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cloud computing
There are 160 entries for the tag cloud computing
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Scaling applications that include AJAX and non-AJAX components may require more than just tuning your web server A common problem after deploying a Web 2.0 AJAX-based application shows itself through poor performance or lower capacity on the server, often both. Web serving tuning is almost always the first step in improving performance and capacity, but the inherently competing behavior of AJAX-requests and “normal” HTTP requests quickly becomes problematic as well. Tune for the AJAX requests and performance of regular old HTTP requests suffers. Tune for regular old HTTP requests, and performance of AJAX-requests suffer. This is...
posted @ Monday, February 08, 2010 4:35 AM |
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We seem on the verge of repeating the mistakes associated with failed SOA implementations: ignoring the larger issue of architecture. Everyone – from pundit to public – is asking the same question: “Where are the network virtual appliances?” But fewer people seem to be asking a question that needs to go hand-in-hand with that one: “Where are the architectural guidelines to support deployment of network virtual appliances?” SOA has been deemed by many to be a failure in part because it lacked true architectural guidance. Architects were simply unable – whether by lack of skills or training or...
posted @ Thursday, February 04, 2010 4:43 AM |
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Emerging architectures are conflating responsibilities up and down the application stack. Who is responsible for integration when services reside in the network? While preparing for an upcoming panel I’m moderating at Cloud Connect (in the “New Infrastructure” track), the panelists and I had a great discussion on the topics we wanted to discuss in the session. During that discussion it became increasingly clear that an interesting phenomenon has been occurring: the conflation of network and application responsibilities in the traditional “stack.” Much of this inversion is absolutely necessary for emerging models of networking and computing...
posted @ Tuesday, February 02, 2010 3:36 AM |
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Which of course are like Ogres. They’re big, chaotic, and have lots of layers of virtualization. In discussions involving cloud it is often the case that someone will remind you that “virtualization” is not required to build a cloud. But that’s only partially true, as some layers of virtualization are, in fact, required to build out a cloud computing environment. It’s only “operating system” virtualization that is not required. Problem is unlike the term “cloud”, “virtualization” has come to be associated with a single, specific kind of virtualization; specifically, it’s almost exclusively used to refer...
posted @ Monday, February 01, 2010 3:52 AM |
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I haven’t heard the term “graceful degradation” in a long time, but as we continue to push the limits of data centers and our budgets to provide capacity it’s a concept we need to revisit. You might have heard that Twitter was down (again) last week. What you might not have heard (or read) is some interesting crunchy bits about how Twitter attempts to maintain availability by degrading capabilities gracefully when services are over capacity. “Twitter Down, Overwhelmed by Whales” from Data Center Knowledge offered up the juicy details: ...
posted @ Wednesday, January 27, 2010 2:55 AM |
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Nope. Wasn’t under the couch. In fact it turns out it wasn’t even missing, it’s just been overlooked and might already be in your data center. As more organizations continue to make virtualization a core part of their overall application deployment strategy they are finding challenges associated with managing and, apparently, optimizing their newly created heterogeneous infrastructure. Kevin Fogarty, in “10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch in 2010”, writes of some of the challenges with virtualization to come in the next year. One of those challenges is, apparently, optimization of resources across physical and virtual assets, at least...
posted @ Tuesday, January 26, 2010 4:02 AM |
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The benefits of automation and orchestration do not come solely from virtualization. Virtualization has benefits, there is no arguing that. But let’s not get carried away and attribute all the benefits associated with cloud computing and automation to one member of the “game changing” team: virtualization. I recently read one of the all-too-common end-of-year prediction blogs on virtualization and 2010 that managed to say with what I think was a straight face that virtualization of the network is what makes it “fluid”. From: 2010 Virtualization Predictions - The Year the Network Becomes Fluid and Virtual ...
posted @ Tuesday, January 19, 2010 3:08 AM |
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There’s been increasing interest in Infrastructure 2.0 of late that’s encouraging to those of us who’ve been, well, pushing it uphill against the focus on cloud computing and virtualization for quite some time now. What’s been the most frustrating about bringing this concept to awareness has been that cloud computing is one of the most tangible examples of both what infrastructure 2.0 is and what it can do and virtualization is certainly one of the larger technological drivers of infrastructure 2.0 capable solutions today. So despite the frustration associated with cloud computing and virtualization stealing the stage,...
posted @ Monday, January 18, 2010 3:35 AM |
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Cloud computing can’t assure availability of applications in the face of a physical network outage, can it? Cloud computing providers focus on providing an efficient, scalable environment in which applications can be deployed and provide for their availability with load balancing services and health monitoring and elastic scalability. But it can’t assure availability of your network. The Rackspace outage late last year was allegedly caused by a peering issue. You know, a network, problem. UPDATE: “The issues resulted from a problem with a router used for peering and backbone connectivity located outside...
posted @ Wednesday, January 13, 2010 5:46 AM |
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Infrastructure 2.0 enabled application delivery platforms have more than a few things in common with the Transformers. Like Autobots, there’s more to it than meets the eye. If you’re familiar with the mythology of the Transformers – and perhaps even if you aren’t – you know that they key attribute of Transformers is their ability to take on “alternate modes” such as cars, trucks, and winged vehicles simply by scanning the object and then adapting their own form to match. One of the key premises of Infrastructure 2.0 is also the ability of network and...
posted @ Tuesday, January 12, 2010 3:02 AM |
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The wrong load balancing algorithm can be detrimental to the performance and scalability of your web applications. When you’re mixing and matching virtual or physical servers you need to take care with how you configure your Load balancer – and that includes cloud-based load balancing services. Load balancers do not at this time, unsurprisingly, magically choose the right algorithm for distributing requests for a given environment. One of the nice things about a load balancing solution that comes replete with application-specific templates is that all the work required to determine the optimal configuration for the load balancer and...
posted @ Tuesday, January 05, 2010 3:50 AM |
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Here comes St. Beaker and Santa Cloud … Twas two weeks past deployment and all through the house Echoed taps on a keyboard and clicks from a mouse The apps were all running inside VMware In hopes compute resources soon would they share. The dashboard showed statuses green and not red our admins had thoughts of going home in their heads The director was ready to it a wrap and I began...
posted @ Wednesday, December 23, 2009 6:06 AM |
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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 |
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Like peanut-butter and jelly, cloud computing and application acceleration are just better together. Ann Bednarz of Network World waxes predictive regarding 2010 trends in application delivery and WAN optimization in WAN optimization in 2010. One of the interesting tidbits she offers from research firm Gartner is growth in the application acceleration market: Second, the research firm is predicting a return to modest growth for the application acceleration market in 2010. Gartner is forecasting a compound annual growth rate of 12.22%, with 2014 revenue of $4.27 billion. This, when viewed alongside...
posted @ Thursday, December 17, 2009 3:21 AM |
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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 |
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An interesting thing happens when you combine toolkits like XAJAX and SAJAX and the ability to perform content-based routing: you can actually achieve function-level load balancing in both cloud-based and traditional architectures. As you might have discovered from previous posts mentioning it, I still do web application development to support hobby interests in my (very little) spare time. I’m currently in love with the XAJAX library, which has made development of what is supposed to be a very interactive application nearly effortless. I’m also very much enamored of load balancing/application delivery and cloud computing, specifically...
posted @ Wednesday, December 09, 2009 3:59 AM |
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Beware the danger of building out isolated network and application network infrastructures in the cloud lest we end up with silos from which it is difficult to escape. While writing a separate post on the business value of public versus private cloud computing investments I specifically called out the fact that infrastructure – virtual or physical – provisioned in a cloud environment is applicable only to that cloud environment; it really can’t be shared within the enterprise architecture or other public cloud computing environments, for that matter. That led to considering the impact...
posted @ Tuesday, December 08, 2009 3:31 AM |
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Ultimately the CAPEX vs OPEX arguments over public and private cloud computing are irrelevant. Business-value is the only metric that really counts. B renda Michelson, Principal of Elemental Links, writes “elemental cloud computing” recently tweeted: “100k buys way more public, than private, cloud computing power” which started a short but inspiring conversation on the subject centering around the observation that “cloud is the gift that keeps on giving.” That’s alluding to the fact that the compute power purchased in “the cloud” is an annual expense, unlike private, cloud computing power which requires renewal at...
posted @ Thursday, December 03, 2009 4:03 AM |
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There are many good reasons to go down the virtual infrastructure road. The illusion that it’s cheaper than dedicated hardware solutions is not one of them.
I was reading an interesting predictive article on WAN optimization that contends that virtualized WAN optimization controllers (WOC) are, well, just better than sliced bread. One of the reasons why the author opined this way was presented as the great benefits of horizontal scalability (linear) in cloud computing environments.
Savings and scalability. This approach ensures that there is no need for dedicated hardware to support WAN optimization, saving on CAPEX and OPEX. Cost...
posted @ Tuesday, December 01, 2009 3:52 AM |
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Sometimes the best answer to a problem is to hit the reset button, but it should probably be the last answer, not the first. My cohort Pete Silva attended the 2009 Cloud Computing and Virtualization Conference & Expo and offered up a summary of one of the sessions he enjoyed (‘Cloud Security - It's Nothing New; It Changes Everything!’ (pdf)) in a recent post, “Virtualization is Real” One of the sessions I enjoyed was ‘Cloud Security - It's Nothing New; It Changes Everything!’ (pdf) from Glenn Brunette, a Distinguished Engineer and Chief...
posted @ Friday, November 20, 2009 4:15 AM |
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When you look at the success of some very proprietary solutions and the loyalty with which customers defend them, you have to wonder if vendor lock-in is really as bad a thing as we sometimes make it sound. The subtext in the discussions around data portability and interoperability in general in cloud computing is really about vendor lock-in. Those driving efforts to come up with solutions that allow customers to pack up their data and head to another provider are primarily concerned about the dangers of being locked-in to a single vendor solution. ...
posted @ Friday, November 13, 2009 3:47 AM |
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These three things have a lot more in common than you might think and all three tend to evoke similar levels of frustration. A very real problem women face when shopping is this: no two brands define a size the same. If you usually wear a size 8 in “Brand X” you might actually wear a size 10 or 6 in “Brand Y”, depending on how the brand decided to define its sizing. Customers, women in this case, cannot count on consistency in sizes across brands. This makes shopping annoying because every time you change brands you’re never...
posted @ Thursday, November 12, 2009 4:05 AM |
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Cloud computing management functionality and standards are right now laser-focused on virtual machines, and most APIs include the ability to stop,start,launch,etc…at that level of the infrastructure. This is because the application is still insulated by its virtualized environment. The “depth” of management and standards efforts today stops at the hard shell of the virtualization layer and leaves the soft, chewy application center alone. This means nothing is really all that different for developers. But it could, and some might argue should, be different. The development of a web-application for a cloud computing environment today is really...
posted @ Monday, November 09, 2009 3:57 AM |
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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 |
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Cloud computing is, at its core, about using resources in the most operational and financially efficient manner possible. It’s about spreading resources around and sharing them to achieve greater scalability with fewer investments in hardware and software. But what if you aren’t moving to cloud? Or virtualization? Or perhaps you are, but the benefits won’t be really seen until you actually get enough resources shared across your organization. Isn’t there any other way to better utilize the resources you have now to improve the bottom line? Yes, yes, there is. And the best part is that these methods...
posted @ Thursday, October 29, 2009 3:30 AM |
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Carrying over the provisioning and capacity planning techniques used in a traditional data center to cloud computing negates the full power of the Force cloud computing. One of the benefits of cloud computing is supposed to be efficiency, particularly in the utilization of compute resources. Over-provisioning of compute resources has long been one way in which IT combats the need for scalability and availability of applications but this often leaves a large percentage of compute resources unused. The utilization rule once employed as a means to ensure availability and performance of applications, i.e. no device...
posted @ Wednesday, October 28, 2009 3:32 AM |
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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 |
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There is a common myth that the reason legacy code continues to run in businesses around the world is that no one understands it; that IT and businesses are afraid to replace it because they don’t know what it does. Once again, living in the mainframe capital of the world (the insurance industry heavy midwest), I get to talk to IT folks who deal with legacy software and hardware all the time. Do not doubt that they know exactly what that legacy software does and how it works, and perhaps frightening to proponents of change and the...
posted @ Monday, October 26, 2009 4:09 AM |
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Paul Miller, who pens Cloud of Data, had an interesting perspective during a chat this week on what effect infrastructure upgrade cycles might have on cloud computing adoption. Paul postulated that as these servers fail and organizations have to make the decision to replace or not replace them that cloud computing becomes a more viable option. That seems a reasonable assumption, especially if the primary reason organizations are evaluating cloud computing is driven by a desire to reduce costs. But in a recent post Paul posits this might not be the case, citing a recent ongoing study from Avanade in...
posted @ Friday, October 23, 2009 5:39 AM |
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“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 |
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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 |
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Spectacular “cloud” failures over the past few weeks have raised the hue and cry for portability and interoperability across clouds for data.The problem is that the cry is based on the false assumption that a “cloud service” is the same as an “application service.” Apparently Microsoft felt Google and Amazon were getting too much attention with their recent outages and decided to join the game. The absolute loss of data for thousands lots and lots of T-Mobile Sidekick users is regrettable and yes someone needs to address such issues but that someone is not a standards group or...
posted @ Monday, October 12, 2009 9:06 AM |
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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 |
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The term “Infrastructure 2.0” seems to be as well understood as the term “cloud computing.” It means different things to different people, apparently, and depends heavily on the context and roles of those involved in the conversation. This shouldn’t be surprising; the term “Web 2.0” is also variable and often depends on the context of the conversation. The use of the versioning moniker is meant, in both cases however, to represent a fundamental shift in the way the technologies are leveraged by people. In the case of Web 2.0 it’s about the shift toward interactive, integrated web applications used to...
posted @ Thursday, October 08, 2009 4:36 AM |
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A question I often hear is “Why don’t you just move load balancing/application delivery into a virtual appliance model?” My answer is almost always “That’s the wrong question.” The question that should be asked is “What are the potential impacts to the infrastructure and application?” Because the whole point of deploying an application delivery solution – virtual appliance or hardware – is about improving some facet of the infrastructure in order to better deliver your applications. So in order to determine whether using a virtual appliance is a good idea or not you have to ask what the impacts might...
posted @ Tuesday, October 06, 2009 3:43 AM |
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Malicious links served up in a browser are OS agnostic. They don’t care about the OS because the target is people, not technology. In response to the problem of links and trust put forth in a recent post a reader replies that the answer to “evil links” is simply to run Linux instead of Windows. the very best solution is to run something other than windows, and with ubuntu at its current state of maturity (and free-ness), why wouldn't you? I won’t disagree with the assessment of Ubuntu and its current...
posted @ Friday, October 02, 2009 5:04 AM |
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Operational efficiency in the cloud comes in part from automation and orchestration as well as from the outsourcing of management and maintenance of the hardware. While you can’t achieve the latter without cloud or hosting externally, you can realize a lot of the same efficiencies in a traditional architecture just by leveraging existing collaborative capabilities of infrastructure 2.0. Glenn Gruber of Software Industry Insights in “Who’ll Be the First to Offer Cash for Infrastructure” (which is a great read in general) says: And for those who are thinking about evaluating a private cloud...
posted @ Tuesday, September 29, 2009 4:12 AM |
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If one of the drivers for moving to cloud-based applications is reducing costs, you should think twice about the placement of application security solutions. There’s almost no way to avoid an argument on this subject so I won’t tiptoe around it: web application security in the cloud is better accomplished at the edge, with a web application firewall or similar solution, than it is inside the cloud in the application. This is true regardless of whether the cloud model is public or private; basically if you’re being charged on a per-usage basis then placement of web application security...
posted @ Monday, September 28, 2009 3:50 AM |
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Infrastructure 2.0 requires collaboration. Collaboration requires the ability to communicate. The ability to communicate requires integration. But how that integration will happen may shape the future of infrastructure and network architecture. There is a growing recognition of the basic problems associated with the rapid rate of change inherent in on-demand architectures (cloud) and the complexity that comes from virtualized data centers. Challenges such as IP address and application management, visibility, and last but not least, integration. Yes, that most dreaded of all technology concepts has finally come to the network. The...
posted @ Friday, September 25, 2009 3:43 AM |
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Isolation of resources in “the cloud” is moving providers toward hosted data centers and away from shared resource computing. Do we need to go back to the future and re-examine mainframe computing as a better model for isolated applications capable of sharing resources? James Urquhart in “Enterprise cloud computing coming of age” gives a nice summary of several “private” cloud offerings; that is, isolated and dedicated resources contracted out to enterprises for a fee. James ends his somewhat prosaic discussion of these offerings with a note that this “evolution” is just the beginning of a long process. ...
posted @ Monday, September 21, 2009 3:21 AM |
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There’s more than one way to address the rapid rate of change in infrastructure supporting a dynamic environment. We spend a lot of time talking about how software and systems and standards are the ultimate solution to addressing the rapid rate of change in the association between applications and IP addresses in a dynamic infrastructure. But sometimes you have look down the stack to find a simpler, more economical and honestly, elegant, answer to the challenge of managing the problem associated with virtualized and cloud computing architectures. We need to take another look at the link layer...
posted @ Friday, September 18, 2009 3:19 AM |
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How Infrastructure 2.0 might leverage publish-subscribe technology like PubSubHubub to enable portability of applications across clouds and data centers
Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. One of the topics surrounding cloud computing that continues to rear its ugly head is the problem of portability across clouds. Avoiding vendor lock-in has been problematic since the day the first line of proprietary code was written and cloud computing does nothing to address this. If anything, cloud makes this worse because one of its premises is that users (that’s you, IT staff) need not...
posted @ Monday, September 14, 2009 3:45 AM |
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Sharing is core to a successful cloud implementation but not something every organization does well. How do you encourage business stakeholders to play well with others? In most definitions of “cloud computing” there lies a central, key component: shared resources. It is the sharing of resources, in fact, through which many of the benefits of reduced operating expenses are supposed to be achieved. It is the sharing of resources – or perceived inability to share resources – that confounds some folks when discussing private cloud, although there are several ways in which sharing of resources can...
posted @ Friday, September 11, 2009 4:01 AM |
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Infrastructure 2.0 is not just about automation, but rather is about the orchestration of processes, which are actually two different things: the former is little more than advanced scripting, the latter requires participation and decision making on the part of the infrastructure involved. Automation is the process of codifying – usually through a scripting language but not always – a specific task. This task usually has one goal, though it may have several steps that have to be performed to accomplish it. An example would be “bring this server down for maintenance.” This may require quiescing connections...
posted @ Thursday, September 10, 2009 9:45 AM |
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A load balancing algorithm can make or break your application’s performance and availability It is a (wrong) belief that “users” of cloud computing and before that “users” of corporate data center infrastructure didn’t need to understand any of that infrastructure. Caution: proceed with infrastructure ignorance at the (very real) risk of your application’s performance and availability. Think I’m kidding? Stefan’s SOA & Enterprise Architecture Blog has a detailed and very explanatory post on Load Balancing Strategies for SOA Infrastructures that may change your mind. This post grew, apparently, out of some (perceived) bad behavior on...
posted @ Tuesday, September 08, 2009 4:11 AM |
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Leveraging Java EE and dynamic infrastructure to enable a shared resource, on-demand scalable infrastructure – without server virtualization Many pundits and experts allude to architectures that are cloud-like in their ability to provide on-demand scalability but do not – I repeat do not – rely on virtualization, i.e. virtual machines. But rarely – if ever – is this possibility described. So everyone says it can be done, but no one wants to tell you how. Maybe that’s because it appears, on the surface, to not be cloud. And perhaps there’s truth to that appearance. It is more...
posted @ Wednesday, September 02, 2009 4:03 AM |
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Why would miscreants bother with other routes when they can go straight to the source? People concerned with security of the cloud are generally worried about illegitimate access of the applications and data they may deploy in the cloud. That’s a valid concern given the needs of certain vertical industries to comply with privacy-focused regulations like HIPAA and PCI DSS. It’s an extremely valid concern given research and studies showing just how vulnerable most web sites and applications are. Hint: it’s more than you probably think it is, and it’s likely your application is vulnerable...
posted @ Tuesday, September 01, 2009 3:32 AM |
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F5 and VMware demonstrate live migration of a virtualized application across clouds without downtime or user disruption Cloud is reaching the peak of possibilities and that (often) means just more paper solutions. You know the ones; the ones that exist only on paper (or in blogs as the case may be). Those paper solutions need to exist because the ideas need to come first either out of necessity, i.e. to solve a specific problem, or out of a desire to find new ways to leverage emerging technology, like virtualization. But still, you’d like to see some of these...
posted @ Monday, August 31, 2009 4:33 AM |
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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 |
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DNS wasn’t meant to handle hybrid cloud architectures and on-demand routing When you start distributing services (workloads, applications) across multiple locations, a la cloud balancing, and those locations may change on a frequent basis you begin to run into problems with finding those services and scaling the rate of change effectively. DNS was designed to resolve host names, but never expected that the same host name might resolve to one of two, three, or four IP addresses all within the span of five minutes. If we want to support a rapid rate of change, we’d...
posted @ Friday, August 28, 2009 4:29 AM |
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Cloud changes how we deliver applications but we’re still delivering applications With all the hype around cloud it’s easy to get caught up in deployment models and architectures and how much money it is/is not going to save us and, of course, with the cool factor that always surrounds such innovation. But when we get our heads too far up in the clouds we forget what we’re really doing: delivering applications. Whether it’s thin-client, fat-client, browser-based, client/server, three-tier, n-tier, traditional, .NET, Java EE, or cloud we are still all focused on the same goal: deliver an application. ...
posted @ Thursday, August 27, 2009 3:57 AM |
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Secure, optimized tunnels to a remote site, e.g. the cloud. Haven’t we been here before? In the continuing discussion around Business Intelligence in the cloud comes a more better (yes I did, in fact, say that) discussion of the reasons why you’d want to put BI in the cloud and, appropriately, some of the challenges. As previously mentioned, BI data sets are, as a rule, huge. Big. Bigger than big. Ginormous, even. One of the considerations, then, if you’re going to leverage a cloud-based business intelligence offering – or any offering in which very, very large data sets/files...
posted @ Wednesday, August 26, 2009 3:47 AM |
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Cloud providers know the secret to a successful cloud computing implementation is integration between the infrastructure and virtualization Ever notice that cloud providers are v e r y reluctant to reveal on what foundation their cloud computing architectures are laid? Most providers don’t want to share their “secret sauce” because, well, then everyone else could get into the game as well. While it is certainly true that the infrastructure – and specifically the application delivery infrastructure – you choose to lay the foundation for a cloud computing architecture can affect your ability to succeed and innovate...
posted @ Tuesday, August 25, 2009 10:17 AM |
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The real power behind cloud is processes, and those don’t come out of a box VMworld, in case you’ve been out of touch, is approaching fairly quickly. As with any trade show/conference there’s likely to be a lot of announcements about this and that and oh, of course, that too. What is interesting about cloud computing and virtualization is that most of the really exciting announcements are not going to be about new products or new features. You heard me, they aren’t going to be about new products or features. The foundations for cloud...
posted @ Tuesday, August 25, 2009 3:41 AM |
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Survey says IT still doesn’t agree on the definition of cloud – private or public – but everybody is doing it Every organization with a stake in cloud computing’s predicted billions of dollar market is interested in understanding what it is IT wants – and needs – for cloud. The only way to find out, in most cases, is to ask. So ask we did. We asked 250 IT managers, network architects and cloud service providers not only about how they define cloud computing, but how widespread adoption of the disparate models of cloud really...
posted @ Monday, August 24, 2009 7:32 AM |
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You’re going to need a dynamic infrastructure lest you effectively negate the gains achieved by higher VM densities In the continuing saga of “do more with less” comes a new phrase that’s being tossed around: VM density. For example, VMware puts forth the notion that the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of virtualization technology must consider VM density, saying, “Density matters in a many-to-one relationship.” VMware illustrates this concept in the context of TCO, but in general an increasing number of solutions are beginning to tout not only the benefits of higher VM density, but of their solutions ability...
posted @ Monday, August 24, 2009 4:07 AM |
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Idle resources will always need to exist, especially in a cloud architecture With IT focused on efficiency – for reduction in operating expenses and in the interests of creating a greener computing center – there’s a danger that we’ll attempt to achieve 100% efficiency. You know, the data center in which no compute resources are wasted; all are applied toward performing some task – whether administrative, revenue generating, development cycles, or business-related – and no machine is allowed to sit around idle. Because, after all, idleness is the devil’s playground, isn’t it? But before...
posted @ Wednesday, August 19, 2009 3:17 AM |
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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 |
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I was recording a podcast last week on the subject of cloud with an emphasis on security and of course we talked in general about cloud and definitions. During the discussion the subject of “private cloud” computing was raised and one of the participants asked a very good question: Some of the core benefits of cloud computing come from shared resources. In a private cloud, where does the sharing of resources come from? I had to stop and think about that one for a second, because it’s not something I’ve really thought about before. But it was...
posted @ Monday, August 17, 2009 3:34 AM |
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Without processes the cloud is not a cloud So you’ve virtualized your application infrastructure using VMware or Microsoft or the “virtualization solution de jour.” You probably also virtualized the application access via an application delivery solution so you can provide scalability on-demand. You might have even virtualized your storage to make it more efficient. Basically, you’re all ready to go and operators are standing by … And therein lies the problem: operators are standing by. The on-demand piece of your little private cloud is almost entirely managed by human beings, which means...
posted @ Friday, August 14, 2009 3:17 AM |
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Simultaneously one of the best use-cases for cloud as well as the worst. What’s IT to do? David Linthicum, SOA and cloud pundit and all-around interesting technology guy, recently pointed out a short post on business intelligence (BI) vendors joining forces with the cloud to offer cloud-based BI services. Four open-source and proprietary vendors on Wednesday announced a new partnership resulting in a cloud-based BI (business intelligence) stack. Jaspersoft and Talend will respectively lend their open-source BI and data-integration technologies to the integrated offering, which also employs Vertica's analytic database...
posted @ Thursday, August 13, 2009 4:58 AM |
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Why Carr’s analogy doesn’t describe today’s cloud environments and how SOA can get us closer to what he describes Back when cloud first starting drifting in to obscure the computing landscape there were a lot of parallels drawn between it and grid, and a lot of analogies used to explain the concept behind it. Cloud computing is most often analogized using Nicolas Carr’s analogy of the cloud as an electrical grid; that’s always bothered me at almost a visceral level. But I could never articulate why well enough and a lot of smart people told me that if I...
posted @ Monday, August 10, 2009 3:57 AM |
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This isn’t all or nothing – focus on the right cloud model for each application and not the entire data center There’s a lot of discussion about why you should choose one cloud computing model over another and all of them miss the point entirely. This isn’t a mutually exclusive deal; it doesn’t have to be just one model chosen. In fact it shouldn’t be. Data centers aren’t comprised of single types of applications. There’s custom applications, deployed sometimes on well-known packaged platforms and in other cases on open source or lesser known platforms. There’s packaged...
posted @ Thursday, August 06, 2009 4:31 AM |
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When you’re thinking about deploying an application it would be good to remember Yoda’s words regarding the Sith: Always two there are, a master and an apprentice. ALWAYS TWO THERE ARE Like Sith Lords, there should always be two instances of any given application available. Just in case. And that doesn’t mean two virtual servers – unless each one is on a different piece of hardware. If you want to ensure availability then you absolutely must not confine your application to one piece of hardware. ...
posted @ Monday, August 03, 2009 4:26 AM |
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The concept of a server needs to go the way of the dodo One of the reasons I enjoy Twitter is that quite frequently – if you’re following the right people – you’ll see a tweet that is absolutely profound despite its simplicity and the constraints placed upon the author. Recently we were having a mini-discussion on Twitter regarding the definition of availability that elicited just such a golden nugget from botchagalupe: “Apps designed for a cloud should remove the ‘server’ concept.” First, I really like the use of the article “a” in...
posted @ Friday, July 31, 2009 3:41 AM |
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Context, it’s always about context (or the lack thereof) I received a call recently that most people have probably received: our banking institution just wanted to verify that yes, that was Don or I making purchases at midnight in Wisconsin and then later in Indiana and yet again that afternoon in Ohio. That’s a good thing, I’m sure, as they’re just trying to watch our back. But later in the day I tried to make a purchase and was, horror of horrors, denied. The bank, when called, seemed matter-of-fact about the situation. The security flag hadn’t been...
posted @ Wednesday, July 29, 2009 4:34 AM |
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Availability means more than the dread “d” word The focus on making servers unhackable to prevent service disruption (that’s such a politic way of saying the dread “d” word – downtime) is admirable but exposes the tendency of technical folks to go down rat holes when discussing application delivery challenges and specifically the challenge of assuring availability of applications and services. What generally seems to happen when we start talking about availability in the cloud is that we go down the rat hole of talking specifically about the cloud and not applications deployed...
posted @ Wednesday, July 22, 2009 2:57 AM |
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No, that isn’t a homophonic mistake. Dan directed my attention to an interesting article recently, “Are 3-tier web architecture models too rigid?” in which the author postulates that “maybe it is time to finally break out of the old 3-tier web architecture box and retire the concept…” In addition to a great mention of F5 and an “application delivery tier” in web architecture models (the concept of which deserves its very own blog post), the author inadvertently, I think, brings to the fore one of the reasons SOA might have failed to dominate the world: service...
posted @ Monday, July 13, 2009 3:22 AM |
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Can intercloud intelligence eliminate the impact of intercontinental latency? Ken has always posited that it would be not only kewl but highly efficient if your data center could “follow the sun.” We all know that application performance is affected – positively and negatively – by distance. So if you’re a global organization with one primary data center that means some folks are going to have to settle for poorer application performance. That pesky speed of light law absolutely must be obeyed, for now at least, and intercontinental traffic has high latency, period. So let’s introduce the...
posted @ Monday, July 06, 2009 3:10 AM |
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The importance of stress-testing in production Everyone is still a-twitter over the problems the web experienced last week right after the news of Michael Jackson’s death. There have been numerous stories on the fact that the Internet nearly fell over itself and died under the strain of trying to support the rush of millions of users as they queried, clicked, watched video, read blogs and news reports on the subject. The Internet itself, of course, was just fine. The infrastructure comprising our electronic highway was humming along, routing packets happily here and...
posted @ Wednesday, July 01, 2009 4:14 AM |
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I was chatting with my mother a couple weeks ago about cloud (she’s a used-to-be programmer turned project manager for a Fortune 500. Don’t look at me like that, I keep telling you it runs in the family) and one of the problems she lamented about was that folks don’t seem to understand how entrenched COBOL and the mainframe is in the organization. It’s so entrenched that given the choice between a client-server application and a COBOL application that did the same thing they chose the COBOL program because it was less expensive and they had the knowledge on staff...
posted @ Friday, June 26, 2009 2:50 AM |
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Whether you are aware of it or not, if you’re deploying applications in the cloud or building out your own “enterprise class” cloud, you’re going to be using load balancing. Horizontal scaling of applications is a fairly well understood process that involves (old skool) server virtualization of the network kind: making many servers (instances) look like one to the outside world. When you start adding instances to increase capacity for your application, load balancing necessarily gets involved as it’s the way in which horizontal scalability is implemented today. The fact that you may have already...
posted @ Thursday, June 25, 2009 3:14 AM |
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You can’t differentiate until you do something different Gartner analyst and cloud pundit Lydia Leong reminds us that without differentiation, all clouds look pretty much the same. “These are traits that it doesn’t take a genius to think of. Most are known requirements established through a decade and a half of hosting industry experience. If you want to differentiate, you need to get beyond them.” [emphasis added] She lists traits common to most cloud providers: premium equipment, VMWare-based, private VLANs, private connectivity, and co-located dedicated gear but doesn’t really get into...
posted @ Thursday, June 18, 2009 2:40 AM |
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Two steps forward, three steps back Every time there is a major shift in technology thought about architecture the question of how it will and should impact infrastructure arises. When SOA was the “next great thing” there was a spate of announcements regarding how infrastructure would not only support it but integrate into its ecosystem. This time it’s virtualization, and its impact on infrastructure both from a support standpoint and usage is getting a lot of mindshare. In a recent announcement around virtual network infrastructure Om Malik of GigaOm has some interesting commentary: As...
posted @ Tuesday, June 16, 2009 3:27 AM |
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How to optimize compute resources in a heterogeneous environment using weight/ratio-based load balancing Unless you’re starting from scratch your data center is full of physical servers of various and sundry sizes, colors, shapes, and compute resources. And even if you’re starting from scratch and you have beautiful racks of everything the same, it’s not likely to stay that way if for no other reason than, well, hardware moves on at an astonishing rate these days. So you’ve almost certainly got (or will have) a physically heterogeneous environment in terms of hardware compute resources. When you’re scaling...
posted @ Monday, June 15, 2009 4:25 AM |
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I’m heading out today for a little time off and so you’ll have to make due the rest of the week without any (new) words of wisdom from me. I know, try to pull yourself together. You’ll live, really, and I’ll be back Monday with something interesting, promise. While I’m out, you might consider checking out some of the blogs I follow myself on a regular basis. They’re always full of interesting tidbits and stories and wisdom on a variety of subjects, and if you don’t follow them yourself you might find something interesting in them. ...
posted @ Wednesday, June 10, 2009 4:25 AM |
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An interesting thing happened on the way to testing that application from the cloud. We broke the innertubes!
Pros and Cons of Application Testing in the Cloud
A firm wanted to test their application and need 100 browser instances. In the old days it would have required 100 machines -- that would be a massive undertaking. Even with hardware virtualization, you would need 5 to 10 machines, and there would be some complex configuration issues. However, by putting it all in the cloud, they were able to sync up 100 virtual instances of the browsers and take them down over...
posted @ Wednesday, June 10, 2009 3:24 AM |
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Balancing Cost, Performance, and Capacity in the Cloud There is a huge difference between provisioning applications to support capacity and provisioning them to support performance requirements. That as capacity increases performance decreases is one of the truisms of scalability that is likely to be one of the first axioms of cloud computing that will bite us in the proverbial rear-end while simultaneously reaching for our wallets. Alistair Croll of BitCurrent has a couple of great charts that illustrate this point perfectly. He then goes on to discuss how that affects cloud computing in “The cloud’s...
posted @ Tuesday, June 09, 2009 3:20 AM |
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Automating components is easy. It’s automating processes that’s hard. The premise that if you don’t have an infrastructure comprised solely of Infrastructure 2.0 components then you cannot realize an automated, on-demand data center is, in fact, wrong. While the capabilities of modern hardware that come with Infrastructure 2.0 such as a standards-based API able to be leveraged by automation systems certainly makes the task all the more simple, it is not the only way that components can be automated. In fact, “legacy” infrastructure has been automated for years using other mechanisms that can certainly be incorporated into the...
posted @ Monday, June 08, 2009 3:14 AM |
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When SOA was declared dead there was a spate of articles and blogs on why the architecture “died.” Most pundits came to the conclusion that like many innovations it wasn’t the technology to blame but rather people. Architects lacked the skills to properly leverage SOA; business stakeholders failed to look at SOA as a strategic architecture, choosing instead to use it as a tactical integration-solving solution; network and systems’ administrators did not understand the unique characteristics and issues a well-designed SOA raised within the network and on systems; and developers were loathe to “reuse” and “share” services despite alternate...
posted @ Thursday, June 04, 2009 4:07 AM |
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Google didn’t kill HTTP. Neither did Colonel Mustard or Professor Plum. In fact, HTTP is still very much alive. Okay, folks, it’s time to stop declaring the death of protocols/technologies prematurely. Please? Especially when such proclamations are clearly not representative of reality. From ElasticVapor :: Life in the Cloud In Google's announcement what I found most fascinating was the protocol they choose for the basis of their new realtime vision. It wasn't HTTP but instead XMPP was selected as the foundation for this decentralized and interoperable vision. What this means in...
posted @ Tuesday, June 02, 2009 3:47 AM |
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Cloud may change the definition of “business critical” applications
Google outages are rapidly becoming as passé as earthquakes to native Californians; unless it’s a really big one, no one really pays much attention. So it shouldn’t be surprising that Google’s latest “crash” (caused by some interesting routing problems, apparently) evinced an attitude of nonchalance from Stanley.
Who is Stanley? I don’t know, except that he was quite vocal about the outage and his opinion that he was “not really bothered by it.”
Google Crashes Again on Friday
Stanley Was wrote: Wednesday May 27 from around 8pm till shortly after midnight, I...
posted @ Monday, June 01, 2009 5:32 AM |
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Understanding the impact of compression on server resources and application performance While doing some research on a related topic, I ran across this question and thought “that deserves an answer” because it certainly seems like a no-brainer. If you want to decrease bandwidth – which subsequently decreases response time and improves application performance – turn on compression. After all, a large portion of web site traffic is text-based: CSS, JavaScript, HTML, RSS feeds, which means it will greatly benefit from compression. Typical GZIP compression affords at least a 3:1 reduction in size, with hardware-assisted compression yielding an average...
posted @ Wednesday, May 27, 2009 3:50 AM |
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There’s apparently been a bit of confusion over what, exactly, F5 thinks of cloud computing as an organization based on a recent blog post. I thought I’ve been fairly clear on where F5 stands in terms of cloud computing but I may be suffering what’s known as the “curse of knowledge”, which means I am so deeply entrenched in F5’s view of cloud that I forget that other people don’t have the luxury of that knowledge. So I’d like to take this opportunity to clear up any misconceptions that may be floating around and just set the record...
posted @ Tuesday, May 26, 2009 4:09 AM |
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The consensus seems to be, at least from the myriad surveys, studies, and research, that cloud as a model is the right answer, it’s just the location that’s problematic for most organizations. Organizations aren’t ignoring reality; they know there are real benefits associated with cloud computing. But they aren’t yet – and may never be – willing to give up control. And there are good reasons to maintain that control, from security to accountability to agility. But the “people” still want the benefits of cloud, so the question is: how do we put...
posted @ Thursday, May 14, 2009 3:27 AM |
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Risks with virtualization is same as it ever was but different Hoff makes a good point about cloud security last month in his “The Cloud is a Fickle Mistress: DDoS&M” which was, if I may quote, “it’s the oldies and goodies that will come back to haunt us.” In other words, it’s the well-known, well-understood protocol-based attacks of uncloud computing that will be problematic for cloud computing. Security in virtualized environments and “the cloud” is indeed the “same as it ever was.” And yet it’s different, too. COLLATERAL DAMAGE While it’s...
posted @ Tuesday, May 12, 2009 3:45 AM |
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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 |
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Don’t confuse computing services with infrastructure services. We aren’t there yet. The subtext to the cloud computing discussion is subtle, as is the wont of subtext. But it is clear that underlying all the concerns about cloud computing is a common theme: control. Whether we’re talking about reliability or security, it should be obvious if you’re reading between and beneath the lines that the biggest stumbling block to massive cloud adoption is the issue of control. There is a very real difference between on-demand computing and on-demand infrastructure. What the cloud provides now, and is described...
posted @ Thursday, May 07, 2009 3:11 AM |
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Brother, can you give a developer a hand? As the topology of networks delivering applications becomes increasingly complex it becomes more and more difficult to troubleshoot problems, especially for developers tasked with figuring out why their “application broke” in production when it was working just fine thank you very much in “DEV” and “QA.” It is rare, after all, that the production environment – including all the moving parts – is duplicated in development and testing environments. It is already difficult enough for developers to track down problems due to the complex nature of application infrastructure...
posted @ Wednesday, May 06, 2009 4:17 AM |
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Hint: It doesn’t actually have much to do with technology or products In case you hadn’t heard, a startup called Panda Security has introduced a cloud-based anti-virus offering. This set off a rift of articles and blogs discussing the solution itself and what it means and some who questioned whether ‘anti-virus’ even meant ‘security’ in the first place. But I’m not interested in that discussion except to say that folks need to be more careful about distinguish “cloud security” from “cloud-based security”. The former is about securing the cloud and its infrastructure, the latter about services hosted...
posted @ Monday, May 04, 2009 3:37 AM |
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The importance of context in solving the problems created by tying web applications to deeply rooted local metaphors (IP addresses). The relationship between IP addresses and web applications to most end-users is much like the metaphorical language of the Tamarians in Star Trek: The Next Generation “Darmok”. It is incomprehensible without the proper foundational concepts; to anyone who lacks the proper context. In the case of IP addresses and web applications that foundation is technological rather than the historical basis of the Tamarian’s metaphorical language. The diseconomy of scale inherent in our reliance on IP addresses...
posted @ Thursday, April 30, 2009 2:45 AM |
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You can’t afford not to invest in technologies that leverage virtualization to improve data center efficiency There’s an old adage that says you have to spend money to make money. In the data center these days this is more true than ever. You have to invest in technology capable of making your data center more efficient in order to make (save) money. A recent Robert Half Technology survey of 1400 CIOs indicates that data center efficiency and virtualization are top priorities. *CIOs were asked, "Which areas, if any, will your IT department be investing...
posted @ Tuesday, April 28, 2009 3:00 AM |
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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 |
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Automation isn’t some special brand of soup and there’s no “automation nazi” who can deny access to its benefits. The recent McKinsey report on cloud computing has pundits everywhere choking on their donuts and scrambling to dispute the report’s findings, which essentially end up saying “cloud ain’t cheaper.” I’m not going to rehash the arguments. I’m not going to analyze the report. But I am going to dig into a few comments on the report by Thorsten at RightScale who started off by saying: “Its claim that cloud computing (in the...
posted @ Wednesday, April 22, 2009 3:18 AM |
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Leveraging virtualization as a means to create a specialized architecture can realize significant gains in performance and IT efficiency With all the talk about “packaging up applications” in a virtual machine and shipping them off to the cloud, it almost sounds as if virtualization might lead us to a return to architecting monolithic applications. The idea of packaging up everything you need to run an application in a virtual container and relieving the worries about connectors and adapters and integration is certainly appealing. But let’s take a step back from the virtualization craze as it relates to...
posted @ Thursday, April 09, 2009 3:34 AM |
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Finding new life for SOA in the cloud We’ve been having quite a few discussions with analysts over the past few months on the subject of “cloud”. The interesting thing about these discussions is the vast array of points of view from which those analysts are viewing “cloud”. Some are focused on the network aspects, others on pricing/differentiation, and some are even very focused on what “cloud” means to applications – and the organizations that will, allegedly, take advantage of the cloud as a means of application deployment. One such analyst is Daryl Plummer of Gartner. Daryl...
posted @ Tuesday, April 07, 2009 3:37 AM |
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One of the greatest strengths of the Cloud is that, like the Internet, it knows no boundaries. It crosses industry and international boundaries as if they do not exist. But as is often the case, your greatest strength can also be your greatest weakness. Take Google, for example, and it’s myriad Cloud-based application offerings. A new complaint made by Epic (Electronic Privacy Information Center) to the US Federal Trade Commission urges the regulatory agency to “consider shutting down Google’s services until it establishes safeguards for protecting confidential information.” From a recent FT.com article: ...
posted @ Thursday, March 26, 2009 5:47 AM |
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There is no evidence, no research, no surveys that indicate the cloud is, or ever will be, ready to completely outsource an organization’s data center. There’s no reason to even believe that’s the goal of cloud providers, though it might seem a logical conclusion. So making outrageous claims about the capabilities of the cloud, and the relevance of the data center, does no one any good. What’s got me so riled up? This particular statement from a prediction for 2009 from Appirio: But all this talk about “private clouds” is a distraction from...
posted @ Tuesday, March 10, 2009 4:30 AM |
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According to the definition of cloud computing used by Avanade for a recently released and often cited study on the use of cloud computing, I could claim to be a cloud computing provider. And so could you. Basically, so could just about everyone who happens to run web-based applications accessed over the Internet. From the summary of the report: In the midst of widespread economic turmoil, this global survey of C-level executives and IT decision-makers shows a clear, collective mandate: use technology to cut the cost of doing business. ...
posted @ Tuesday, March 03, 2009 2:59 AM |
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Owning the stack is important to security, but it’s also integral to a lot of other application delivery functions. And in some cases, it’s downright necessary. Hoff rants with his usual finesse in a recent posting with which I could not agree more. Not only does he point out the wrongness of equating SaaS with “The Cloud”, but points out the importance of “owning the stack” to security. Those that have control/ownership over the entire stack naturally have the opportunity for much tighter control over the "security" of their offerings. Why? because they...
posted @ Wednesday, February 25, 2009 3:13 AM |
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Cloud computing and virtualization promises to revolutionize the architectural principles of the data center. Shared resources enable efficiency, but ultimately the dynamism required to achieve such gains in efficiency will cause chaos in a variety of other functions throughout IT. The CIO is in for a rocky road unless a broader set of IT management vendors pave the way for a smooth ride. The (In)accuracy of Forecasting in a Dynamic Environment Organizations rely on the ability to forecast project costs and anticipated ROI in order to prioritize and set budgets for coming years. Many IT project management...
posted @ Tuesday, February 24, 2009 3:36 AM |
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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 |
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The focus of cloud and virtualization discussions today revolve primarily around hypervisors, virtual machines, automation, network and application network infrastructure; on the dynamic infrastructure necessary to enable a truly dynamic data center. In all the hype we’ve lost sight of the impact these changes will have on other critical IT systems such as network systems management (NSM) and application performance management (APM). You know their names: IBM, CA, Compuware, BMC, HP. There are likely one or more of their systems monitoring and managing applications and systems in your data center right now. They provide alerts, notifications,...
posted @ Thursday, February 19, 2009 4:55 AM |
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When folks are asked to define the cloud they invariably, somewhere in the definition, bring up the point that “users shouldn’t care” about the actual implementation. When asked to diagram a cloud environment we end up with two clouds: one representing the “big cloud” and one inside the cloud, representing the infrastructure we aren’t supposed to care about, usually with some pretty graphics representing applications being delivered out of the cloud over the Internet. But yet some of us need to care what’s obscured; the folks tasked with building out a cloud environment need to know what’s...
posted @ Wednesday, February 18, 2009 4:14 AM |
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The year 2009 may be remembered as the year technologies died. First Anne Thomas Maynes of Burton Group declared SOA dead, and more recently Mark Fabbi of Gartner announced the death of load balancers. The difference in the obituaries is striking: Maynes declare an entire architectural model dead while Fabbi merely declares the death of a product, not the technological concepts behind it. Load balancers may be dead, the concept of load balancing lives on as a critical foundation for more advanced and valuable features available in the load balancer’s evolutionary replacement: the application delivery controller. Where Maynes gives...
posted @ Monday, February 16, 2009 5:10 AM |
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The issue of application state and connection management is one often discussed in the context of cloud computing and virtualized architectures. That's because the stress placed on existing static infrastructure due to the potentially rapid rate of change associated with dynamic application provisioning is enormous and, as is often pointed out, existing "infrastructure 1.0" systems are generally incapable of reacting in a timely fashion to such changes occurring in real-time. The most basic of concerns continues to revolve around IP address management. This is a favorite topic of Greg Ness at Infrastructure 2.0 and has been subsequently addressed...
posted @ Tuesday, February 10, 2009 7:59 AM |
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Rich Miller, in response to some questions I maintain on meta-data ownership and interoperability with regards to the CCIF's efforts in defining a cloud interoperability specification, had some questions of his own: The part I'm itching to ask her about ... or start a more open conversation: the possibility of "a specification regarding application network delivery metadata" which, if properly (??) abstracted and generic, could "allow the meta-data policies to be transported and applied across different cloud implementations while preserving the specific details of implementation within the cloud computing infrastructure." Whoa!! Tall order, isn't it? ...
posted @ Monday, February 09, 2009 4:19 AM |
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The February issue of Dr. Dobb's has a lot of articles about cloud computing. That's not surprising, cloud computing is very much on the minds of many folks these days and it does affect developers as much as (if not more than) most IT folks. One developer had a very interesting perspective on the topic, and very clearly spells out what he does and does not want: I don't want to write HTTP and SOAP and REST and SimpleDB queries. I don't want to be squeezed into a browser and I most certainly...
posted @ Wednesday, February 04, 2009 6:23 AM |
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The webification of applications over the years has led to the belief that client-server as an architecture is dying. But very few beliefs about architecture have been further from the truth. The belief that client-server was dying - or at least falling out of favor - was primarily due to fact that early browser technology was used only as a presentation mechanism. The browser did not execute application logic, did not participate in application logic, and acted more or less like a television: smart enough to know how to display data but not smart enough to do anything...
posted @ Monday, February 02, 2009 4:38 AM |
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We've been talking a lot about the benefits of Infrastructure 2.0, or Dynamic Infrastructure, a lot about why it's necessary, and what's required to make it all work. But we've never really laid out what it is, and that's beginning to lead to some misconceptions. As Daryl Plummer of Gartner pointed out recently, the definition of cloud computing is still, well, cloudy. Multiple experts can't agree on the definition, and the same is quickly becoming true of dynamic infrastructure. That's no surprise; we're at the beginning of what Gartner would call the hype cycle for both concepts, so...
posted @ Wednesday, January 28, 2009 7:19 AM |
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For as many deployment models for packaged software as exist there are an equal or higher number of software licensing models. I used to think integration of software packages was the biggest challenge when evaluating them for Network Computing but the truth is that calculating the cost of licensing for that software was even more of a challenge. And realistic comparisons? Nearly impossible. The old models of software licensing are wholly incompatible with cloud computing and on-demand environments. Enterprise software is in a category unto itself when it comes to licensing. It isn't like drive-by...
posted @ Tuesday, January 27, 2009 4:24 AM |
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Open APIs are a matter of much discussion these days in the realm of cloud computing. Just take a peek at the discussion that occurred via Twitter during Cloud Connect. Many folks were not shy in putting forth the notion that cloud portability and interoperability can only be achieved through accepted "cloud" standards. Integration standards, for the cloud, if you will. The fear is that any emerging standards will focus only the portability of the application or virtual container environment. They are likely to ignore the fact that no application is an island, and that the application delivery...
posted @ Monday, January 26, 2009 3:40 AM |
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Much of the dialogue today surrounding cloud computing and virtualization is still taking the 50,000 foot view. It's all conceptual; it's all about business value, justification, interoperability, and use cases. These are all good conversations that need to happen in order for cloud computing and virtualization-based architectures to mature, but as is often the case that leaves the folks tasked with building something right now a bit on their own. So let's ignore the high-level view for just a bit and talk reality. Many folks are being tasked, now, with designing or even implementing some form of a cloud...
posted @ Friday, January 23, 2009 4:51 AM |
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Twitter is, once again, feeling growing pains. This time the microblogging darling of the social networking world is proactively addressing the problem - by further rate limiting its APIs. Alex Payne, API Lead for Twitter, explained on the Twitter Developers mailing list: “Starting later this week we’ll be limiting those on the whitelist to 20,000 requests per hour. Yes, you read that right: twenty THOUSAND requests per hour. According to our logs, this accounts for all but the very largest consumers of our API. This is essentially a ...
posted @ Thursday, January 22, 2009 6:14 AM |
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The debate this week is on location, specifically we're back arguing over whether there exist such things as "private" clouds. Data Center Knowledge has a good recap of some of the opinions out there on the subject, and of course I have my own opinion. Location is, in fact, important to cloud computing, but probably not in the way most people are thinking right now. While everyone is concentrating on defining cloud computing based on whether it's local or remote, folks have lost sight that location is important for other reasons. It is the location...
posted @ Wednesday, January 21, 2009 7:13 AM |
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Infrastructure 2.0 is, at its core, about evolving to a new level of interconnectedness, one in which the underlying infrastructure becomes as flexible and adaptable as the applications and virtualization infrastructure it is responsible for managing and delivering. In order to be connected, however, you need a way in which disparate infrastructure components can communicate, either directly or via a third party (coordination | management | orchestration) server. That communication is almost certainly going to take (and in many cases has already taken) the form of service-enabled control planes. These "services" are necessary in order to provide the...
posted @ Tuesday, January 20, 2009 5:42 AM |
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It has been suggested more than once, by folks normally considered rational, that in a cloud computing implementation everything - and I mean everything - should be virtualized. Even the infrastructure. The hype surrounding virtualization has spread not just to applications and their virtual image deployment as a means to achieve dynamic horizontal scale but also to infrastructure, to routers and switches and security devices. Indeed, there are a good number of infrastructure vendors currently offering and others feverishly working on virtual appliance versions of hardware devices for deployment in cloud and virtual computing environments. Part...
posted @ Monday, January 12, 2009 4:29 AM |
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After talking about data integration being the Achilles heel of cloud computing I had a chat with Informatica, who is not only providing a solution for data integration for the cloud, but is leveraging the cloud to do it. While we at F5 are focused on tearing down the silos that exist in IT to support the delivery and management of applications both internal and external (SaaS, cloud), Informatica is looking to tear down the silos in the cloud that currently exist as Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings. Integration, always a painful subject, has become...
posted @ Friday, January 09, 2009 7:11 AM |
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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 |
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dy·nam·ic (adj) Characterized by continuous change, activity, or progress flex·i·ble (adj) Responsive to change; adaptable. Able to bend without breaking Infrastructure 2.0 is, at its core, about not just the network but the entire infrastructure evolving to a new level of interconnectedness, one in which the underlying infrastructure devices become flexible and adaptable; capable of responding to the continuous change in the next generation data center without breaking. The demands placed upon infrastructure by virtualization, consolidation, and the cloud require that networks grow out of their static configuration models and adopt a more...
posted @ Tuesday, January 06, 2009 6:56 AM |
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VM sprawl is predicted to be one of the outcomes of early adoption and excitement over virtualization. Just as IT struggled to manage the explosion of PCs and servers across the enterprise, it is predicted that now it will need to find a way to manage the explosion of virtual machines as they pop up all over the enterprise with surprising alacrity. Part of the difficulty in managing new technology is the rogue deployment of X. Whether that's physical or virtual servers is irrelevant, the challenges associated with managing what are essentially unmanaged applications and servers deployed outside...
posted @ Friday, December 19, 2008 7:10 AM |
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The INTERNET, December 18, 2008 - In what is certainly a blinding epiphany for some it was suddenly realized today that some applications are not well suited for deployment in a public cloud computing environment. With all the hype surrounding cloud computing these days it is easy to forget that there's more to enterprise applications than just some code and a database. It is a rare application that is an island in the data center, and the more integrated with other systems a given application is the less likely it is that the application will be well suited...
posted @ Thursday, December 18, 2008 4:14 AM |
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One of the most affordable options for small and medium businesses in terms of Internet connectivity is business-class service from cable and telco providers like Time Warner Cable, Cox, Verizon, and AT&T. Unfortunately, the definition of "business-class" is ill-suited to businesses that host their own web applications or mail servers. If you've ever looked into business class service, you'll notice that like residential services, they are only truly cost effective if you don't really care about upload speed. For example, Verizon has a promotional offer that promises download speeds up to 7.1Mbps, but limits upload speeds to 768Kbps....
posted @ Friday, December 12, 2008 3:46 AM |
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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 |
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Deploying applications in a cloud computing environment, whether private or public, requires a bit of proactive thinking on the ramifications of a dynamic, on-demand environment, particularly when considering the impact on application session management. Consider that today, application sessions are often relied upon to remain in memory, on the application server, for hours. Persistence is achieved by storing the session in a file if necessary on the local server rather than in a database. This is particularly true of web applications developed in scripting languages like PHP that do not require a separate application server. But users who...
posted @ Thursday, December 04, 2008 7:15 AM |
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The prediction of the death of online shopping this holiday season were, apparently, greatly exaggerated. As it's been reported, Sears, along with several other well known retailers, were victims of heavy traffic on Black Friday. One wonders if the reports of a dismal shopping season this year due to economic concerns led retailers to believe that there would be no seasonal rush to online sites and therefore preparation to deal with sudden spikes in traffic were unnecessary. Most of the 63 objects (375 KB of total data) comprising sears.com home page are served from sears.com...
posted @ Wednesday, December 03, 2008 3:10 AM |
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Christofer Hoff, better known as @Beaker to the Twitterverse, put on his devil's advocacy hat (yes, it really is a good color for him) yesterday and questioned whether there was a need for hardware application delivery solutions in the cloud. He postulated via Twitter that application delivery functions would become part of the cloud fabric and thus whether they were implemented in hardware or software was largely irrelevant. Generally speaking we're in agreement on that one. But then he really used that devil's advocacy hat and suggested that the application delivery control layer might be virtualized and...
posted @ Tuesday, December 02, 2008 7:15 AM |
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Thanks to a tweet from @Archimedius, I found an insightful blog post from cloud computing provider startup Kaavo that essentially makes the case for a move to application-centric management rather than the traditional infrastructure-centric systems on which we've always relied. We need to have an application centric approach for deploying, managing, and monitoring applications. A software which can provisions optimal virtual servers, network, storage (storage, CPU, bandwidth, Memory, alt.) resources on-demand and provide automation and ease of use to application owners to easily and securely run and maintain their applications will be critical for the...
posted @ Monday, December 01, 2008 2:59 AM |
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Horizontal scalability achieved through the implementation of a load balancing solution is easy. It's vertical scalability that's always been and remains difficult to achieve, and it's even more important in a cloud computing or virtualized environment because now it can hurt you where it counts: the bottom line. Horizontal scalability is the ability of an application to be scaled up to meet demand through replication and the distribution of requests across a pool or farm of servers. It's the traditional load balanced model, and it's an integral component of cloud computing environments. Vertical scalability is the ability of...
posted @ Tuesday, November 25, 2008 3:29 AM |
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The diseconomy of scale so adversely affecting the IP address management space isn't limited to network infrastructure; it's crawling up the stack steadily and infecting all layers of the data center like some kind of unstoppable infrastructure management virus. That is why, even with the simple act of managing an enterprise network’s IP addresses, which is critical to the availability and proper functioning of the network, actually goes up as IP addresses are added. As TCP/IP continues to spread and take productivity to new heights, management costs are already escalating. -- Greg Ness, "What Are the Barriers to...
posted @ Monday, November 24, 2008 3:47 AM |
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Amidst the hype of cloud computing and virtualization have been the publication of several research notes regarding SOA. Adoption, they say, is slowing. Oh noes! Break out the generators, stock up on water and canned food! An article from JavaWorld quotes research firm Gartner as saying: The number of organizations planning to adopt SOA for the first time decreased to 25 percent; it had been 53 percent in last year's survey. Also, the number of organizations with no plans to adopt SOA doubled from 7 percent in 2007 to...
posted @ Friday, November 21, 2008 3:09 AM |
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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 |
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Load balancing an application should, by now, be a fairly routine scaling exercise. But too often when an application is moved into a load balanced architecture it breaks. The reason? Application sessions are often specific to an application server instance. The solution? Persistence, also known as sticky connections. The use of sessions on application servers to add state to web (HTTP) applications is a common practice. In fact, it's one of the greatest "hacks" in the history of the web. It's an excellent solution to the problem of using a stateless application protocol to build applications for which...
posted @ Wednesday, November 19, 2008 3:40 AM |
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The saying goes that to forget (or in some cases blatantly ignore) the mistakes of the past is to be doomed to repeat them. ODBC. BPEL. JDBC. All three are extensible standards in the software industry that cause no end of headaches and increased management overhead for folks attempting to deal with them. None of them are interoperable; you can't use the ODBC driver for Oracle to hook up to a SQL Server database, nor you can use the same BPEL produced by one BPM solution as within another. Because they're "extensible" and that extensibility leads,...
posted @ Monday, November 17, 2008 4:45 AM |
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Whenever there is a shift in architectural thinking about technology, such as is happening right now with cloud computing and virtualization, we start thinking forward, past the now, and into the future about how that technology might be leveraged. We start looking at the impact to architecture from the top of the stack to the bottom. For a company that's focused on application delivery, that means taking a good hard look at how that new technology might impact the architecture of applications. It's been suggested that perhaps, just maybe, we'll see service-oriented clouds; that the concepts of SOA...
posted @ Wednesday, November 12, 2008 8:52 AM |
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When SOA was the hot topic of the day (not that long ago) everyone was pumped up about the ability finally align IT with the business. Reusability, agility, and risk mitigation were benefits that would enable the business itself to be more agile and react dynamically to the constant maelstrom that is "the market". But only half of IT saw those benefits; the application half. Even though pundits tried to remind folks that the "A" in SOA stood for "architecture", and that it necessarily included more than just applications, still the primary beneficiary of SOA has been applications...
posted @ Monday, November 10, 2008 8:23 AM |
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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 |
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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 |
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You have just been promoted to CTO of Widgets, Inc. (Congratulations, by the way!) In your new role, on which of the following will you focus the most attention (and budget): (a) the network (b) the applications (c) the data Trick...
posted @ Thursday, October 23, 2008 4:40 AM |
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Managing a heterogeneous infrastructure is difficult enough, but managing a dynamic, ever changing heterogeneous infrastructure that must be stable enough to deliver dynamic applications makes the former look like a walk in the park. Part of the problem is certainly the inability to manage heterogeneous network infrastructure devices from a single management system. SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol), the only truly interoperable network management standard used by infrastructure vendors for over a decade, is not robust enough to deal with the management nightmare rapidly emerging for cloud computing vendors. It's called "Simple" for a reason, after all. And...
posted @ Wednesday, October 22, 2008 3:58 AM |
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Paul Maritz' keynote at VMWorld this year featured a demonstration of cloud computing using B-Hive, F5 Global Traffic Manager (GTM), and BlueLock. If you missed it, here's your chance to kick back and explore how these technologies fit together to provide a dynamic, virtualized environment. Related Links ...
posted @ Friday, October 17, 2008 4:14 AM |
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Not every infrastructure vendor needs new capabilities to support cloud computing and infrastructure 2.0. Greg Ness of Infoblox has an excellent article on "The Next Tech Boom: Infrastructure 2.0" that is showing up everywhere. That's because it raises some interesting questions and points out some real problems that will be need to be addressed as we move further into cloud computing and virtualized environments. What is really interesting, however, is the fact that some infrastructure vendors are already there and have been for quite some time. One thing Greg mentions that's not quite accurate (at least...
posted @ Friday, October 17, 2008 3:58 AM |
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There are a lot of SOA governance solutions out there that fall into two distinct categories of purpose: one is to catalog services and associated security policies and the other is to provide run-time management for services, including enforcement of security and performance-focused policies. Vendors providing a full "SOA Stack" of functionality across the service lifecycle (design, development, testing, production) often integrate their disparate product sets for a more automated (and thus manageable) SOA infrastructure. But very few integrate those same products and functionality with the underlying network and application delivery infrastructure required to provide high-availability and scalability...
posted @ Wednesday, October 15, 2008 5:37 AM |
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Darren Jefford has an excellent (and detailed with code examples) post Related Posts regarding what could easily be categorized as cloudbursting with BizTalk workflows. In a nutshell, Microsoft allows hosting of BizTalk activities in the cloud at BizTalk labs. Developers then integrate those...
posted @ Monday, October 06, 2008 3:29 AM |
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It seems that every time a new technology breaks through the surface a hundred "experts", vendors, and standards-bodies appear like moths to a flame attempting to define the term such that only "they" have the answer, the solution, the standard, or the product. When my son mentioned a research paper he wrote on cloud computing (which you still haven't sent me, by the way) he did so while disagreeing with a previous post of mine on the subject. He was quite vehement that grid computing did not equal cloud computing, and seemed almost shocked that I would dare...
posted @ Monday, September 29, 2008 11:07 AM |
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Desktop virtualization. Virtual desktops. Application streaming. Whatever you want to call it makes no nevermind to me because the problem driving the entire concept is gone. Eradicated. Made irrelevant by the cloud. Made irrelevant by cloudware, SaaS (Software as a Service), and the ubiquitous browser. I cannot count the number of times I've heard complaints about some form of desktop virtualization/application streaming in the past. It's slow. The server died in the middle of my exam. It's slow. There are no more licenses left. It's slow today (why do you add "today", it's slow every day!). Sensing a...
posted @ Wednesday, September 24, 2008 5:01 AM |
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Reuven Cohen of the Elastic Vapor blog, in this article, puts forth the notion that infrastructure is required to enable cloudbursting and then asks an excellent question: To truly enable a capable cloudbursting infrastructure, I feel there needs to be a common consensus on how this may be archived and by what means. So the question in...
posted @ Thursday, September 18, 2008 8:41 AM |
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No matter where you deploy it, it's still your application Related Reading Everyone's talking about cloud computing and cloudware (applications in the cloud) services and pointing to the hiccups of several major cloud providers already this year. Reliability, availability, and security are still major concerns, and yet some reports indicate these three "itys" aren't impeding adoption of cloud computing models at all. ...
posted @ Wednesday, September 17, 2008 3:20 AM |
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There has been much fervor around the outages of cloud computing providers of late, which seems to be leading to an increased and perhaps unwarranted emphasis on SLAs the likes of which we haven't seen since...well, the last time the IT saw outsourced anything reach the hype-level of cloud computing. Consider this snippet of goodness for a moment, and pay careful attention to the last paragraph. From Five Key Challenges of Enterprise Cloud Computing I won’t beat the dead “Gmail down, EC2 down, etc down” horse here. But the truth of the...
posted @ Wednesday, September 10, 2008 7:03 AM |
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David Linthicum of Real World SOA asks whether SOA governance should be delivered as a service, from the cloud. Core to this proposition is the use of a registry/repository in the cloud: This repository would provide more than just WSDL, but a complete design time and runtime SOA governance system delivered out of the cloud, perhaps linked with a local slave repository within your firewall. One of the problems with this, I see, is that in a SOA where governance is actively used and policies enforced, governance becomes crucial to...
posted @ Tuesday, September 09, 2008 4:17 AM |
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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 |
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Elasticity (adj) the ability of a cloud computing environment to expand or contract automatically on-demand according to real-time computing needs One of the promises of an on-demand cloud computing environment (that's redundant, I think) is the ability to burst resources. Much in the same way that ISPs have long offered contracts that include the ability of the organization to exceed its allotted bandwidth for a fee, it is expected that cloud computing providers offer a mechanism for "bursting resources" that allows an organization to exceed its agreed upon resources for a fee, based on any number of factors such...
posted @ Thursday, August 28, 2008 7:04 AM |
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Abhik, in a reply to "Why can't clouds be inside (the data center)?" says that "the whole point (and primary benefit) of cloud computing is that someone else manages the computing resources. That set of resources is drawn as a cloud in a network diagram because you, the developer or the company using cloud resources, neither knows or cares to know the specifics of the computing infrastructure. An in-house cloud would require procurement, management, maintenance and continuous cost even during idle time -- it is just a grid."
Is it? Is that the primary reason enterprises might be considering cloud computing?...
posted @ Wednesday, August 20, 2008 3:46 AM |
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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 |
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SC Magazine reports that (1) cloud computing environments may not be very secure and (2) a VPN can improve the security of cloud computing environments. Countering cloud computing threats via SC Magazine Technology such as two-factor authentication systems, when married to encrypted VPN connections, can secure an internet connection into a cloud computing-based service. That's the verdict from the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA), which concludes that using such techniques would tend to make interception of files and transmissions almost impossible. Sarb Sembhi, president of the...
posted @ Thursday, August 14, 2008 8:43 AM |
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Cloud computing promises customers the ability to deliver scalable applications on-demand without the overhead of a massive data center. The visibility - and flexibility as well as control - you have into and over the cloud computing environment depends on whether the provider you select offers an opaque or a transparent cloud computing environment.
OPAQUE CLOUD COMPUTING MODEL
In an opaque cloud computing model all details are hidden from the organization. The hardware and software infrastructure details are not necessarily known or controlled by the organization but are completely managed by the cloud computing provider. This allows for a completely...
posted @ Monday, August 04, 2008 5:04 AM |
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Alistair Croll has a great post on GIGAOM discussing how networking vendors will need to change in order to support a cloud computing infrastructure. He outlines two options for networking vendors that will keep them relevant in a cloud computing environment. In option number one he postulates that virtual appliances are the way to go, that the "pendulum swings back to software". Option number two revolves around sales strategy, and he suggests that networking vendors will need to sell to the providers of the cloud. That makes sense to me. If you want to be a...
posted @ Wednesday, July 30, 2008 5:11 AM |
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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 |
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The increasing webification of applications both for external and internal consumption combined with the concept of outsourced data centers and applications, i.e. cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS), may resolve in a perfect storm for proponents of telecommuting.
Consider the scenario: A small to medium organization needs more horsepower but it really doesn't have the budget yet to build out its own enterprise-class data center. Cloud computing offers an off-site, managed data-center that can be used to deploy applications for use by both external and internal constituents. Take advantage of SaaS offerings such as those from Salesforce.com and you've...
posted @ Monday, July 14, 2008 5:15 AM |
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Cloud computing is, at its core, about delivering applications or services in an on-demand environment. Cloud computing providers will need to support hundreds of thousands of users and applications/services and ensure that they are fast, secure, and available. In order to accomplish this goal, they'll need to build a dynamic, intelligent infrastructure with four core properties in mind: transparency, scalability, monitoring/management, and security.
Transparency
One of the premises of Cloud Computing is that services are delivered transparently regardless of the physical implementation within the "cloud". Transparency is one of the foundational concepts of cloud computing, in that the actual implementation of...
posted @ Thursday, July 10, 2008 5:45 AM |
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