Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

John and I caught up earlier in the week. Despite it being a short time between this episode and the last, we found plenty to talk about:

• Man! It's hotinhur!
• John's Cloud Week videos - John Adams from Twitter, Chris Wensel on Cascading, ControlTier.
• The "science" meme at Velocity - R, Mathmatica, and doing stats. Coté also remembers that Sara Dornsife now works for the R company, and the Zed Shaw talk that included R. I ask John what you'd use this stat stuff for, obviously charting historic data, but also doing predicting.
• Chef vs. Puppet - also cfengine is mentioned in this context. What other "alliances" does OpsCode have around Chef? EngineYard, (maybe, if John remembers) RightScale. Also, they got $2.5M in funding (we mistakenly remember $5M).
• Eucalyptus - talking through their layered up, (seemingly) "swappable" cloud platform and how they're thinking of making money off it.
• IBM CloudBurst demo (this one, or this one, or another one? - how was that? John likes the Service Management hook-in, self-service portal.
  
• Is "private cloud" slowing down "cloud computing." And getting at traditional IT shops "hav[ing] that ability to, kind of, 'API' themselves."
• Are SLAs and KPIs calling out for "better" operational stuff in IT like private cloud?
• This gets us into webappVM - deep instrumentation; "webappVM is building a self-monitoring application cloud for web applications, bringing enterprise-level application management capabilities to public and private clouds" from their site.
• FiveRuns Dash - generic-ish, Web 2.0 style metrics. This gets us onto FiveRuns memories. Also, former FiveRuns CEO OT is now at Zenoss as their CMO.
  
• Google Ops Head goes after blood at Structure 09, .Net at MySpace
• Kuleto's review
• John [was] helping run CloudCampColumbus this week. He's trying to get some Tivoli folk out there.
  
• Coté interested in pictures and anecdotes of Detroit. [We'll see if John snatches some.]
• I mention that I'm thinking of strumming up interest in barcampESM II (see the first for reference) - is there enough interest for that kind of thing this year? Also, I'm lazy.

Disclosure: Reductive Labs (Puppet), IBM, and Zenoss are client.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

During the second night of Velocity, in the piano-filled sunken lounge of the Fairmont Hotel, John and I talk with Reductive Lab's Andrew Shafer, who walked up just in time to be the guest for this episode.

We start out talking about Reductive Lab's big news of the day, getting $2,000,000 in funding. Andrew tells us what Reductive Labs plans are for the moment: working on some additional offerings on-top of Puppet that have been wanting for awhile and, as with all newly funded open source companies, focusing on the community.

We then turn Velocity itself as I ask Andrew and John what they've seen and liked at the conference so far. This gets us into a conversation about what a "traditional" enterprise operations guy would think of this Velocity. As I put it, it'd be fun to do an "Alice in Wonderland" with one of these operations guys and see what they thought about the high-scale, web operations focus of the conference.

Latching on another trend, we discuss how the web operations folks at Velocity seem to have less silos in their "IT departments" (groups of 3-10 folks, usually) and how "doing everything" effects the approach and tools vs. traditional enterprise organizations.

We discuss some of the other tidbits from the conference sessions of the day: focusing on queueing more, the mythical flickr provisioning systems, etc.

I then try to extract some other IT Management items from Andrew, but, having focused on Reductive Labs of late, he's got nothing. So I ask him how he keeps up with IT Management news now-a-days. In place of RSS feeds, he uses Twitter. This gets us into a discussion of the efficacy of RSS vs. Twitter vs. both and so on.

Catching up on the news since Thursday, we mention the RightScale and Hyperic/SpringSource partnership. I then briefly go over the AccelOps launch from today.

We wrap-up by talking about the rest of the week, where we think we'll be moving into "the dry-cleaning cloud" at Structure.

Disclosure: Reductive Labs, SpringSource, and AccelOps are clients. As is IBM.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

This week, John and I are joined by Ethan Galstad, the "father of Nagios." Having caught up on the news in the previous episode, we spend the entire time talking about Nagios, Ethan's history with it, and Nagios Enterprise's present and future.

First, Ethan gives us a quick overview of Nagios, the open source monitoring framework used by (Ethan & co. estimate) 250,000 users world-wide. Following this, we start out talking about different scenarios where Nagios is used. And then I get ask Ethan to give us a brief of architectural overview of Nagios. John asks about events vs. collecting all data and Nagio's take on that divide.

In the context of enterprise installs, John asks Ethan if he see lots shelf-ware out there. That gets Ethan to talk about several sites he gone in that use Nagios along-side Big 4 offerings. Next, I ask Ethan about the commercial services around Nagios. They're building up several support deals, and have been doing some service engagements.

John asks about Nagios scaling - the biggest installs, how many nodes typically get used. I also ask Ethan a question I get asked a fair amount myself: why hasn't Ethan started a company like others have done in the open source IT Management space? After discussing it, this gets Ethan into a discussion of how he's like to see Nagios commercialized, keeping closer to the open source way of thinking than doing things like, say node limits.

John gets into forking open source projects which leads to the forking of Nagios a month ago. Ethan tells us what his reaction at the time and then the resulting community management Ethan and Nagios folks have been doing afterwards. We also talk about ICINGA, the recent fork of Nagios.

Finally, him being up in the Twin Cities, I ask him what the tech scene in Minneapolis/St. Paul is like.

Disclosure: IBM, Zenoss, GroundWork, and Hyperic/SpringSource are clients, as is HP. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

To listen to this podcast, download the podcast directly, subscribe to the blog/podcast feed in iTunes (or whatever), or click play below to hear it:

[audio http://media.libsyn.com/media/redmonk/agileexec002.mp3]

After having some coffee here in Austin, Israel Gat and I braved the Texas heat a little while longer to record a conversation about the recent Agile Roots conference, how Agile has spread in recent years, and some of the potentials that cloud computing plus Agile might bring.

We go over the Agile Roots conference that Israel was currently at: one of the themes, Israel says, was a sort of retrospective on the Agile Manifesto (put out in 2001). Also, as Israel points out many times, there was a good mix of people that made the "hallwaycon" enjoyable. Part of this, it seems was due to the somewhat unconference-y feel of the event: while it had a formalized agenda, there was room for less structured, unconference-style sessions and discussions.

Based on this, I then ask Israel to summarize what his and other's people take was on where Agile is today. In my words, it seems like Agile thinking has, largely, gone main-stream. In fact, as I chime in, large corporate development tool vendors like Microsoft with VisualStudio and IBM with the Rational line are bringing in and using significant Agile principals and practices.

Next, we get into the "Agile Operations" conversation folks from Reductive Labs have been having of late. Esp. when cloud computing technologies (like virtualization, automation, and SaaS-think) are brought into the operations side of the house, Agile principals seem especially well positioned to take advantage of cloud technologies. This gets us into a discussion of how cloud delivered software (SaaS, pretty much) might help free up some time and resources in the traditional software delivery process, primarily, by not having to support many different versions, but also (some what paradoxically to that) allowing bette customizations per customer.

From here, I lay out the theory that with cloud computing, there seems to be some efficiency gains that make it possible for smaller teams to develop and sell software instead of having to hook-up with larger software companies to get efficiencies of scale. While this discussion, as Israel gets to, has been happening a lot in the startup world (startups need less capital up-front to buy hardware and such, and thus, need less funding), it hasn't been reflected on much in the plain old ISV world. Israel lays out an interesting "out source (most) everything" model for software companies.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

This week, John and I catch up on several weeks worth of news, cramming a lot in:

• John in China. Seems like there's lots of open source IT Management in China. Industrial park Waixi for cloud stuff - see Mike O'Rourke RSC video for more, that Coté references. John thinks IBM must be pushing a lot of iron (hardware) over there. Of course, we talk about the food in China, which John says is fantastic.
• IBM's Cloud announcements - Rational tools in the cloud, CloudBurst, Virtual desktop stuff. CloudBurst: 42U rack VMWare ESX with Tivoli Monitoring and Tivoli Provisioning manager. John Willis getting exciting about IBM Blue Cloud!
• Here, we get into talking about different approaches the private clouds: dramatically changing the role of IT, or playing along with the "way it is."
• In "good, old fashioned IT Management" news, there have been several recent releases: GroundWork, Zenoss, Spiceworks.
• John's recent Hadoop adventures... the trend of mass data/BI vendor talk going on now.
• Microsoft STB Analyst Summit - also, Management Pack for Novell SUSE Linux. SDM/SML/Oslo. Also, MOF usage (by chance, see this ITIL/MOF decoder ring).
  
• Also: Microsoft System Center Essentials 2010 - Bjorn Axell summerizes a little video from the SCE team. Also, SC OpsMgr is coming out with a new release in July: check out overview post on it.
• CA gets Cassatt's IP - probably for automation and cloud stuff.
• John wonders, who's the Big 4/Little 4 of cloud computing? We solve it with an inside joke.
• RightScale has Mårten Mickos on their board. Eucalyptus friendship there? Also, Ubuntu has Eucalyptus bundles in it.
• Google Wave - see also Stephen O'Grady's take.
• SalesForce Force.com free app, Sites. The chance to build on SalesForce.com and Intuit's Partner Program seem interesting.
• Coté will be around for Velocity, CloudCampSF, Structure. Also, in August, I'll be at OpenSourceWorld, which appears to be free for some now.
  
• SolarWinds IPO.
  
• Seems like CITTIO shut down while I was out. Also, a 451 write-up of Nimsoft getting big.

Disclosure: IBM, Microsoft, GroundWork, Zenoss, Spiceworks, Intuit, and Cloudera are clients. See the RedMonk client list for other clients that might have been mentioned.

You can download this episode directly directly and it'll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

This week, Joshua Marinacci joins me to talk about more about JavaOne and JavaFX. We discuss:

• Josh's coffee places: Allen Brothers, Dutch Brothers.
• Josh's take on JavaOne and CommunityDay.
• In talking about Kenai and Zembly, we get into a discussion about moving parts of the software development process into the cloud.
• We then talk about the Java Store, which he's been working on in the recent time. See his recent Q&A on the Java Store.
• The difficulty of collecting money in these stores - figuring out regional tax laws, income tax, etc.
• JavaFX 1.2 - lots of control improvements & additions. Redoing GUI concepts - separating styling from controls. Button, slider, checkbox, but some things missing: table, tree, combo box. No more layout managers, there's containers. No ties to AWT and Swing, everything is skinable with CSS. Also: charts. Linux and Solaris support.
• JavaFX tools? Updates Production Suite for CS4. More people working on the open source Eclipse plugin. JavaOne showed sneak-preview of the design tool. Also the other fun JavaFX Wii-mote and motion sensing demos during the Gosling talk. See the JavaOne Toy Show replay.
• Also, we rat-hole on JavaFX profiles - desktop and common, and I'd expect mobile out there. But Josh, says they're trying to limit them.

Disclosure: Sun is a client.

In this episode, sponsored by Reductive Labs, I talk with returning guest Luke Kaines (of Reductive Labs) and RedHat's David Lutterkort. David has been an active member of the Puppet community for several years now, and we spend much of our time talking about the projects he's worked on that incorporate Puppet. We also get into a discussion of how RedHat internal IT uses Puppet in their for their own applications from development to deployment.

We start out talking about Augeas, one of the projects David is currently working on. In my horkly words, it provides a "configuration file normalization API." That is, Augeas provides a layer to read in, modify, and then spit back out all sorts of *nix configuration files, each with it's own syntactical essentracies. For Puppet - which spends much of it's time updating those configuration files - the connection is obvious. Indeed, as Luke says, it wouldn't be far fetched to think that, sometime in the future, Puppet would consider replacing it's current config file engine with Augeas. In the meantime, there's some docs on using the two together.

Next, having been around Puppet awhile, I ask David what other uses of Puppet he's been seeing recently. This draws up a conversation about how RedHat's internal IT uses Puppet through Genome through their internal application development process to build development boxes and servers. We get into a discussion of how this use of Puppet effects the development cycles and tries to address the "wall of confusion" between development and operations.

We next talk about Cft (pronounced "sift") that provides a sort-of command line recorded for admins to build up Puppet manifests. We wrap-up by talking about Cobbler which sets up and configures Linux machines over a network. And, of course, how Puppet interlaces therein.

Disclosure: Reductive Labs is a client and, as mentioned, sponsored this podcast.

You can download this episode directly directly and it'll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

This week, Ryan and I are back with a bevy of RIA topics:

• Adobe Flash tools in beta: Catalyst and Flash Builder. See Ryan's round-up as well. There's a big, multi-city, global user group tour as well.
• JavaFX at JavaOne - Larry likes it; JavaFX for OpenOffice? Java Store (desktop), Java Warehouse ("will eventually be used by TV and mobile service providers to create their own 'private-branded storefronts' for programs that run on their platforms"). See Project Vector post from Jonathan. So, you have the Warehouse which is the repository and "back-end" for applications submitted by developers (the apps are to be focused on Java and JavaFX desktop apps for now) and then the Java Store which is the consumer-facing store-front. In the future, the Warehouse may be a supply channel to other store-fronts, e.g., TV and mobile-based things. Also, see Joshua's piece on new features in JavaFX 1.2, like Linux & Solaris support, chart components, etc.
• The Rise of the "HTML5" Meme - seems like we have Google + HTML 5 + Mozilla/Chrome as a new, emerging RIA/UI silo. After Google I/O last week, there was some zero-sum, horse-race framing around Google Wave being a front in killing off Flash and Silverlight. See also Ryan's HTML 5 vs. Flash features comparison. And, though not mentioned in the episode, see the recent Bespin updates.
• PhoneGap has been leaping in popularity. See a previous episode with Nitobi's Andreé Charland on PhoneGap too.
• Silverlight release date? July 10th event as reported by The Register.
  
• After reading a brief piece on .Net RIA Services, I wonder if there's pattern collections for other RIA technologies?
• piece linking up ADO.NET Services (Project Astoria) with Silverlight. A RESTful approach to connecting with the back-end.
• Reflecting on my recent vacation in Thailand, I speak to explosion in (unlocked?) cellphones over there and the abundance of pirated software available everywhere.

You can download this episode directly directly and it'll also show up in the RIA Weekly feed for iTunes and other podcatchers. Or, just use the controls below to listen to it right here:

This week, Ryan and I are joined by Dave Wolf from Cynergy Systems, a firm that specializing in RIA development. We spend most of the time talking about Dave's take and Cynergy's involvement in the RIA space, but we get to a handful of news items at the end:

• Last week we mentioned a "working with RIAs" report they did with Forrester. We go over the suggestions and tips - small teams, rich experiences don't come from cubical farms, but open places where you can "smear monitors," getting designers and developers to work together. Moving beyond the "isolationist" phase of J2EE and web app driven development. Using mutual-respect and tooling.
• Grooming developers and designers to fit into this milieu, applying the usual cultural fits for tech-people. Also, "you only use full-time employees" - talent becomes a competitive advantage for Cynergy.
• We talk about the kinds of things they work on: telcom expense management, retail banking, fleet management, hip-hop site. Also, software companies realizing they don't have to compete "feature-by-feature" as taught by the iPhone, growth in ISVs that is.
• Ryan asks if the iPhone is the best way to pitch RIA to "the boss." Pretty much, Dave says. It's a good example of how RIA tricks and whatnot can be powerful and useful.
• What kind of interest are you seeing with Microsoft Surface?
• "Desperately trying to get away from The Mouse." 60 years later, we're still using the same input device - "Mouses are strange."
• How do you choose the RIA framework to use, out of Flash, Flex, Silverlight, WPF, etc? We ask Dave to go over the types of applications and audiences ("users") that each technology works well with and doesn't work well with. The IDEs on both sides are good.
• Ryan draws out more of Dave's negatives about each platform - this is all an attempt to get back to the desktop - Flash Platform struggles a little bit with the designer/developer workflow, the life-cycle for the software between the designers (with PSDs) and the developers (with Flex and other code). Microsoft's difficulty is player penetration, learning through the difficulties very quickly - catching up with Adobe/Macromedia's 10 years in 2 years - "the ability to chase tail-lights."
• All that said, Dave says, we believe they'll be a duopoly in our work in the future.
• We discuss the old idea of having one UI instead of many: moving beyond "least" in "least common denominator" - applying the multi-screen, multi-modal thinking to applications - making it OK to have 5 UIs, for example.
• What's the experience been like with maintenance, across many versions of years of the RIA-based software?
• Moonlight 2.0 Preview - see some other coverage from Mary-Jo Foley and Tim Anderson.
• Don't forget to leave a note in the Flex Builder for Linux "bug" listing.
• Ryan mentioned the New Your Times AIR app write-up, the Times Reader 2.0, which talks about how the Times used and RIA for their readers and why.

Sponsorship

This Episode is Sponsored by Adobe:

Use the Adobe Flex framework and Adobe AIR to create rich Internet applications. RIAs that combine the wide reach of the browser and the flexibility of applications that can also be delivered outside the browser. Adobe Flex combined with Adobe AIR provides an agile and powerful solution to develop and make quick iterations on applications that reach across platforms and deliver a consistent user experience.

Download the free Flex Builder trial and the Adobe AIR SDK and start building the next- generation of RIAs.

Disclosure: Adobe is a client and sponsored this podcast. Microsoft is a client as well, as is Sun.

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

This week, traditional IT Management seems to dominate our discussion, which is kind of refreshing for how much glad talk we've been doing of late. We discuss:

• IBM Impact has been going on this week in Las Vegas. After explaining what that is and skirting around our light coverage of it (neither of us was there, though RedMonker James Governor has been there all week) we discuss how IBM acquisitions have been generalizing the conferences. This also leads us into a discussion about conferences in general I've been having a lot recently: large vendors are looking to get into doing more, smaller conferences. John reports on hearing about how the crowds went wild at the prospect of "never having to install WebSphere again."
• "Enterprise" means (a.) complexity and high performance, but also, (b.) accepting and dealing with old stuff, legacy.
• This gets us into talk of disruption - Kindle driving more book sales - but can tech companies defend against tech disruption.
• Nagios forked to ICINGA. GroundWork's take, and the Open Sourcers' Dilemma.
• SpringSource buys Hyperic - John and I go in-depth, covering who SpringSource is and the happy-path for IT department shopping at SpringSource + Covalent + Hyperic. The general up-shot between the two of us is pretty positive, actually. Coté is wrangle up some scheduling to talk with SpringSource, so perhaps there'll be an update/clarification.
• Citrix Synergy was also this week in Las Vegas - there's a helpful links wrap-up page from them. Their Dazzle cloud service-catalog (as we understand it) looks interesting. Also, on the cloud front, it sounds like they're adding Application Virtualization into their cloud bucket, C3.
• Coté is a judge for the Microsoft Azure contest, which should be fun for seeing the types of applications people will be building on Microsoft's PaaS. Also, see Jeffrey Schwartz's story on the topic. (For more on Azure, check out the interviews from MIX09.)
• John re-caps what he's heard about the Federal Summit on Cloud - he strongly recommends Ruv's write-up. As he said over in Twitter, "I can't believe how high a priority cloud computing is for the new IT agenda in Washington. The fact there is a Cloud Czar says it all." Of note is that the (US) government now has a definition of for "cloud computing."
• Tap In Systems - we've both been hearing about this outfit. RedMonk's Stephen O'Grady is setting up a briefing with them, so perhaps we'll have more to report next time.
• Conformity - identity life-cycle management for SaaS applications - more details here.
• Spiceworks 4.0 - in alpha now, very interesting: help desk, portal, network map.
• John notices an ousting at SugarCRM, of John Roberts - I get John to explain what SugarCRM does.
• Phurnace migrations - this gets us to talking about IBM in Amazon EC2. John likes the pay-as-you go pricing that's relatively new.
• We recap the (in)famous McKinsey cloud report.
• John will be at Interop - embracing the cloud, cloud summit session. May 19th and 20th.

Disclosure: IBM, Microsoft, Spiceworks, Hyperic, SpringSource, and GroundWorks are clients.