cloud

Comparison of Amazon, Google, AppNexus, and GoGrid Cloud offerings

Peter Wayner at Infoworld published a good overview of Cloud offerings from Amazon, Google, AppNexus, and GoGrid. The main takeaway: Cloud Computing is as nebulous as it is cumulus.

The first surprise is that the services are wildly different. While many parts of Web hosting are pretty standard, the definition of "cloud computing" varies widely. Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud offers you full Linux machines with root access and the opportunity to run whatever apps you want. Google's App Engine will also let you run whatever program you want -- as long as you specify it in … Read more

Google App Engine sort of getting Perl support

Google programmers are adding support for the Perl programming language to its App Engine service for hosting Web applications, but so far it's not really an official project.

The work is the project of Google employee Brad Fitzpatrick, who disclosed the project on his blog Tuesday. But he's not a member of the App Engine team, and Google isn't promising Perl support, he said. By going public with the project, he hopes to intercept other Perl fans' work in the area.

"I (along with other Perl hackers here at Google) are now allowed to work on … Read more

Opening up the cloud

Joyent's David Young has written an excellent treatise on why "clouds" (as in cloud computing) should be open and not proprietary. He details nine attributes of an open, "platform as a service" cloud.

My favorite? Young's contention that while an open cloud could lead to everyone "rolling" their own, the rationale behind doing so is, well, not so rational:

If you're writing an application, and you want to be able to achieve tremendous scale, the answer shouldn't be to move off the cloud onto your own "private" cloud of dedicated servers. Of course, if the cloud computer is open, as we've described, you can build your own cloud. It's also true (that) you can generate your own electricity from coal, if you want to bother. But why bother?

This is a fundamental tenet of open-source businesses. There's much that you could do to fork an open-source project and create your own splinter project, but generally, it's not worth the bother.

The Slashdot community piled on to comment on Young's post, with some insightful questions as to the viability of uploading a company's "crown jewels" to the cloud, "for all the world to see." Others suggest that "'cloud computing' is just the latest marketing promotion designed to move us to renting software."… Read more

Amazon offers automatic credit for S3 outage

Customers affected by Sunday's outage of Amazon's Simple Storage Service, an online data storage plan, won't have to do anything to get credit for the hours-long glitch.

"We'll be announcing on the developer forum momentarily that we'll be waiving our standard SLA (service-level agreement) process and applying the appropriate service credit to all affected customers for the July billing period," the company said Monday evening in a statement about the S3 outage. "Customers will not need to send us an e-mail to request their credits, as these will be automatically applied. This … Read more

Amazon S3: For now at least, sometimes you have to reboot the cloud

Amazon.com's Simple Storage Service, S3, spent a few hours Sunday in a big pothole on the road to the glorious cloud computing future, with an outage taking the storage system offline for several hours Sunday. Should we be surprised?

No. In short, the computing industry is making up what's called cloud computing as it goes along, often with a server and networking architecture that's one part improvisation to two parts proven best practice. Frankly, it's notable to me that some services are as reliable as they are.

Computing practices tend to gravitate toward one of … Read more

Microsoft copies Google, Salesforce, and Red Hat in new partner initiative

If you attended Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference 2008, you can be excused for thinking you showed up at the partner event for Red Hat, Google, or Salesforce.

After all, Microsoft's new partner initiatives rely heavily on concepts devised and delivered by these companies:

Tech watchers will see lots of familiar concepts in software behemoth Microsoft's revamped go-to-market strategy....[Microsoft] proclaimed its newfound focus on delivering software and services to customers via "the cloud," using a subscription-based model popularized by companies like Red Hat, Websense and Salesforce.com.

Microsoft is smart: Why reinvent the business model wheel when others have pioneered successful ways to deliver software value? Of course, Microsoft has never been the most innovative of companies - it has become the market behemoth that it is by out-executing its competitors, not by out-thinking them.

But this may be one area in which Microsoft needs to think a bit more. As The Motley Fool notes,… Read more

CherryPal desktop has friendly $249 price tag

The CherryPal is a small, black, rectangular box with not much inside.

Besides a processor, some flash memory, and some connecting parts, it's definitely not the kind of computer you'd see heavyweights like Hewlett-Packard and Dell waving around. But Max Seybold, the creator and CEO of CherryPal says this barebones PC is the future.

Yes, we've been hearing for a while now that cloud computing and the browser are the next iteration of the desktop OS, but Seybold is betting big on it.

The CherryPal--so named because one early tester declared the device "sweeter than an … Read more

S3 down again with no visibility into cause or time to resolutions

More downtime for Amazon S3 doesn't make the Cloud any more appealing for enterprises.

One of the main reasons enterprises won't be quick to embrace the Cloud for meaningful applications is due to the lack of visibility associated with downtime. Most companies are too paranoid (rightly so) to have no idea what caused system downtime or to have a clear mean-time to resolution.

As an S3 customer we should definitely be able to get notifications and have the ability to ask for refunds. I couldn't figure out how to do either one.

For basic monitoring you can … Read more

Morphological analysis of Cloud Apps and Services

Over on Cloudy Times, Markus Klems has created some great diagrams that help to classify Cloud elements. Plus he used the the term "morphological analysis" which I have to tip my hat to.

The most interesting factoid is the non-existence of big vendors like IBM, Microsoft, HP, Dell and Sun who are enablers, but not players (yet.)

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