There are a lot of businesses and individuals blogging about the cloud. I thought I’d put together a list of some of the top rated cloud bloggers. Please let me know if you agree, disagree or have some other cloud bloggers to throw into the mix.
In my second post, I’m highlighting four more bloggers and some posts of interest:
Rational Survivability by Chris Hoff @Beaker
Chris Hoff has 20 years of experience in high-profile global roles in network and information security architecture, engineering, operations, product management and marketing with a passion for virtualization and all things Cloud. Hoff is currently a Sr. Director and Security Architect at Juniper Networks.
Chris’ recent blog “Cloud Service Providers and the Dual Stack Dilemma” is an interesting read even though he downplays it by summarising it in three Tweets. I particularly like the part of this post that reads:
Then an interesting series of events happened as AWS continued to innovate and lower prices and open source/community-based offerings such as OpenStack took flight; the ability to deliver lower cost but high-quality cloud services became more realistic. And large pools of vendors began to participate.
That said, many of the enterprise-level security and compliance knobs and buttons aren’t available generically in these offers and options like security introspection APIs are not standard fare on most of the platforms. This means that enterprises who have high compliance requirements may not be willing or able to use these platforms, but this, too, is starting to change. What CSPs are interested in now is maturing their business, controlling their own fate, costs and roadmap features…while optimizing their spend, R&D and marketing around very streamlined service offerings and market segments.
Cloud Pundit by Lydia Leong @cloudpundit
Lydia Leong is an analyst at Gartner, where she covers cloud computing, hosting, colocation, content delivery networks, and other Internet infrastructure services. This is a personal blog, and as such, it should not be taken to express Gartner’s views.
Lydia writes in an August post “Servers are cheap, talent is expensive” that many of the Amazon customers she speaks with mention the benefits AWS provides, but that they believe they could do it themselves. Lydia says:
“Most people don’t choose cloud IaaS for lowered costs, unless they have very bursty or unpredictable workloads. Instead, they choose it for increased business agility, which to most people means “getting applications, and thus new business capabilities, more quickly”.”
The benefits of AWS are great, but more competition is needed. That is exactly why we are providing cloud orchestration software to service providers. Lydia highlights an important point where she says in the blog that people are going to innovate and provide competitive advantage. There is very little point in a service provider creating orchestration software when it already exists to provide the agility she mentions. Perhaps I’ll write another blog post on the topic.
InfoWorld Cloud Computing by David Linthicum @DavidLinthicum
David S. Linthicum is the CTO and founder of Blue Mountain Labs and an internationally recognized industry expert and thought leader. Dave has authored 13 books on computing, the latest of which is Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise, a Step-by-Step Approach.
In David’s post “The tipping point for cloud management is nigh” he says:
As enterprises continue to use IaaS (infrastructure as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service) cloud services to solve pressing business problems, the number of cloud services used will continue to grow. Although dozens of services are relatively easy to track, many companies are quickly using hundreds or even thousands of services. This means they’re approaching a tipping point where the number of services used exceeds IT’s ability to manage them manually.
CloudAve particularly Krishnan Subramanian @krishnan
The Team behind CloudAve lives and breathes Cloud Computing – they’ve been evangelists since before there was a term for it. Quite simply CloudAve seeks to be the pre-eminent location for commentary and analysis on all things relating to Cloud computing and SaaS.
Krishnan Subramanian (a.k.a Krish) is the Principal Analyst of Rishidot Research LLC. His main focus areas include Cloud Infrastructure and Platforms while he also focusses on the big picture where the seemingly disparate technologies of cloud computing, mobile, social and big data converge to change IT in ways we can’t even imagine today. Krish also evangelizes Open Source and Cloud Computing on various media outlets, public speaking and blogs. Rishidot Research offer research reports and advisory services for enterprises and IT vendors.
Whilst CloudAve is a great source of information, I particularly enjoy Krish’s posts because he is not afraid of controversy. He may not be the most well-researched, however he makes up for this by being good at articulating controversial and forward thinking topics, generating debate and learning through them.
In my next post, I’ll highlight another three bloggers.
