One of the popular instance types supported by Amazon EC2 is the Micro Instance. In November 2010, Amazon announced the free tier and started offering 750 hours of Micro Instance usage free per month for the first one year. Initially this offer was available only to Amazon Linux instances but last month AWS announced that they are extending this to Microsoft Windows Server instances.

Looking at the technical specifications, the Micro Instance type doesn’t have the muscle required for heavy lifting. It comes with burst CPU capacity that can go up to 2 Elastic Compute Units (ECU). That means the CPU performance is not predictable. The main memory offered is 613MB! This is just not sufficient for running any serious workloads. Of course, storage can be added through EBS and the free tier covers up to 30GB of storage.

But it doesn’t mean Micro Instances are totally useless. They offer excellent value in certain scenarios. In this article, I want to share how to get the best out of the Amazon EC2 Micro Instances and the dos and don’ts of using them.

Let me start by asking this question – what differentiates a platform from a product? A product is typically targeted at consumers and the only metric to measure the success of a product is the number of consumers using the product or the market share. But what is a platform? A platform is a product that goes beyond the consumers and builds a thriving ecosystem around it. Majority of this ecosystem consists of developers and other product companies that embrace and extend the original product. Facebook is undoubtedly a platform. That is because there is a very healthy ecosystem around Facebook that literally brought everything from the digital storefronts to the commercial e-learning services into Facebook platform. The other example is Amazon.com, which is one of the early companies that realized the advantage of building a platform and not just an online ecommerce store. That enabled Amazon to quickly become the only digital outlet for traditional brick and mortar retail companies. In the recent past many companies successfully transitioned from a product company to a platform company. Apple and Google are the examples of the new generation platform companies. Of course, Microsoft made sure that everything that they built is a platform by encouraging its partners to complement the functionality. Do you know that the most popular consumer product of Microsoft, Microsoft Office is a strong platform? There are tens of thousands of companies whose products and business models revolve around the Microsoft Office platform.

Technically what turns a product into the platform is the Application Programming Interface or API. An API is a hook for developers to tap into the power of a product. This opens up many avenues for the developers to extend the scenarios that go beyond the original intent of the product. An API lets developers automate the functionality without going through the user interface. For example, if you are an ecommerce website, you can integrate your product tracking page with the Blue Dart API to provide a unified and seamless experience to your customers to track the status of their order. Interestingly, once a product starts exposing the basic API, the consumers of the API will drive the innovation and will influence the evolution by shaping the roadmap. Over a period of time, the API becomes mature and starts powering other successful products and services thus transforming the original product to a complete platform.

Read the complete article at CloudStory.in

]]> http://www.janakiramm.net/blog/are-the-indian-tech-startups-building-platforms-or-just-products/feed 0 http://www.janakiramm.net/blog/are-the-indian-tech-startups-building-platforms-or-just-products http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/JanakiramM/~3/U6AhLYn0Mvw/my-interview-with-jishnu-bhattacharjee-of-nexus-venture-partners http://www.janakiramm.net/blog/my-interview-with-jishnu-bhattacharjee-of-nexus-venture-partners#comments Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:01:23 +0000 Jani http://www.janakiramm.net/?p=2846

Last week I had the privilege of interviewing Mr. Jishnu Bhattacharjee of Nexus Venture Partners on what Cloud really means to a VC. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation.

The interview is available on CloudStory.in in two parts. Below are links to the articles.

Cloud Conversations: Cloud Specialist Janakiram MSV with Jishnu Bhattacharjee of Nexus Venture Partners – Part 1

Cloud Conversations: Cloud Specialist Janakiram MSV with Jishnu Bhattacharjee of Nexus Venture Partners – Part 2

]]> http://www.janakiramm.net/blog/my-interview-with-jishnu-bhattacharjee-of-nexus-venture-partners/feed 0 http://www.janakiramm.net/blog/my-interview-with-jishnu-bhattacharjee-of-nexus-venture-partners http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/JanakiramM/~3/Bm8U558vAvM/cloudstory-in-january-highlights http://www.janakiramm.net/blog/cloudstory-in-january-highlights#comments Wed, 01 Feb 2012 03:28:01 +0000 Jani http://www.janakiramm.net/?p=2831

One of the roles that I play is being the Chief Editor at CloudStory.in. I am thoroughly enjoying the new gig and this turned me into a professional blogger!
The highlight of the month has been the Webinar that I delivered on PaaS. I also covered the detailed analysis of various PaaS players and I continue that theme as we move into February.

My editorial calendar for Feb looks interesting! Please do subscribe to the CloudStory.in feed!

Here is a round up of some of the popular articles from January-

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• How the Platform War has Shifted to the Cloud – This article discussed how the platform war of .NET, Java and LAMP has slowly shifted to the Cloud.
• What’s in store for the Cloud in 2012? – Our predictions for 2012 where we foresee OpenStack gaining ground and VMware Cloud Foundry becoming a viable PaaS offering.
• Developers Are The New Super Heroes Of The Cloud – We love developers and tell you why they are much more powerful in the era of Cloud.
• Will the Real Private Cloud Please Stand up? – The classic debate of Virtualization & Private Cloud goes on and here is our take!
• Has Google App Engine Lost the Steam? We believe so! Here is a critical analysis of how Google has lost the momentum with Google App Engine.
• What is Cloud Telephony? – Our first guest post brings an overview of the telephony on the Cloud that talks about the key attributes.
• A Peek into Amazon DynamoDB – A closer look at Amazon’s latest managed NoSQL database offering along with a comparison with Amazon SimpleDB.
• Is VMware the new Microsoft in the PaaS World? An analysis of how VMware is attempting what Microsoft did in early 2000s with .NET.

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Thanks & stay tuned for more updates from CloudStory.in!

]]> http://www.janakiramm.net/blog/cloudstory-in-january-highlights/feed 0 http://www.janakiramm.net/blog/cloudstory-in-january-highlights http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/JanakiramM/~3/bQnIIr8YvKc/slides-from-the-cloudstory-in-paas-webinar http://www.janakiramm.net/blog/slides-from-the-cloudstory-in-paas-webinar#comments Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:19:24 +0000 Jani http://www.janakiramm.net/?p=2823

Last week we hosted our first Webinar at CloudStory.in in partnership with Zinnov on Navigating the PaaS Maze in the Cloud. The response was overwhelming!

Here are the slides from the Webinar

 

]]> http://www.janakiramm.net/blog/slides-from-the-cloudstory-in-paas-webinar/feed 1 http://www.janakiramm.net/blog/slides-from-the-cloudstory-in-paas-webinar http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/JanakiramM/~3/9Nn8iNEfZnw/analyzing-the-paas-landscape-force-com http://www.janakiramm.net/blog/analyzing-the-paas-landscape-force-com#comments Tue, 31 Jan 2012 03:03:59 +0000 Jani http://www.janakiramm.net/?p=2818

I am helping one of my customers choose the right development and deployment platform. They are building an extremely data-centric and process-driven application. In the process of choosing the right development and deployment platforms, I evaluated existing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings.

Deploying an application on IaaS will involve building everything from the scratch. Since the application requires functionality that is already available in the form of 3^rd party components, we may have to deal with the licensing and compatibility issues of these components. So, it becomes the responsibility of the developer to write the core business logic that includes the integration of multiple 3^rd party components. Since we are dealing with IaaS, we also need a solid DevOps strategy to deploy and manage the application. Once the application goes live, we need to define the scaling policy and monitor the infrastructure needs regularly. This requires investment not just in the Cloud infrastructure but also in highly skilled developers and administrators to develop and deploy the application that my customer is not ready to invest. The plan is to have a lean and mean team that is highly efficient.

In 2000, Microsoft announced that it is building a brand new runtime and a framework called .NET. At the heart of .NET was the Common Language Runtime (CLR) designed to execute an assembly like language known as Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL). This was at a time when Sun was trying to lure the developers away from Microsoft Visual Basic and Visual C++ to their flagship Java platform. It was not just Microsoft but an array of language and platform players were seriously threatened by Java’s dominance. Microsoft realized that by supporting more languages on top of .NET could bring multiple vendors to join them in challenging Sun. So, Microsoft created a standard called Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) and submitted it to ISO and ANSI. Along with it, Microsoft started engaging with Fujitsu, ActiveState and academia to bring COBOL, PERL, Fortran, Python and even Java to the .NET platform. Microsoft .NET looked similar to Java in its approach of creating a runtime (CLR), libraries (.NET Fx) and language (C#). But Microsoft’s game plan was slightly different than just creating a platform that looked better than Java. Microsoft wanted to downplay the significance of a language by elevating the power of mature framework and a high performance runtime. Microsoft hoped that by on-boarding developers from diverse environments, they could become the de-facto platform for deploying applications. As one of the early .NET evangelists, I vividly remember demonstrating how to build a web application by assembling components written in half-a-dozen languages (I actually wrote an ASP.NET Web Form in COBOL!).

Last week Amazon Web Services added another feather in the cap in the form of a brand new NoSQL service called DynamoDB. Though it looks like yet another announcement from the Amazon stable, this is huge. It has a strong impact not just on AWS but the industry.

In the last couple of years, there has been massive rush in the NoSQL database market. Many companies sprung up offering a variety of schema-less, scale out databases. Major Cloud platform providers have their own offerings in the form of Amazon SimpleDB, Google BigTable and Windows Azure Table storage. Recent entrants in the PaaS segment started supporting MongoDB and the likes to provide the NoSQL capabilities to the stack. So, how is DynamoDB different from Amazon’s SimpleDB and other similar NoSQL databases?

Last week I had the privilege of being on stage with the CEO of Red Hat Mr. Jim WhiteHurst and the GM of Red Hat India, Mr. Anuj Kumar. I was invited to be a part of the OpenEdge event that Red Hat has hosted for their enterprise customers in India.

Red Hat has a compelling Cloud strategy for its customers. On the IaaS front, they have CloudForms that enables enterprises and service providers build Private and Public Clouds. Red Hat OpenShift is the PaaS offering based on Makara that Red Hat has acquired last year. Other products like Red Hat MRG and the recent acquisition of Gluster make them a very strong player in the Cloud domain.

My role was to do a question & answer session with Jim and Anuj around their Cloud strategy. While I do not have the PR approval to discuss the details of the session, all I can say is that I am impressed with the road map and the solid story that Red Hat has around the Cloud offerings.

I recently covered Red Hat OpenShift on CloudStory.in.

I always believe that the developers are the most powerful resources in the IT ecosystem.

Entrepreneurs may dream, VCs may invest and architects may design highly scalable applications. But it is the developer who will turn all of this into reality. He breaths life into an idea that otherwise will just be yet another idea confined to a set of slides and documents. If you compare software project with a commercial movie, a developer is like the cameraman. The director may have a great plot and an enthralling storyline, but it is the cameraman who let’s the world sees through his lens. So, developers are always powerful. In the current era of Cloud, they are more powerful. If you are curious to know why, read further!

Read the complete article at CloudStory.in

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