Tag Archive for 'public cloud'

Highlights From CloudSlam 2011

By Olafur Ingthorsson on May 5, 2011 in Cloud Computing, Private cloud computing and Public cloud computing. 0 Comments

The third edition of CloudSlam, a virtual annual conference about cloud computing presented by CloudCor, was held from April 18 to 22. The conference provided a fresh outlook on cloud computing, covering all the latest trends and innovations in the space. Since the first event in 2009, CloudSlam has been growing in prominence with partners like Microsoft, CA, Rackspace, AMD and many more endorsing the conference.

The conference hosted many innovative demonstrations and interesting presentations (delivered via WebEx hosted portals) from a variety of cloud players. Some interesting examples include:

  • Verizon demonstrated some of the world-class public and private cloud capabilities that are helping driving “Everything-as-a-Service” global cloud strategy to deliver content to users virtually anywhere, anytime, on any device.
  • Intel delivered a headline keynote address titled “Vision to Action – Cloud 2015″ that discussed the key challenges facing IT as it evolves to the cloud. The speaker also explained how open, interoperable and standards-based solutions enable IT managers to realize greater benefits of cloud computing.
  • Fujitsu presented a vision of an “intelligent society” that describes how people and technology can be brought together to enhance the quality of life – on a wide scale. People today are entering a different era, where almost everything can be put on a network. New services are being created, such as cloud computing, sensor technology, and mobile services. It is an era in which people can greatly benefit from IT and the important role that technology plays in lives.
  • PwC shared insight into how companies can achieve business transformation by leveraging cloud technologies while maintaining strong controls over security.
  • ServiceMesh CEO Eric Pulier delivered a keynote titled “Primal Fear: Enterprise Cloud transformation and the Fight or Flight Reflex,” which addressed common enterprise cloud adoption pitfalls and challenges that await IT and business leaders, along with practical strategies to overcome these hurdles and navigate risk.
  • Steve Taylor, CTO of OpenMake Software, discussed how Cloud technology can be leveraged to improve DevOps, particularly in the area of software builds and release. According to Steve, cloud technology is becoming increasingly important in the area of DevOps, exaplaining that cloud technology has become very important in the management of build servers and development machines.

All-in-all, the CloudSlam 2011 virtual conference gave a very comprehensive overview of the latest cloud trends, bringing together many of the largest and most influential players in the cloud ecosystem. For those that missed the conference, the conference proceedings, sessions audio-visual recordings and slide decks, can be purchased (in May 2011) from the CloudSlam homepage.

 

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What is a quasi-private cloud?

By Olafur Ingthorsson on October 4, 2010 in Cloud Computing, Private cloud computing and Public cloud computing. 0 Comments

It’s not surprising that interest around private clouds and their implementation inside corporate firewalls is increases as many enterprisesreckon that public clouds are not secure or trustworthy enough for migrating their IT systems and/or data to. VMware, HP and others have been introducing private cloud solutions lately that are intended for enterprises that want to obtain the primary benefits of cloud computing, like auto-provisioning, self-service, cost granularity, breakdown pricing and pay-for-what-you-use, within their own premises or data centers. Some solutions, like the IBM WebSphere, also offer “bursting” of temporary resource needs into a external cloud – a type of a hybrid cloud, instead of building your own excessive infrastructure to handle peak-loads.

From an enterprise perspective, public clouds often do not address the specific needs and requirements that enterprises make. Especially is this true when it comes to issues related to data privacy, data residency, governance, compliance, security as well as other issues like trust factor. Many enterprises have requirements that simply prevent them for deploying certain processes or applications within a public cloud provider environment. For many of them, the obvious step would be to consider establishing a private cloud. However, as has been discussed in length by many thought leaders, private clouds are probably only a viable alternative for larger enterprises as well as often being controversial when it comes to deriving all the benefits of true cloud computing, e.g. as often repeated by the SalesForce CEO, Marc Benioff (Private cloud is not a real cloud). Whatever is being said, it’s a fact that public clouds do not sufficiently manage many of the security and data privacy concerns that enterprises need to comply to. For example, an enterprise will not keep its PCI compliance for resources or processes it migrates to a public cloud provider. Also, local privacy legislation and data jurisdiction regulations make it even illegal to adopt public cloud services or migrate data to the public cloud!

As addressed by Terry Wolozsin in an interesting article, it seems that certain cloud providers, e.g. Oracle, have started to provision some of their cloud solutions specifically from within individual territories or jurisdictional boundaries in order to address and fulfill the regulatory requirements that local enterprises need to comply to, thereby mitigating some of the problems associated with public clouds. Thus, with the idea to enable enterprises to easily adopt the local cloud services without worrying about some of the public cloud issues, e.g. uncertain data residence. Establishing one large data center in each continent to serve enterprises from multiple geographies and countries, a la Amazon AWS with it’s data center in Ireland for the European market, does not sufficiently address concerns of enterprises.

However, as in the case of Oracle, the cloud solution (Oracle CRM) is being being provisioned by a local hosting provider, i.e. a “semi-public cloud” solution. From Mr. Wolozsin’s article:

What this means for Oracle customers is that they can adopt Oracle’s CRM cloud solution, while addressing their data residency requirements – the data never leaves the shores of Australia.  If successful, Oracle plans on similar offerings through partners in other geographies. They are able to offer this because each customer gets their own instance of Oracle CRM on-demand, but it’s delivered to the end user as a cloud solution.

Then does this approach extract the benefits of private and public cloud computing into one cohesive pool – removing the barriers that enterprises face when it comes to the public cloud?

Enter the notion of the “quasi-private cloud”. The quasi-private cloud is a cloud that provides a middle ground between hosting your own applications in a private cloud, and using a true public cloud application/service completely managed by the provider.

Despite being an interesting concept, the quasi-private cloud has its own challenges. For example, the responsibility can be unclear between the cloud service provider and a hosting provider. Also, it seems this model misses some of the essential benefits of public cloud computing, namely the economies of scale obtained from massive data centers. It’s hard to see that smaller, local hosting providers will be able to retrieve such benefits – presumably mirroring in their price offerings.

Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see if the quasi-private cloud will find its way as the middle ground between private and public cloud computing.

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Will virtualization become less important in cloud computing?

By Olafur Ingthorsson on August 30, 2010 in Cloud Computing and Virtualization. 1 Comment

It’ generally acknowledged that VMware are the leaders in virtualization technology. Products like the the vSpere has probably been installed in more data centers than any ofther virtualization platform. Not to minimize the importance of other platforms, like the Citrix XenServer and Linux KVM, the vSphere is the market leading virtualization platform that together with its strong installed base and head-start set VMware in a comfortable position for developing its cloud computing strategy. And then the question emerges – how is VMware cloud computing strategy actually playing out?

Well, first of all we know that by enabling multiple logical server instances on a single physical server, virtualization is usually seen as one of the fundamental enablers of cloud computing. But exactly how important is virtualization as a cloud computing enabler? By many, the importance of virtualization is considered to become less significant when cloud-based application platforms mature to the point where applications are built and deployed without any reference to current notions of servers and operating systems. Developers using Plaform-as-Services, like Google App Engine and Microsoft Azure, are never going to have to think about virtualized infrastructure. The same goes with Software-as-a-Service. So as companies migrate services to the cloud, they are less likely to purchase VMware’s vSphere virtualization platform, unless they are going to establish their own cloud computing environment.

VMware has unofficially acknowledged this transformation. Their CEO, Paul Maritz, speaking on the 2010 GigaOM Structure conference, said that “the cloud at the infrastructure level is the new hardware”. What Mr. Maritz means is that “as the cloud infrastructure becomes more complex, or hardened, there is a point where we will stop seeing the details behind the infrastructure making it agnostic” and, hopefully, interconnected clouds from multiple cloud providers (federated clouds). All this of course is heavily dependent upon standardization work. Several bodies are now working on cloud standards, including the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) which have formed a Focus Group for that purpose

So where does all this leave VMware when it comes to their cloud initiative, especially if virtualization is to be a given thing – and ultimately more restricted to cloud provider and large company data centers? Well, VMware is already offering cloud platforms for various needs, both for public and private clouds. Their cloud vCloud Express platform was built for IaaS providers in particular, to offer services to end-users and to create PaaS services.  Already, it seems that VMware, e.g. through its partnership with SalesForce around VMforce, is moving more into the realm of PaaS by its Java Cloud enterprise offering. In the longer term, it is likely that virtualization will become less important when it comes to PaaS offerings and public clouds, while it probably will last longer in private cloud environments.

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Status of the cloud computing hype!

By Olafur Ingthorsson on December 17, 2009 in Cloud Computing. 2 Comments

It seems that cloud computing is nearing the top of the hype-cycle according to “Gartner’s Hype Cycle Special Report for 2009“. Gartner claims that within the next 5 years, most enterprises will utilize cloud computing as a more economical alternative for running their IT resources, compared to on-premise resource management. Not only does this apply to migrating IT resources like network servers, databases and storage to the public cloud utilizing “Infrastructure-as-a-Service” (IaaS) services, but also private clouds and hybrid clouds. Equally, enterprises will increasingly adopt “Software-as-a-Service” (SaaS) services instead of running business applications locally. We’ve already seen successes in this direction – Salesforce CRM of course being the foremost example.

Another report from The Economist, Let It Rise – A special report on corporate IT, points to a similar direction. Public cloud providers are improving their offerings. IaaS providers like Amazon AWS and Go-Grid are continuously announcing new corporate-class services and addressing many of the security vulnerabilities associated with public cloud computing. Not only are public cloud providers improving their services, but are also adding new services extending corporate networks into the cloud through Virtual Private Network (VPN) connections or even through MPLS. A good example of the former is the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud and Verizon has started offering cloud services, termed Verizon Computing-as-a-Service (CaaS), over their private IP network (MPLS network) in selected areas.

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