You Can’t Automate Your Way to the Cloud
When racing to execute a ‘cloud’ strategy, it can be very tempting for IT organizations to try and automate their way to the cloud. A key benefit of the cloud is operational efficiency. We know that humans are error prone and costly, which makes automation such an enticing solution. Add to this the fact that [...]
Ignoring that harmless looking “Force Majeure” clause in your cloud services provider agreement?
“Force Majeure” – An event that is a result of the elements of nature, as opposed to one caused by human behavior. This nugget is a common clause in contracts that essentially frees both parties from liability or obligation when an extraordinary event or circumstance beyond the control of the parties, such as a war, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Top Five Challenges Facing Enterprise Application Developers
Several common themes have emerged from discussions with a broad array of enterprise developers. In this post, I’ll share some of what I’ve been hearing. I would love to get your feedback. 1) Cloud Apps are Hard to Get Right – While abstraction of infrastructure has helped agility and application management, it doesn’t make it [...]
The Truth About Lock In
Last week I was invited to speak at a Microsoft conference in Redmond about building cloud applications for portability across clouds and infrastructure. In my presentation, I approached the issue of application portability from the enterprise perspective. This means that developers generally are not choosing servers, clouds or other infrastructure components. Developers focus on building [...]
PaaS and Mobile Enterprise – Real Conversations with Customers
One of the benefits of working on cutting edge technology like PaaS is that I get to have conversations with enterprise customers about the transformations that PaaS will bring. Increasingly, I’m seeing lots of interest in the intersection of PaaS and mobile enterprise (yeah, it’s not just an attempt by me to put together two buzzwords!). [...]
PaaS Pivot: Big Data At The Core Of Platform Services
As we go into 2013, I keep thinking about the evolution of the Platform as a Service and wonder what is in store for this segment this year. As Platform Services are one of my core focus areas of research, I thought I will start off this year with a post on this topic. For [...]
Moving PaaS Beyond the Sound Bites in 2013
Most of the discussion around PaaS these days tends to focus on the rapid application deployment capabilities. That’s the easiest thing to demo in a 3-minute video so it tends to get the headlines. I believe that in 2013 we will move on from this eye candy and dig into some of the higher value [...]
Why CloudFoundry Spin Off Is Interesting
The rumors are true with VMware publicly announcing that CloudFoundry will be spun off as a separate organization along with EMC’s Greenplum and VMware’s vFabric. This unit will be headed by Paul Maritz, former CEO of VMware. This leaves VMware to focus on their Software Defined DataCenter initiative which they announced during last VMworld. I [...]
Apprenda Launches Hybrid Cloud Support
CloudBeat is all about customer case studies and not about vendor announcements, that said I am aware of a couple of announcements coming up today in the PaaS space.
CloudFoundry Core May Not Be Important But CloudFoundry Is Important
Two weeks back I wrote a post arguing that CloudFoundry Core is not important. I had argued that even though CloudFoundry Core is done with an intention to make application portability seamless across various CloudFoundry deployments, the business considerations of PaaS vendors in the ecosystem will ensure that application portability is not a given. The [...]
Why CloudFoundry Core Is (Not) Important?
On Tuesday, VMware’s CloudFoundry project announced the availability of CloudFoundry Core, a baseline to test if an application is compatible to CloudFoundry’s core open source release. The CloudFoundry Core is based on a set of components that forms the baseline for the definition of core. Right now, they have limited set of programming languages and [...]
AppSecute Launched In Beta With Revised Messaging
AppSecute, the New Zealand based startup focussing on the PaaS space (disclosure: Fellow CloudAve blogger and friend Ben Kepes is an investor in the company but I have no relationship with them), recently launched in public beta with a changed messaging. AppSecute started out talking about federated PaaS which, even though was an interesting idea, [...]
The Best PaaS is one that is Being Used
Often I hear that the enterprise is “starting to warm up to PaaS” spoken as though adoption in the enterprise is purely a function of the customer’s readiness. Obviously an enterprise must adjust its IT world view in order to truly embrace PaaS. PaaS is at least as much a cultural change as it is [...]
