complex then we all thought at first. The Gartner Hype Cycle has been calling this for years the trough of disillusionment, a valley that only the strongest of innovations manage to pass in order to reach the slope of enlightenment or even the plateau of productivity that lies beyond.

But even before the through there are pitfalls hypes need to survive in order to thrive. Cloud computing itself once started its journey as "on demand" or "utility" computing. Terms that in retrospect were not sexy enough to survive. Whether Serverless will survive the markets sexy text is something that remains to be seen. Because - unlike there are no real clouds in cloud computing - there are plenty of real servers in what is called serverLESS computing. Something that caused blogger Paul Johnston to say: "Serverless is just a name. We could have called it Jeff". Mind you, by day Paul goes by the job title of "serverless consultant", which to me sounds almost as nebulous as the now popular cloud architect.

Whether serverless indeed will be sufficiently different to be deemed as the next generation of "How to do IT" is not easy to answer. After all we saw plenty of earlier generations of different approaches, such as Structured Programming, Object Orientation, Service Oriented Architectures and now Micro Services, all lay claim to such a change agent role. But deep down they are all just similar enough that somewhere a grey bearded mainframe type can claim: "been there, done that, on our sixties S/360". And let's face it, when it comes to server less, did not virtualization, software appliances, containers and everything delivered "as a service" already take many steps to remove any physical servers from our direct field of vision.

The most visible incarnation of serverless is currently Amazon Web Services Lambda. Although this was by most accounts not the first implementation of the idea. Manta of IaaS provider Joyent - recently acquired by consumer electronics giant Samsung - and Iron.IO's Iron Worker arguably were earlier. And neither is Lambda one of a few. Due to rapid succession introductions of Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions and IBM OpenWhisk. Although many of these newbies are still in a beta or even alpha stage. The term functions is rapidly becoming a standard when it comes to naming serverless offerings. And Functions as a Service (FAAS) or Function Platform as a Service (fPaaS) is even used as a more precise (but therefore more confined) alternative for the term Serverless altogether.

Most of today's serverless implementations enable users to execute user-defined functions based on various event triggers. For example, one can have a thumbnail created every time someone saves a picture, or send a bill every time someone streams a song, or verify the identity of a user every time he triggers an event. Behind the scenes the invoked function is usually performed in a container (mainly because they are so fast to start-up). While the individual containers are often running in an isolated and secured user dedicated environment, in most cases a Virtual Machine (mainly because they provided proven insulation and safety). On some platforms you declare your functions by inserting a piece of code or a script, with others you can insert functions in the form of a ready to run (binary) container. The latter feels -with a container basically being a portable machine incarnation – somehow a lot less "serverless" than the script approach.

The essence of serverless in my view is however that in addition to no longer having to worry about WHERE (on which server or which virtual machine) your functionality will be running, you also don't have to worry anu more about WHEN your function will be performed. This is taken care of by the trigger or event engine of the serverless platform. This will make classic structures such as loops and infinite, nested and complex "If - then - else " trees a thing of the past. And we all know how much code it can take to handle the logistics, versus the core transformation. Not to mention how hard it is to debug such logistic code. Not surprisingly one of the most frequent comments heard about serverless computing is how amazingly little code you have to write to get something done.

With serverless the provider/operator of the platform is responsible for the WHERE and the WHEN and the user/developer needs only to determine the WHAT. In some way this sounds as a familiar promise. Did not non-procedural and event-driven 4th generation languages lay similar claims? And if so, could serverless long-term turn out to have the same disadvantages as these predecessors. And I don't mean just the increased lock-in that these platforms brought, but the fact that in case of performance issues tuning let alone refactoring was almost impossible, as the environment almost fully abstracted the user/developer from the HOW.

Whether we will all be shredding our just recently printed business cards and updated linked-in profiles claiming our new found role as "Cloud Something" to replace them with "Serverless Whatever" is therefore questionable. If only because "it runs in the cloud" still sounds so much better than it runs "at the Serverless".

"At the Hop" by Danny & the Juniors rose directly to the top of the charts in 1958 and turned out to be the bands' biggest but certainly not their only hit song. Others were the largely forgotten "Dottie" and the more persistent "Twistin 'USA". Although the dance moves of the Hop were clearly different from the Twist and from subsequent Rock & Roll and Hip Hop variants, for many older people it all seemed just more of the same.

<https://open.spotify.com/track/6vkuJbGjyjnSQReeaCh8wT>

#    
Money for Nothing

## Tune into: The dark side of digital

For me the digital age began with the introduction of the CD (a Dutch invention BTW) and I still remember inserting my first real DDD (Digitally Recorded, Digitally mixed and Digitally Mastered) album into my first hard earned CD player. In hindsight we now know that digital – after a brief revival with the introduction of the CD – had a very dark side for the music industry. By providing the ability to endlessly copy songs without any loss of quality the economic model of buying music quickly eroded. And also in the broader economy we are now beginning to experience some of the drawbacks of ever progressive digitization.

One of the symptoms of this is the seemingly endless stream of RIFs (Reductions in Force) at once leading high-tech enterprises. Fortune recently rattled off a seemingly end-less list of tech lay-offs: 5500 at the largest provider of data center networking, 4000 at its equivalent in mobile networking, another 4,700 at one of the world's largest software providers and no less than 6,500 at a producer of hard disks. And it is not limited to hardware and software companies, also in the area of IT services several historically very stable players are no longer able to escape this trend. And that an industry that most of us still deem to be the "market of the future". It now seems increasingly likely that a majority of traditional high-tech companies may fail to find a recipe or modus operando for long-term success or even survival in tomorrow's digital, open-source and cloud-inspired era.

And unlike in the past, these RIFs do not seem to be just a temporary reshuffle of the skills portfolio to the demands of a changing market. McKinsey recently came out with "Poorer than Their parents?". A report which identified that, while between 1993 and 2005 only about 2 percent of the world population faced declining or steady incomes, that number increased to no less than 65 to 70 percent of all western households for the period between 2005 and 2014. A whopping 65% of all households that experienced no economic progress for years and years on end! And that despite the massive technical progress signified by smart phones, flat-screen TVs, voice activated assistants, electric cars and every bit of information and knowledge – always and everywhere – available on-line.

If these technological advances indeed lead to growth, then that growth is clearly not benefitting traditional businesses and –even more worrying in this context – completely bypassing their employees. One reason for this may be stagnation of the once seemingly endless growth in productivity per employee. Even though – thanks to innovations such as Blendle (another Dutch innovation) – we can all now start our morning much more informed by scanning five daily newspapers and an endless stream of weekly and monthly magazines, it does not necessarily seem to make us more productive. Something equally true for the endless stream of emails, instant messages, pokes, likes and other digital artifacts that (over)fill our days. With regard to productivity, office workers are now losing the war against technology and automation as fast as their blue-collar colleagues before them. And the next group of war refugees – the tribe of knowledge workers that most of us will deem ourselves a member of – is only around the corner, with every major tech firm upping the pre-emptive arms race with massive investments in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Systems.

Looking for a more sustainable economic model for our (yours and mine) digital future, I therefore started reading Paul Mason's "Post Capitalism", especially triggered by its ambitious subtitle: "a guide to our future". In practice the book feels more as a – very readable – refresher on Marxist theory, including political conspiracy theories and a plea for a non-work-related basic income (Money for Nothing) for everyone, rather than as a practical recipe for full employment and shared economic growth in a fully digital economy. So we continue our search – for example by revisiting the ideas of "Small is Beautiful" economist E. F. Schumacher – for a workable model to understand, predict and of course govern the increasingly Wall-E and Jetson-like future we are all heading into.

Mainly because it would be a distinct shame if a digital "Money for Nothing" scenario would for most of us pan out as "not having a dime to spend on anything", instead of Mark Knopfler's original intent of "receiving pay for activities that hardly feeling like work" while listening to an endless riff (but now spelled with double f) of "I want my MTV"..

" _Money for Nothing" was the second track on Dire Straights' first "all-digital" album "Brothers in Arms" in 1985. You therefore can imagine my surprise when I recently saw a remastered version turn up on Spotify. Turned out the original was still mostly mixed using an analog device. Not that my ears were able to register that, for sure not on the type of speakers I could afford at that time. And even now – on the compressed (but free) Spotify stream, I could not point out any significant differences._

<https://open.spotify.com/track/4WfGrAJVC3A5xhUTja0gUG>

#    
Cheap Thrills

## Tune into: a Faceless Cloud

For the longest time, product differentiation, has been the non-plus-ultra for technological offerings, but recently we see – in an sector that is about the same age as the cloud industry – a number of suppliers that are taking a diametrically opposite strategy. The industry we are talking about is the smartphone industry. A sector that – after early attempts such as the Nokia 9000 (the refrigerator) and the first RIM Blackberries (which you could not make any calls with) only really got started with the introduction of the first iPhone. That was in June 2007, just a year after what is now generally seen as the beginning of the cloud, namely the launch of Amazon's S3 service in March 2006.

But while in the cloud both the leaders at the top of the market and the challengers at the bottom of the market are still trying to differentiate themselves by doing things different from their competitors (adding more features and replacing standard components with possibly premium but for sure proprietary implementations), we see at the bottom of the smartphone market a drive towards ultimate standardization. One by one a large number of suppliers of Android-based phones are installing plain vanilla Android. No special skins, not a collection of bloat ware and no proprietary software what so ever.

For users, this means there is barely any learning curve when changing brands. In addition, updates to the underlying open source software are immediately available – no need to re-apply any of the supplier-specific modifications. Meaning the phone will age much more slowly and thus can be used longer and more productively. Open Source as it was intended. Not only to provide vendors a quick start for the release of a yet again proprietary product, but to offer customers and end-users an interoperable and standard platform.

Selection in this segment of the phone market thus happens more and more based on pure hardware specs. The functionality is by virtue of using the exactly same software exactly the same and also the design is becoming less important for choosing. They namely all have a solid black glass plate with no buttons on the front augmented with a user selected case against drops and damage on the back. Although some innovations – such as wireless charging, fingerprint readers, and dual cameras – may come a year later with these vendors than with the market leaders, the do come typically implemented in a more standard way and at significantly lower cost.

The only question that remains is: Do I take the 8-core, 6″ for $ 95 or a 4-core 5.5″ for $ 50, both ex works and with the latest version of Android preinstalled. BTW the mentioned (indeed very low) prices are not wishful thinking of this blogging gadget freak, but found in the wild prices from reputable manufacturers, even including VAT (or salestax), import and shipping. In reality only the two or three market leaders do not seem to participate in this trend.

The question is whether struggling cloud providers (again everyone except for the two or three market leaders) should consider a similar approach. Not offering their own – albeit open source based – unique cloud solution that with a lot of luck and even more effort may capture just 1 or 2% market share, but instead a 100% undifferentiated on unmodified implementation of a standard platform. A standard platform which – if you add all these "commoditie" suppliers together – might well capture a 20/30% market share and where customers can switch seamlessly between vendors as not only the API but also higher level platform services (such as databases, messaging and container scheduling services) all work exactly the same. A step beyond what we now see with platform as a service frameworks, which, although the framework they started from was standardized (for example by being based on Cloud Foundry) is not really plug- let alone binary-compatible with the other vendors offerings.

If (increasingly struggling) challengers of the industry would indeed take this route then also selection of cloud providers could be largely based on objective criteria such as pure specs, prices, and of course... data center location. The latter is namely rapidly becoming more important in terms of compliance, data-residency and of course existing and upcoming privacy regulations..

"Cheap Thrills" is likely the most well-known song of Sia, the popular artist that performed at Apple's most recent recent iPhone Launch (the 10th edition). An artist who has indeed chosen to link her popularity not directly to herself as a person, by making a habit of performing with a standard black and white faceless wig. Someething that has done wonders for her privacy.

<https://open.spotify.com/track/27SdWb2rFzO6GWiYDBTD9j>

#    
Das Model

## Tune into: Direct Container Costing

It is the day that you knew was coming, namely the day IT costs finally transitions from indirect overhead cost to direct attributable costs. This of course was to be expected with digital business becoming the norm(al). But the actual transition may still take a little longer than we might expect. The final transition needs what many would call a perfect storm, with all the ingredients lining up at the right time. A number of these ingredients is already present:

For one, we have seen – especially when the sold products themselves and the distribution thereof are becoming more digital – the share of IT cost in the total product cost increase, resulting in a greater need to account for these costs directly in the cost of each product. As a logical result of this we see the responsibility for these costs moving into the line of business departments. In addition we see the costs of the Internet of Things and smart machines shift to the line organization while we signaled years ago that in many industries the chief marketing officer may well have more to spend on IT than the CIO.

On a technical level we can – largely thanks to the introduction of containers – identify individual micro services costs and attribute them to the individual products or services that directly benefit from using these. Very much like we allocate the cost of wheels, saddles and gears in a bicycle factory to each produced cycle and not as a kind of convoluted overhead tax on the cost of the frames. What helps here is that we can start software containers per use and stop again. And that's just the key difference between direct costs (such as mounting a wheel) and indirect costs (such as lighting or heating the factory).

This also opens the opportunity to move away from budget driven IT management. For digital business a budget driven approach is as inefficient as the budget-driven factories of the former Soviet Union. Where often already in August production had to be shut down for the rest of the year because the budget for saddles, tires or even bicycle bells was exhausted.

The scheduling of all those containers is by the way a challenge that is quit comparable to the challenges of planning production in a modern bicycle factory: pretty complex. Especially if we want to do a certain amount of long-term planning and set ambitious but achievable cost targets. Calculating how much it cost to produce an individual product after the fact is relatively simple, namely simply summing the individual cost of all the resources. But to set an upfront target cost (what should this product or service cost), we get stuck without a model that can be used to describe the service. In production we have known such models for years under the name of bill of material or formulation. In the cloud we often hear the term "services blueprint", but in terms of maturity and acceptance of this, we are still some time away from beauty parades and model of the year elections.

For a sensible move to using direct costs, it is also necessary that we can pay our cloud providers based on the individual containers services used. With function platforms (fPaaS) such as Amazon's Lambda we have seen this indeed become possible. Here we on pay per function called (in millionths of cents) and for the actual memory used (in tenths of seconds). But for many of the more generic container services payment is still a kind of flat fee calculated based on the cost of the underlying VMs, regardless of how many or what type of containers are actually running. That's a bit like a bicycle factory which pays its supplier by the cost of the machine that produces wheels, instead of by the actual number of wheels consumed,..

The song "Das Model" from 1978 of the German band Kraftwerk is about a catwalk beauty parade. In the UK it originally came out as secondary B-side of as song called 'Computer Love', but the market was quick in deeming it the primary A-side, elevating it to the number 1 position in the UK top 75 singles.

<https://open.spotify.com/track/1FL9DHDSED6lxNMDJUJQvB>

#    
Closer

## Tune into: Ecosystem Platforms

During 2016 cloud computing celebrated its tenth anniversary. Therefore, on the threshold of 2017, we'll briefly look at what the next decade may bring. Also this brings to a close the version of Tune into the Cloud that published monthly in the Dutch print publication Cloudworks, the magazine where we started this series .

On your tenth birthday, as fresh teenager, you're normally not yet an adolescent – a.k.a, a beginning adult – and you may not be seated at the adult table yet. But there are exceptions. Sometimes things just move faster. Just look at a Max Verstappen, our Dutch Formula 1 phenomenon who – by literally going faster – now starts standard from the front of the grid. And also, the cloud has maneuvered itself in pole position for the 2017 race, with more and more "fans" who go for a 'cloud first', an 'all-in cloud or even a "cloud-only" strategy.

But the next decade will not just deal with the phenomenon of cloud computing. In addition to "shared, scalable, elastic, self-service and connected" IT systems there are namely four other areas that must be addressed effectively to provide a viable platform for economic and social activities of the next decade.

The first area is also the most significant, and that is the ecosystem area. In the past, companies bought solutions to optimize or automate their internal processes (eg. applications for billing, production and purchasing, sometimes even integrated into an ERP system). These applications they then used to better take part in the various supply chains they competed in. But if several companies in a chain each only optimize their own process and nobody optimizes across the chain then the officially name for that is sub optimization. And suboptimal is no longer sufficient to be competitive. Hence the increasing need for ecosystem orchestration platforms that transcends the individual players. The tricky part is that the company that takes the role of playing the orchestrator, immediately gathers vast knowledge (and thus power) over the rest of the chain. And with the growing importance of scale, there will be a very limited number of ecosystems. Meaning that for both consumers and producers there often will be little choice of ecosystems to participate in (often there may only be one per area). Just think of the public concerns about the power of early platform players such as taxi service Uber, hospitality player Airbnb and retailer Amazon.

The second area is closely related to the first and is all about interacting with customers and the associated customer experiences. As ecosystems grow stronger, it will be more difficult for individual companies (and governments) to interact with customers through their own websites, call centers or even sales teams. Many consumers and companies in China have grown accustomed to the wall garden of an app such as WeChat , that incorporates functionality similar to Facebook, WhatsApp, Uber, PayPal, Marketplace and dozens of others, under one integrated user interface. Accessing a new market while bypassing WeChat is risky at best. But that means WeChat increasingly determines how your products are offered, how you get paid and in many cases which (potential) customers get to see your offers. How to deal with the expanding power of such ecosystems enablers will be one of the trickiest issues of the coming decade. A discussion we already see some signs of in the current debate about the social impact of fake news and the possible responsibilities of players such as Facebook in this context.

The third aspect is the Internet of things or rather the needed connections to the numerous devices making up this next generation of the Internet. With billions of devices joining it will be increasingly more difficult – and dangerous – to throw on the Internet and then "just see who is coming along and what happens." While that somewhat hap hazard approach was a big part of the original charm (and strength) of the original Internet phenomena. More and more we will use private or non-public network paths – albeit via software defined – to make contact with a pre-set collection of trusted parties. And guess who is going to decide who exactly is trusted and allowed to participate? Exactly! The same ecosystem enablers that provide the platforms that everybody uses. Providers who incidentally will increasingly carry out their duties and leverage their vast knowledge and data by exploiting the new capabilities of artificial intelligence and machine learning, which make up the fourth additional area critical for the next ten years cloud.

The next decade cloud which will therefore be much more closed than the first ten years. A maybe unexpected change to the cloud, that none the less seems to seamlessly fits with the rapidly changing – economic and social – sentiments about free trade.

With Closer we closed off the four-year series of Dutch Tune into the Cloud columns. The song "Closer" by The Chain Smokers was – with 12 weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 – one of the most popular summer hits of 2016. It accelerated the duo behind the Chainsmokers to new heights of popularity, very much like we expect from the cloud.

<https://open.spotify.com/track/7BKLCZ1jbUBVqRi2FVlTVw>

# About the Author

Gregor Petri is a Research Vice President at Gartner covering cloud computing and cloud service brokering. In 2013 he started to write a monthly column called Tune into the Cloud for the Dutch print publication CloudWorks. The English versions of these columns have been publishing since 2014 on GBN, his employer's Blog Home Network, and are now also bundled in this eBook for convenient reading.

Prior to joining Gartner, Mr. Petri was a regular speaker at industry events and wrote one of the first cloud primers – "Shedding Light on Cloud Computing" (2009) – and "Lean, or the Art of Cloud Computing Management" (2011). Both highlighted the role of cloud computing in enabling digital business sites around the world. He syndicated his LeanITmanager blog, and he was named by Cloud Computing Journal as one of the world's Top 100 Bloggers on Cloud Computing.

Earlier in his career, Mr. Petri worked as a management trainee in the office of the CIO at Akzo, helped roll out just-in-time manufacturing at Philips, and helped roll out several IT innovations, such as object-oriented ERP applications, mobile business applications and XML servers, in Europe. Prior to his current position, he was senior director of product marketing EMEA at CA Technologies.

Mr. Petri is a former board member of the Dutch Web-Services Association, the XML Users Group Holland and Geel-Zwart field hockey, where he still plays. He studied business economics and information technology in Rotterdam and Tilburg; during this study, he wrote and marketed one of the first European shareware applications and founded I.N.N.O.V.A.T.I.F., his first consumer electronics and media startup.

You can follow Gregor at @gregorpetri and read his blog on the Gartner Blog Network at http://blogs.gartner.com/gregor-petri/ and at http://Tuneintothecloud.com.  
The Spotify Playlist of this blog is available at  https://open.spotify.com/user/gregorpetri/playlist/4ie7kKgHeRAeYXn75D03ZC
