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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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Amazon introduces the AWS Private Cloud, and the question that arises is if this new service enables the deployment of real Private Cloud..

August 26, 2009 in IT Departments, News by pcalcada | No comments

Amazon has introduced today the new AWS Virtual Private Cloud service, more details on it could be found here: http://aws.amazon.com/vpc

On the follow up of this new service, some doubts have arisen about the real type of the cloud built with this new service, and also if this kind of cloud could even be difined as Private Clouds.

Using the NIST definition:

” Private cloud. The cloud infrastructure is operated solely for an organization. It may be managed by the organization or a third party and may exist on premise or off premise. ”

It’s very clear, a Private Cloud could be on premise or off premise. The next question is what should be considered the premises of the cloud. Should it be the wall of the datacenter, the box of the server or the VM where the OS is running? For one company their premises could be a single room, whereas to another it could be the entire building, in the cloud computing paradigm the private cloud is, in my perspective, a sandbox, which has boundaries well definite and on which we trust. These boundaries are the set of features that are available (CPU, network, storage, development API, etc) and the trust comes by means of contracts, cloud provider reputation, etc…

It’s easy to understand that this kind of definition are not closed to discussion, but in my prespective, the service introduced by Amazon should be consider a very interesting tool to build effective Private Clouds.

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Cloud Computing: The “low cost” arrived to IT business?

May 31, 2009 in CloudViews, User Experiences, short-thoughts by Maria Spínola | No comments

The low cost products and services are here, either at supermarkets, airlines, holidays, automobiles, hotels, food-chains, etc., and we use them because, sometimes, we really don’t need all the features of the non low cost products and services.

In my opinion, the Cloud Computing, in a way, is the “low cost” for IT business.

Let’s take the example of Traditional CRM software versus CRM as SaaS:

  • Traditional CRM software : They earned a bad reputation by bringing with it integration and customization demands that easily spiraled out-of-control. So as a result, there was the feeling that CRM software was a huge head-heck and a huge waste of money with no practical results.

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  • CRM as SaaS: what have SaaS vendors done? they provide just-enough customization in a very easy way, and they shifted integration responsibility from the clients. So as a result CRM as SaaS is simple to use, economic and with practical results.

Or the example of infrastructure such as Amazon’s S3 and SimpleDB versus conventional enterprise counterparts (distributed file systems and relational databases) : they can’t be compared to their conventional, however they offer the basic features that everyone needs  (and also one huge advantage: vast scalability)

In other words, we can say that the use of the 80/20 rule is actually a common theme across cloud technology, and what might appear to be a limitation is actually a secret to success: it gives customers what they actually need in a very easy and cheaper way.

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IBM, Amazon and Microsoft in the clouds

February 17, 2009 in IT Departments, News, Technical by acc | No comments

Quoting a ZDNet article: «If there were any lingering doubts about whether Amazon Web Services were enterprise ready they dissolved this week once IBM became a partner. And now that Amazon and IBM have teamed up a picture of multiple computing clouds is emerging. Amazon Web Services teamed up with IBM to provide pay-as-you-go access to Big Blue’s database servers, Lotus and Websphere middleware running on Novell SUSE Linux. Those applications will run on Amazon’s EC2. While much of the details have been covered what’s notable is the vision. IBM’s cloud will connect to Amazon’s and licenses will also carry over. To the enterprise IBM’s endorsement makes Amazon an official member of the corporate cloud club.»

It’s cloud related interesting reading, but things will not be so easy for IBM and friends…

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