
Microsoft Does It Right And Oracle Claims They Are Right
This week saw cloud related announcements from two software behemoths from the traditional era, Microsoft and Oracle. Microsoft rebooted Windows Azure making it more palatable to modern day developers and started playing nice on the interoperability game. Oracle re-announced their public cloud strategy and, in the process, tried to convince users that they should see […]

AppFog, Apprenda And Azure: The Future Of PaaS Is Getting Defined
Three news from three different vendors came out today but they are interconnected with one another. More interestingly, this has the potential to redefine PaaS landscape empowering the end users by helping them avoid infrastructure lock-in. AppFog and Apprenda have announced interoperability with Windows Azure which itself is undergoing a revamp (you can learn more […]

Oracle PaaS Speculations
Oracle has scheduled a webcast this Wednesday where their CEO, Larry Ellison, and President, Mark Hurd, are going to make some announcements regarding Oracle Cloud and platinum support services. There are widespread expectations that Oracle will talk about their PaaS offerings, especially their pricing strategy around Java Cloud Service and Database Cloud Service. PCWorld has […]

CloudBees Adds HA To Jenkins Enterprise Edition
CloudBees (previous CloudAve coverage), the PaaS company behind the Open Source Jenkins project, today announced that they are offering a high availability plugin to their Jenkins Enterprise product. They made this announcement at the Jenkins User Conference at New York City. This plugin will help in better uptime and improved governance/oversight along with increased productivity. […]

IBM PureApplication Systems: It Is Not PaaS. Period. But
IBM Impact has been going on at Las Vegas and the buzz around the event is IBM PureSystems. I see a lot of excitement around PureSystems both from IBM side and their customer side. However, I also see some confusion around the messaging. IBM has been sending ambiguous signals around IBM PureApplication Systems which is […]

Red Hat Releases The Source Code For Openshift
Red Hat today announced that they are releasing the source code of their Openshift PaaS platform. Red Hat announced that Openshift is open source at the time of release but they didn’t release the source code till now. There are two reasons for this delay: Since Openshift came through Makara acquisition, it is important for […]

CloudFoundry On OpenStack: PistonCloud Makes It A Reality
Remember BOSH? The open source tool chain for release engineering, deployment and life cycle management of very large scale instances of Cloud Foundry, announced a few weeks back? They initially released it with support for VMware infrastructure and Amazon EC2. Since it was open source, there were expectations that others will build the necessary interface for […]

dotCloud Ramps Up Their Offering
dotCloud, San Francisco based platform services company letting you build your own platform stack across three data centers, yesterday announced that they are ramping up their platform stack support with support for web sockets, MongoDB 2.0 and vertical scaling. After being relatively quiet for sometime (at least, I didn’t hear much about them), they are […]

Heroku hstore: Key Value Store Inside Relational Database
Heroku (previous CloudAve coverage), the PaaS company under Salesforce, announced recently that they will be supporting key value store inside their Postgres database instances. Named hstore, it takes advantage of Postgres’ extensibility. Ever since MySQL was gobbled up by Oracle, Postgres has been getting additional developer love from the community. I am not saying that […]

PaaS Is The Future Of Cloud Services: AppFog Adds Ruby And Node.js Support
Appfog (previous CloudAve coverage), the PaaS player previously known as PHPFog, today announced support for Ruby and Node.js on their platform. This is nothing new or surprising and I can even say that this completes the process of removing any differentiation in terms of language support among the PaaS providers (yeah, I know that there […]

Acquia Gets Another Round Of Funding: Commercial Open Source Is Still Strong
Acquia (previous CloudAve coverage), the commercial company behind open source Drupal content management software, announced the completion of Series D round of funding worth $15 Million Dollars. This round was funded by Tenaya Capital along with significant follow up participation from their existing investors, Northbridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners. Acquia will tap into this […]

Soccer, Fail Whales and APIs
I played a good bit of soccer as a kid and even more in college. I mostly played defensive positions. One of the things I most appreciate about the game is that the smallest of errors can have game-changing impact. As a defensive player, an errant pass in the mid-field or a moment out of […]

Platforms: Of Governance and Taxes
I like analogies. This week, Brad Burnham of Union Square Ventures wrote a thoughtful post based on an analogy between software powered platforms and governments. Bob Warfield of the SmoothSpan Blog did a follow-up post claiming that application developers should seek platforms that act like Switzerland; something Warfield has apparently been saying since 2007. The […]

Twitter is No Longer a Platform
Twitter no longer deserves the label “platform”. There, I said it. Its recent decision to lock out third-party ad networks, combined with its clear move in to the edge application space fundamentally alter what Twitter is. It is no longer a platform for application developers to productize around core stream functionality and monetize the edge […]

When Platforms Collide; Mobile and Payments
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post that covered my areas of investment interest for 2010. Three of the areas I find most interesting are the mobile ecosystem and the payments sector and the theme of “platform” business models. You can find that post here. The natural question I’ve since been asked is: “What […]