The PaaS competition heats up with Amazon adding ASP.NET support to its AWS Elastic Beanstalk environment and MS SQL Server to the Amazon RDS offerings. This is a significant announcement from Amazon as it draws the battle lines with Microsoft which is aggressively positioning Windows Azure as the .NET Cloud offering to the developer community.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) was launched in 2009 with the initial support for MySQL. Amazon has been regularly investing in RDS by bringing the high availability features like Multi-AZ deployment and performance enhancements like Read-Replicas. Last year, Oracle got added to the supported databases of RDS and recently the Multi-AZ feature was added to it. Right from the day of the announcement, it was clear that AWS was moving towards supporting the popular databases on RDS. Until now, SQL Azure has been the only database choice for Microsoft customers looking for a managed DB on the Cloud. With MS SQL Server support on RDS, Amazon will go after the Microsoft customer base luring them to move to its Cloud. The smart move from Amazon comes in the form of the free tier that includes the one-year free access to the MS SQL Server Express edition. SQL Azure’s free trial is limited to only 90s days after which customers will start getting billed. But SQL Azure is ahead of the game through its capabilities like Data Sync, Reporting and Federation. Microsoft has invested in hybrid capabilities to enable easy integration of on-premise MS SQL deployments with SQL Azure. Microsoft’s hybrid strategy is far more powerful and easier than AWS whose hybrid strategy primarily revolves around the complex VPC architecture. While competing with each other in the Public Cloud domain, Microsoft and Amazon collaborated in enabling the customers to extend their existing MS SQL licenses to RDS. Microsoft’s License Mobility program allows customers who already own SQL Server licenses to run SQL Server deployments on Amazon RDS. This benefit is available to Microsoft Volume Licensing (VL) customers with SQL Server licenses covered by active Microsoft Software Assurance (SA) contracts.

OpenStack gets one of the most crucial endorsements as HP goes into the public beta on May 10th. I got the private beta access a couple of months ago and I tried a few scenarios. Though it has a long way to go, HP Cloud looks complete in its approach and is ready to take Amazon head on!

HP Cloud has three major components in its current form -

HP Cloud Compute that provides on demand compute instances as well as custom instances to handle workloads. HP Cloud Compute also enables the addition of new instances through RESTful APIs based on industry standards for quick scale out

HP Cloud Object Storage offers on-demand scalable storage capacity ideal for archiving and data backup, serving static content for web applications, and storing large public or private data sets

HP Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN), powered by the Akamai Intelligent Platform™, reduces latency and improves performance by accelerating the delivery of cached content to end users

Soon after going into the public beta, HP wants to add persistent block storage and relational database capabilities to the stack. According to HP, the Cloud Block Storage offers a high performance, persistent storage solution that allows users to easily move data from one compute instance to a second compute instance and the HP Cloud Relational Database for MySQL is a managed, web-based service that provides you with on-demand access to your application data stored in a relation-based structure. HP manages the database administration tasks for you.

I tried moving a LAMP based web application to HP Cloud Compute service and found it to be simple and fast. You can watch the video where I walk you through the experience of moving an application to the HP Cloud.

Recently Amazon Web Services has launched the AWS Marketplace. It is certainly a welcome move that brings all the available software on Amazon EC2 under one roof. This is especially good for ISVs to get visibility and become more accessible to potential customers. The interface inherits the classic look and feel of Amazon shopping experience and has close resemblance to the Amazon Appstore for Android. The analysts and the media have responded very positively to this move from Amazon. While this is appreciated by the Amazon partner community, there are some facts that the AWS customers should know.

The Cloud is not just about Compute

AWS success is primarily attributed to the mature Web Services that help customers build scalable, reliable and available applications. In fact, Amazon Simple Queuing Service (SQS) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) were one of the first services to be offered by Amazon before announcing the wildly successful Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Storage offered in the form of Amazon S3 is very popular among developers and startups to tackle the ever-growing needs of data driven applications. SQS is leveraged by many applications to decouple the dependencies and to achieve the scale of web applications.

It’s been a year since VMware launched Cloud Foundry. This was an important milestone for VMware in establishing itself as a platform company. VMware has been on an acquisition spree to consolidate its offerings to woo the developers. It started with RabbitMQ, GemStone and finally SpringSource. But announcing Cloud Foundry was a masterstroke from VMware to tackle the competition that exists in the form of Microsoft and Amazon. How did it fare in the first one year of its existence? Read further!

VMware put two rock stars, Derek Collison and Mark Lucovsky on the job to create an architecture that would truly democratize PaaS. What they came out with is not just yet another PaaS but a meta PaaS (the marketing term from VMware for this is Open PaaS) that can run anywhere from a developer notebook PC to a massive Public Cloud. I called it meta PaaS because it is a framework for any vendor to implement a PaaS based on their preferred language, framework and runtime. Microsoft and Google spent a lot of dollars and resources to design Windows Azure and Google App Engine. An average platform company cannot match the engineering brilliance and the complexity of Windows Azure or Google App Engine. So, till Cloud Foundry became available, the prominent PaaS players remained to be Microsoft, Google, SalesForce.com, Engine Yard and Heroku. But in the last one year, there has been a huge proliferation of PaaS players and most of them have built an offering based on Cloud Foundry. This has made me wonder if VMware is the new Microsoft in the PaaS World?

VMware has taken a leaf from the OpenStack book. If OpenStack has democratized IaaS by becoming an open source and hypervisor agnostic Cloud Controller, VMware did exactly the same by offering a platform independent PaaS framework. Just like OpenStack is powering big names like HP and AT&T, some well-known platform companies are consuming Cloud Foundry. It is all set to commoditize PaaS by turning every low-end hoster into a potential PaaS player. Undoubtedly, both OpenStack and Cloud Foundry disrupted the IaaS and PaaS landscape in the last one year.

I recently got a chance to work on RightScale for a proof-of-concept and I must say that they have an impressive technical architecture that reflects some of design and deployment best practices of the Cloud. I want to provide a business overview of this platform through this article.

Compared to traditional IT, Cloud does offer many benefits in the form of self-service, on-demand, elastic, and pay-as-you-go models. For example, going live with a line of business application on physical infrastructure might take anywhere between 6 to 8 weeks and by leveraging the Cloud, this can be reduced to a couple of hours! Many enterprises are seriously considering the switch to the Cloud. This includes both Private and Public Clouds. But as the investment increases in the Cloud, so is the complexity and the management overhead. IT departments need to manage disparate Cloud environments that run within and outside of their enterprise. Just on the Public Cloud, there are many challenges in dealing with multiple isolated and independent Clouds. For example, a multi-national company with global presence might want to leverage Amazon Web Services for deploying some of their business applications. The same application needs to be available across multiple continents and geographies. Even though it is a homogenous Cloud from Amazon Web Services, every Region is considered to be an independent and an isolated Cloud. Replicating the configuration and the topology of an application across multiple regions is extremely complex and expensive. An AMI that is chosen at one AWS Region may or may not be available in other AWS Regions. So, a lot of work goes into mapping the infrastructure architecture across multiple regions. Now, imagine managing the application that is deployed across multiple regions. Upgrading, patching and maintaining the application becomes extremely complex. On top of this, the enterprise IT team needs to manage a completely different environment that runs their Private Cloud. This could be running on Eucalyptus, OpenStack or CloudStack. These heterogeneous environments force the IT team to deal with proprietary APIs, tools and interfaces that reduce the efficiency. The administrators will end up writing a completely different toolset to manage Private Cloud and Public Cloud. And finally, when it comes to moving from one Cloud service provider to another, it just becomes a nightmare!

Citrix has announced that it is submitting the popular CloudStack platform to Apache Foundation. This comes as a surprise as Citrix has acquired Cloud.com only last year by investing a few hundreds of millions of dollars! With this, Citrix is also dumping it’s own distribution of OpenStack called Project Olympus. This move has shaken the industry and the analysts. Till now, OpenStack enjoyed all the attention and is aiming to become the Open Source Cloud monopoly. Though Eucalyptus has been around for a while, it failed to garner as much industry support as OpenStack. With CloudStack moving to Apache Foundation’s stable, there comes a credible and serious open source Cloud offering which can be a true alternative to OpenStack. This announcement will certainly force Rackspace to relook at their strategy. Rackspace has been successful in rallying the bigwigs of the industry including NASA, AT&T, HP, Dell, NetApp, Akamai, SoftLayer and Internap around OpenStack with a hope to take Amazon Web Services head on. But the latest announcement from Citrix changes the whole equation!

There are interesting views emerging from the industry analysts. Krishnan Subramanian, Principal Analyst from Rishidot Research has brilliantly analyzed the impact this announcement may have on OpenStack. He thinks that this move in a way endorses the open source Cloud offerings and makes them much more potential alternatives. He also says that this will force OpenStack to innovate better, which will ultimately benefit the Cloud consumers.

There are many books on Cloud Computing in the market today. Most of them focus on the technical aspects of dealing with designing, developing and deploying applications on various Cloud Computing platforms. The target audience of these books happens to be developers or IT professionals. But when it comes to senior decision makers and CXOs, there are not many resources that give them the big picture of the Cloud. That’s where the book To The Cloud: Cloud Powering an Enterprise shines. It is a prescriptive guide to the CIOs who are keen on adopting the Cloud. It provides a comprehensive framework for the decision makers to systematically move to the Cloud.

Authored by the senior leaders from Microsoft, To The Cloud: Cloud Powering an Enterprise reflects the real-world experience of dealing with internal IT and the challenges of moving to the Cloud. Though all the authors come with strong Microsoft pedigree, this book offers a generic framework to embrace the Cloud running on any technology stack which makes it a credible resource for CIOs.

With less than 100 pages, this is a great read during a short flight. Each chapter is modular and makes it an easy read to absorb the key points effortlessly. Each chapter focuses on a specific milestone of the Cloud adoption lifecycle. CIOs will easily be able to relate to the terminology and nomenclature used in the book. The 4 Es of moving to the Cloud – Explore, Envision, Enable and Execute provide a programmatic approach to the Cloud. Irrespective of the phase that your enterprise may be in the adoption of Cloud, you will find this book as a great reference.

Almost every PaaS vendor has gone polyglot and Amazon Web Services is not an exception. Last week AWS has announced PHP and Git deployment for Elastic Beanstalk. Having been launched with Java support almost a year ago, Beanstalk has got another language in the form of PHP. Technically, Amazon Beanstalk has been designed to run any language / platform from day one. Since AWS is an IaaS, many developers felt it was complex to choose the instance types, adding persistent storage, enabling monitoring and other tasks. Other PaaS providers like Microsoft and Google have good integration with Visual Studio and Eclipse that offer single click deployment. This forced AWS to assemble all its assets across compute, storage, networking and databases and offer an abstraction layer in the form of Amazon Beanstalk.

I tried deploying WordPress, a popular CMS built on PHP to Amazon Beanstal and was impress that I could do it in less than 10 minutes. All this without dealing with EC2, security groups, ELB, AutoScale configuration etc. Git integration brings an extremely agile deployment to Beanstalk. With this. Amazon has matched the ease of deployment offered by Cloud Foundry, Heroku and RedHat OpenShift.

On March 22, AWS and Eucalyptus announced a partnership to bring compatibility between the AWS API and the Eucalyptus API. While this can be perceived as simple technology interoperability between the stacks, this announcement has a significant impact on the Cloud ecosystem.

Amazon’s CTO, Dr. Werner Vogels has been vocal about their stand on the Private Cloud. AWS never endorses the Private Cloud phenomenon and almost considers it as an oxymoron. Dr. Vogels calls Private Cloud as ‘False Cloud’. But this stand has been changing in the recent past. Amazon’s announcement of Storage Gateway is a clear indication that they want to step into the crowded enterprise space. Storage Gateway is the first ever AWS service that runs behind the firewall of an enterprise.

Eucalyptus enjoyed the attention of IaaS customers till the announcement of OpenStack. Given the backing from Rackspace, credibility of NASA and the support of 140+ companies, OpenStack saw a good momentum. Personally, I believe Eucalyptus is more enterprise ready than OpenStack. OpenStack has generated the buzz primarily due to the large brands adopting it and pumping the marketing dollars to talk about it. But for a mid-sized enterprise, OpenStack is incomplete to deploy an end-to-end IaaS stack. Eucalyptus on the other hand, has been more concrete in terms of features and enterprise use cases.

Amazon has done it again! They reduced the price for the 19th time in the last six years. The latest price reduction is significant because it impacts Amazon EC2 which is the most popular service of AWS.

You can consume Compute on the AWS Cloud in one of the three forms; 1) On-demand which is available in a pay-as-you-go model, 2) Reserved Instances where you commit for a term of one or three years to enjoy discount on the hourly charges and, 3) Spot Instances where you bid for the unused capacity. Recently, AWS has introduced three types of Reserved Instances that aligns with the utilization pattern of your workload. By effectively leveraging these models, you can realize significant savings on your Compute bill.

The new pricing structure varies by the instance type and region and impacts both Linux and Windows instances. According to Jeff Barr, the cost of running a website on an m1.small instance was $876 an year in 2006 which will now cost only $250!