This experience got me thinking about the evolution of application development and that led to a guest post on Om Malik’s GigaOm on the migration of cloud computing from infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) to platform-as-a-service (PaaS).

Most assume that server virtualization as we know it today is a fundamental enabler of the cloud, but it is only a crutch we need until cloud-based application platforms mature to the point where applications are built and deployed without any reference to current notions of servers and operating systems.

As I mention in the post, I’m quite impressed with VMWare’s willingness to push forward in this direction. Listening to Paul Maritz, CEO of VMWare, speak at Structure, it’s clear he’s aiming very far and has the leadership potential to get there. More than a decade ago, I used to listen very carefully to what he said because he owned several large groups inside Microsoft, some of which loved my first startup (Allaire) because we pulled through many thousands of Windows & SQL servers and some of which hated us because we had the best Web development environment on Windows. He’s back on the list of execs I’ll follow carefully.

This is a big opportunity for Amazon to go up the stack at the right time. It’s good from an economics standpoint as it can increase margins in two ways: (a) improves efficiency and (b) switches pricing to more value-based application-related metrics. AWS has gone up the stack into data storage,  management and analytics. I doubt they’d miss the opportunity to become a meaningful PaaS provider at the right time. Breadth of platform support and platform expertise will be interesting challenges to resolve.

The other interesting trend to watch for here is that a reduction in the capabilities of the server virtualization tier increases the value of intelligent networks, one reason why Cisco smartly grabbed @lewtucker as CTO of their emerging cloud group and has security gurus like @Beaker on board.

The comments have raised several questions:

• Is security harder with PaaS? In the short run, yes, but only because we have less experience with shared hosting on locked down PaaS platforms. Google App Engine, Heroku and others are leading the way here. Werner Vogels said that he trusts hypervisors to provide isolation. It will take a while for big cloud providers such as AWS to equally trust PaaS implementations. In fact, it’s likely they’ll build their own as Google has. Cisco badly wants to help, too.
• How does IT rebill in enterprises? Having a simpler hypervisor or no hypervisor at all doesn’t mean you can’t collect HW usage metrics and decide how to apportion them to simultaneous users of the hardware. Even better, you can measure and rebill based on other, more business-value-oriented metrics which could give the IT organization some budgetary slack. It would certainly give them more deployment flexibility both inside and outside of their data centers.

Soon we will be able to throw away the server virtualization crutch and, like in that memorable moment from Forrest Gump, we will be able to run leaner and more scalable applications in the cloud on next-generation platforms-as-a-service. For the time being, my call to action is for application developers to stop writing code that directly touches any hardware or operating system objects and try the current generation of platforms-as-a-service.

Developers out there building applications, give me a shout about when was the last time you programmed against a file.

Let me know what you think in the comments or on Twitter @simeons.

I spoke on a panel with Google, IBM, Microsoft and Sun. Their offering are somewhere between vaporware and beta.

• Google recently launched App Engine
• IBM has a big vision and is mastering resources internally
• Microsoft is trying to equate enterprise application hosting and SaaS as cloud services
• Sun recently did a beta release of Project Caroline.

Absent from the discussion due to schedules was Amazon, so I had to be the one to talk about Amazon Web Services. For the record, I like what AWS is doing for the simple reasons that (a) they shipped early and (b) they took a very open approach to the core of cloud computing (EC2 and S3).

The audience focused Q&A on a couple of interesting areas: SLAs/reliability, where is became clear that one-size cloud computing would not fit all, and security/privacy, which is indeed a very interesting topic, especially when one considers, for example, what governments can force your cloud services provider to do with your data.

There are three complementary approaches to both topics or, for that matter, any facet of value-add on top of the core infrastructure-as-a-service cloud computing layer:

• You can architect a solution that achieves your objectives based on core cloud services. For example, since many startups don’t trust Amazon S3 and EC2 not to fail they have made alternative provisions. In another example, one can introduce application-level encryption such that Amazon or Google only keep encrypted data and don’t have access to the keys.
• You can rely on enhanced cloud services, e.g., data encryption add-ins or spreading servers across different zones with an automatic failover layer maintained by the cloud service provider (CSP), etc. This carries potential lock-in implications in exchange for having to solve less of the problem yourself.
• Rather than solving the problem through technology, you can solve it through processes and contracts. For example, failure to meet SLAs can carry financial penalties.  

Congrats to the Animoto team. They’ve built a very cool service and deserve to get a little breathing room.

Handling this type of spike the old-fashioned way would have been painful and expensive. If you plan on being successful and see these types of spikes in traffic, you should think about cloud computing from day one.

What caused the problem however was a sudden unexpected surge in a particular type of usage (PUT’s and GET’s of private files which require cryptographic credentials, rather than GET’s of public files that require no credentials).  As I understand what Kathrin said, the surge was caused by at least one very large customer plus several other customers suddenly and unexpectedly increasing their usage. 

I would highly recommend for anyone who is building a developer community or providing SaaS infrastructure or relying on SaaS infrastructure to take the time and read the many posts on the AWS forums about the outage. You hear the real pain and frustration of people whose businesses depend on AWS. The key complaint was not that the service failed–failures do happen–but that Amazon was not prepared to engage with the developer community around the failure.

It’s AmazING the fact of having no info on what’s happening. Absolutely unacceptable. Come on, people on this forum are all tech guys, so we understand that bad things happen from time to time. However, you MUST be transparent with your customers and give them details on what’s going on (yes, we want to know exactly what’s happening and not a standard response like ‘The issue is resolved’). In fact, it is not. So please, scale these complaints to the right person and post the technical explanation of the issue as soon as possible.

Jesse Robbins over at O’Reilly has a good post comparing how Amazon dealt with the situation to how Salesforce responded to its infamous outage a couple of years ago. I’ve also blogged before about how SaaS brings increases responsiblities.All in all, Amazon worked very hard to get the issue resolved and the community was thankful for their efforts.

As I said before, you need to be transparent with your customers. No service can provide 100% uptime. It’s a fact. No matter if u have a redundant anycast network or supercalifragilisticexpialidocious elastic clouds. I just want to get notified and know what’s exactly happening. Nothing else. That said, the issue was resolved very fast, so you should be very proud. Hats off to Amazon’s IT staff.

The symbol of the prize was a gold-painted hammer signed by Jeff Bezos. Under the lenses of the eager photographers and videographers, the team banged the hammer on a 2U rack server to symbolize the end of servers deployed in the enterprise.

The finalists are:

• Brainscape
• Commerce360
• Justin.tv
• Milemeter
• Ooyala
• UserTesting.com
• WeoGeo

If you’ve any experience with the finalists, let me know. I’m one of the judges and Polaris is sponsoring the event. There is a cool dinner, which will bring together entrepreneurs and execs from the area. Unfortunately, it’s $100/seat. More importantly, Polaris is throwing together an after-dinner party. No, you won’t need to pay for that. If you can’t make dinner but want to come to the party, let me know.

Hope to see you in Seattle.

Worth noting:

• S3 is really getting some load–peaking at 27,000 requests/second.
• The VM marketplace is cool on EC2 is a great way to market virtual appliances.
• The flexible payments API is a godsend for people building cool new e-commerce experiences.

A number of people asked for a copy of my presentation. Here it is.

The event is from 2-7pm at The Great Hall, Cooper Union, 7 East Seventh Street. Attendance is free and there will be good food + cocktails. Stop by if you can. The agenda is as follows:

2:00 – 2:30     Opening Statements/Andy Jassy, Senior Vice President, AWS
2:30 – 3:00     Overview of AWS/Mike Culver
3:00 – 4:00     Presentations from startups using AWS
4:00 – 4:15     Break
4:15 - 5:00     ”Beyond Bootstrapping”  (conversation led by me)
5:00 – 7:00     Cocktail Reception

You can still sign up at www.regonline.com/startupny or for more information, go to http://aws.amazon.com/startupny