Cloud Computing is like baseball...really.

Well it is now Fall, and of course a young man's fancy turns to baseball and the World Series. As a result, "the boys of October" in the form of William Fellows (451 Group), Duncan Johnston Watt (Enigmatec) and I just wrapped a panel on Cloud Computing at the High Performance on Wall Street Conference moderated by A-Team's Pete Harris. (I will connect it up below.)

The core topic of this conference tends to be shaving microseconds off of your messaging load to be able to handle the extreme loads of quote volumes being put out by the global financial exchanges. The vendor section is a "who's who" of computer scientists who live, sleep, breathe the ambitions of lowered latency.

Fortuitously though, Pete Harris is looking ahead to the time very soon where virtualization overhead approaches negligible - and other dimensions of high performance kick into competitive play.

Pete's kickoff question was to the effect of "what lessons can financial service teams learn from broader industry adoption of cloud computing". What I think this means to a "high performance" audience is that they should be looking ahead to what new attributes might be a part of high performance computing in the near future.

Some of these new attributes are:

• "Mass performance" in the form of managing order of magnitude more computing devices than they have ever managed before. As one of the competition starts leveraging the use of thousands to 10's of thousands of dynamically available virtual machines; then all of them will have to.
  
• "Duration performance" in the form of now that you have 10's of thousands of devices available to you, why not leave some of them running as "agents" or "views" on some of your more complex financial transactions. Leave them on for a while.....say 20 years?
• "Integrity Performance" in the form of transforming key exogenous audit requirements into elements suitable for what is the same, and what is new in cloud computing.
  
• "Dynamic Performance" in the form of dealing with the mass of devices with speed, precision, reproducibility and audit sanctity. Get these devices set up, running, and torn down in response to business needs.
  

This last point is the one that ties to baseball and our business at CohesiveFT. Baseball is a simple game in its essence. "Get them on, Get them over, Get them in." Easy. Right?

This is the key to dynamic performance; get the vm's assembled, get them up and running in the cloud(s), have them do their work - and tear them down. Get them off the playing field and then start over in the next "inning". Easy? Right?

Last week in the hallways of VMworld and in a panel at 451 Group HTS, Enigmatec's CTO Duncan was showing an example of this capability demonstrating how Enigmatec, Scalent and CohesiveFT have solutions that when combined contribute well to making this happen.

Maybe we can help your IT team use the cloud - and do the "easy" things. Something to think about while watching the Chicago Cubs win the World Series this October.