Cloud Asia enters its third year co-organized with Singapore’s IDA (Infocomm Development Authority).  Cloud Asia 2013 runs from the 15-16 May 2013 in Singapore.  An exciting change from last year’s event is entry to CloudAsia and the co-located Cloud Security Alliance Asian Congress is free for all enterprises, small and medium businesses, and operator users.

Here are my summaries of Cloud 2012, Cloud 2011 and some interesting tidbits from Cloud Asia 2011.  Cloud Asia is a great event to meet the decision makers and implementers across the cloud computing ecosystem in Asia from enterprises, telecom operators, regulators, government agencies, service providers, system integrators and vendors.  The event is much more realistic and implementation focused than many other events.  It was only late last year that Cloud Computing finally came down from the peak of inflated expectations in the Gartner Hype Cycle, being at the peak since 2009.  The IDA’s involvement in Cloud Asia highlights the strategic importance Asian governments and regulators place on Cloud Computing.  This weblog previews the event and my workshops during the event.

First and foremost, the event focuses on real enterprise deployment experiences, this is why I make the time for this conference. The internet has created a “marketing echo-chamber” where hype and spin can run rampant with little regard to the reality of implementation.  This conference provides a great ‘dose of reality salts’ with presentations from the practitioners: Darragh Kennedy, Online Platform Manager, Lonely Planet, Australia; Ted Suen, Head of IT, MTR Corporation, Hong Kong; Leon Jackson, Head, Healthcare IT, UM Specialist Centre Sdn Bhd, Malaysia; Marcelo Wesseler, Senior Vice President, eCommerce, Singapore Post Limited, Singapore; and many more from banks, retailers, manufacturers, distribution, services, transportation, healthcare, etc.

An important change from previous years is the workshops are running in parallel with the track sessions, rather than as pre- or post-conference workshops. Generally those who attended the workshops found the plenary sessions of most value, and would preferred to have spent more time in the workshops than the tracks.  Some of the workshop attendees only came for the workshop and did not attend conference.  Hence over 2 days, which is really the most time people can afford to be out of the office, Cloud Asia packs the most value given their specific needs.

The Cloud Security Alliance will be running a parallel conference over the Wednesday and Thursday.  Since the beginning security remains the top issue for most enterprises in Cloud Computing, and there’s no sign this is going to change anytime soon.  Though technologies such as Verizon’s CloudSwitch do manage this quite well for larger enterprises.

I’ll be giving 3 workshops at the event, 2 on Cloud computing and 1 on Big Data, the workshop outlines are shown below.  It’s been fun following Cloud computing over the years, for Asia there are clear benefits, and the role of the service provider is more important than in markets like North America.  Having the cloud be in the network avoids internet back-haul; which is expensive, especially when that back-haul is international.  Though with that said Verizon and AT&T in North America are taking different and quite interesting approaches to building their enterprise specific cloud offers.

As mentioned at the start of this weblog Cloud Computing has only just come down from the peak of inflated expectations in the Gartner Hype Cycle, an important aspect of the workshops is looking at the technologies over time, it really helps filter out a lot of the marketing noise.  I’ll be reviewing the latest Open Group Cloud Computing survey which I consider to be the most accurate out there.  I’ll be reviewing the recently announced Google Compute Engine with a quick comparison to Amazon Web Services and what that means for multi-cloud deployments, and having a closer look at Joyent’s cloud that I reviewed in this weblog.

On the Big Data Workshop, we have much to cover with respect to technology and the market. I have created several “cheat slides” that cut through all the hype to the essence of what needs to be done on Big Data, and will spend time reviewing several case studies on how ‘Big Data’ is really used today.

I’m looking forward to the “dose of reality salts” Cloud Asia provides when those working at the coal-face come together, compare notes, and realize the implementation challenges they’re facing are not unique, and the return on investments are not those claimed in vendor slideware, and the journey is going to take a decade not a couple of years.

Workshop B.  Cloud Computing 101: An Independent Practitioners Review Part 1: Covering the Basics

Topics Include

• Comparing and contrasting the available delivery models of cloud computing
• Evaluating the benefits of cloud products, including Salesforce.com, Microsoft Azure, Google, Amazon Web Services, and the many CSP (Communication Service Provider) offerings
• Cloud brokerage: what is it and is it necessary?
• Deploying Software as a Service (SaaS) to optimize productivity and collaboration
• Deploying Platform as a Service (PaaS) to streamline application deployment
• Examining the cost benefits of deploying Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Course Benefits
As cloud computing becomes a viable IT solution, increasing numbers of organizations are evaluating how they can benefit from cloud computing technologies. This workshop presents an overview and introduction to Cloud computing, aimed at providing attendees with a solid understanding of both the technology and the market, to be able to understand and position the offers available, and understand the implementation issues required for their specific situation.

Please note this is an independent course given by an independent speaker, there is no vendor bias.  This course brings together the latest deployment experienced gathered through 2012 and intro 2013.

Who Should Attend
Anyone interested in evaluating cloud computing technologies. No prior background with cloud computing is required.

Introduction to Cloud computing

• Confusion and Cloud-Washing
• Cloud Consolidation
• History
• Vision
• Definitions – focus on NIST
• Cloud computing reference architecture
• Actors, Brokers, Consumers, Auditors
• Cloud Types: Public, Private, Community and Hybrid
• Orchestration and Management
• Business support, security and privacy
• Cloud Benefits and Issues
• Cloud Misconceptions
• The Open Group Surveys 2011 and 2012

Getting into the Details

• Mapping suppliers and technologies in Cloud Computing
• Understanding the economics behind the benefits
• Quantifying the benefits
• Cloud market taxonomy and market size
• CSPs and Cloud Computing
• Mapping the workloads
• SOA and the Cloud
• Cloud Computing in Asia

Recommendations and Wrap Up

Workshop D.  Cloud Computing 101: An Independent Practitioners Review Part 2: Implementation Details

Topics Include

• Understanding the underlying technologies of Data Centers and Virtualization
• Understanding implementation issues across security, compliance and business continuity
• Integrating multi-vendor cloud products and services
• Focusing on the first two steps, initial business case and pilot project
• Understanding the mapping of enterprise applications and enterprise vertical to private, virtual private, hybrid and public cloud offers

Course Benefits
As cloud computing becomes a viable IT solution, increasing numbers of organizations are evaluating how they can benefit from cloud computing technologies. This workshop follows-on from “Workshop B.  Cloud Computing 101: An Independent Practitioners Review Part 1: Covering the Basics.”

Special emphasis is given to the mapping of enterprise applications / verticals to the different types of cloud offers.  This is a critical uncertainty for many enterprises in their cloud decision making, and is for some verticals, especially banking and financial services making them reluctant to adopt anything but private cloud.

Please note this is an independent course given by an independent speaker, there is no vendor bias.  This course brings together the latest deployment experienced gathered through 2012 and intro 2013.

Who Should Attend
Anyone interested in evaluating cloud computing technologies. No prior background with cloud computing is required.

Understanding the Components

• Summary: Web 2.0, SaaS, Utility Computing, Virtualization, SLAs, Autonomic computing, Grid technology, Web Services, Service Oriented Architectures, Free and Open Source Software
• Deep Dive: Virtualization
  • History
  • Issues and Trends
  • Supplier review: Citrix, IBM, Linux, Microsoft, Novell, Symantec, Oracle, VMWare
• Deep Dive: Data Centers
  • History and the drive for efficiency and availability
  • Changes and pressures on DC – drive for DC management
  • Capex and opex DC costs
  • DC economics drives cloud computing
• Deep Dive: Force.com, Google, Joyent, Microsoft and Amazon
  • Force.com
  • Google App Engine and Google Compute Engine (plus a quick comparison to AWS)
  • Microsoft Azure
  • Amazon Web Services: Netflix deep dive,  AWS walk-through
  • Joyent, the real-time cloud

Implementation

• Survey – what workloads others are moving into the cloud
• Summary
  • Key points in cloud migration
  • Industry : Workload : Cloudability Space
• Project Plan – example from IBM
• Decision Tree for implementing Cloud Computing
  • The Open Group decision tree
• Security
  • Reviewing SAS70, PCI DSS, ISO27001, NIST, HIPAA, FISMA, CoBIT
• Data Protection Directive, practical aspects
• Architectural Review

Recommendations and Wrap Up

Workshop E.  Introduction to Big Data and Real Time Analytics Workshop

The purpose of this workshop is to provide both an introduction and pragmatic insight into Big Data, Data Science and Real-Time Analytics.  Unfortunately people take notice of hyperbole, so marketeers create an escalating chorus of hype, fear, uncertainty and doubt to make the buyer “believe don’t think” when making a purchasing decision.  This course will provide a frank and objective review of the state of the art and the market.  Examining at what is working in practice and what is not through an extensive series of case studies.

Big data usually includes data sets with sizes beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage, and process the data. Big data sizes are a constantly moving target, as of 2012 ranging from a few dozen terabytes to many petabytes. With this difficulty, a new platform of “big data” tools has arisen to handle sense-making over large quantities of data, for example the Apache Hadoop Big Data Platform.

Analyzing large data sets in near real-time is not new, business intelligence is as old as business itself (that is as old as human society).  IT automated it, and enabled an organization to own it rather than in the wet-ware of a few human brains (generally the owners of a business.)  Some real-time analysis results in automated triggers, so called machine learning, most analysis still requires human interpretation which is not straight forward.  Analysis of such large and mixed data sources has its own problems, as we’ll discuss in the course.  Privacy and regulation cannot ignored, for some industries this will limit the application of Big Data.

History and Overview: Understanding Big Data and Real-Time Analytics in Context

• What do we mean by Big Data?
• Why does Big Data matter?
• Big Data Maturity
• The 3Vs: Volume, Variety and Velocity
• What are the Domains of Big Data?
• Big Data Technologies
• What Enterprises Think of Big Data
• How Enterprise Verticals are Impacted by Big Data
• Why Now?
• Key Trends driving towards Big Data
• History of Big Data
• Taxonomy of Big Data Companies
• Big Data Landscape
• List of Companies in Big Data (and their Big Data revenues)
• Big Data Market Sizing

Quick Technology Review: Diving into a little detail on a few of the key technologies (only as deep as the architecture) to understand their history and capabilities / limitations

• Hadoop
• Hadoop and Hbase in the Cloud (Amazon)
• NoSQL and Cassandra + some use cases
• Hbase versus Cassandra

Application of Big Data

• Hardware and Software Trends
  • Execution and Results Characteristics
  • Framework: Ecosystem, Application Services, Data Management
• Real-Time Analytics
  • Use Cases
  • Extended RDMS versus MapReduce / Hadoop
  • Requirements, Trends, People and Organization Issues, Outlook
• Big Data and the Cloud
  • Why the Cloud and Big Data?
  • Cloud benefits
  • Use Cases: Bankinter, Etsy, Razorfish

Case Studies

• Orbitz, Hertz, Yelp, Starhub

Global Enterprise and Telecom Survey on Big Data and Real-Time Analytics

• Background
• The Questions
• The Importance of Analytics
• Impact of Big Data on Analytics
• Size of Data Sets, Number of Data Sources
• Update Frequency
• Integration of Data Sources
• Data Set Responsibility
• Types of Data, Types of Processing and Analytics
• Challenges
• Big Data Analytics Platforms
• Benefits and Plans
• Data Analytics Storage and IT Infrastructure Requirements
• Increasing Interest in Hadoop MapReduce Framework Technology

Recommendations and Wrap Up