This is an incredibly important time for the cloud computing area. What are some of the new directions in the massively parallel cloud computing space? I’ll mention four that I’m particularly interested in, that are exciting and challenging, and that I think will have a huge impact...

SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Expo will take place in San Jose. Seems like everyone is coming in to the Bay Area for this one, so I am looking forward to meeting a lot of the folks active in cloud computing at this event. There is also talk of another Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum...

One thing is pretty clear to me from an investment perspective. I am not going to invest in the next hot cloud computing infrastructure service that will compete against Amazon, Rackspace, Microsoft, and every other large tech vendor in the world. This is suicide and far from capital e...

Months ago, 3tera unveiled our Cloudware architecture. But rather than try to convince the world that there is only a single architecture that works and ours is it, we emphasized that Cloud architectures need to be open. Not only need they interoperate with all sorts of hardware and so...

In a recent report, Gartner made some bold predictions around the near-term future of SaaS. In essence they are endorsing that the SaaS model has increasing leverage over existing software models as the IT spending tightens - worldwide software-as-a-service revenue in the enterprise ap...

In most discussions about scalability, we often approach the topic as a pure technical/architecture challenge, and ignore cost issues. The problem is that when we truly scale our application, and want to benefit from economies of scale, we're going to end up with scale limitations, not...

The problem with the notion of “Windows for EC2” is that it perpetuates the broken, legacy model of tying your application to the infrastructure upon which it runs. In the legacy model, applications became artificially tied to the physical server upon which they ran, and server uti...

The term “Cloud Storage” has become en vogue in the past 18 months, pushing the hype curve into the red. While industry buzz and news around this technology has increased, definitions have failed to root any sensibility and meaning as to what it really is and what can differentiate...

The cloud is coming of age. Amazon took another huge leap forward when it announced that EC2 is now out of beta, together with an SLA that is evidence of Amazon’s commitment to provide top-notch service. Their uptime has been stellar, and they are now standing behind their offering c...

There’s been quite a bit of chatter on the web about Microsoft's Azure Services Platform. Obviously I’m excited to see people talking about our new platform, especially when there is plenty of good, some bad, and some good if not somewhat rambling. There will be no shortage of gues...

For too long, the emphasis in Cloud Computing circles has been almost exclusively upon provision of rapidly scalable and ad hoc remote computing on top of cost-effective commodity hardware. The Cloud play from Salesforce, Amazon’s EC2 and the rest has been dominated by the implicit a...

What happens when your cloud provider has multiple datacenters and has the ability to move your code around based on their need (read: not your need)? One thing that any enterprise IT buyer knows how to say is “who’s throat do I choke?” When you have a composited application, who...

The biggest problem we have is trying to figure out what to leave out, because we simply have too much to present. Attendees are going to get a real hands-on feel for how they can utilize the world of on-demand computing. It won't be a sit-back-and-listen day, it's a true hands-on, sle...

Considering that the price tag for state-of-the art data centers is now reaching $500M, cloud computing is an arena for big players. I don’t expect small players to stay competitive for long in this game. Cloud frameworks are very diverse, and switching from one cloud to another is g...

The technology blueprint of President Elect Barack Obama, if implemented as promised, bodes well for the future of Cloud Computing. Let me consider some of the Barack Obama's Technology proposals and explain how it is relevant to the success of Cloud Computing. This is not a political ...

Although cloud computing vendors are not explicitly trying to lock-in customers to their platform, the fact is that today if a customer has heavily invested in either platform then there isn't a straightforward way for customers to extricate themselves from the platform and switch to a...

Recently, so much ink has been spilt on our VC-backed brethren racing for the cash-conserving hills. Why they weren’t shooting for revenue and profitability from day one is beyond us. Joyent believes when a company is built to be profitable from day one, market context is much less m...

It's been an interesting week for Salesforce.com Chief executive Marc Benioff. The Salesforce chief called for the creation of cloud interoperability standards for moving data between applications in rival clouds. Which on the surface appears to great step forward. Problem is he was ve...

Cloud Computing represents both a fundamental and universal change from a desktop- to network-centric software model. The key to understanding cloud computing is that its infrastructure — network, storage and other services – is abstracted away from users to point that it “just d...

Paraphrasing Einstein, the future will not be created at the same level of thinking which created the past and the present. In Hugh Macleod's 'The Cloud's Best-Kept Secret' he writes: "...Nobody's saying that one day a single company may possibly emerge to dominate The Cloud, the way G...

I see this whole cloud computing movement as nothing more than a reincarnation of the classic mainframe client-server model. People want painless access to their data and applications from wherever they are, from whatever electronic gizmo they happen to be usin

If you were to believe the hype from the media and certain so called industry experts, you would be forgiven for thinking that cloud computing is the second coming. The answer to all our scaling and usage problems. Everything to everyone. The notion that the "cloud" is always on, or up...

Grid computing is scalable (that is, make it big or small according to your needs) computing power, usually used by businesses. And supplied via the web. Cloud computing is a method of supplying technology on demand. Who cares where it comes from, or even what it’s called? So long as...

As the popular Belinda Carlisle song, Heaven is a place on earth, goes, while we talk about all this virtualised computing power and clouds, somewhere there is a real physical CPU doing real work somewhere on earth. In some data center your cloud application is taking up physical space...

Microsoft have done far more than simply follow others. They have created a complete new platform that leverages much of what the likes of Amazon, Google, Sales Force, Open Social API, all are doing in their own spaces but bringing them together. While sign-ups are being accepted to te...

Although cloud computing provides financial benefits like reduction of CAPEX and the ability to pay-as-you-go, organizations will still need a reasonable amount of granularity in the reporting of cloud usage and the ability to map that usage into a financial chargeback model that makes...

Is infrastructure cloud computing a natural monopoly? I suspect there will be enough fragmentation in the kinds of offering available that a demand for variety will make it more like the automobile industry than like the online bookstore industry.

There have been multiple white papers and articles written by analysts - Is Cloud Computing Ready for the Enterprise? The question is asked so many times now - Is Cloud Computing ready for the enterprise? So, I have to ask - Is the enterprise ready for Cloud Computing? I’ll start th...

First of all the the traditional ideas of an AMI Bundle have been dropped because of Microsoft licensing limitations. For traditional EC2 Linux users, a local file system image can be bundled as an AMI in order to be used on Amazon EC2. This provides a direct migration path between the...

Also in the book, DeFrank writes about Ford's opinion of Bill Clinton's addiction to women. Ford says about Clinton: 'He's sick - he's got an addiction. He needs treatment. He's sick. You know there is treatment for this kind of addiction. A lot of men have gone through the treatment w...

Cloud computing refers to the ability to deploy your application on infrastructure that you do not necessarily own nor manage yourself and that can be easily scaled up to handle demand and provide resiliency to failure. The hardware infrastructure can be composed of clusters of many ch...

I think that cloud computing is going to be 'the way ahead' for most businesses and individuals in the coming year or two. It makes a lot of sense. However, right now, in 2008, I think it's a very brave person who would entrust their business data to one of the thousands of micro-busin...

SYS-CON Media ripped all Kontera links off of its website yesterday, after a brief trial period. SYS-CON's circulation manager Engin Sezici said: "It was not worth for us to mess up our Website and pages for the actual amount of revenue share we observed during the trial period. Google...

Red Hat is a trusted open source provider. Red Hat offers enterprise customers a long-term plan for building infrastructures on the quality and innovation of open source. Combining open source operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management...

Although SaaS development platforms like SalesForce and Coghead have gotten a lot of attention, this market has so far been remarkably closed and proprietary. The Platform as a Service leader, SalesForce, has both a draconian hosting policy (host your apps and data anywhere, as long as...

The NY Times had a story yesterday, much-written-about in the blogosphere, that said that bloggers were working themselves to death. This was one article about blogging I was glad to be left out of, even so, it could have been about me, a number of years ago, when my lifestyle almost d...

This session will provide attendees with an overview of the iPhone SDK, including discussion of the App Store, Apple's planned distribution channel for SDK applications. Keep in mind that the contents of the SDK and experiences while using it are covered under NDA, so be prepared for m...

I asked what she did for a living. She said she was a software engineer working with SOA. I did not think about my plane ride much until I arrived in San Francisco to attend the SOA World Conference & Expo this past Monday and Tuesday. The first day of the conference as I walked into t...