Cloud Computing Digest

Quick plug… If you’re in the Ohio river valley area and you’re into Cloud Computing, you should consider attending Cloud Develop 2012 on August 3^rd in Columbus, Ohio. Please support the community and the event by getting registered! More info at: http://clouddevelop.org/

If it’s not one thing it’s another I guess. Still trying to get this back to a weekly digest but there always seems to be a distraction. So before some other distraction arises, let’s make some cloud computing news.

I’ll start off with a “first impression” post by Ben Kepes and his thoughts on Google’s new Compute Engine IaaS offering (announced at the GoogleIO conference on June 28^th, 2012).  The short version is that while it’s a nice start, Google will have some work to do before they can win the enterprise.

The comparisons continue with John Furrier’s matchup of GCE and Windows Azure. John’s opinion is that it will come down to who wins the developers. I personally feel it’s more about winning the hearts and minds of the decision makers.

I also found a blog post about best practices for Amazon Web Services. It discusses creating high availability solutions via multiple distributed deployments in different geographies. Just a few weeks later, the massive storms that hammered the eastern half of the United States caused a partial outage at Amazon’s data centers in the region.

The Washington Post reported on how this called into question the viability of cloud computing. Netflix, who weathered an outage early last year without issue was even impacted this time around. But like all good cloud computing adopters, learned from the experience and is applying that learning to make their solution better.

As if this wasn’t enough, not even a week later, Salesforce experienced an outage that disrupted its CRM software as a service solution. While the multi-hour outage was a serious impact to some clients, the bigger issue for many was a lack of communication.

In brighter news, VMware has acquired cloud automation provider DynamicOps. This will dramatically increase VMware’s ability to help drive adoption of their public and private cloud offerings and enhance their existing solution offerings such as vCenter Operations Management Suite.

My final three links for this edition all follow a common theme. Which cloud is better? Private vs Public? PaaS vs. IaaS? VendorA vs VendorM? Ben Kepes, this time for CloudAve, talks about how both public and private cloud solutions have their place. Randy Bias of CloudScaling.com also talks about the right cloud (and storage) for your application. And lastly, Adron Hall over at CompositeCode took a walk in the IaaS world to see how it compared to Pass.

Until next time!