Cloud

VMware teamed with SpringSource takes cloud computing head on

The VMworld 2009 opening keynote began like a rock concert with pulsing music and a light show as the morning’s keynote speaker, Tod Nielsen, took the stage. Nielsen, VMware’s Chief Operating Officer, introduced the conference venue with exciting news for the company’s multiple products and services.

None of which measured up to the audience’s response when Nielsen was joined on stage by Steve Herrod, CTO and vice president of R&D for SpringSource. Herrod reviewed VMware’s plans for SpringSource, which he’d already blogged about in August.

SpringSource, a commercial open source company, started by creating tools that competed with Java; but in the last few years has released a more diverse tool developer. Combined with the VMware infrastructure, Herrod said, SpringSource’s software will bring advanced development and storage capabilities to data centers.

“I am very excited about this,” said Rob Zylowski, Director IP for GlassHouse Technologies Inc. “With VMware and SpringSource working as one, they will be formidable competition for Apple’s cloud powered initiative.”

Chris Wolf, Burton Group senior analyst, is another industry expert who voiced enthusiasm, Twittering and blogging about the SpringSource-VMware combination throughout the opening day of VMworld. On his blog, he wrote:

“Rod Johnson did a tremendous job with the SpringSource demo. Giving application owners an interface to provision an app locally, or to an internal or external cloud was spot-on. IT service delivery requires IT operations to give application owners and individual business units interfaces that they understand… this is a technology VMware ships should begin working with in their labs.”

Stay tuned for additional blogs, videos and impressions from VMworld.

Atlassian Nerd Herder Moore spots app/dev trends

In an interview this week, Atlassian engineer/Nerd Herder, Pete Moore, told me that he got good news and bad news from software developers and engineers at JavaOne 2009 this year. The good news was that developers had moved beyond Code Review 101, but the down side was a lack of adoption of cloud and some backwards thinking about tool purchasing.

A good number of software engineers at JavaOne 2009 told Moore, that they still have to fight with management for approval to buy lightweight development tools. Wait, there’s a punchline: The big surprise is that the managers aren’t approving these requests due to lack of money, but rather because the managers “still believe in top-down purchasing of suites and one-size-fits-all,” Moore said. He couldn’t believe that the people holding development purse-strings had such an antiquated approach to buying software. Well, actually, he called them “ignorant managers.”

Fortunately, Moore said, Atlassian’s products are priced low enough that “most teams can sidestep the management silliness, because it fits in their discretionary budgets.”

I met Moore at JavaOne, where he showed me an animated 3D tee shirt logo. We talked about Atlassian’s comprehensive Java-based plugin architecture, a subject that drew a lot of interest from attendees in the booth. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation in this video.

Moore spent a lot of time at JavaOne talking about the nuts and bolts of integrating plugins into real life environments. “I think this underlines that engineers still want pragmatic point solutions,” he said when we talked this week. “Best of breed [software] was the catch cry a few years ago, and it’s still what the front lines want, they now just want them to work together!”

This was Moore’s fifth JavaOne, and “it was sensational that I didn’t have anyone who didn’t know what code coverage or peer code review was,” he said. That hasn’t been the case in the past, when he’s had to explain what per-test coverage was, “or worse, the merits of unit testing.”

Two years ago when Atlassian introduced its Crucible code review tool “the majority of
young developers had never done formal code review, and everyone was talking about pair programming,” he said. “This year, whilst there were still heaps of people who weren’t doing reviews, it seemed that every second person specifically wanted a demo of Crucible.”

Developers haven’t stepped up in another area, though. “I was disappointed not to see more development in the cloud in real life,” Moore said. Engineers like Atlassian’s Bamboo tool, with which one could start agents and do builds in the cloud. “But almost to a person they
said, ‘There’s no way we’d be allowed to use that.’ Here’s hoping that next year the story will be different.”