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
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
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
Responsibilities 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 thought I would share some content for those readers who are relatively new to cloud computing. It is critical that people working on cloud initiatives understand what the responsibilities are within each service model. The following diagram shows a subset of the different components within each service model... Read More
Vendor Spotlight: A discussion with Randy Bias of Cloudscaling
Last week I had the privilege of talking about cloud computing with Randy Bias, CTO and Co-founder of Cloudscaling. Cloudscaling’s core product Open Cloud System 2.0, is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) technology built on top of OpenStack that can be deployed either as a public or private cloud. OCS is the open source cloud buyer’s answer to Amazon’s AWS and Google cloud solutions. Randy was gracious enough to give 40 minutes of... Read More
How the cloud is changing the economics of business
I am writing a book on cloud service models and have been real busy interviewing architects, C-level executives and founders of both cloud based companies and companies rearchitecting legacy applications to take advantage of the cloud. I have talked with IaaS providers, PaaS providers, SaaS providers, B2C plays, B2B plays, 20 year old companies and stealth startups. I attended several meetups in Silicon Valley and met with a number of peers... Read More
Vendor Spotlight: A discussion with dotCloud
I had a conference call today with founder and CEO of dotCloud, Solomon Hykes. I have recently written about the new generation of PaaS vendors who don’t lock customers into a programming language or into the vendor’s infrastructure and dotCloud is one of those newer companies with that forward thinking vision. For those of you not familiar with dotCloud, they are a fast rising award winning startup out of the valley who started in... Read More
PaaS is the future, but is it ready for prime time today?
I have been researching PaaS solutions recently both for work and for my book I am working on. After spending the last four years building enterprise solutions from scratch on AWS, I have come to the conclusion that if I were to do it all over again, I would leverage PaaS for much of what we built on IaaS. When we started in 2008, the only real viable PaaS solutions in my opinion were Force.com and Google. Even Microsoft’s Azure was... Read More
Is the Cloud driving better software?
As companies shift to delivering software as a service (SaaS) or platforms (PaaS) the customer demand for increased security, closely measured SLAs, complete disaster recovery plans, and 24×7 availability is driving more rigid technical requirements. You can thank the cloud for this. Traditionally software companies built packaged software that only required a fraction of the technical requirements that today’s cloud services... Read More
