Another Data Point on Ascendancy of OpenStack Cloud
Earlier this week, I gave the keynote address at the Storage Plumbing and Data Engineering Conference in Santa Clara (it’s abbreviated SPDEcon and pronounced, “Speedy-con,” by the way). Sponsored by the SNIA, the event is targeted for hardcore storage development and data engineers who configure, integrate and support storage and data management solutions – often called “storage [...]
Unpicking the multi-cloud at GigaOM Structure
Image © Mission Bay Conference Center Last month, RightScale’s State of the Cloud report got me thinking about the rise of multi-cloud solutions. Next month, I’ll be moderating a Mapping Session at GigaOM’s Structure event to work out how, where, when, why and if this trend is going to prove significant. Hybrid clouds, in which one [...]
Discussing Virtual Machine interoperability with the Open Data Center Alliance
The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) is holding its Forecast event in San Francisco in June, and I’ve been invited to moderate the panel discussing Virtual Machine Interoperability. As moderator, I’ll be far more interested in facilitating insights from panel and audience than in wittering on about what I think, so I wanted to use this [...]
5 Key Essentials of Cloud Workloads Migration
The benefits of migrating workloads between different cloud providers or between private and public clouds can only truly be redeemed with an understanding of the cloud business model and cloud workload management. It seems that cloud adoption has reached the phase where advanced cloud users are creating their own hybrid solutions or migrating between clouds [...]
Xeround, and a tale of evolving business models
Cloud database company Xeround announced that they’re shutting down the version of their service hosted in public clouds such as Amazon, Rackspace, GreenQloud, and others. Users of the free service have until 8 May to move elsewhere, whilst paying customers have until 15 May. The company describes this as an attempt to “re-focus,” with the [...]
When things go wrong with Windows Azure
When things go wrong with Windows Azure I recently started with Windows Azure, and really tried to start digging into it today. Unfortunately, everything went wrong. Windows Azure is turning into one stubborn system to get to do much with. It all started with trying to redeem my coupon code for a free three month [...]
Don’t Count Microsoft Out of the Public Cloud Race Just Yet
Microsoft this week announced the general availability of Azure Infrastructure Services. This marks a notable course correction for Microsoft, which initially provided Azure solely through a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model. While many market observers assume that public cloud IaaS in the enterprise is now a three horse race between Amazon AWS, Rackspace and Google, they may [...]
Disaster Recovery for Amazon EC2 in a Single Click
In my journey through the cloud I often come across great new initiatives. The interesting fact is that although the cloud is a pure revolution terms such as SLA, TCO and ROI remain valid, new methodologies and techniques are presented to support them in the cloud. I recently met Uri Wolloch, the founder of N2W [...]
The Trouble With Choice…
Choices, as the old British adage goes, are rather like buses – you wait patiently for one to arrive and then, annoyingly, several of them arrive at once. So true is this, that in my continued observation of our beloved tech industry, it appears to be the present day case for enterprises feeling their way [...]
Using Bosh to Bootstrap Cloud Foundry via Stark & Wayne Consulting
I finally sat down and really started to take a stab at Cloud Foundry Bosh. Here’s the quick lowdown on installing the necessary bits and getting an initial environment built. Big thanks out to Dr Nic @drnic, Luke Bakken & Brain McClain @brianmmcclain for initial pointers to where the good content is. With their guidance [...]
Deploycon, PaaS & the pending data tier gravity fallout…
For a quick recap of last years Deploycon & related talks, check out my “Day #3 => DeployCon && Enterprise && Data Gravity” entry from last year. PaaS Systems aren’t always effectively distributed. Heroku has fallen over every time east-1 has gone down at AWS. Not that I’m saying they’ve done bad, just pointing that [...]
VMware vs. Amazon … ROUND TWO … FIGHT! — VMW Conceding Impotence?
Two and a half years ago I wrote about the inevitable throwdown between VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS), but recently VMware’s senior leadership appeared to outright admit defeat. The message to VMware’s partners was simple: “We want to own corporate workload,” said Pat Gelsinger, VMware’s CEO. “We all lose if they end up in [...]
Best of Breed versus Polyglot Revisited
If you feel that PaaS is a new-age devops/application management tool, like any management tool user or vendor, you’ll want maximum breadth of coverage. Nobody wants multiple monitoring, backup, deployment or configuration management solutions for each platform or application in their environment. Heterogeneous breadth coverage with the ever elusive “single pane of glass” is the [...]
Continuity Rolls Out Public Beta of its Big Data PaaS
When Continuuity launched late last year I was pretty skeptical given the buzzword heavy press release, light on any real specifics. After spending some time talking with the founders however I was more positive, and not only because of the princely $10M funding round the company had just raised. As I said at the time: [...]
Apprenda Shifts the Game on Polyglot Vs Best of Breed PaaS
One of the biggest battles raging in the PaaS world has been between the Polyglot and the Best of Breed camps. In the polyglot corner stands Heroku, Engine Yard and Cloud Foundry who all say that only a platform that gives an organization the ability to develop in multiple different
