What I think Udayan really nails in his post is the various strategies of the prime cloud players. Particularly clear is the his assessment of Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform.

“Microsoft: I am giving you a platform which is very similar to what you use so that you can seamlessly extend your application to the cloud and even the developers can continue to use the same set of tools.”

And here is his visual map of the cloud space.

@jmacofearth

Read the entire article on the Cloud Computing Journal: Cloud Computing Strategy.

3Leaf Systems
3PAR
3Tera
10Gen
Adaptivity
Agathon Group
Akamai
Amazon EC2
Apache Hadoop -
Appirio
Appistry
AppNexus
Apprenda
Appzero
Aptana
Arjuna.
Asankya
AT&T
Bluewolf
Boomi
Box-Net
Booz Allen Hamilton
CA
Cassatt
Cisco
Citrix
Cloud9 Analytics
CloudBerry Lab
Cloudera
Cloudscale
CohesiveFT
Cordys
Cumulux
Dataline
Dell
Desktoptwo
ElasticHosts
Elastic Compute Cloud
Elastic Drive
Elastra
EMC
Engine Yard
ENKI
Enomalism
Eucalyptus

eVapt
FlexiScale
Force.com
Fortress ITX
G.ho.st
GigaSpaces
GoGrid/ServPath

+++

Some how they missed Azure and Salesforce.com. But they did say it was only part 1. More to come.

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://cloudclip.net/top-cloud-players-2009-2010

One of the prime tracks will be:  Building Applications for the Windows Azure Platform by Steve Marx
Come hear how the Windows Azure Platform provides a scalable compute and storage environment with Windows Azure, a fully relational database with SQL Azure, and a service bus and access control service with the Microsoft .NET services. Learn about these new services and see several demos that show how to build applications that run in and take advantage of Microsoft’s new cloud platform.

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://cloudclip.net/microsoft-pdc09

Amazon Web Services VPN Cloud

It looks as simple as pie. I’m sure it’s less than that, but here’s the word from Amazon on their new VPN-enabled cloud services:

Here’s all you need to do to get started:

1. Create a VPC.
2. Partition your VPC’s IP address space into one or more subnets.
3. Create a customer gateway.
4. Create a VPN gateway to represent the AWS end of the VPN connection.
5. Attach the VPN gateway to your VPC.
6. Create a VPN connection between the VPN gateway and the customer gateway.

The full instructions are a bit more technical, but for now let’s just say Amazon has fired the first grappling hook over the corporate firewall, and that’s a good thing.

The limited beta application for admission is here.

I was well on my way to the best day in my life.

Traffic was up. Pages per visitor was a dotted line of fact.

And in the middle of a self-promoting tweet, I must’ve overheated my cloud.

Cause that dip you see, is not from natural causes. It was death by IT.

In the middle of the working day,

My hype out ran my Google Analytics and the gods of DDoS came to play, on me.

Was it too many widgets, one plug-in gone south?

A leak in my computing cycle managment?

What the CloudMaster said, while scratching his head, was…

“We’re working on it.”

@jmacofearth
permalink to uber.la: http://bit.ly/cloudmaster

Note about fables from wikipedia: A fable is a succinct story, in prose or verse, that features animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature which are anthropomorphized (given human qualities), and that illustrates a moral lesson (a “moral”), which may at the end be expressed explicitly in a pithy maxim.

So if your business were running on the Tweet-Cloud (I know it doesn’t exist, I’m just making a reference) and your ecommerce transactions depended on the 99.999 uptime on the brochure, your two hours of dark, in the middle of the US morning, could be quite expensive.

I was talking about Dell and their “cloud computing” strategy the other day a with an enterprise 2.0 advocate and here’s what we came up with.

Let’s say Dell moves their consumer transaction business onto Azure, from Microsoft. And then let’s say there is a problem with something in that cloud, and just for fun (using an actual example that struck Dell over the Christmas holidays) let’s say your webstore went off line during one of your most lucrative times.

I can imagine the executives at Dell getting on the phone and rounding up their IT staff for a WTF meeting. Butts would be in seats, careers would be on the line, and the millions of dollars that would be missed for each offline minute would be accounted for later when the reckoning was taken. In that scenario Dell would call Dell employees and have 100% leverage on their time.

So now, imagine the same Christmas time scenario but this time the Dell executive calls Microsoft and gets the Sr. Manager on duty for Azure. Now it’s not that Mr. Azure is not going to take the call from the Dell VP seriously. Of course all available resources will be put on the effort to get the Dell store back online. And of course an accounting will be made of what went wrong. And of course EVERYTHING will be done to keep it from happening again.

But the leverage that Dell can exert on the Microsoft employee, the Azure Sr. Manger at any level, no matter how grevious the failure, would be significantly less than the heat that would be felt by those Dell employees.

So how can the cloud be held accountable in the same way an employee is accountable? Microsoft could have insurance and pay Dell for any possible interruption of service. Dell could fire Microsoft and take back their store, although once the cloud is deployed it’s not as easy as redirecting web traffic back to Dell’s home servers.

How can the cloud be as responsive as an owned butt in a seat on Christmas morning?

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/tweet-cloud

Here are the Amazon Web Services Documents available from Amazon Web Services, now renamed and organized for your convenience and reference.

amazon web services – developer’s guide

amazon web services – quick reference guide

amazon web services – cloud front quick reference guide

amazon web services – cloud front developer’s guide

amazon web services – elastic cloud developer’s guide

amazon web services – elastic cloud quick reference guide

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/aws-guides

Cloud Computing Journal: What’s the idea behind the term ‘IT Transformation Factory’ as an umbrella term for Adaptivity’s activities in the Cloud Computing space?

Tony Bishop: The industry is intensely focused on a narrow definition of Cloud Computing (remotely managed IaaS resources). Adaptivity sees the opportunity from a much broader perspective. IaaS type resources managed externally from the enterprise do provide value; however, the larger opportunity is enabling enterprises to change how they deliver and consume IT resources.

The IT Transformation Factory is a combination of tools, knowledge base, and advisory services, which together form turnkey programs that accelerate systematic enterprise IT delivery transformation.

Excerpt of inteview with Tony Bishop – CEO of Adaptivity
See the entire interview on the Sys-Con site.

The Four Tiers of Cloud Computing according to Cisco.

[Excerpt: from the Register: Cisco cuddles all clouds but one]

Clouds mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Warrior explained that Cisco sees cloud computing as having four tiers. The lower tier is an IT foundation, including servers, storage, and networking, and that the whole point of UCS was to be a player for infrastructure. In this area, Cisco plans to compete with IBM and Hewlett-Packard as well as partner with EMC, VMware, Microsoft, and others.

The next tier up is what Warrior referred to as infrastructure as a service, which means selling cloud computing capacity like Amazon does with its EC2 compute utility and S3 and EBS storage utilities. Warrior showed a slide that pegged Amazon, AT&T, BT, HP, IBM, Sun Microsystems Oracle, Savvis, Telstra, and Terremark as the key suppliers so far. And Cisco will not be one of them, even though it must be tempting to build a cloud at cost and sell capacity on it.

Now, taking a step up in the abstraction layer of Cisco’s cloud computing model is something Warrior called platform as a service, and this is really providing cloud infrastructure with software development frameworks that allow companies to deploy applications. This is more like Google App Engine, Windows Azure, and certain parts of Amazon Web Services, and in Cisco’s case, the application framework is WebEx Connect, which is evolving from the online Web meeting platform of the early 2000s into a collaboration framework with APIs for integrating other applications into the Web conferencing, chat, and collaboration tools that can be mashed up as IT organizations see fit.

The top and final tier of the cloudy world that Cisco is helping us all build is software as a service, and here, Cisco absolutely has plans to be a player alongside Microsoft, Salesforce.com, and Google. Up here, WebEx will be the brand. WebEx Mail, a mail and calendaring service based upon the PostPath acquisition from last summer, will be added to the WebEx mix and delivered as a service atop Cisco’s own cloud infrastructure. Dennerline said that WebEx is hosting 220,000 meetings per day and over 4 billion meeting minutes per month and that this was supported from nine data centers around the globe. He added that there are over 450 million knowledge workers on the planet and that the collaboration software and services space would comprise about $34bn in sales and that “we certainly don’t have our fair share yet” of that space. As for how Cisco will get its fair share, it’s the same old mantra: build, buy, and partner.

I think that’s a pretty good demarcation of the space.

@jmacofearth
permalink to uber.la: http://bit.ly/4-clouds

Other cloud posts

• Tag Cloud Computing? – Categories, Keywords, SEO, Tags, Getting to Simplicity
• More About the Azure Cloud – Privatization of the Internet – This Time It’s Personal!
• Cloud Fail – Is The Fail Whale Coming to a Cloud Computing Platform Near You?
• Technorati Fail – The Monster is Out – Another Cloud in Transition
• The Cloud the View and the App (a fable)
• A Tale of Three Clouds – Microsoft’s Cloud Computing Reveals Some Concerns

Microsoft’s overzealous .Net branding campaign is a pretty much a thing of the past. But that doesn’t mean the .Net confusion is completely over.

Microsoft’s attempt to juggle too many .Nets is coming home to roost with testers writing workflow-centric apps and services that can be hosted in the Azure cloud. In a posting to the Azure Services Platform blog last week, Microsoft officials admitted that .Net Services was based on a different, older version of .Net — and that the newer version wouldn’t be ready in time for Azure’s official launch (which is expected this fall).

Microsoft’s .Net Services is one of the infrastructure components of its Azure cloud-computing platform. .Net Services is the uber-name for the access control, service bus, queuing, routers and workflow technologies powering Microsoft’s cloud platform. .Net Framework 4.0 is the version of the .Net Framework that will be part of Visual Studio 2010, slated to ship in late 2009 or early 2010.