Cloud Computing Digest

Sorry I didn’t get out an update last week. I’m sure that, like me, you’re all getting busy as the holiday season and year end approaches. To top that off, I was laid low by a cold. The end result is that I have many items to share with you today. I’ll even be putting out another Microsoft specific update later on. So without further delay, let’s get going…

 

CIO.com has a short editorial on VMware’s vision of the private cloud. To boil it down they want to create a super app-store where users and devices consume applications without a care for where they reside and execute. Furthermore, they want to make desktops available anywhere using VDI or virtual desktop infrastructure.

 

Rarely one to be left behind, Microsoft also announced more about its private cloud story or “Hyper-V cloud”. Microsoft is also trying to take a different tact then VMware by not dictating what hardware components you us to build their private stack. Microsoft’s approach will instead be a combination of hardware and software guidance all built around Hyper-V. The guidelines will in turn be driven by both vendor and customer needs.

 

Security still remains a big concern (rightfully). So I like to mention it frequently. This digest I have an item from Gartner asking Is cloud security even achievable?  Read and form your own opinion. I think you can guess mine. J

 

On a more experimental front, ZDNet has a small update on Microsoft’s “Project Orleans”. I won’t try to describe this beyond it being a possible “next gen approach for cloud app development”.  I heard this group had a booth at PDC and I’ll definitely continue to follow their work. This could result in an interesting future for programming on the Windows Azure Platform.

 

Read Write Cloud put up the results of a poll they gave to some early public cloud adopters. The results were favorable across the board with security getting rated as having the most issues.

 

I found a neat little roundup of news at Data Center Knowledge. They talk about Amazon’s new CloudFront (content delivery), Nirvanix’s (cloud storage provider) new CEO, and Compuware’s CloudSleuth product (3^rd party cloud availability monitoring).

 

CRN is reporting IBM claims that cloud computing will help it grow over the next five years, but at a cost of some of its existing businesses. They project that a $3 billion grown in revenue will require a $12 billion increase in their cloud computing business. For those that have an issue with math like me, that means $9 billion in “cannibalized” business.

 

I’ve got some international news, as Google is making a cloud computing play in India. They’re going to try and double their engineering staff in the next two years with an eye on the small and medium business market. They already have a significant customer base in India, so it will be interesting to see how this bet plays out for them.

 

I’m starting to talk to more and more clients lately, and the key cloud advantage that it always seems to come back down to is the economics of the cloud. Microsoft has published a new whitepaper on this subject and it asserts that the potential savings are much better than some think.

Terremark recently had a big win when the US Federal Communications Commissions selected them to support its online presence. Terremark was selected because of their ability to connect to the FCC’s existing hardware and still provide FISAM compliance.

 

High Performance Computing and the cloud have both been showing up on my radar often the last few weeks. Some HPC purists argue that that high performance in the cloud isn’t possible. Well Randy Bias, CEO of CloudScaling, has a great article that I think cuts through the bias and lays out the options.

 

Lastly, it’s been awhile since I sent out a cloud computing top 10 list. So here’s a list from Focus.com on their top 25 experts, blogs, and influencers. The list brought a few new names to my attention and reinforced others.

 

Well that’s it for this edition. With the Thanksgiving holiday next week I’ll be skipping a week again and my December 3^rd update will likely be my last before the new year. I’ve got several speaking engagements coming up and some writing I need to do. So I’m planning to take a few weeks off.

 

Until next time!