Kicking the Week Off

James Urquhart has some interesting things to say about the different approaches that Amazon and Cloudera are taking with the Hadoop implementation of MapReduce and summarizes it as the “Internal cloud’s big test“. By comparing and contrasting the offerings, he thinks over time we’ll “finally have reasonable means of watching which directions enterprise IT prefers.”

David Linthicum recently presented “Winning with Cloud Computing…Step-by-Step” at the Cloud Computing Expo. As he says, “My larger concern is that there is so much hype in the cloud computing space that those looking to implement cloud computing ignore the fact that we’re in essence extending the architecture to outside platforms, nothing much more than that. Thus, architecture is still the focus.” Some live blogging was done as David gate his presentation and you can read it here.

In the hoopla over the Open Cloud Manifesto, let’s not forget that the Cloud Security Alliance was recently formed to promote best practices in cloud computing. However, as NetworkWorld reported “it will not seek to define standards”. The alliance, with fouding members eBay and ING, will be launched at the RSA conference later in the month.

Other news worth noting:

Deutsche Post Spin-Off to Bring Eclispse App Development to the Cloud

NetSuite talks up integration with Salesforce.com

Longjump puts SaaS inside IT shops: Provider says customers who are not yet ready to all-in with cloud computing can now control cloud functions themselves.

Weekly Round-Up (and what a week it was)

In the area of cloud computing, here are the news and articles that I found most interesting:

“Not long ago, the phrase “Windows cloud” was an oxymoron; no two words could be further apart in meaning. But cloud computing is evolving quickly, and Windows clouds are finally taking shape.” More here >

“Microsoft’s Azure, where you go to build cloud apps” More >

“One of the bigger challenges IT departments will face this year is whether they can take the plunge with cloud computing quickly enough to benefit their organizations as a whole.” More >

“Vendor lock-in is one of the primary fears expressed by IT leaders considering a move to the cloud, but much of that fear is caused by misconceptions.” More >

“So, before you merrily send your apps flying into the cloud, check their combined software licenses. If there are CPU restrictions in any of them, maybe those apps should remain grounded in the data center.” More >

“IBM, SAP, and Microsoft have just revealed efforts to use the cloud to move and manage the kinds of big workloads that are common in corporate data centers.” More >

“…from VMware’s point of view, cloud computing isn’t just an option that some leading-edge customers will deploy, but an evolution of virtualization that will eventually be adopted by all of its customers.” More >

“Lots of fresh research is coming out on the state of cloud computing. The following data points provide a snapshot of user attitudes in this fast-moving market.” More >

As I blogged about earlier in the week, we need to pay attention to SOA with equal interest, as we move forward with cloud computing. With that in mind, here are the news and articles that I found most valuable in the area of SOA.

“SOA is the ‘architectural pattern’, while ‘cloud computing’ is a set of enabling technologies as a potential target platform or technological approach for that architecture.” More >

“SOA has had time to mature, but discussions around it are still laden with buzzwords and unrealistic expectations. Learn what SOA is and isn’t with the first of a new series.” More >

“…James Kobielus explores the exploding use of cloud computing by enterprises and the fact that the expanded use of cloud services is causing issues around existing SOA governance policies and mechanisms.” More >

Finally, take a look inside a real-world SOA project by someone on the front lines of Fastenal Corp’s big project. More >

More on SAP, Microsoft, and Google; Plus SOA vs Cloud: More Clarity

A little bit of thought goes a long way when it comes to SAP’s acquisition of Coghead and what it means for customers when their platform as a service (PaaS) vendor goes bust and support has been dropped. The thoughts belong to Richard Watson, of the Burton Group. Before offering up some “advice for mitigating the development risk,” he questions whether or not SAP may have missed an opportunity by not extending support to existing Coghead customers — some of whom certainly were joint customers too.

Still confused by cloud computing? Find yourself scratching your head because it sounds so similar to SOA? You are not alone. Luckily, we have David Linthicum because, as he states, “we need to understand cloud computing in the context of SOA.” And what would that be? SOA is the “architectural pattern”, while “cloud computing is a set of enabling technologies as a potential target platform or technological approach for that architecture.” So, again, be careful and focus on the architecture that’s best going to enable your enterprise to take advantage of services offered via the cloud.

Finally, here are two quick updates on Google and Microsoft. As InfoWorld reported, Google will institute new billing services for its App Engine hosting service. By the way, did you know that Google estimates that 45,000 applications have been built on App Engine? Pretty impressive. On the Microsoft front, Steve Ballmer stated that the Windows Azure cloud computing platform will be released by the end of the year.

Cloud Event Summary, Plus SAP’s Move

I think Charles Babcock’s provocative question posed to a panel at the Cloud Computing Forum deserves a few minutes of your time. He asks, “why it was necessary for every hypervisor vendor to launch its own virtual machine runtime format?” Then he asks rhetorically, “What will it take…a user revolt?” The answers he gets are, sadly, not too encouraging.

But never fear, there’s always another way of perceiving the situation. Jason Brook’s takes a look at how “the cloud computing world today resembles the early days of Linux, during which dabblers with a surplus of time and motivation could assemble and integrate their way to a Linux platform.” He then points to announcements from Red Hat and Ubuntu underscore how this just might come to pass. It’s well worth reading.

Another worthwhile panel discussion at the Cloud Computing Forum centered on “Security, Privacy and Compliance in the Cloud.” Check out Roger Smith’s synopsis of that discussion.

SAP made news after announcing that it bought Coghead, a cloud-based startup that offered Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to developers and others who wanted to create custom web-based applications. As InformationWeek reported, SAP will bring Coghead’s IP in-house to help bolster its own applications, though it will shut down the service to outside customers.

There’s an interview with Andrew Jassy, senior vice president of web services at Amazon, on TechFlash that you may want to check out. John Foley, over at IW’s Cloud blog, critiques it and sums it up by saying, “Amazon’s Cloud is Too Cloudy.”

David Linthicum has two interesting posts this week. One talks about SOA “becoming a part of IT, rather than just a new destination.” And it repeats his empahsis that we need to shift away from all the technology and focus on what matters — the architecture. His other post talks about an increased interest in SOA, albeit in a more incremental, and possibly more reasonable, approach.

Kicking off the New Year: SOA, Open Source, and Clouds

Well, isn’t it just like us “media types” to kick off the new year with hype, controversy, and the belief that things will get better with IT–if we just get out of the way.

Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group, blogged that “SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession. SOA is survived by its offspring: mashups, BPM, SaaS, Cloud Computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on ’services’.”

It’s a great read and well worth checking out. While states that “organizations desparately need” SOA, it was in the implementation (or lack thereof)–not the theory behind it–that has done it in. People got caught up in the technology and lost focus on the architecture. She continues by saying, “Although the word “SOA” is dead, the requirement for service-oriented architecture is stronger than ever.”

David Linthicum, at InfoWorld, has a nice piece of commentary if you want to devlve a little deeper into the subject. Essentially, he agrees with her.

In the open source front there were a couple of recent articles that are worth checking out. One that is sure to add to the controversy posits, “What if Gartner’s prediction that 50 percent of IT projects using open souce will not have a lower TCO than those using closed source products?” You can read more here.

The same crew from InfoWorld also wrote up a nice summary of the five biggest trends they see in open source for 2009. They include: more commercial open source; more experimentation with business models; more acquisitions; more power in the user community; and more mainstream.

Finally, let’s move away from predictions and controversy and let’s looks at a customer success story with cloud computing. InformationWeek has an interesting piece on Eli Lilly’s cloud intiative, whereby they’re tapping into Amazon’s Web Services. You can hear more by signing up for a related webcast. Should be well worth your time.

I think we’ll see a lot more real world successes (and some failures) in the area of cloud computing this year. Lots of things are working in its favor. And the biggest one is that there are more and more valuable services that enterprises can tap into.