• MemBase and CouchOne and What it Means for Cloud Sartups

     

    Focus.com Cloud RoundtableLast week marked the merger between Membase (formerly NorthScale) and CouchOne, associated companies producing NoSQL products. It’s a logical combination as it creates an end-to-end NoSQL solution. But more than that it’s an indication of something I’ve…

  • BMC and Cisco Combine to Automate Cloud Delivery–Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery

     

    In another example of two big companies combining their strengths to compete in this brave new world of cloud, Cisco and BMC Software today announced a joint venture to create new cloud offerings. As an initial step, Cisco and…

  • Datapipe Blends Managed Hosting with Amazon

     

    There is an ongoing theme of companies setting up solutions to act as a central and neutral portal to organizations loud services – in the past few weeks I’ve talked to a number of people who, for example, provide…

  • Is There a Need for a Cloud Spot Market? Enomaly Thinks So

     

    Enomaly this morning sent out a press release (and about a gazillion tweets huh Ruv?) telling the world about the launch of SpotCloud, a cloud computing clearinghouse & marketplace. So.. what’s it all about? From the release: For cloud…

  • Weekend Bits: Difference Between Amazon And VMware Explained

     

    If you look out on the web, you can find tons of articles comparing and contrasting the cloud offerings from Amazon Web Services and VMware. But you may not find many tweets that articulate the differences well in 140 characters or less. Today, I came …

  • PaaS Is The Future Of Cloud Services Series

     
    Diagram showing overview of cloud computing in...

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    There is an overwhelming view among the pundits that PaaS is the future of cloud services and IaaS will slowly go into the background. In fact, in my opinion, PaaS is the idea of cloud computing that comes closer to the utility comparison made by Nick Carr in his book “The Big Switch”. In this series I am going to dig deeper into the future of PaaS and how various companies are positioning themselves to meet this future. In this first post of the series, I am going to dig deeper into the general idea and then take a look at how different players from the entire cloud stack, IaaS to SaaS, are playing the game. In the next post, I will talk about one of the interesting companies in the mix, Heroku, and briefly touch upon a recent news that came out recently.

    Why PaaS and Why Not IaaS?

    The poster boy (girl) of cloud computing is Amazon Web Services and they are basically an IaaS player offering compute and storage services. Their huge success is one of the reasons why cloud computing is gaining so much traction with everyone from individual developers to small businesses to enterprises. They completely altered the way we do computing by cutting down the costs drastically empowering the startups and small business to have IT similar to that of enterprises. Their success has lead many more providers to jump into the infrastructure game making IaaS the pretty girl (handsome boy) in the cloud computing block.

    IaaS completely changed the way developers deployed their applications. Instead of spending big with their own datacenters or managed hosting companies or colocation services and then hiring operations staff to get it going, they can just go to Amazon Web Services or one of the other IaaS providers, get a virtual server running in minutes and pay only for the resources they use. With cloud brokers like Rightscale, enStratus, etc., they could easily grow big without worrying about things like scaling and additional security. In short, IaaS and other associated services has enabled startups and other businesses focus on their core competencies without worrying much about provisioning and management of infrastructure. IaaS completely abstracted the hardware beneath it and allowed users to consume infrastructure as a service without bothering anything about the underlying complexities.

    Even though IaaS made it easy for developers to go to the market fast with their applications and other services, it still required them to have some operational expertise. In the case of startups and other small companies, the use of IaaS still required the developers to know a bit about managing the virtual servers, OSes, middleware stack, etc.. If the developers didn’t have much expertise, they had to hire sysadmins who could take care of managing the infrastructure. On the enterprise level, it needed significant investments in operations workforce. In short, it was not the cloud which Nick Carr made us all to imagine.

    This is where PaaS came in handy. PaaS is one layer above IaaS on the stack and abstracts away everything up to OS, middleware, etc.. This offers an integrated set of developer environment that a developer can tap to build their applications without having any clue about what is going on underneath the service. It offers developers a service that provides a complete software development lifecycle management, from planning to design to building apps to deployment to testing to maintenance. Everything else is abstracted away from the “view” of the developers. In short, PaaS takes operations out of the picture and gives the developers a complete peace of mind. With IaaS, a developer with no help on operations from people with sysadmin skills is very likely to botch up the application either at its inception or while scaling. PaaS makes developers succeed even if they are completely “operations blind”. This makes PaaS ver attractive for the future of cloud computing.

    The advantages of PaaS are

    • Complete abstraction all the way up to development environments and other middleware components, taking the operations out of the picture
    • Considerable cost savings and faster time to market
    • Better security. As Chris Hoff pointed out,  one could enforce sanitary programmatic practices across the derivate works built upon PaaS

    Does it mean end of road for IaaS?

    Not really. PaaS will not kill off IaaS. Rather, it pushes IaaS completely into the background. Even in a PaaS dominated world, IaaS is still important because

    • PaaS will not be dominated entirely by big players like Google or Microsoft. There will be many smaller level players, some of whom offer some niche platforms. For example, PaaS companies like Heroku and Engine Yard can’t afford their own datacenters. Such players will run on top of IaaS
    • There are other component services that extend core PaaS platforms. These players will run on top of IaaS while integrating with PaaS players
    • There may be many developers who want custom platform stack for their needs. Such developers will always need IaaS

    There are many other reasons why IaaS will exist in the background ceding limelight to PaaS.

    The Future Of IaaS Vendors Are Gloomy. Huh?

    Not exactly. Many IaaS vendors are understanding the PaaS based world in the future. That is why they are already planning to move up the stack. Whether it is public cloud providers like Amazon or players who are strong in the private cloud space like VMware, they are already moving up the stack. We will continue to see this trend where these originally IaaS players differentiate themselves in the PaaS layer. It is not just the IaaS vendors who are moving up the stack but we are also seeing SaaS vendors moving down the stack. For example, we have seen how Salesforce is trying to make their Force.com platform attractive for the developers. SaaS vendors are also seeing a PaaS future and are repositioning themselves to take advantage of such a future.

    In the future posts in this series, I will take individual providers and dig deep into their offerings, strategies, etc.. The next post in this series will feature Heroku and I will follow it up with other players in the coming weeks.

    CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

  • CloudCamp Auckland – First of Many

     

    Last week I ran the first of a lengthy series of Australasian CloudCamps – this one was in Auckland, New Zealand.

    When I first started telling people that I was running the events, I was pretty stunned at the buy-in: both from potential sponsors and from attendees. It seems that 2010 is going to be a big year – two factors would seem to account for this, firstly that we’re coming out of a recession and the barriers to expenditure are finally coming off and secondly that every man and his dog, from start-ups to traditional vendors, are positioning themselves to deal in this brave new world.

    This fact was borne out by the organizations that chose to sponsor the event – from platinum sponsor Gen-i, an ICT product and service company that is a subsidiary of New Zealand’s largest telco, to the companies who took gold-level sponsorships: salesforce.com, VMWare, Microsoft and enStratus, through to those who chose to support in other ways, Intergen, Zendesk and the University of Auckland, it really was a well supported event.

    There were some incredibly interesting discussions – local lawyer Rick Shera led a remarkably interesting and, at times, passion filled session looking at the jurisdictional and general legal implications of the cloud. While a few participants asked why we’re asking these sorts of existential questions that have been asked time and again over the past decade or so, I believe that the fact that attendees still have concerns around this stuff shows that, despite what many would say – the legal implications of the cloud, encompassing distribution of data, outsourcing of processing and less certainty of where and how data is actually stored, all result in a clear uncertainty and reticence to embrace the benefits.

    We talked about privacy and security and the trade off that those who chose to use “free” services make (given that these “free” services are monetized through other, and sometimes less transparent, means) – this discussion was put in a “who’s less evil of the bigcos” question with many attendees expressing far greater concern over Google’s approach (free apps with a potential dark side) compared to Apple’s (proprietary and inflexible attitudes and a paid-for service but arguably a more “open” approach).

    We had some really interesting (and frankly a little depressing) discussions about the ability or otherwise that New Zealand has to compete in this new world and the opportunity for cloud companies here to succeed – it was really great to have the founders of both VendHQ (an interesting startup to watch – someone doing SaaS in an entirely new space) and Litmos (another interesting start-up from downunder) along to give their perspectives on the startup space.

    We talked around the usual barriers-to-adoption issues – and looked at how governance, IT concerns and connectivity issues all impact negatively on the willingness of organizations to adopt the cloud.

    And finally (and unavoidably) we talked about the private cloud vs public cloud debate – we had a few dogmatic types who discounted the entire private cloud concept, while others were much more accepting of the trend.

    All in all an excellent event – many thanks to the sponsors and the attendees and a special shout out to Anne Bilek from enStratus for her logistical help on the ground. Next CloudCamp is on Thursday in Sydney, it’s still not too late to register, you can do so here.

    CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by
  • Cloudcamp Seattle – Cloudcamp Comes Back To Seattle

     

    Last year I covered Cloudcamp Seattle organized at Amazon HQ here. 

    Overall, it was an interesting collection of people talking about everything Cloud Computing. This unconference style camps will play a major role in promoting Cloud Computing with people who don’t know anything about it and it will also help us to advance the technology to suit the needs of enterprises and governments. Let the conversation continue.

    Well, the conversation is going to continue this year on Feb 3rd 2010 at Grand Hyatt Seattle. With Amazon ramping up their cloud computing offerings and Microsoft readying for an onslaught with Windows Azure, Seattle is the place to be right now. Cloudcamp is expected to be buzzing with folks from Microsoft and Amazon talking about the wonders of their technology. This is an ideal place for experts in cloud computing to dig deeper and there will be many sessions that could help individuals and business owners to understand how cloud computing can help them with their needs. 

    For those who are not aware of Cloudcamp, I would quote this from their website

    CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place where we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.

    This year, there will be lightening talks from folks from AWS, Windows Azure, ReliaCloud and Enstratus. The rest of the sessions are opened up to the participants to decide on the topic, in a typical unconference style. I am one of the members of the official organizing team and if you have any questions regarding Cloudcamp Seattle, feel free to contact me. If not, just go over to the website and register for the events. If last year is any indication, the tickets will be sold out real fast. BTW, did I mention that the tickets are free of cost?

    CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

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