Technical

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Is the Cloud as the vendors are claiming?

August 28, 2009 in Events, IT Departments, News, Technical by pcalcada | No comments

IT news from Australia is presenting a work made by the UNSW School of Computer Science. In this study they try to verify if the Cloud is as the Vendors are claiming that it is: elastic, reliable, dynamic, fault tolerant, high available..

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/153451,stress-tests-rain-on-amazons-cloud.aspx

These are very interesting points and independent tests are fundamental to create trust among Cloud users and providers.

Although I think this kind of test should be more focused on specific applications. As  studies show, some of the potential problems found on the Cloud could be solved by the developers.

Using these ideas as starting point I’m working on a project that should be presented as a parallel event on the CloudViews.Org Cloud Computing Conference – 2010. This project, and the whole CloudViews.Org Cloud Computing Conference 2010 will be presented very soon, but If any one is interested in these topics, feel free to contact me directly.

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White Paper: An Essential Guide to Possibilities and Risks of Cloud Computing

July 19, 2009 in Basic Views, CloudViews, IT Departments, Interoperability, News, Technical by Maria Spínola | 1 comment

Cloud Computing is quite possibly the hottest, most discussed and often misunderstood concept in Information Technology (IT) today.

In short, Cloud Computing proposes to transform the way IT it’s deployed and managed, promising reduced implementation, maintenance costs and complexity, while accelerating innovation, providing faster timeto-market, and the ability to scale high-performance applications and infrastructures on demand.

But business managers know that in spite of the benefits of every new technology/business model there are also risks and issues (like for example: trust, loss of privacy, regulatory violation, data replication, coherency and erosion of integrity, application sprawl and dependencies, etc.) and that rushing things when it comes to Cloud Computing can be a very bad decision, but blowing off Cloud Computing all together because you think you can secure your own stuff better than a service provider or because many claims, made about Cloud Computing, have lead you to the point of “irrational exuberance” and unrealistic expectations, isn’t smart, either.

The goal of this White Paper is to provide a realistic perspective of the possibilities, benefits and risks of Cloud Computing; what to look for, what to avoid, and also some tips and best practices on implementation, architecture and vendor management strategies. It is important to consider all those aspects before you decide either to move (but without putting the carriage before the horse) or not to move your systems, applications, and/or data to to the “Cloud”, in a “hype free” approach.

Click here to download the White Paper (or click on the image at left side)

Thanks and please let me know how I can help you.

P.S. And of course your comments, feedback’s and thoughts are always welcome.

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Google Chrome OS – more thoughts about it

July 9, 2009 in Technical, short-thoughts by pcalcada | 1 comment

I have to admit that this type of short post could transmit the idea of a follow-the-hype initiative, but that was not the intention. So following some feedback on the Google Groups I’ve decided to clarify some of my initial thoughts.

First, I have to clarify on what part of Cloud Computing I was talking about. As I’ve written here (http://www.cloudviews.org/2008/12/cloud-computing-the-internet-becomes-our-computer/) the SaaS layer is the one, in my perspective, that could have more relevance to the user’s daily work or in the user’s perspective of the Cloud. And it’s precisely there where I think that products such as the Google Chrome OS and the Palm WEB-OS could have a strong impact. Not because they are thin clients to access the Cloud but because they will put the cloud working for users.

The perfect sandbox or ecosystem for SaaS applications is the web browser, but because its development is so dependent on the development of the underlying OS, I think that having both developed in an integrated way could be a major step forward.

To be able to have a perfect Could OS we still need to develop simple things as:

Those are simple examples that I think could be easily developed if they are built in a integrated way.

It’s obvious that in a commercial perspective, and being Google one of the top developers on the SaaS market, to have a complete Could ecosystem is something that they would love to have, and it’s precisely here that they should be careful and try not to close this platform and make it only available to their products. Taking the VMware (Virtualization) example, don’t forget that we are now trying to discussed which Virtual Machine Open Format is more suitable to prevent the vendor lock-in problem.

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Google Chrome OS – The so expected and speculated (Cloud) OS

July 8, 2009 in News, Technical by pcalcada | No comments

A couple of months ago I have written a short post about how amazing the new Palm WEB OS is and how their engineers (marketeers, developers, etc ) have captured so well the essence of the Cloud Computing Paradigm (http://www.cloudviews.org/2009/01/squeeze-the-cloud-to-fit-into-your-hand/).

When Google introduced the Chrome browser. A broad discussion about it and about how it could be transformed in the OS of the Cloud emerged, without a great surprise Google introduced yesterday (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html) their plans to the Google Chrome OS.

Apparently this new OS is a real OS, based on Linux, it’s not a browser working as a sandbox for Cloud Application (Cloud OS) but I’ve no doubts that it will be a major step forward in the Cloud Computing paradigm.

The Web OS from Palm has a large set of features that they should use as example, but there is one important thing that they must have – the platform should be as open as the web. If Google would have any kind of temptation to close this new Chrome OS on their platform (GDocs, Gmail, etc, ) they will definitely end with their foot on moving sands and they will sink…

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Increasing the control over the Cloud – Reducing the EDoS danger

May 21, 2009 in IT Departments, News, Technical by pcalcada | No comments

As it has been discussed in the Cloud Computing Google Group (Cloud Forum), the Cloud Computing paradigm has an ever growing underlying attachment. As I’m sure you can guess, I’m talking about the security threats that have emerged, one of them being the Economic Denial of Sustainability (EDoS). The EDoS attack has as its main goal to make no longer viable the business model of Cloud providers. The majority of Cloud Computing business models have as its basis the notion of elasticity and the pay as use. In this business model, clients pay as use, or as its clients use (for those who are selling services based on Cloud providers). This flexibility and elasticity is one of the greatest innovations that have sprung from Cloud Computing but it could also be a danger for the users of this model. Without the proper control technologies Cloud Computing clients could easily be exposed to fake usage, and because they are paying as the platform is used, they cloud be suffering the EDoS and their business cloud be seriously affected.

One of the control technologies that will definitely reduce the dangers of the EDoS is the new Auto Scaling from Amazon. With this technology Amazon clients will be able to define boundaries that would limit the elasticity of its platforms. With these boundaries they will always control how their platforms will grow and therefore they will no longer be exposed to the EDoS. This new feature of the AWS platform should be used with the also new Amazon CloudWatch which adds to the Amazon platform the ability to be full motorized by their costumers.

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Amazon Elastic MapReduce – The power of the Grid and the elasticity of the Cloud

April 2, 2009 in News, Technical by pcalcada | No comments

Amazon has recently introduced its Elastic MapReduce service. With it users will have the power of the Grid Computing together with the elasticity of the Cloud Computing paradigm. Having access to computing power able to perform data-intensive tasks like financial analysis, scientific simulation, etc , will no longer be dependent of a pre-tagged price. You only need to pay when you are using the service. This seems to be a very interesting service, and as Sam Johnston says, a very interesting development in the “Cloud as an operating environment”.

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Cloud Gaming, would it be possible? – I believe it will!

March 30, 2009 in News, Technical, User Experiences by pcalcada | 2 comments

In a recent post, JC Fletcher talks about the service promoted by onlive.com gaming platform. In this post he talks about some subjects on which the Cloud Gaming could have problems, namely the video encoding process and the latency on communications. In previous posts I already have talked about some of these questions and also about the projects developed by AMD on this field, but the information provided by the JC’s post will help introduce some new thoughts on this matter.
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