Episode 18: Did 2011 have a silver lining for the cloud in ireland?

2011 for the cloud in Ireland was a turning point. At the start of the year, there were but maybe two handfuls of cloud computing service providers in Ireland, & twelve months on, the choice has ballooned, with numerous IAAS & SAAS providers in the market place, pushing forward the commoditisation of the cloud away from preserve specialty services they have been in recent years.

One of the biggest complaints & criticisms levelled at Irish cloud service providers by their customers, even by those in the market space as potential adopters is the inability by those same providers to actually make the services easy to access, in the same way Apple makes its technology intuitive & accessible. They want it easy to use, with a user-friendly interface. They don’t care how it works, or why it works and rightfully so. They don’t need to. It should ‘just work’ right out of the well packaged & marketed box as promised. It’s not a uniquely Irish problem, but one that is in the forefront of the Irish cloud space.

To an extent, 12 months on this is still the case, but as the Cloud pervades further in the consumer space, the innovations from this will drive into the enterprise solutions to address this. This is atypical of how the technology life cycle works. First, things become the preserve of a few innovators at the vanguard with early adopters. Then, the tech is adopted, moulded & shaped to find it's way into the biggest market where real cost-return scales can be achieved, to then eventually become more refined, powerful & resilient at the enterprise level.

Earlier this year, Microsoft & the IDA announced Ireland could become a global centre of excellence for the cloud. And this showed, with Irish Cloud companies taking in investment from VC funds, foreign cloud companies setting up shop here, like EngineYard, Marketo, & Tethras, to name but a few (although this had more to do with a low unchanged  Corporate Tax rate than Ireland's output from the cloud to date), the big players like EMC, IBM, HP & Dell furthered their investment in their cloud services from Ireland.

Cork Institute of Technology announced in May that it had under consultation with cloud system heavyweights EMC, VMWare, Cisco, GreenPlum, RSA, & SpringSource, developed a two year programme to allow people to attain an actual qualification specialising in the field of cloud computing, as opposed to say a grouping of certificates from various companies; i.e. Cisco accreditation, VMWare VSP etc. This was heralded as proof of Ireland's ability to reshape & own its identity as a knowledge economy.

2011 was also the year where people realised the true impact of what happens when cloud can & does go wrong. None more so than the outages at Amazon, & the countless security breaches throughout the year. These incidents made news headlines, & had people jittery, reacting over the top, & discussions about how fragile the cloud was were made like they were children's fairytales. This could not have been farther from the truth, but the fallout in the media was plain to see, & not limited to specialist media.

Security, reliability, resiliency & data protection were all constant reoccurring themes. While Ireland was being positioned by its new Government  as a Cloud Computing/Digital Gaming/Life Sciences & Clean Tech place to do business.

Ireland itself was not engaging in areas such as helping to tighten up on areas of digital security, following up on EC court rulings about ISP content blocking, or its own Government moving towards cloud adoption the same way some of its European & global counterparts were.

All of this happened against a backdrop of increasing economic depression at home & globally. Ireland asked & got its change of leadership earlier this year, and that leadership by year end despite sound bites, media ramblings, event appearances has still failed to reach out to  those in the Irish Cloud market, even despite the announced €5m centre of cloud excellence announced by that same Government.

2012 will require the indigenous cloud computing sector in Ireland to shout to have its voice heard above the noise of foreign multinationals whose first interest is in tax savings they can make here rather than fostering Irish industry to serve itself at home & abroad.

Episode 10: Band On The Run?

People think Cloud is big business now. We're not even at the projected years yet like 2014 where some have estimated it will be worth as much as USD$150bn. There is a growing perception out there amongst executives in business that 'Cloud' is nothing more than a really nice way of saying 'outsourcing' & question its value based off that, which is really the wrong way to view it. But leaving that aside, the other side of the table are the Cloud service providers.

So far in the Cloudiverse, we've:

• SAAS - Software As A Service
• PAAS - Platform As A Service
• IAAS - Infrastructure As A Service
• CAAS - Cloud As A Service (granted this is my own term - but still!)

Last week upon my weary travels through the countless number of articles/blogs/opinions/reports I read every day a new term came creeping like a truck hurtling down a mountainside into my view;

Desktop As A Service, or DAAS.

That's right, 'DAAS'. In the late 90's there was a running joke amongst I.T. workers about TLA's (Three Letter Acronymns) & even some went as far as XTLA's (Extended Three Letter Acronymns, which was another humourous way of saying four letter acronymns). In my early days as a support engineer we would try find as many funny TLA's or XTLA's as we could for things during mind-numbing tasks as a way of lightening the mood. A collegue of mine one day introduced me to the term 'PEBKAC error' (Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair). Even to this day it brings a wry smile to my face.

But it does over a decade later have me asking, are we getting to the stage again where in order to 'sound' convincing we're confusing the end user with loads of fancy abbreviated terminology? It is bad enough that currently there are so many people out there who from a lay person's stand-point can see how some of these 'Cloud services' can help their businesses. Whether that's to save money, or divesting themselves of capital investment, or just making access to certain systems more global or location neutral. There is a growing problem where despite the fact Cloud companies are sprouting up at the rate Dot Com businsses used to, the market is not being brought along for the ride with it.

There is a sales technique called 'the band wagon effect' where in a bid to try & have your lead buy in to what you're trying to sell them you tell them that their competitor is using your product/service & already benefitting, so they should to. It is a technique done in the hope of assuading fears about how something may be relevant & useful to your business/vertical, while also inserting another fear; the competition having an edge over you as a business.

I get the feeling in amongst this explosion of cloud that people are really trying to be extreme with the 'first to market' ethos & creating as many new 'As A Service' models as possible in a bid to hitch their own wagons to the Cloud band wagon. While no-one can ever deny the fact it's easier than ever to establish a solutions based business to leverage off the Internet, & tag your solution as a 'Cloud' service, there's a temptation for the I.T. industry to 'pig out' on what alot must feel is an 'all you can eat buffet' in the Cloud.

They say unless you learn from history, you are doomed to repeat it. The last time there was a feeding frenzy like this it was called the 'Dot Com Bubble', & that burst. Hard. It also took alot of investors with it & alot of VC companies took a real kicking, especially over companies like 'Boo.com'. Yes, you shouold make hay while the sun shines, but considering the global econmy is still recovering, & here in Ireland we are really struggling, the last thing we need is another over-inflated bubble bursting, which may send any recovery or early signs of it straight into a grave.

As someone whose been involved in the Cloud for some time now, it  has been very good to me in terms of employment, work, & opportunity. Not to mention the education it has given as well as enthusiasm again for the I.T. service industry. While we all as Cloud warriors, defenders, enthusiasts, developers, founders, evangelists, champions, consultants etc. want to share this with the world, make some bucks too (because this is what it is ultimately about), we must ensure that as chiefs in our tribes bring the tribes along with us, otherwise we're going to be standing there all on our own looking at a very expensive totem pole that everyone else stopped  caring about, & sees no relevance in, with a very hefty tab awaiting us, wondering why people 'don't understand' or 'don't get it'.

Episode 3: The one where the the story of the cloud in Ireland was told

In the last four years, clouds in Ireland have represented three distinct things to the Irish people; our freakish & severe weather pattern changes wreaking havoc & causing hundreds of millions of euros in insurance claims, the dark clouds of national economic & personal depression from our financial issues, which have since placed Ireland at the centre of the world’s gaze, & the third kind being the latest buzzword in I.T., ‘Cloud Computing’, which coincidentally was heavily influenced by those aforementioned fiscal issues. Business costs being driven down were becoming part of the fight-for-survival, & traditional I.T services models or owning hardware was no longer part of the business plans for some companies, for who cloud was a solution turning traditional capital costs (CAPEX) into more economic, budgeted operational spend (OPEX).

The economic factors by their very existence and effect on Irish businesses has proven influential in the story of the cloud in Ireland, and its growth to Ireland becoming a ‘Global Cloud Computing Centre of Excellence’ according a report commissioned by Microsoft & the IDA (the Industrial Development Agency - who are responsible for the attraction and development of foreign investment in Ireland). [ link to report http://www.idaireland.com/news-media/publications/library-publications/external-publications/Cloud%20Computing.pdf ] A view that also conforms with the recently produced programme for Government  [ link to Programme for Government 2011  http://www.finegael.ie/upload/ProgrammeforGovernmentFinal.pdf ] from the recently elected National Unity Government of Fine Gael [link http://www.finegael.ie ] & the Irish Labour party [link: http://www.labour.ie ]

To firstly put some perspective on where the cloud in Ireland currently stands say against the USA, a recent comparison of cloud adoption rates between Ireland and the USA suggested that the IAAS aspect of cloud services (infrastructure as a service - for those not ‘down’ with the cool tech kids) is getting a far better adaptation rate in the USA than in Ireland, while SAAS (software as a service - think SalesForce, Apple iTunes’ Appstore etc.) had a better adoption rate in Ireland than IAAS. IAAS in Ireland still has some levels of mistrust, and as a result the cloud in Ireland to date has never really been driven by big business demands, or the major global players in the same way it has in the USA.

Cloud’s adoption in Ireland has traditionally been led by the development community, who when working on new web-based projects for small Irish start-ups had seen them place those projects live in the cloud, as shared hosting had proved itself unreliable despite being cheap, and that dedicated servers had become expensive, but again seen as unreliable in against ‘the cloud’.

The Irish development community, through its early use of Amazon’s web services, demanded cloud services in Ireland. The Irish hosting companies, who were either running out of space, available power and/or access to land to build data-centers (as the cost of land in Ireland went out of control - [ link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_property_bubble ] ), or even those who saw the potential for small scale virtual private servers, began slowly answering the call.

The charge with providing cloud services in Ireland has been blazed by Irish hosting companies, and has since spawned a new breed of cloud-centric service providers who provide ‘cloud-only’ services, supplying best-in-class cloud services without the noose of aged legacy infrastructures and services to support. One such company is Dublin based Digital Mines, the brain-child of Ed Byrne. Byrne  was part of the senior management team who early last year sold Hosting365, once one of the mainstays of the Irish shared hosting scene, to U.S disaster recovery company SunGard.

Digital Mines (www.DigitalMines.com), founded in 2010, recently shot into the news after closing €750,000 in first round funding via Enterprise Ireland and Delta Partners [ link:  http://blog.digitalmines.com/2011/03/digital-mines-receives-e750000-investment/ ], a venture capital fund. Considering the difficulty Irish businesses in general have continued to express over the last three years since the global economy imploded, i.e. obtaining loans, funding, credit etc., this kind of investment not only shows the strength of the cloud for economic hope in Ireland, but that experienced Irish cloud professionals are leading the way, getting their message heard and more importantly, playing their part in the cloud fulfilling its potential and economic role in the Irish and European markets.

Digital Mines, as an example, set out on the path of innovating beyond the traditional euro-spend-sink of buying hardware, building a data-center and the whole traditional go-crazy capital investment infrastructure spend by instead leveraging off existing world-class leading infrastructure from Amazon’s AWS [ link: http://aws.amazon.com ]. Amazon’s lead in this area is best put in perspective by the fact each day they add the equivalent compute power & services to power Amazon.com in the year 2000, which then was a USD$2.8 billion business. It is hard to imagine there is anyone else globally implementing that much infrastructure for cloud on a daily basis, let alone in the Irish market.

Digital Mines’ team with overfour years experience of building out cloud services, combined with a similarily experienced cloud sales team, no legacy infrastructure or service issues, or capital investments, Digital Mines set about creating a best-in-class, business friendly management console that plugs into AWS, which operates from multiple, diverse cloud centres in Ireland, which are the centrepiece for Amazon’s European cloud strategy. Again, a demonstration of Ireland’s importance role in the European cloud story to date and for the future.

The recent Microsoft and IDA study in Ireland, which was conducted by Goodbody Economic Consultants, while highlighting and acknowledging the importance of the cloud for Ireland, failed to highlight the opportunities and the levels of innovation it has already spawned. It also failed to demonstrate the issues the market in Ireland faces to meet the potential it envisions and aspires to, which are concerns that could apply to the potential for the European market growth for cloud.

Many cloud companies in Ireland (and across the world) have learned along the way that the awareness of cloud computing among both business and technical users is quite high, but that they come at it from different perspectives. Most interesting is that while awareness of the cloud is high, the actual understanding of how to apply it within a business is not. As a result, most businesses have not taken advantage of cloud services to date. Obviously this is a huge opportunity with awareness and appetite being very high, but expertise and understanding lacking.

For example, IAAS cloud providers in the Irish market have in recent years tended to take a very hands-off, business unfriendly ‘we-provide-infrastructure-only-with-service-level-agreements’ approach. This has proven to be one of those barriers to adoption of cloud in Ireland, and indeed an example of bad experiences some early cloud adopters faced, which has in fact turned some of them off the cloud, and back into traditional frameworks such as colocation (where a company buys server hardware and places them in a third party data-centre for power, security, cooling and connectivity), dedicated servers (IAAS), or shared hosting (a no-frills, no guarantees, inexpensive, generally insecure form of web hosting). Cloud, where it was supposed to be a solution, suddenly became a problem for some of these users.

One of the biggest complaints (and indeed criticisms) levelled at Irish cloud service providers by their customers, and even by those in the market space as potential adopters is the inability by those same providers to actually make the services easy to access, in the same way Apple makes its technology intuitive and accessible; they want it easy to use, with a user-friendly interface. They don’t care how it works, or why it works and rightfully so. They don’t need to. It should ‘just work’ right out of the well packaged and marketed box as promised. It’s not a uniquely Irish problem, but one that is in the forefront of the Irish cloud space.

Too often a start-up (usually the most common adopter in Ireland of cloud services) approaches a cloud service provider for a solution, only to be told the solution they want is a problem, as opposed to the provider having the solution to the prospect’s problems. Often the prospective cloud customer must rejig their needs to fit into the provider’s expensive monthly template.

I personally experienced from a particular hyper-visor supplier’s seminar last year a presentation about the benefits of this cloud platform solution to the service provider in maximising return and revenue, with very little if no emphasis on the benefits for the end user, who it ultimately must serve and be attractive to want to acquire services on. The perception presented was that ‘it was cloud and it will sell itself and to make hay while the sun shines’.

And yet in spite of these kind of issues, the cloud in Ireland has had a large number of successes, which those in the industry know exist, but won’t discuss, or are afraid to share. As a result, success stories in the cloud in Ireland to date have been given minimum coverage, despite the current hype.

If the cloud in Ireland is to grow in line with that hype, genuine use cases and indeed, more cloud-based businesses must be encouraged to come on stream, innovate and ultimately be a  leading part of the ‘smart economy’ Ireland’s politicians have waxed so lyrically about during countless media interview sound-bytes.

While the Goodbody Economic Consultants report rightly indicated the level of hype for cloud in Ireland, and the many job possibilities, it really failed to highlight what the opportunities were, or indeed explain the Cloud in any detail to help drive the point home and to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship, which has driven the cloud in Ireland to date.

Yes, it has garnered further awareness and excitement, as well as help ignite sparks of hope for jobs in the smart economy, but the example of Ireland’s fervor for ‘hype and excitement’ in property in the early part of this decade did it no favours. The fervor for this must have follow through. It must be purposeful, and not turn into the same level of emptiness that the property boom did in Ireland. Cloud in Ireland, or anywhere else must be about working smarter to gain better results as we face into an uncertain set of economic circumstances that our previous ideas about IT enabling business had alluded to.

The cloud and it’s strategy in Ireland now needs the Irish Government, arm in arm with its global commercial links and partners to work together to ensure that it nurtures this space adequately and appropriately. That it actively encourages the lead Ireland’s native cloud industry has taken thus far, and supports the jobs it has, can and will create in the future. It is with this impetus that it can contribute to the economic recovery in Ireland, and across Europe, with an excitement and energy that we all need; one that is found in abundance within those same cloud companies daily.

Episode 2; 'The one where he talks about Star Trek, Dragons, Facebook & The Cloud'

In the much beloved (and often maligned) world of Star Trek (a seperate discussion entirely for another day) there exists a race called 'the Trill'. The Trill are a race who are engage in a symbiotic relationship with symbionts. Part of the lore in Star Trek is that those involved in the joining of the humanoids with the symbionts like to make sure that the symbiont and the host 'suit' each other. Now, while those who love Star Trek can get into the whole debunking of the 'suitability' that does happen further into the storylines in both canon & non-canon lore, the crux is what we're getting to - suitability of two things to integrate with each other in a harmonious manner that grow together.

Now, how is that relevant to cloud you ask? On Sunday evening, I happened to get dragged into a three way micro-debate (as only 140 characters can do) on Twitter with @smccarron & @JMcCormac following my comment of; 

#ddirl never fails to provide amusement & the proof that people take something as simple as hosting for granted too easily.

While I realise that the comment itself upon second glance does make the issue of a site getting a sudden surge following exposure such as an appearance on the Irish franchise of Dragon's Den appear like a 'any problem encountered must be a hosting problem', it really was more an encompassing statement on how poor planning and or poor understanding of your creation can be the real point of failure.

In alot of my dealings with prospective customers seeking to go onto the cloud, it seems like while they feel a need to 'be there', alot of the time the real question of why they want to be there & can they actually get the best from being there are two questions that are rarely answered. And the follow-on comments from John & Stephen did further illustrate the point:

JMcCormac John McCormac

@TheIanFella #ddirl May not be hosting at fault. Many web developers have no idea how to design high traffic database backed sites.

smccarron Stephen McCarron

@JMcCormac @theianfella decent hosting alone will get you into the 100mbps of traffic range. After that it's architecture

JMcCormac John McCormac

@smccarron @theianfella That, the db schema and the db server. That's where the real killer lies for db backed sites.

It did have me thinking about my own experiences of dealing with entrepreneurs putting their projects on the web & their ideas, how their developers were translating them into code, & ultimately the problems they experience either early on, or at critical growth milestones. Most good ideas for webpreneurs (as I like to term them) are just that, good ideas. Good ideas poorly 'packaged' for consumption become almost like the Sinclair C5, an anecdote for failure. And I do often feel that for webpreneurs, their developer is what will make or break them.

Very often webpreneurs are the Captain of the ship, trying to ensure it gets to where it is going, completing its missions & delegating responsibilities where needs be, but at all times knowing how to act upon advice given at any junctures. This is why a ship often has spcialist officers to help advise the Captain in certain areas. Sometimes webpreneurs leave 'dock' without ever engaging some key specialists, & when it comes to the crunch, find themselves in a more expensive juncture than if they had sought the required expertise early on; a stitch in time saves nine so to speak.

Most developers from my own experience in dealing with countless webpreneurs over the years are unsure about the actual requirements of what they are building from a hosting perspective, & even less sure about how their 'baby' scales. Alot of this comes down to what I think is the general consensus that developers are not database specialists, or infrastructure specialists. Alot of the webpreneurs who engage a third party developer very often do not also engage a database specialist to work with their developer from the outset.


Whether this is cost driven or not, it is usually when the project is live on the Internet that once traffic builds, problems tend to be discovered & fingers get pointed at the hosting services as the application is running fine according to the developer & the webpreneur. Often, it is down to the database not being optimised correctly, SQL statements being very wieldy & a general poor choice in the database design where efficiencies are yet to be found on issues as simple as incorrect data type being chosen (i.e. not using DATE or DATETIME for dates - seems straight forward but I've seen people use strings & integers), or in some cases where I've seen media files actually stored inside the database, rather than just referenced in it & them file-stored instead, or worse still - developers trusting user input & not sanitising it. (A great article on this can be read @ http://blogs.sitepoint.com/mysql-mistakes-php-developers ).

While it is super easy for me to state the aforementioned, it is often the case that because of the general unknown about how the application scales/behaves with data in terms of how much data is handled in a transaction, & the resources required by each transaction ideally, the hosting (very often now some form of cloud option or has been the case some form of SLA free shared hosting) is over-whelmed very easily, & sometimes the hosting provider is totally unable to provide the levels of compute & RAM required.

At that point it becomes almost like a an Indiana Jones-esque scramble into discovering what is needed to be done to resolve the issue. There is often a reluctance to engage a database specialist as developers will always swear blind their 'baby' works great (I know, as I've been one of those developers in the past who strayed from the best practices of how he was taught to build software systems). Once those hurdles are over-come, & the business of understanding the application/hardware relationship has been completed on both sides, the symbiotic relationship starts to then grow & heal itself quickly.

However, arriving at this juncture after the GM of the system is a bit like discovering that after you sold a car the steering wheel doesn't quite work as intended. Often for webpreneurs they only get one bite of the cherry with their latest projects, & anything that can make a mess of it, can hurt any chances of recovery, let alone growth.

For anyone who has watched 'The Social Network', there's a very poignient scene where Mark Zuckerberg is on the phone to Eduardo Saverin where Mark has called Eduardo to read him the riot act over cancelling the bank account as the bank account closing down jeopardises the hosting. In fact much of the early protaganism centers around anything in the infancy stages that causes people to stop using it & that it 'can never go down'.

Coming full circle, many Irish webpreneurs have appeared on Dragons Den in the UK & Ireland, & their projects receive decent traffic but as soon as their appearance airs on TV, the sites go down & kill any momentum or traction that was there for the taking. The same can happen to anyone who places their web project at the mercy of any kind of advertisement campaign, even people who have placed ads on NewsTalk for the first time have seen some of their services over-whelmed for the same reasons.

They say being a leader is more about being adept at planning than being the head hauncho. If you're thinking about using cloud for your latest & greatest web project, no matter how good your developer is, engage a database specialist & people involved in the cloud, even if you're not seeking  hosting at that point. Getting the fudamentals absolutely right from the get-go can help you steady the project out of the dock & into Internet space.

Episode 1; 'The one where he introduces himself'

Welcome to 'The Clouded Issues'. This is a blog I decided to start in order to discuss the many issues facing Cloud Computing & Cloud services in the Irish market across all verticals, as witnessed from my own professional experience in Ireland's Cloud Computing Service Market.

I started being involved in Cloud services in Ireland back in 2007 when it was a little known concept that was new & also challenging to present in the Irish market, simply due to its being unknown when pitched against heavily established solutions such as colocation, dedicated servers or in-house hosted systems in comm's rooms, or 'the corner of the office'.

'Cloud' at that point was something that only really gained the attention of those atypical,  brave very early adopters, developers. But even then, as a concept it was largely defined by scalar/utility based computing, such as AWS, or the scalar, fixed term enterprise model that Hosting365 brought into the Irish market. Since then, Cloud has now taken on an extremely wide set of definitions & has become a buzz-word as many service providers try cash-in, & widen the scope of their service offerings, leveraged off existing investment, to maximise return on that same investment - much like the starting story & point  for Amazon's AWS.

Since my own start in this arena in 2007, I've witnessed the Irish market embrace cloud strongly, but the penetration levels when  compared to traditional hosted infrastructure models, or hosted/managed services still remain unattractive, mainly due to traditional services being 'the known quantity', rather than the market embracing a more powerful, utilitarian, scalar & more cost effective platform especially in these difficult times, where costs are so crucial to business survival, especially to SME's.

And yet, Irish SME's, with their ability to generally be more nimble & flexible than medium to large businesses in moving from traditional in-house hosted infrastructure, or even traditionally third-party hosted infrastrucutureto the cloud remains a challenge. Sure, cost is important, but one of the more concerned areas is 'control'. In larger organisations, the issues are more substantial, sometimes it is entrenched personnel, or entrenched work practices due to the investment; financial, human & knowledge/skills capital. Teaching an old dog new tricks sometimes even despite the benefits, sometimes is viewed as 'more trouble than it's worth'.

Without derailing what is essentially a 'welcome/hello world' post into a full blown discussion already,my points thus far should demonstrate some of the areas of Cloud Computing in Ireland I plan to blog about here on a regular basis. I will be allowing comments up on my posts, & will try my best to answer any questions or feedback.

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