
“Vanilla OpenStack” Doesn’t Exist and Never Will
One of the biggest failures of OpenStack to date is expectation setting. New potential OpenStack users and customers come into OpenStack and expect to find: A uniform, monolithic cloud operating system (like Linux) Set of well-integrated and interoperable components Interoperability with their own vendors of choice in hardware, software, and public cloud Unfortunately, none of […]

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 […]

Orchestrate.io, To the Death of Database Infrastructure!
In this interview I talk to Matt Heitzenroder, Co-founder of Orchestrate.io and previous general manager of Basho Europe, data nerd and love of data types. In this video he talks about the data types, data structures, schema or schema-less options, graph, stores and other ideas behind Orchestrate.io. He also jumps into what exactly Orchestrate’s Mission […]

OSCON : Conversations, Deployments, Architecture, Docker and the Future?
I wrote about my first day of OSCON “OSCON : Day 1, Windows Just Doesn’t Do Cloud Foundry… but, there’s a fix for that…“. The rest of the week was most excellent. I caught up with friends and past coworkers. I heard about people working on some amazing new projects. Some things I will try […]

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 …

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Build 2012: Microsoft Takes The First Step Towards A Coherent Platform Strategy
This week I had a chance to spend some time at the Build 2012 conference, Microsoft’s developer conference. Though I didn’t get a chance to attend the keynotes or any briefings, I spent time talking to Microsoft employees, developers and partners attending the event. I thought I will share my take on Microsoft’s platform strategy based […]