May 26 2009 11:17AM GMT
Posted by: Margaret Rouse
Cloud computing,
outsourcing,
insourcing,
Telecommuting,
work-at-a-distance,
cloud economics
 |
There are two key areas in which companies should consider the economics of cloud computing: (1) how much an organization can save if it consumes cloud computing as an outsourced utility computing service and (2) how much it might save if cloud computing principles successfully reformulate data center strategies.
Tom Nolle, Gaining cost savings from the cloud |
Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is cloud computing. In a memo released last week, the Feds propose cloud computing and telecommuting as ways to make the federal government leaner.
Cloud-computing and “work-at-a-distance” represent major new Government-wide initiatives, supported by the CIO Council under the auspices of the Federal CIO (OMB’s E-Government Administrator), and funded through the General Services Administration (GSA) as the service-provider.
It’s in this section called “IMPROVING INNOVATION, EFFICIENCy AND EFFECTIVENESS IN FEDERAL IT.”
May 22 2009 6:18PM GMT
Posted by: Margaret Rouse
Storage,
terabyte,
Amazon,
Cloud computing,
Import/Export,
Amazon Simple Storage Service
Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is terabyte. A terabyte (one trillion bytes) is in the news today for two reasons — a terabyte of data of data from the Clinton administration is missing from the National Archives and Amazon has announced a new cloud service called Import/Export for moving terabytes of data to the cloud.
The interesting thing about missing data from the Clinton administration is that it was on a 2-terabyte hard drive that was left sitting on a shelf for a couple of months. And guess what? The data on it was not encrypted. What the heck???
The Amazon announcement is another WTH. The Import/Export service is being promoted as a way to move large datasets to and from the cloud (meaning Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).)
A terabyte is a lot of data and trying to push it up to Amazon over the Internet takes a lot of bandwidth. With Amazon Import/Export, you can move the data by off-loading it to a portable storage device and then shipping the device to Amazon. Amazon has a handy-dandy calculator for estimating the cost of service. They will charge you $80 for moving the data from the portable device to the storage you’ve purchased at Amazon (along with a $2.49 per data-loading-hour surcharge) and then they’ll ship the device back to you. It might sound pricey until you consider that uploading a terabyte of data over the Internet with your T1 line is likely to take 82 days.
And oh yeah, you may want to take a lesson from the National Archives and encrypt that data before you ship it out.
Dec 11 2008 1:54PM GMT
Posted by: Margaret Rouse
LAMP,
Cloud computing
 |
This generation of web services got their start from LAMP - a stack of simple, yet powerful technologies that to this day is behind a lot of popular web sites. The beauty of LAMP is in its simplicity; it makes it very easy to get a prototype out the door. The problem with LAMP is in its scalability.
Alex Iskold, Reaching for the Sky Through The Compute Clouds |
The first scalability issue is fairly minor - threads and socket connections of the Apache web server. When load increases and configuration is not tuned properly you might run into problems. But the second problem with LAMP is far more significant: the MySQL relational database is the ultimate bottleneck of the system.
Lately I’ve been reading about the future of the LAMP stack, which I always thought of as the poster child for Web 2.0. Alex got me wondering about the future of LAMP now that everything is cloud-colored. Will MySQL be the bottleneck? But then I read this article about Sun Microsystems throwing “more chips into its “billion-dollar bet on the LAMP stack” with the recent launch of its MySQL Enterprise 2008” and now I’m not so sure that LAMP is on its way out.
Dec 10 2008 4:44PM GMT
Posted by: Margaret Rouse
Technology,
Cloud computing,
service level agreement
 |
“Cloud computing” is an apt name for a technology that is many things to many people. Although each vendor that enters the space seems to have a different approach to cloud services, all of them face a common challenge: coming up with an achievable service guarantee to reassure hesitant customers.
Erika Morphy, Cloud Computing, Part 3: SLA Spirit in the Sky |
Take the tech challenge for service level agreement.
Dec 9 2008 11:23PM GMT
Posted by: Margaret Rouse
Technology,
Cloud computing,
hybrid application hosting,
Jeff Barr
 |
Cloudbursting is an application hosting model which combines existing corporate infrastructure with new, cloud-based infrastructure to create a powerful, highly scalable application hosting environment.
Jeff Barr, Cloudbursting - Hybrid Application Hosting |
I could have come up with some kind of lifeless and forgettable acronym, but that’s not my style. I proposed cloudbursting in a meeting a month or two ago and everyone seemed to like it.
I really like Jeff Barr and usually agree with his observations, but this time I think he missed the boat…er cloud. The term cloudburst doesn’t really describe a hybrid model at all. And it has a negative connotation. And it’s already been used in the blogosphere to describe what happens when your cloud is unavailable.
Remember Microsoft’s Hailstorm? Not a good name either. Still, I can see why Jeff didn’t want to just slap an ordinary acronym on the concept. Hybrid Application Hosting. HAH?
We need to put on our thinking caps and help him out.
Nov 26 2008 3:53PM GMT
Posted by: Margaret Rouse
SaaS,
Cloud computing,
PaaS,
IaaS
Forrester’s Frank Gillett talks with Beet.tv about “cloudwashing.” He does a nice job breaking down where the future might lie for cloud computing and unlike a lot of other pundits, Frank seems to have his feet on the ground (and not in the clouds). Don’t miss this one.
Thanks go to Dennis Shiao for recommending this video clip. My takeaway? I need to keep an eye on three things: software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and virtual infrastructure as a service (usually shortened to just IaaS).
Nov 25 2008 12:34AM GMT
Posted by: Margaret Rouse
standards,
Cloud computing
 |
It is clear that without standards of one kind or another (de-facto or from a recognised body), there won’t be a market, and without a market, the cloud is unlikely to thrive. The competition isn’t as much between cloud providers, as it is between cloud providers and internal IT organizations. Cloud providers need to keep that firmly in mind.
Benjamin Ellis, CloudCamp London 2: On Standards. Special Guest Post |
A standard image format might provide a base level of standardization, but there is a risk that the industry then gets caught up in a ‘lowest common denominator’ model that throttles much of the unique innovation that the scale and speed of cloud computing allows. There was a consensus for a pragmatic approach: a layering of APIs, standardizing a layer at a time.
(My apologies to Benjamin Ellis! I had originally credited this quote to James Govenor.)