There are a lot of things to consider when shifting from on-premise software products to cloud based services. Here is a short summarized list of topics to consider when building SaaS or PaaS based solutions in the cloud. It is not a complete list. My goal is to provide a list of “areas of concern” as guidance. Companies looking to build cloud services should take a deep dive into each area. Areas of Concern Security Research... Read More
SLAs and compliance in the cloud
SLAs for an application or service built in the cloud is the combination of: SLAs from the cloud vendors (ex: AWS, Azure, Heroku, etc.) SLAs from the apps built on top of the cloud vendors Cloud Vendor SLAs and compliance I analyzed the SLAs of some of the top cloud service providers and was surprised about what I found. For most well established IaaS and PaaS providers, SLAs ranged from 99.9% to 100%. One major PaaS solution, Heroku, does not... Read More
Design Strategies for Cloud Computing
Whether building a startup from the ground up or helping a fortune 100 company, I typically break down cloud design into a number of categories. I have written several blog posts about these different categories and felt it would be helpful to consolidate them all on a single blog post. Many of these posts are previews into individual chapters from my book that will be released near the end of 2013. If there are categories you want me to write... Read More
Monitoring strategies in the cloud
I wrote in a previous post called Cloud computing’s impact on operating models how the elastic cloud model requires more engineering than the package and ship software model. The elastic cloud model also requires a more advanced monitoring strategy since the cloud service provider is providing a real-time 24×7 autoscaling solution to its customers. With shipped software, the customer is responsible for monitoring the infrastructure and... Read More
State of Open Stack
I am simply sharing this presentation about Open Stack by Randy Bias just in case any of my readers have not seen it. There is not much to add since Randy covers it all in the slides. The only thing I’ll say is if you are going private cloud and you are not thinking Open Stack, you might want to look at some of the numbers in this presentation. State of the Stack April 2013 from Cloudscaling, Inc. Thanks to Randy for this great wealth... Read More
The Public, Private, Hybrid Decision
I watched the live stream feed of the Open Stack Summit this morning and saw a number of different use cases for public, private, and hybrid clouds. Most of my hands on experience comes from the two startups where I have been in an architect role. Both of these startups have been public cloud implementations on AWS. If a company is building greenfield applications and does not already have a datacenter, it is a slam dunk to go “all in”... Read More
Cloud Economics – Part 6: PaaS is the game changer
Welcome to final post of my 6 part series on how the cloud is changing the economics of business. This post discusses how PaaS is becoming more mature and will be a game changer in the enterprise. PaaS 1.0 The early pioneers of cloud based platforms are some of the leaders in the PaaS market today. Vendors such as Force.com, Google Apps Engine, Heroku, and Microsoft’s Azure all have a healthy amount of market share. I call these PaaS... Read More
Vendor Spotlight: CloudAware
After numerous consulting engagements helping clients streamline deployments, Mikhail Malamud noticed a trend of shadow IT teams forming within companies and launching cloud based solutions. These solutions often went ungoverned leading to inefficiencies and non-optimized cloud expenses as well as created issues around quality and auditability. To combat that, Mikhail formed CloudAware, a cloud management SaaS solution with the goal of putting... Read More
Cloud computing’s impact on operating models
My most recent two clients are well established and highly technical companies. Both companies are taking highly successful products and modernizing and enhancing them as cloud services (one is a PaaS, the other a SaaS). Building SaaS and PaaS based solutions for consumption by external customers is a bigger under taking than many people realize. Obviously there are technical challenges in building high available and reliable systems, but the... Read More
Data considerations in the cloud
I am working on my book called Architecting the Cloud: Design Decisions for Cloud Computing Service Models (SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS) and am working on the chapter about data considerations in the cloud. In this post I will share a few of the topics that are discussed in the book for this chapter. Analyzing data requirements There are many characteristics of data that should be taken into consideration when building cloud services. Here is a... Read More
