Date: June 20, 2012

By: Aaron Delp and Brian Gracely

Description: Brian talks with James Urquhart (VP Product Strategy, enStratus) about interconnected systems (Clouds, APIs), complex systems, and how transparency and governance are critical to be able to design, build and operate today’s Cloud Computing environments.

The Cloudcast - Eps.43 - “Cloud - The Need for Transparency in a Complex World”
Date: June 18, 2012
Guests: James Urquhart (@jamesurquhart), VP Product Strategy @ enStratus

Description: Brian talks with James Urquhart (VP Product Strategy, enStratus) about interconnected systems (Clouds, APIs), complex systems, and how transparency and governance are critical to be able to design, build and operate today’s Cloud Computing environments.

Topic 1 - Every 3-6 months, you seem to get focused on a specific aspect of this evolution in Cloud Computing. Recently it’s been focused on system-level thinking and complex systems. What triggered this thinking and what are the big ideas you’ve been focused on?

Topic 2 - You get to work with a number of different Cloud providers (both public and private). Do you get the sense that they understand the extent of interconnectedness happening today? Do you think they understand the value of this interconnectedness (vs. more closed or silo’d models)?

Topic 3 - One of the key things you’re focused on in your complex systems work is the idea that we’re not going to avoid these catastrophic failures (eg. AWS outage, June 2012), but that studying them and having visibility into why they happen lets you better plan for the future. This outage didn’t feel as “loud” as the one last fall. Are we learning?

Topic 4 - A lot has been happening at enStratus since you joined last fall. New VC funding, new European offices, more product functionality, new partnerships. As VP of Product Strategy, where do you see the company today, and more importantly, where do your customers see the company?

Topic 4a - “Hybrid Cloud” is one of those terms that seems to have quite a few definitions, depending on who you talk to. With all the experience enStratus has across different clouds (AWS, Rackspace, HP Cloud, OpenStack, VMware, Cloudstack, etc.), what are you seeing from people as they think about leveraging multiple clouds, or multiple cloud models to manage the technology needs for their business?

Topic 5 - You’re attending the GigaOm Structure conference this week.  It’s amazing how fast the technology is changing in this space (albeit the adoption doesn’t always change as quickly). What are you looking forward to this week?