Can You Feel The Force?
Last week, I was fortunate enough to have a “customer success story” published by our friends at Apigee. It’s not something our organization tends to do very often, but in cases like this one, where we feel that there is sufficient industry-relevant and generally interesting content to stir other people’s imaginations, then we give these [...]
Microsoft, Apprenda And Service Providers – An Analysis
Microsoft (previous CloudAve coverage) and Apprenda (previous CloudAve coverage) yesterday made some announcements focussing on service providers at #wpc12 and it generated lots of buzz in the tech community. Even though there were lot of talk about the VMware angle in the story and about Microsoft planning to push Azure as the cloud OS of [...]
Microsoft Offers Hosts Another Cloud to Chose From–White Labels Azure
Microsoft this week announced a new program that will allow hosting service providers to use existing data centers to deliver a white-label version of Azure. This is a progression from the announcement last month that Microsoft was giving developers the ability to achieve symmetry between public and private PaaS with .NET as this announcement heads [...]
ActiveState Lanches Stackato 2.0
ActiveState (see coverage here), is today announcing the general availability of version 2 of Stackato, their private PaaS designed for enterprise customers. By way of introductions, over the 15 or so years it has existed, ActiveState have focused on understanding three things deeply; Developers, Enterprises and OpenSource technologies. I spent some time recently talking with [...]
Why Google Compute Engine Is The Right Move
Two weeks back at Google I/O, Google announced the release of their infrastructure services offering called Google Compute Engine. This is a pretty interesting move from Google who is late in the infrastructure game compared to Amazon Web Services or, even, Microsoft Azure. The last two weeks were filled with posts from pundits and I [...]
Moving to the Cloud – External Business Considerations
CloudU Notebooks is a weekly blog series that explores topics from the CloudU certificate program in bite sized chunks, written by me, Ben Kepes, curator of CloudU. How-tos, interviews with industry giants and the occasional opinion piece are what you can expect to find. If that’s your cup of tea, you can
Cloud, Cost, Coal And British Economists
One of my heroes in the cloud world is Joe Weinman, the father of cloud economics. Weinman wrote the book about the economic impacts of cloud computing (actually he really did, Weinman’s “Cloudonomics” book is due out in the next few months) and has done much to extend thinking beyond the simplistic “oh, but cloud [...]
IaaS vs. PaaS or Infrastructure vs. Platform and I Want Beer NOW!
A friend and now coworker of mine, Richard Seroter (@rseroter & Blog) decided to do a comparo. I took the infrastructure based deployment, ala IaaS and he took the platform based deployment, ala PaaS. What we’ve done is taken a somewhat standard ASP.NET MVC with Entity Framework, a SQL Server Database, a UX & UI design [...]
The Future Ain’t Homogenized–Please Stop the FUD Vendors
We all, commentators, vendors and customers, need this cloud thing to happen safely and consistently. Dogmatic messages like these ones do nothing to increase the comfort level of prospective or actual cloud customers. Vendors, please stop it now. That is all.
Visiting the Switch SuperNAP Facility
While in Las Vegas recently I was invited by Mark Thiele to tour the Switch SuperNAP data center – an invitation I jumped at. Like all guys, I grew up reading stories about soldiers and spies and dreamed of running around in a SWAT team. Entering a facility that has ex-marines patrolling the perimeter in [...]
Google Compute Engine–Day One Analsysis
At GoogleIO today, Google announced the limited launch of its Infrastructure as a Service product, Google Compute Engine. This comes as no surprise, the move has been rumored for months and Google does undeniably have some of the largest scale infrastructure on earth alongside the smarts to run it amazingly effectively – a potent combination [...]
The Right Storage, the Right Cloud
We spend a lot of time in this blog talking about the architecture of elastic infrastructure clouds (EIC) like AWS and our own Open Cloud System. We contrast this against the architecture of enterprise virtualization clouds (EVC) like VCE’s Vblock. Nowhere are these differences more obvious than when you look at how storage systems are [...]
Cooking up some Standard Recipes for OpenStack with Opscode
The battle royal that is being played out between the different Cloud “operating systems” reached new heights at Structure last week. While all of us are talking about this stuff however, vendors and customers alike are simply trying to get going with these tools. They’re not focused on idealogical battles, but rather on finding easy [...]
NASDAQ CEO blames CIO over Facebook IPO
NASDAQ CEO, Robert Greifeld, blames staffers and IT for the Facebook IPO debacle. Where was his own accountability?
HP’sCloud Forays – DreamWorks runs on OpenStack Powered Production Kit
At HP Discover (disclosure – HP covered my T&E to attend Discover), almost half of the opening day keynote was given over to DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg to articulate why DreamWorks has gone “all in” with HP. Katzenberg’s presentation was entertaining, and told the usual tails of an industry that is undergoing seismic shifts and [...]
