Rumbling from distant clouds

For those with their heads in the sand this last week, life was busy in the IT weather system. A few key announcements, combined with some very credible rumors set the stage for a thrilling Q2CY08:

• Amazon adds key features for hosting commercial capacity payloads in their "cloud". Notice to all: embrace failure.
  
• Google is rumored to be close to releasing its capacity-on-demand offering, perhaps for free to "moderate need" customers. Not surprisingly, free may make great sense here.
  
• Rackspace may be beginning the IPO process. Given the success of Mosso for some power users, this may be an IPO to watch.
• IBM and two universities team up to develop cloud computing technologies.
• Yahoo teams with Tata to research cloud computing using a "super-cloud".
• The first capacity brokerage that I am aware of makes its pitch.
• Cloud Computing Demo Night happens, and dammit, I'm not there! Apparently, there were a number of cool demos, including an interesting PaaS play for Ruby fans.

In the meantime, I was knee deep in family (thanks for coming Dad and Sheila), working my butt off to manage four separate customer pilots, two of which I am working directly on, and generally having to choose sleep or blogging on a day-to-day basis. (Luckily I'm obsessive enough about blogging that sleep only wins about half the time.)

Thank god blogs like datacenterknowledge.com, highscalability.com and others are providing stellar coverage of the cloud computing space.

By the way, I've had a very good boost in subscribers in the last week. Thanks to all who have joined the conversation, and please feel free to comment at any time. If you have a blog related to service level automation, utility/cloud computing or distributed systems technologies you'd like me to follow, drop me a line at james dot urquhart at cassatt dot com.