"Since Cloud Expo is running the week of June 10, we thought it'd be a great idea to schedule our Meetup this week. That way, if you have colleagues, friends, or family in town that week for the Expo, you can invite them to join you!" With those words, the OpenStack New York Meetup Group's organizer's launched a landing page this week where anyone interested can register for the June 12 evening event.| By Diane Mueller | Article Rating: |
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| February 1, 2013 11:00 AM EST | Reads: |
2,814 |
Anyone who has moved houses knows there is nothing worse than hauling boxes and boxes of stuff, only to unpack it all on the other end and discover that the beloved furniture and knick-knacks do not work in the new place. Portability is a tricky concept, and moving applications to the cloud is not much different than moving house. Just as every home is uniquely suited to certain décor pieces and not to others, every cloud requires certain specifications. The code and configurations that worked like a charm in one cloud environment suddenly look like a bull in a china shop when moved to a new cloud.
The Myth of Cloud Portability
One of the most advertised benefits of moving applications to the cloud is the so-called portability that the cloud environment offers. The claim is that enterprises can easily switch cloud jurisdictions whenever they need to scale up or add features. Portability is indeed an important factor for businesses concerned about vendor lock-in, as moving applications into a new environment can involve a lot of heavy lifting.

In reality, cloud portability is a myth, and InfoWorld's cloud computing blogger David Linthicum drove the point home in a recent blog post. "The reality is that using any technology, except the most primitive, causes some degree of dependency on that technology or its service provider. Cloud providers are no exception," Linthicum writes. "Companies that create technology have no incentive to fly in close enough formation to let you move data and code willy-nilly among their offerings and those provided by their competitors. The cloud is no different in that respect."
There is truth in Linthicum's statement. Moving applications to clouds with proprietary deployment or technology stacks often creates cross-platform issues that limit portability. In fact, when portability relies on the cloud provider, applications inevitably encounter provisioning and configuration dependencies that create vendor lock-in. Further, a new cloud provider might not have a clue how to install, deploy, run, and manage an organization's applications without detailed information about the apps and their underlying stacks.
Companies should not have to give up on portability. They need the freedom to switch cloud providers on short notice to reduce cost, enhance reliability, initiate geographic expansion, or meet compliance requirements. To make a successful move, they require the help of a moving company of sorts. Platform as a Service (PaaS) offers this much needed service to enterprises on the move.
Platform as a Service (PaaS): Global Citizen of the Cloud
As an elastic middleware layer between the applications and the cloud provider, PaaS delivers a standard open approach that simplifies the interfaces common to multiple clouds without doing away with the value-added features that make each cloud unique.
With PaaS, businesses travel light from one cloud to another. A PaaS sits between the software and the infrastructure, providing everything an application needs to run, including hardware, operating system, database, language runtime, modules, and web framework. The PaaS middleware layer removes borders and gets rid of the vendor-specific excess luggage. Applications can easily travel to a new cloud provider or to the enterprise's private cloud.
A PaaS can be deployed on multiple hypervisors and on different types of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) foundation. In a three-tiered cloud computing model, the PaaS middle layer lies between the application and the IaaS, enabling portability. Enterprises can painlessly push their applications to any cloud anywhere, and with little or no reengineering.
When choosing a technology stack for portability, there are several factors to consider. It is best to include a PaaS layer that is built with open standards, uses lightweight bindings, and is portable on most cloud operating platforms. Businesses either have the option of selecting a cloud-hosting provider that offers a PaaS layer or deploying their own private PaaS.
With a PaaS, cloud portability becomes real, and its simplicity will surely bring the house down. Because those moving boxes aren't going to unpack themselves.
Published February 1, 2013 Reads 2,814
Copyright © 2013 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
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More Stories By Diane Mueller
Diane Mueller is a leading cloud technology advocate and is the author of numerous articles and white papers on emerging technology. At ActiveState, she works with enterprise IT and community developers to evangelize the next revolution of cloud computing - private platform-as-a-service. She is instrumental in identifying, building, and positioning ActiveState's Stackato cloud application platform. She has been designing and implementing products and applications embedded into mission critical financial and accounting systems at F500 corporations for over 20 years. Diane Mueller is actively involved in the efforts of OASIS/TOSCA Technical Committee working on Cloud Application Portability, works on the XML Financial Standard, XBRL, and has served on the Board of Directors of XBRL International. She currently works as the ActiveState Cloud Evangelist.
"Since Cloud Expo is running the week of June 10, we thought it'd be a great idea to schedule our Meetup this week. That way, if you have colleagues, friends, or family in town that week for the Expo, you can invite them to join you!" With those words, the OpenStack New York Meetup Group's organizer's launched a landing page this week where anyone interested can register for the June 12 evening event.May. 22, 2013 01:45 PM EDT Reads: 753 |
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“Open source has always provided a number of benefits, including easing adoption costs, propagating a better understanding of the technology, and allowing for faster evolution and commercialization of products and services based on it,” noted Terry Woloszyn, Founder & CEO, Leeward Security Ltd., in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “This is clearly evident with the OpenStack and CloudStack,” Woloszyn continued, “and others that have been quickly commercialized as...
SYS-CON Events announced today that OpenStack will exhibit at SYS-CON's 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. OpenStack software controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed by a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface.
OpenStack powers some of the most widely-used SaaS app...
SYS-CON Events announced today that BUMI (Backup My Info!), the premium provider of managed online backup and recovery solutions for small to mid-sized businesses, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Manhattan-based BUMI (Backup My Info!) is a premium managed service provider specializing in online data backup and recovery. Founded in 2002, the company's data backup and recovery serv...
SYS-CON Events announced today that nfina Technologies, a provider of highly reliable cloud server products, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
nfina Technologies develops, manufactures, and markets highly reliable cloud server products, designed to solve the most demanding data center requirements in mission-critical cloud applications. Nfina’s staff has decades of experience in co...
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Dave Eichorn, Global Data Center Practice Head at Zensar, will share a case study describing how a utility services company handled the migration of its Microsoft platform to the cloud. Challenged with the time-consuming task of opening operations out of temporary offices, this company struggled with the need to simultaneously access data that was accumulated from a vast amount of data-intensive jobs. Zensar migrated the company’s application ...
“Social, mobile, analytics and cloud can’t be looked at as distinct technology trends; they are facets of the same movement and an everyday reality for consumers and businesses alike,” said Craig Sowell, IBM VP of SmartCloud Marketing, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “This means that businesses need to start looking at trends as one: cloud is the delivery, analytics is the unique insight, social is a shareable service, and mobile is the ubiquitous access.”
...
Organizations across the world are increasingly starting to see the benefits of moving more and more services to the cloud. The focus on the cost-saving potential of cloud is rapidly shifting to completely transforming the business with cloud. As organizations are investing enormous sums on technology they are starting to realize that in order to maximize the return on investment and accelerate the business transformation process the first area of focus should be people. By ensuring the organiza...
SYS-CON Events announced today that Wowrack will exhibit at SYS-CON's 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Wowrack’s core expertise lies in high-availability Private and Public Cloud IaaS Hosting Solutions. Wowrack provides a true Hybrid service – where business release all IT management and hardware provisioning – taking the data center and server system administrative headaches off our customer’s shoulders. ...
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