Why are APIs so important in clouds? Do APIs have to be open? How fast or slow will standardization in the cloud be? Why is ensuring high availability for the cloud service critical?
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Mårten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, will answer these questions and address cloud standards, APIs and the critical question: Will we end up with one, two or more competing cloud standards? And, how will this affect the evolution and adoption of cloud comput...| By Ezhil Arasan Babaraj | Article Rating: |
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| May 1, 2010 04:56 PM EDT | Reads: |
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What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud Computing is nothing but providing Information Technology (IT) components such as computing, storage, network bandwidth,security, platforms and software as a service. It is considered to be a cost effective method, because you need not pay upfront a hefty amount and you will pay for what you use.
Classification of Cloud Computing Services
There are three types in Cloud Computing Services .
1. IaaS - Infrastructure As a Service
The base IT infrastructure components such as Machines for computing, Storage, Network is provided as a service. Example : Amazon AWS, Rackspace Computing Cloud & Microsoft Windows Azure.
2. PaaS - Platform As a Service
A solid platform in which you can develop, test, deploy & offer your applications to your end customers. Mostly your applications are offered as a Web & Web Services technologies. Example : Microsoft Azure, Google App Engine, force.com from SalesForce.
3. SaaS - Software As a Service
Software applications provided as a service, As a Cloud Developer, mostly you will consume the services to enhance or enrich their existing offerings. Example : Google Apps, SalesForce.
Simple Analogy to Cloud Computing
I am sure we are not new to the idea of pay per use, ie, utility model, we have been using electricity, telephone, mobile phones in the utility mode and the government & telecom providers have invested a lot in building the infrastructure to provide best services to you. In the similar way, Cloud Providers like Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Gogrid, Google have invested a lot and created the infrastructure to be used by end users like us.
What Does Cloud Computing Solves?
Cloud Computing is going to change the way we compute soon. It is important for the developers to understand that many problems that we currently face like application not scaling, database reached maximum no of concurrent connections, single server deployment...etc are being addressed by Cloud Computing.
I Am a Developer, Why Should I Worry About This?
In a traditional way, If you are a web developer you would have learned either Java, .NET, PHP...etc along with one or more RDBMS technologies and frameworks related to your technologies. Especially , if you are first timer, you would have spend most of your time configuring the related softwares in your machine rather than developing the code that you like.
Cloud Computing brings the flexibility for you to quickly start using the configured machine instances rather than you setting up things on your own. in Amazon terms
it is refered as Machine Images. A Machine Image is nothing but a package comprises of Operating System, required softwares and its related configurations. This package can be used to while launching your instances. Most of the traditional Software Providers such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Redhat has already started providing their software packages as machine images in Amazon Cloud.
Cloud Computing provides various application building blocks that are commonly used in large scale application development & deployment such as message queues, databases, application containers and extendable storage for backup as a services and you can develop your applications to leverage those building blocks rather than breaking your head to deploy those components on your own. As a Cloud Developer you should be familiar with all these building blocks and their provider specific API's.
In a nutshell, If you want to be Cloud Developer, you must understand all these building blocks and their API's to develop applications for Cloud Technologies.
Where Do I Start?
"Practice Makes the Man and Women Perfect", you should start using the Cloud Computing technologies to get a feel of it.
Before you start, you must decide on a provider first, aligning yourself to a provider, makes you an expert in that platform too. When I started my learning way back 2006, I have choosen AWS platform. I would suggest, if you are Microsfot developer, you can start with Microsoft Azure by learning SQL Azure, Windows Azure...etc. If you are Java & Python developer, start using Google App Engine. If you are a CRM/ERP app developer, you can choose SalesForce.com.
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Published May 1, 2010 Reads 3,022
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More Stories By Ezhil Arasan Babaraj
Ezhil Arasan is a research and development specialist at CSS Labs. One of his favorite platform is Cloud Computing and its related technologies. He has been involved in cloud computing for about two years and has led several projects in Amazon Web Services Platform.
Why are APIs so important in clouds? Do APIs have to be open? How fast or slow will standardization in the cloud be? Why is ensuring high availability for the cloud service critical?
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Very few trends in IT have generated as much buzz as cloud computing. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Mark Hinkle, Director, Cloud Computing Community at Citrix, will cut through the hype and quickly clarify the ontology for cloud computing. The bulk of the conversation will focus on the open source software that can be used to build compute clouds (infrastructure-as-a-service) and the complementary open source management tools that can be combined to automate the management...
The proliferation of device connectivity is redefining the functionality requirements and capabilities of many embedded systems as more and more of these devices look to leverage the “Cloud.” While many commercial software and hardware component vendors have begun to realign their value propositions to satisfy growing demand, commercial-off-the-shelf products (COTS) alone cannot meet every OEM’s needs. As a result, the Embedded Cloud has injected a new level of uncertainty and a new competitive ...
Hardware and chemistry improvements will make the $1,000 human genome a reality soon. While the massive amount of genomics data that will be generated represents a huge opportunity to advance personal medicine, it also presents an enormous big data challenge.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Dr Andreas Sundquist, CEO of DNAnexus, will discuss how the cloud will address these issues by enabling the management, storage, sharing and analysis of the world’s DNA data and how it ...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else h...
With Big Data Expo 2012 New York (co-located with 10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
In 2011, Apache Hadoop received tremendous attention for helping organizations cost-effectively capitalize on their big data. Hadoop is now disrupting the business of analyzing data.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Baldeschwieler, Co-Founder & CEO of Hortonworks, will look at the current state of the Hadoop project, lessons learned by deploying it at scale, and the roadmap for its future.
Big Data Track attendees will learn about the exciting developments that have ...
The focus of Java EE 7 is on the cloud, and specifically it aims to bring Platform-as-a-Service providers and application developers together so that portable applications can be deployed on any cloud infrastructure and reap all its benefits in terms of scalability, elasticity, multitenancy, etc. The existing specifications in the platform such as JPA, Servlets, EJB, and others will be updated to meet these requirements.
Java EE 7 continues the ease of development push that characterized prior ...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else h...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else h...
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What do these two vulnerabilities have in common?
Apache Killer.
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