Cloud, DevOps and Herding Cats
The conventional wisdom is that 2014 is that year that enterprise IT finally “rolls up the sleeves” and gets serious about cloud adoption. But what does this really mean? Basically we’re seeing the era of cloud pilots and proof-of-concepts in the enterprise drawing to close, especially around IaaS and to a certain extent PaaS. CIOs […]
Cloud Reviews from Real Customers: EC2, Azure, App Engine, Heroku and More
Choosing the right PaaS cloud for your application can be a confusing process. There are literally dozens of cloud providers, large and small, that offer the basic set of services you need to run your app. I founded IT Central Station to help enterprise tech users find the best service by offering hands-on reviews by […]
Is PaaS dying?
The ‘platform’ tier in the middle of cloud computing’s architecture is being squeezed, folded and reshaped beyond recognition. Even with continued investment, can it survive the transformative pressures forcing down upon it from the software/application layer above, or the apparently inexorable upward movement from the infrastructure layer upon which it rests? To look at recent […]
Is PaaS Tech Still Around? Maybe Containers Will Kill it or Bring it?
Recently a post from @Gigabarb popped up on the ole’ Twitter that started a micro-storm of twitter responses. Ok tech users. Who out there is using a PaaS? For realz. Serious question.— Barb Darrow (@gigabarb) November 21, 2013 This got me thinking about a number of things and I started to write her an email […]
Learning About Docker
Over the next dozen or so few days I’ll be ramping up on Docker, where my gaps are and where the project itself is going. I’ve been using it on and off and will have more technical content, but today I wanted to write a short piece about what, where, who and how Docker came […]
Sorry Database Nerds, Nobody Actually Gives a Shit…
So I’ve been in more than a few conversations about data structures, various academic conversations and other notions about where and how data should be stored. I’ve been on projects and managed projects that involve teams of people determining how to manage data so that other people can just not manage data. They want to […]
Enterprise PaaS Is About Making Money, Not Saving It
I’ve written before about how the ‘deploy and scale’ demo of PaaS is really just a superficial illustration of its potential. It functionally buckets PaaS with automation tools like Chef or Puppet which probably does both a disservice. One of the key benefits of running enterprise PaaS at scale is incredible insight it gives you […]
ITaaS is About More Than Just Cloud
ITaaS, short for IT-as-a-Service, is one of the more misleading acronyms around. Because it follows the somewhat annoying “XaaS” pattern, many assume that like SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS it’s just another cloud delivery model or technology platform. This mistaken assumption will prove to be very costly for many in enterprise IT. ITaaS is in fact […]
Do you really want your IT department to define your application stack?
The term “Platform-as-a-Service” or PaaS is gaining widespread popularity. The PaaS promise is that either a hosted solution or a private cloud solution gives your enterprise all you need. You just write an application and post it to the Cloud. “Cloud Magic” will run and scale it for you. There is no lack of competition in […]
Architectural PaaS Cracks or Crack PaaS
Over the last couple years there have been two prominent open source PaaS Solutions come onto the market. Cloud Foundry & OpenShift. There’s been a lot of talk about these plays and the talk has slowly but steadily turned into traction. Large enterprises are picking these up and giving their developers and operations staff a …
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 […]
