Companies that excel at agile software development often become enablers for their respective businesses. The ability to quickly react to the speed of business and deploy new features, fix bugs, and try new experiments leads to better products, happier customers, and increased revenues. In many cases it even gives IT some sense of work-life balance. Sounds awesome doesn’t it? Unfortunately, many companies attempting to move towards agile... Read More
The Many Faces of PaaS
By now, enterprises understand the value of Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), but there still is much confusion about Platform as a Service (PaaS). Check out my latest post on The Virtualization Practice that discusses the 6 different deployment models for... Read More
The Pros and Cons of Private vs. Public PaaS
Enterprises are driving the adoption of private PaaS. Private PaaS gives enterprises more control but in return they sacrifice agility and costs. Check out my article on this topic at The Virtualization... Read More
The NSA, the Patriot Act, and myths about the public cloud
Dave Linthicum just posted another myth buster post clearing the air on 3 more myths about cloud computing. I would like to add one more after the recent events where the NSA’s secret data collection program has been exposed. First, here is the myth: Public clouds are not safe for storing sensitive data due to the Patriot Act which gives the government the power to seize the data in an attempt to mine data in the name of preventing... Read More
Designing Secure Cloud Solutions
I just finished the following presentation that we will be discussing at the Tampa Bay Cloud Computing meetup in a few days. Cloud security design considerations from Mike Kavis Here are some Key Take Aways The further down the cloud stack the more responsibility you own and must build Three aspects of securing systems are apply, detect, prevent Three key strategies: Centralize, Standardize, Automate Along with the control that comes with... Read More
Vendor Spotlight: Garantia – In-memory NoSQL company
NoSQL solutions are all the buzz these days. Today’s dataset volumes often exceed what a relational database can consume and process in a timely manner causing companies to turn to NoSQL solutions. The challenge with NoSQL databases is that they can be complex to manage and maintain and only a limited number of people have experience working with them in a production environment. Redis is a very popular key value store database that many high... Read More
Vendor Spotlight: Cloud Broker Jamcracker
Jamcracker was founded back in 1999 when ASPs (Application Service Providers) where popular. At that time they were a managed service provider who served up various software solutions to enterprises from a central location. Enterprises who did not want to host and manage various software packages would look to Jamcracker to aggregate and provide those services for them. Fast forward to the current decade and ASPs have been replaced with SaaS,... Read More
RESTful Services: The key to cloud computing
As companies start embracing cloud computing, architects and developers must start thinking differently to take full advantage of what the cloud has to offer. Cloud computing promises agility, high scalability, and speed to market. In order to reap those benefits, a deep understanding of distributed systems, RESTful services, and ACID vs BASE transactions is critical. In this post I’ll take my best shot at explaining how to do REST right... Read More
Disaster recovery strategies in the cloud
Cloud computing allows us to build systems faster and cheaper than ever before. There are countless stories of companies building solutions that were unfeasible and practically impossible in the old days of purchasing servers and managing datacenters. But don’t be fooled, there are no silver bullets. When it comes to uptime and resiliency it still comes down to good old architecture and planning. This post will focus on different... Read More
7 lessons learned from an early adopter of the cloud
Cloud computing has come a long way since I first swiped a credit card on AWS in 2008 and started building a platform from scratch in the cloud. Back then cloud services were not mature and many of today’s SaaS and PaaS solutions that assist in building cloud based solutions did not exist. Back in 2008 we built everything from scratch and there were few success stories to learn from. Long story short, we made a ton of mistakes and learned... Read More
