Cloud computing

Overheard: Cloud computing too big a risk for mission critical apps

The nature of Grid/Cloud computing means a business has to migrate its applications and data to a third party solution. This creates huge barriers to the uptake. Paul Wallis, Is the Cloud There Yet?

Recently we’ve seen the London Stock Exchange fail, undersea data cables cut in the Gulf, espionage in Lithuania and the failure of the most modern and well-known data farm at Amazon.

In such a climate it will require asking the business to take a leap of faith to find solid footing in the cloud for mission critical applications.

And that is never a good way to sell to the business.

Overheard: Microsoft Live Mesh is JBOF (just a bunch of feeds)

Essentially, Live Mesh is a collection of feeds (which can be expressed as ATOM, JSON, FeedSync, RSS, WB-XML, or POX). Every piece of data entered into a user’s Mesh — be it a file, a folder, a message, a user permission, or a new device — is rendered as a piece of information in a feed. The feeds are then synced with other devices that are part of that Mesh following rules for how to sync each particular piece of information. Josh Catone, Live Mesh: First Look at Microsoft’s New Platform

Ok…I’m loving this. Social networking all grown up. News feeds are the future and Facebook showed us how to use them.

The Live Mesh Notifier is a news feed of all the activity on a user’s Mesh. Right now that means changes made to files, folders, devices, user permissions, and comments left on files/folders. However, because Live Mesh is a platform that seeks to interact with third party services…it is easy to envision how much more could be pushed through the news feed.

Overheard: Salesforce - GoogleApps marriage takes place in the cloud

When it takes just a mouse click to open Gmail and have the message saved with the prospect record, it won’t take long before Gmail becomes the default email system for most Salesforce users… For Google, the combination brings Google Apps into big enterprise accounts and also expands its footprint among smaller businesses. For Salesforce.com, it expands the reach of its Salesforce application and further validates its Force.com integration and development platform. But more importantly for both of them — and for the rest of us who are committed to the on-demand model — it puts extra weight behind the gathering trend towards running business applications and computing in the cloud. Phil Wainewright, Salesforce and Google team to conquer the enterprise

I’m not so sure about the first statement I grabbed from Phi’s excellent post — but I’m pretty sure he’s got it right about us looking back and seeing this as the beginning of the tipping point for enterprise computing in the cloud.

Early adopters will purchase 40% of their IT infrastructure as a service

Increased high-speed bandwidth makes it practical to locate infrastructure at other sites and still receive the same response times. Enterprises believe that as service oriented architecture (SOA) becomes common “cloud computing” will take off, thus untying applications from specific infrastructure. This trend to accepting commodity infrastructure could end the traditional “lock-in” with a single supplier and lower the costs of switching suppliers. It means that IT buyers should strengthen their purchasing and sourcing departments to evaluate offerings. They will have to develop and use new criteria for evaluation and selection and phase out traditional criteria.

Gartner Highlights Key Predictions for IT Organisations and Users in 2008 and Beyond

Overheard: Amazon cloud services

One of the Highlights in the [Q4] earnings statement picked up by the geek press was about Amazon’s online data and storage services: Adoption of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) continues to grow. As an indicator of adoption, bandwidth utilized by these services in fourth quarter 2007 was even greater than bandwidth utilized in the same period by all of Amazon.com’s global websites combined. Jack Schofield, Amazon delivers financial results, says Kindle is a sell-out

Thanks to Dennis Shiao for the cloud watch tip. It’s interesting that Amazon is using bandwidth as the success metric.

Overheard: Google is leading the new industrial revolution

The real electrical innovation wasn’t Thomas Edison’s idea of installing individual power plants in factories. It was Edison’s financial clerk, Samuel Insull, who thought of creating a central plant that powers an entire region, turning electricity into a utility and vastly dropping its price. Nicholas Carr, as quoted in When Google Grows Up

Overheard: What’s inside IBM’s Blue Cloud

“Blue Cloud is based on an open-source project called Hadoop that manages computing resources across large clusters of computers. Hadoop includes an open-source version of MapReduce, the same software Google uses to efficiently distribute its computing chores across its servers around the world.” Erick Schonfeld, IBM’s Blue Cloud is Web Computing By Another Name