I spent several days this week in San Francisco, attending CloudCamp on Tuesday night and the cloud computing conference Stucture08 on Wednesday. Both events were great. CloudCamp was a Barcamp-style Open Space conference with 30+ ad-hoc discussion and presentation sessions on topics all over the cloud computing map. The first session I checked out was a presentation by a Microsoft tech-evangelist on their cloud-database service that I talked about previously. Highly scalable databases for Internet-scale applications is a very hot area of development right now, with Amazon, Microsoft, Google and a host of startups all trying to solve this tricky problem. Although no details were provided, it sounds like Microsoft is gearing up to launch more Web Services in the future - I’d expect to see announcements around PDC in October. The second session was really a group-feedback excerise on Amazon Web Services with Jeff Barr, their lead evangelist. Needless to say I had plenty of feedback to offer :). The last session of the day for me was a group discussion on the challenges and approaches to creating an online storage API that could work across multiple clouds. The session was organized by Nirvanix, a cloud storage startup that is working on an open-source PHP cloud storage API. While it would be nice to see a cross-cloud API emerge at some point, I think the market is too new and moving too fast to accomodate any single standard at this point. As it matures I think we will see one emerge, although it may end up being a de-facto standard as other vendors simply adopt the APIs of the market leader(s).

The Structure08 conference the next day was a more typical conference format with a number of presentations, interviews, and panels. For a first-year event I thought it was very well organized and ran smoothly - they even managed to get back on schedule after slipping early on. The quality of the individual sessions was mixed.  Some, such as Werner’s keynote and the cloud-provider panel were interesting, while others like the cloud database panel came off as pure product pitches.

I also found it quite interesting to see how Mendel Rosenblum, Chief Scientist of VMWare, and Greg Papadopoulos, CTO of Sun see their companies positioned in the cloud computing world. Both companies are in a similar position - they sell premium hardware/software for large-scale computing to enterprise, but both are being bypassed by cloud providers like Amazon and Google who are building their infrastructure on commodity hardware and open-source software like Xen for both cost and control reasons. The risk to Sun and VMWare is that enterprises may start moving their applications from their own datacenters running VMWare/Sun and into the commodity cloud infrastructure.

Mendel’s take was that cloud computing today is basically ASP2.0 - and companies that got burned before won’t fall for it again. Mendel sees their VMWare platform as a way for companies to create “mini-clouds” that they can host themselves, gaining the benefits of cloud computing without losing control.

Greg’s take is slightly different - he thinks that just because computing is becoming a commodity, it doesn’t mean you need to run on commodity hardware. He illustrated this with a few examples, like a portable generator versus a powerplant steam turbine. No one expects the electric utilities to run off hundreds of portable generators - they use larger, efficient, and higher quality systems. Of course the problem I see with this analogy is that the performance difference between a portable generator and a steam turbine is huge - many orders of magnitude. By comparison, the performance difference of a white-box Intel or AMD machine isn’t going to differ much from equivalent Sun hardware. There are certainly other factors - such as reliability and maintenance, but at the end of the day, Sun will have to provide significant leadership in $/cycle and cycles/watt in order to displace commodity hardware in the cloud.

Of course for most Jungle Disk users this doesn’t really matter much - in fact, the whole point of the “cloud” is that users (you) don’t need to know or care how it’s built or what hardware and software it’s running. In the bigger picture however this movement is going to change the whole makeup of the computer industry. The wide-scale migration of data and applications into the cloud is going to create new opportunities for some and many challenges for traditional software, hardware, and hosting providers. Online backup in particular is going to rapidly supplant traditional tape backup and offsite tape rotation services within the next few years.

A few weeks ago I posted about Microsoft getting into the cloud computing space with their SQL Data Services service, and predicted that Google would soon join the game as well. As you may have already heard, yesterday Google announced their entry into the market for developer-oriented cloud services - Google App Engine. Neither Microsoft nor Google can currently match what Amazon currently offers, either in breadth or when it comes to bulk data storage with Amazon S3. Google currently limits applications to 500MB of storage and doesn’t provide APIs suitable for uploading or downloading large files, however in their Campfire presentation they had a slide with large file services at the top of their “What’s Next?” list so it’s only a matter of time (and price!).

While we’re still completely focused on building the best possible service on the Amazon S3 platform, it’s good to know that there will be more options “in the cloud” down the road. I think these announcements further validate Jungle Disk’s strategy of focusing on building great storage software rather than building datacenters and server farms.

I was somewhat surprised recently to read that Buford, Georgia (which despite our address is actually the closest city to our current office) was named by Fortune Magazine as the #3 best place in the country to start a business. Of course, that’s not really a surprise to me. When I moved to Georgia from California (where I had lived and worked for 10 years) to start Jungle Disk a year and a half ago, more than a few friends thought I was crazy. Why would anyone leave California to start a technology company? Although there were personal reasons as well, I saw a great opportunity to build a company in Georgia and Gwinnett County specifically. There are the factors that Fortune points out like cost of living and quality of life (yes, the people here are actually nice), but Atlanta also has a strong backbone for technology, with schools like Georgia Tech, Emory, and UGA close by. The venture capital opportunities, while the best in the southeast, still don’t come close to California, but the software business isn’t capital intensive and we’ve been extremely successful without outside funding to date. There is a small but growing community of technology startups here, and you can really feel things starting to happen.

Of course, I still had concerns about building a business here - would I be able to find the best people? Would they even want to work for an Internet startup in Atlanta? The answer so far has been yes - we’ve recently hired some great people and I’ll be introducing them shortly. We’re moving to new offices in nearby Suwanee soon, and Jungle Disk 2.0 coming up fast. Lots of excitement here to say the least. I’m looking forward to sharing more news about Jungle Disk 2.0, as well as a preview of some of the new features later this week. Stay tuned for more!

Microsoft announced their first serious, developer-oriented cloud computing service yesterday, Microsoft SQL Data Services. This particular service doesn’t appear to compete directly with Amazon S3, but does appear very similar to another Amazon Web Service - Amazon SimpleDB.

There have been many rumors over the past few months about Microsoft making a serious push into cloud computing, an area which thus far has been pioneered (at least on a wide scale) by Amazon. It will be interesting to see where they go from here. Launching a bulk data hosting service or a virtual hosting service to compete with Amazon S3 and EC2 seems like a strong possibility. Beyond Microsoft, I think we’ll see other large companies get into this market including Google and Sun (which already has the Network.com computing service). All this competition can only be a good thing for cloud computing customers such as Jungle Disk and our users. Competition will drive down prices and start a functionality race as each service tries to attract developers.

It’s worth noting that although Jungle Disk only works with Amazon S3 today, we’ve designed the software to be flexible enough to allow us to add additional storage providers in the future if there is customer demand. Right now there really aren’t any viable competitors to Amazon S3, but it looks like that is going to change as the major Internet companies slowly transition from being simple web sites to Internet infrastructure utilities. While the media is focused on the “social” revolution changing the face of the web through sites like MySpace and Facebook, the real revolution is happening behind the scenes as the Internet changes from being a global communication platform to a global computing platform.

In the past year since Jungle Disk was first released we occasionally get stories about how Jungle Disk “saved the day” when someone’s hard drive crashed or had a laptop stolen. They are always great to read, but I thought this one was especially interesting because the user had initially forgotten about their Jungle Disk backup and thought all was lost, and blogged about it along the way.

Read how Troy had a 1 month old 1TB drive fail, with estimates of $1200-$2500 to recover the data (if possible).

Then see his elation as he realizes that Jungle Disk has quietly been backing up his files for the last few months, saving the day (and the $1200).

Do you have your own story of how Jungle Disk saved the day? Be sure to tell us about it.

When Amazon.com announced S3 a few weeks ago there were mixed reactions around the web. Some people focused on the promise that S3 offers - unlimited, reliable, online storage for a fraction of what other providers currently charge. Others focused on the reality of the situation - S3 is just a set of web services. Nothing for consumers to use, no application to install, no web site to visit. Both groups were right of course. S3 offers a value proposition for personal storage that is unmatched in the market today, but without a way for consumers to use it who really cares?

Well today, all of that changes. Jungle Disk isn’t the first utility released to make use of S3, but we think it’s the first one that makes S3 consumer friendly enough for the average Internet user, and it’s shipping today in a stable-beta form.

To help understand the value proposition of S3 all you need to do is spend a few minutes with the calculator on the front page of the site. For almost any values you put in, and certainly any  real-world usage, S3 comes out way ahead of the competition - and not just by a little bit - by an order of magnitude in most cases. And frankly, I don’t expect them to catch up on price any time soon. Other storage providers will probably be quick to point out that they have a more complete feature set right now, with features like public file sharing and folder synchronization, but with time that lead will disappear. It’s a lot easier to add features than it is to retool a business model that has just become obsolete. In the end, I believe users will choose where to store their data online based on two factors: price, and trust. In both of those areas I believe Amazon S3 is head and shoulders above the rest.

Â

One of the things that we think separates Jungle Disk from every other online storage provider out there is the transparency with which we handle your data.

When you use Jungle Disk, your files are stored on Amazon.com’s servers using S3, an open web-service based API. They never touch our servers, and we have no idea what (or how much) data you are storing. Access to your data on S3 is restricted at all times by your AWS Secret Key which is never sent to us or any other user. By default, all of your data is encrypted before it leaves your computer, and stays encrypted while stored. For users who prefer to forgo this step, encryption can be disabled.

To further re-enforce the idea that you are in control of your data, we have made available open source code that can be used to browse and download your data without even using Jungle Disk. In addition, we hope that other authors creating S3 utilities will make use of the code to become Jungle Disk-compatible.

Choosing to store your personal data online is always going to be a tough decision. We want to do everything possible to reassure our users that they are in control of their data at all times.