PaaS (platform as a service)

Software development "in the cloud" has been one of the really interesting developments to come out of the cloud computing market so far. While many early players, such as Zimky and Coghead died on the vine, there is a pretty robust Platform as a Service (or "PaaS") market out there today, with Google App Engine taking the most visible lead, and a pretty solid stable of Ruby on Rails-based hosting providers telling a compelling story of their own.

Such success is driving some new players to seek the spotlight, however. I wanted to highlight two that I found most interesting. They are very different from one another, but those differences highlight the breadth of opportunity that remains in the PaaS market.… Read more

One of the most common questions I get from those exploring cloud computing for the first time is "what is the difference between cloud computing and virtualization?" It is an excellent question, as most IT departments are currently exploring the ways in which virtualization enables automation and provisioning agility. Given the fact that cloud is often touted for providing similar benefits, it can be confusing to understand why the two terms aren't equivalent.

My response to that question requires a bit of explanation, so let's step through the differences between the two concepts.

Virtualization is a … Read more

In a press release Wednesday morning, Salesforce.com and Google announced the availability of Force.com for Google App Engine, a platform as a service integration that allows App Engine developers to more easily integrate their applications with data from Salesforce.com.

Force.com for Google App Engine provides developers a set of tools and services to build new kinds of Web and business applications entirely in the cloud. Instead of having to manage and maintain their own on-premise infrastructure, developers can use real-time cloud computing infrastructure from Google and Salesforce.com to develop and deploy new applications on the … Read more

In conjunction with the well attended Interop and Enterprise Cloud Summit conferences in Las Vegas this week, cloud infrastructure and service vendor 3TERA announced the 3TERA AppStore, an online portal containing a variety of "cloud ready" components for use on their AppLogic platform. This is the latest commercialization of cloud image stores, and another example of how cloud computing enables marketplaces that were difficult or impossible to do before.

One of the earliest example of this trend comes from none other than Amazon, which provided a commercial payment system (called DevPay) for their Amazon Machine Image store some … Read more

While most readers probably think "portability or mobility" when they think of cloud interoperability, the vendor community sees a shorter-term opportunity in standardizing the operation of clouds and cloud infrastructures. It's not that vendors don't care about image portability; it is an especially critical opportunity for so-called "cloud operating system" vendors.

However, the cloud operations opportunity--building a full-featured operations API and user interface for a cloud--is a daunting task, requiring tools for provisioning, management and monitoring, among others.

(Note that I am calling the term "operations" tools, not "management" tools. … Read more

Update: Corrected Reuven Cohen's title and added link to Chris Hoff's post.

Update 2:The NIST has added a Web page with links to the definition, and an email address where one can send comments.

Reuven Cohen, CTO of cloud infrastructure vendor Enomaly, recently posted a review of his trip to Washington, D.C. to speak to a variety of federal officials about the potential for cloud computing in government. Reuven points out that the enthusiasm with which the federal government is pursuing the cloud may in fact be putting the private sector to shame.

And it makes … Read more

What is the core value proposition of cloud computing today? What is it that your public cloud provider is providing? What does your private cloud environment allow you to provide your own IT customers? Why are end users in the know so excited about the new capabilities they gain from using various cloud offerings?

I'll give you a hint. The three acronyms by which cloud fare is usually categorized all end in three letters: "aaS," short for "as a Service".

Service is the name of the game in cloud computing. It is at the heart … Read more

The debate about the validity of internal cloud implementations has raged on for some time now, with some claiming that cloud computing and wholly owned infrastructure don't mix, and others pointing out that applying "on demand," "at scale," and "multitennant" to enterprise IT data centers offers unique advantages to those who have already made that investment. It has been difficult, however, to do an objective comparison of the two approaches--until now.

The announcement on Thursday of Amazon's new Hadoop-based Elastic MapReduce service, combined with the introduction of a commercial Hadoop distribution from start-up Cloudera, … Read more

Ten years after the creation of Salesforce.com, the future of cloud computing is not in doubt; it is just being heavily debated. Two opposing views of how cloud computing will play out--especially enterprise cloud computing--are making the rounds among thought leaders and customer decision makers alike. Interestingly, there is enough to question about both approaches that a third option may, in fact, gain importance.

What all sides agree on, however, is that some form of cloud computing is coming your way. As always, the devil is in the details.

Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com's "pull no punches" … Read more