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I CAN HAS DEFINISHUN of SoftADC and vADC? In the networking side of the world, vendors often seek to differentiate their solutions not just based on features and functionality, but on form-factor, as well. Using a descriptor to impart an understanding of the deployment form-factor of a particular solution has always been quite common: appliance, hardware, platform, etc… Sometimes these terms come from analysts, other times they come from vendors themselves. Regardless of where they originate, they quickly propagate and unfortunately often do so without the benefit of a clear definition. A reader recently asked a question that reminded me that we’ve done just that... posted @ Thursday, March 11, 2010 3:31 AM | Feedback (1)

When Did Specialized Hardware Become a Dirty Word? If you’re just trading “specialized” hardware for “dedicated” hardware you’re losing more than you’re gaining.  Apparently I have not gotten the memo detailing why specialized hardware is a Very Bad Thing(TM) . I’ve looked for it, I really have, but I cannot find it anywhere. What I did find was any number of random press releases announcing how “virtual version X” of some network or application infrastructure solution was now virtualized and hey, you don’t specialized hardware to run it. These random press releases neglect, I might add, to mention that there's very little difference between the requirement... posted @ Monday, January 11, 2010 3:21 AM | Feedback (9)

Amazon Response to Botnet Incident: Balancing Privacy with Security in Cloud Computing An e-mail exchange with Kay Kinton, a spokesperson for Amazon, on the subject of Amazon and its recent run-in with the Zeus botnet controller, raised two very interesting and valid points. First, there is a fine balance that must be maintained by providers – cloud or traditional hosting – regarding the privacy of applications and data deployed by customers and monitoring/security. Second, Kay points out that it’s easier in the EC2 environment, at least, to disable botnets once they are discovered. The second point is one that appears on the surface to be true but I’m not entirely... posted @ Friday, December 18, 2009 3:16 AM | Feedback (1)

Botnets, Worms, and “Open” Clouds: Can Enterprise-Class Clouds Be Far Behind? Cloud computing environments are just as suited to illegitimate use as legitimate use. Do providers need a way to separate the chaff from the wheat to reassure enterprise-class customers that they’re doing everything they can to eliminate the hijacking of cloud computing resources for nefarious purposes? One of the negatives of being the technology darling du jour is that every misstep, problem, and outage is immediately jumped on and reported everywhere. Amazon is particularly susceptible to such coverage, being recognized as one of the leaders in public cloud computing. Last week Amazon suffered yet another outage, true, but... posted @ Tuesday, December 15, 2009 3:42 AM | Feedback (5)

Maybe Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud Makes Cloud Computing Too Easy With just a few clicks you, too, can create a cloud computing environment. But if you’re like a lot of organizations, you may not know what to do with it after that. The latest version of Ubuntu Server (9.10) includes the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), which is actually powered by Eucalyptus. The ability to deploy a “cloud” on any server running Ubuntu is really quite amazing, especially given the compatibility of Eucalyptus with Amazon and the plethora of application images available for nearly immediate deployment. It supports both a public and private option, and a hybrid model, and... posted @ Tuesday, November 03, 2009 5:30 AM | Feedback (6)

Vertical Scalability Cloud Computing Style Vertical scalability used to require optimizations inside the application, at the code level. Cloud computing changes the nature of vertical scalability and, one hopes, will lead to a new model of scalability based on the capabilities of Infrastructure 2.0 and increasingly granular resource management capabilities. RightScale recently offered up its own analysis of Amazon Usage Estimates and while the details they provide on Amazon usage from their vantage point is very interesting I found one of their related observations even more fascinating: In earlier days the predominant method of scaling was by... posted @ Tuesday, October 27, 2009 3:13 AM | Feedback (2)

The Cloud Is Not A Synonym For Cloud Computing “Where are you storing your data these days,” he asked casually after trying to come up with a better opening line but failing. “Ah, dahhling,” she drawled while gesturing in no particular direction with an almost deprecating wave of her hand. “The Cloud, where else?” Thanks to the nearly constant misapplication of the phrase “The Cloud” and the lack of agreement on a clear definition from technical quarters I must announce that “The Cloud” is no longer a synonym for “Cloud Computing”. It can’t be. Do not be misled into trying, it will only cause you... posted @ Wednesday, October 21, 2009 3:12 AM | Feedback (2)

Amazon Elastic Load Balancing Only Simple On the Outside Amazon’s ELB is an exciting mix of well-executed infrastructure 2.0 and the proper application of SOA, but it takes a lot of work to make anything infrastructure look that easy. The notion of Elastic Load Balancing, as recently brought to public attention by Amazon’s offering of the capability, is nothing new. The basic concept is pure Infrastructure 2.0 and the functionality offered via the API has long been available on several application delivery controllers for many years. In fact, looking through the options for Amazon’s offering leaves me feeling a bit, oh, 1999. As if load balancing hasn’t... posted @ Thursday, October 15, 2009 3:50 AM | Feedback (3)

Paradox: When Cloud Is Both the Wrong and the Right Solution Cloud offers an appealing “pay only for what you use” that makes it hard to resist. Paying on a per-usage hour basis sounds like a good deal, until you realize that your site is pretty much “always on” because of bots, miscreants, and users. In other words, you’re paying for 24x7x365 usage, baby, and that’s going to add up. Ironically, the answer to this problem is … cloud. Don and I occasionally discuss how much longer we should actually run applications on our own hardware. After all, the applications we’re running are generally pretty light-weight, and only see... posted @ Tuesday, October 13, 2009 4:30 AM | Feedback (1)

The Thing Private Clouds Can Do that Public Clouds Can’t When an admin brags they can do some task with their eyes closed there may be hidden process inefficiencies that orchestration can uncover. But the orchestration in a public cloud is effectively done for you, with little opportunity to design based on your organization’s operational processes. Orchestration in a private cloud, however, is all up to you. I was doing the laundry a few weeks ago, folding the clothes before I took them upstairs and hung them up when I realized just what I was doing. What I had been doing for, well, a very long time... posted @ Friday, October 09, 2009 3:11 AM | Feedback (8)

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Makes Internal Cloud bursting Reality How to leverage a “private virtual cloud” such as Amazon VPC with your own dynamic infrastructure A couple of blog posts on Amazon’s recent announcement of its VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) have made much of the fact that the resources available within Amazon’s cloud via VPC aren’t public. These same commentaries seem to believe that this makes the resources not very valuable. One author called it a “terrible” implementation because “users can’t expose clients to the internet and can’t assign them IP addresses.” I understand how some might reach that conclusion if they... posted @ Monday, August 31, 2009 3:48 AM | Feedback (1)

Amazon Compliance Confession About Customers, Not Itself Amazon EC2 and S3 are no more or less safe than they were last week despite hype around PCI compliance admission The recent admission/announcement that “Amazon EC2 is not PCI compliant” (this is not exactly true, but we’ll get to that later) has set off a rush of blogs, articles, and tweets that say, in effect, EC2 is no longer “safe”. But a lack of compliance does not make Amazon any more less safe than achieving PCI compliance makes a site more safe. Ladies and gentlemen of the Internet, I submit as proof the... posted @ Tuesday, August 18, 2009 3:29 AM | Feedback (2)

Get your SaaS off my cloud Why architecture matters not only to security but to the future of cloud computing It seems the phrase “in the cloud”, sadly, has become a marketing-hyped euphemism for “the Internet.” I say sadly because the use of cloud to refer to every and any service delivered over the Internet dirties up the cloud. It obscures the intent of cloud computing and makes it difficult for technologists in the trenches to get a handle on how cloud – both external and internal – can provide benefits and solutions to problems they have right now. The very loose use of the... posted @ Monday, May 11, 2009 3:38 AM | Feedback (11)

We’re sorry. The IPv4 address you are trying to reach has been disconnected. We know what the problem is. We know what the solution is. So why aren’t we doing something about it? Every year, around April Fools’ day, someone pulls out the old “Internet Spring Cleaning” gag. For those of us who are not technical neophytes or have been “online” long enough, the joke is amusing but not nearly as much as when it originally appeared many, many, many years ago. Is it possible, though, that one day the old “the Internet needs to be rebooted” gag might be real? That in order to get from here... posted @ Monday, April 27, 2009 3:23 AM | Feedback (3)

How to recoup the costs associated with long URLs and variable names Long URLs and variable names increase transfer size which wastes bandwidth and money o3 magazine has a great article on the impact of long URLs on bandwidth; specifically on how much bandwidth is wasted by excessively long URLs and variable names within HTML, JavaScript, and CSS selectors. What the author does not mention, and he really should, is that wasting bandwidth can translate into wasted dollars, as well. This is particularly true of applications that might be hosted in a cloud environment, as well as those delivered across WAN links provisioned with bursting capabilities above limits for which organizations are... posted @ Tuesday, March 31, 2009 4:13 AM | Feedback (5)

Approaching cloud standards with end-user focus only is full of fail If you’re looking at standardization and interoperability efforts only as they relate to providers or end-users then you’re not thinking long term nor are you really considering the potential of cloud computing and virtualization to revolutionize data center architectures. In a nutshell, if you equate “cloud” with “providers like Amazon and Google” then you don’t really get the big picture. While the ultimate goal of cloud specifications and standards is to enable interoperability and ease of migration for the end-user, approaching the creation of such standards from the point of view of the end-user will result in a... posted @ Monday, February 23, 2009 4:06 AM | Feedback (4)

SOA isn't dead, but its standards are The spirit of SOA and its core principles are still very much alive, but we can't call it SOA any more because, well, SOA is (pretty much) officially dead, at least according to folks on the tubes and we all know that if you hear it on the tubes it must be true. Anne Thomas Manes of the Burton Group declared SOA officially dead on January 1, 2009, but maintains that "although the word “SOA” is dead, the requirement for service-oriented architecture is stronger than ever." Ms. Manes blames the death of SOA on the failure to... posted @ Wednesday, January 07, 2009 9:07 AM | Feedback (1)

Cloud Computing: Will data integration be its Achilles Heel? Wesley:  Now, there may be problems once our app is in the cloud. Inigo:  I'll say.  How do I find the data?  Once I do, how do I integrate it with the other apps?  Once I integrate it, how do I replicate it? If you remember this somewhat altered scene from the Princess Bride, you also remember that no one had any answers for Inigo. That's apropos of this discussion, because no one has any good answers for this version of Inigo either. And no, a holocaust cloak is not going to save the day this... posted @ Tuesday, December 09, 2008 4:12 AM | Feedback (6)

As a Service: The many faces of the cloud Last month I happened across this amusing, and ironic, poem describing the dichotomy that exists in trying to define cloud computing. Go ahead and read it, I'll wait, it's worth the time. Seriously. I am not going to define cloud computing again. I've done that already and the point of this discussion is not what is cloud computing but rather how the cloud is beginning to separate into distinct models, each serving a different set of needs. The common theme between these models is "as a service". Some "thing" traditionally relegated to the local IT data center is... posted @ Thursday, November 20, 2008 3:12 AM | Feedback (1)

Cloud Computing: The Last Definition You'll Ever Need The VirtualDC has asked the same question that's been roaming about in every technophile's head since the beginning of the cloud computing craze: what defines a cloud? We've chatted internally about this very question, which led to Alan's questions in a recent blog post. Lori and others have suggested that the cloud comes down to how a service is delivered rather than what is delivered, and I’m fine with that as a long term definition or categorization. I don’t think it’s narrow enough, though, to answer the question “Is Gmail a cloud service?” because... posted @ Wednesday, November 05, 2008 6:53 AM | Feedback (6)

Cloud Computing: It's the destination, not the journey that is important How the cloud acts and is used is more important than where it physically resides Cloud computing and SOA suffer from the same lack of prescriptive architectures. They are defined by how they act rather than what they are, or from what they are composed. They are, in a way, existential technology that cannot be confined to a simple architectural diagram but require instead a set of properties or ways of acting in order to be recognized. To over simplify and paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre's concepts of existentialism, we define ourselves (mankind) through our actions. To apply this to... posted @ Monday, November 03, 2008 3:29 AM | Feedback (0)

Bursting the Cloud The cloud computing craze is leading to some interesting new terms. Cloudware and cloudbursting are two terms I particularly like for their ability to describe specific computing models based on cloud computing. Today we're going to look at cloudbursting, which is basically a new twist on an old concept. Cloudbursting appears to be to marry the traditional safe enterprise computing model with cloud computing; in essence, bursting into the cloud when necessary or using the cloud when additional compute resources are required temporarily. Jeff at Amazon Web Services Blog talks about the inception of this term as applied... posted @ Wednesday, September 03, 2008 5:10 AM | Feedback (1)

Why can't clouds be inside (the data center)? Ken Oestreich of the Fountainhead blog has an interesting take on cloud computing. Ken cites many examples of cloud computing experts who essentially claim that cloud computing cannot be done "inside" the data center. Then he postulates that yes, yes in fact it can. In general, I agree with Ken's assessment. A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system is still a CRM whether it's hosted inside the data center or remotely by a SaaS (Software as a Service) provider. Similarly, a cloud is still a cloud regardless of whether it's implemented in someone else's data center, such as Amazon,... posted @ Tuesday, August 19, 2008 9:40 AM | Feedback (7)

Compliance in the Cloud Who is responsible for security in the cloud? Let's say you just developed a web app through which customers can order widgets. You're pretty sure your widgets are going to be the hit of the year and you want to make sure that you don't suffer outages and performance issues like many retailers have in the past, especially around Black Friday. So you've decided to take advantage of the fact that a cloud computing provider can and will shoulder the responsibility for scaling your application even in the face of hundreds of thousands of customers knocking on your... posted @ Tuesday, August 05, 2008 4:56 AM | Feedback (0)

I say cloud, you say grid With more and more focus on cloud computing one theme seems to be running consistently: the "cloud" is public, and anyone who claims to be building a "private" cloud, a.k.a. mini-cloud or enterprise cloud, is just doing it wrong. John Foley @ InformationWeek has it mostly right when he says that what's important is the technology. The Rise of Enterprise-Class Cloud Computing That's an oxymoron since cloud computing, by definition, happens outside of the corporate data center, but it's the technology that's important here, not the semantics. [emphasis added] ... posted @ Thursday, July 17, 2008 5:49 AM | Feedback (6)