A Simple Outline of the Clouds: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS
Sep/092
[from Udayan Banerjee on the Cloud Computing Journal]
What I think Udayan really nails in his post is the various strategies of the prime cloud players. Particularly clear is the his assessment of Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform.
“Microsoft: I am giving you a platform which is very similar to what you use so that you can seamlessly extend your application to the cloud and even the developers can continue to use the same set of tools.”
And here is his visual map of the cloud space.
Read the entire article on the Cloud Computing Journal: Cloud Computing Strategy.
Microsoft’s PDC 09 (Professional Developer Conference) Reveals More Panels
Sep/090
Check out the PDC 09 website to see what Microsoft has on the docket. And while you’re at it you might add their Twitter feed as well, it seems like they have a healthy stream of information they are putting out. We need to get them to put #PDC09 in the tweets so we can search them better.
One of the prime tracks will be: Building Applications for the Windows Azure Platform by Steve Marx
Come hear how the Windows Azure Platform provides a scalable compute and storage environment with Windows Azure, a fully relational database with SQL Azure, and a service bus and access control service with the Microsoft .NET services. Learn about these new services and see several demos that show how to build applications that run in and take advantage of Microsoft’s new cloud platform.
@jmacofearth
permalink: http://cloudclip.net/microsoft-pdc09
Amazon’s Web Services Personal VPN Jumps the Cloud Firewall
Aug/090
The cloud is awesome. But getting data across a firewall and into the cloud or back again can prove to be a non-starter. Take Sharepoint for example. A great product, but I still have not seen a proven model to give Enterprise Sharepoint Access to a large business customer without some act of IT. Most corporate VPN networks will NOT ALLOW ANY VENDORS. So if your stuff is in SharePoint internally, you have to figure out another way to get it “outside” the firewall for your customers to access. Amazon’s Virtual VPN connection looks like a quickstart option.
Amazon Web Services VPN Cloud
It looks as simple as pie. I’m sure it’s less than that, but here’s the word from Amazon on their new VPN-enabled cloud services:
Here’s all you need to do to get started:
- Create a VPC.
- Partition your VPC’s IP address space into one or more subnets.
- Create a customer gateway.
- Create a VPN gateway to represent the AWS end of the VPN connection.
- Attach the VPN gateway to your VPC.
- Create a VPN connection between the VPN gateway and the customer gateway.
The full instructions are a bit more technical, but for now let’s just say Amazon has fired the first grappling hook over the corporate firewall, and that’s a good thing.
The limited beta application for admission is here.
Cisco Draws a 4 Tier Map of the Clouds and the Future of Cloud Computing
Jul/090
[Crossposted from Uber.la]
The Four Tiers of Cloud Computing according to Cisco.
[Excerpt: from the Register: Cisco cuddles all clouds but one]
Clouds mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Warrior explained that Cisco sees cloud computing as having four tiers. The lower tier is an IT foundation, including servers, storage, and networking, and that the whole point of UCS was to be a player for infrastructure. In this area, Cisco plans to compete with IBM and Hewlett-Packard as well as partner with EMC, VMware, Microsoft, and others.
The next tier up is what Warrior referred to as infrastructure as a service, which means selling cloud computing capacity like Amazon does with its EC2 compute utility and S3 and EBS storage utilities. Warrior showed a slide that pegged Amazon, AT&T, BT, HP, IBM, Sun Microsystems Oracle, Savvis, Telstra, and Terremark as the key suppliers so far. And Cisco will not be one of them, even though it must be tempting to build a cloud at cost and sell capacity on it.
Now, taking a step up in the abstraction layer of Cisco’s cloud computing model is something Warrior called platform as a service, and this is really providing cloud infrastructure with software development frameworks that allow companies to deploy applications. This is more like Google App Engine, Windows Azure, and certain parts of Amazon Web Services, and in Cisco’s case, the application framework is WebEx Connect, which is evolving from the online Web meeting platform of the early 2000s into a collaboration framework with APIs for integrating other applications into the Web conferencing, chat, and collaboration tools that can be mashed up as IT organizations see fit.
The top and final tier of the cloudy world that Cisco is helping us all build is software as a service, and here, Cisco absolutely has plans to be a player alongside Microsoft, Salesforce.com, and Google. Up here, WebEx will be the brand. WebEx Mail, a mail and calendaring service based upon the PostPath acquisition from last summer, will be added to the WebEx mix and delivered as a service atop Cisco’s own cloud infrastructure. Dennerline said that WebEx is hosting 220,000 meetings per day and over 4 billion meeting minutes per month and that this was supported from nine data centers around the globe. He added that there are over 450 million knowledge workers on the planet and that the collaboration software and services space would comprise about $34bn in sales and that “we certainly don’t have our fair share yet” of that space. As for how Cisco will get its fair share, it’s the same old mantra: build, buy, and partner.
I think that’s a pretty good demarcation of the space.
@jmacofearth
permalink to uber.la: http://bit.ly/4-clouds
Other cloud posts
- Tag Cloud Computing? – Categories, Keywords, SEO, Tags, Getting to Simplicity
- More About the Azure Cloud – Privatization of the Internet – This Time It’s Personal!
- Cloud Fail – Is The Fail Whale Coming to a Cloud Computing Platform Near You?
- Technorati Fail – The Monster is Out – Another Cloud in Transition
- The Cloud the View and the App (a fable)
- A Tale of Three Clouds – Microsoft’s Cloud Computing Reveals Some Concerns
ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley Examines the .NET in AZURE’s Silver Lining
Jun/090
[An excerpt from ZDNEt's Too many .Nets, too little time? by Mary Jo Foley]
Microsoft’s overzealous .Net branding campaign is a pretty much a thing of the past. But that doesn’t mean the .Net confusion is completely over.
Microsoft’s attempt to juggle too many .Nets is coming home to roost with testers writing workflow-centric apps and services that can be hosted in the Azure cloud. In a posting to the Azure Services Platform blog last week, Microsoft officials admitted that .Net Services was based on a different, older version of .Net — and that the newer version wouldn’t be ready in time for Azure’s official launch (which is expected this fall).
Microsoft’s .Net Services is one of the infrastructure components of its Azure cloud-computing platform. .Net Services is the uber-name for the access control, service bus, queuing, routers and workflow technologies powering Microsoft’s cloud platform. .Net Framework 4.0 is the version of the .Net Framework that will be part of Visual Studio 2010, slated to ship in late 2009 or early 2010.
My Azure Credentials Arrived a Bit Ago – I’m On Cloud Blue!
Jun/090
I have no idea what to do with it yet, but my AZURE portal is now open for… business… well… no… for musical diversions? Maybe!
I’m downloading the Azure SDK (I’ll have to run this within my Parallels WIN7 VM machine) and kick the tires. I’ll let you know what I find.
@jmacofearth
permalink: http://cloudclip.net/azure-on
