Is it the dizziness from dealing with IT for so long or a new found love for a 3 letter acronym - LOB (Line of Business). Why does every one talk about onDeman and LOB in one breath and one sentence. There are different models of offering an on demand solution. Each of the them could be (should be and is) for a different target audience. While it is correct to assume that SaaS (or applications on demand) is targeted towards LOB, the same cannot be assumed for PaaS and IaaS. Platforms are for developers and Infrastructure is for IT / developers. The fact that IaaS solutions should have a buy in from IT departments is where I find a break in the value chain. Read more »

Its a known fact that all the cloud offerings are different from each other. Weather they are big or small players, everyone is innovating at break neck speed and there is no point in comparing feature by feature because such a comparison could be obsolete before it is useful. I have a personal bias towards Amazon's EC2 because I have spent most time on it, and it seems to be far ahead of rest of the herd. However, I don't find everything easier and nicer in Amazon. Some use cases can be very simple and EC2 would be an overkill or insufficient. One example is if I want to host a website in the cloud. Sure, I could go with a traditional web hosting company, but if my requirements needed me to look at IaaS providers then there are a couple of things to consider. Read more »

Scalability can be a confusing topic, because it is usually not defined in easy terms. If I were to characterize scalable system,

1. The system should be able to accommodate increase in data
2. The system should be able to accommodate increase in usage
3. As the load increases on the system, the system still remains relatively accessible and maintainable.

Three are at least three categories of service providers in the cloud : 1. IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service (e.g. GoGrid, Amazon EC2) 2. PaaS - Platform as a Service (e.g. Force.com, Google App Engine) 3. SaaS - Software as a Service (e.g. Salesforce, SAP Business By design, ...) The details of these different providers is not in the scope of this post. I will write about how to manage security on these platforms and who is responsible for which part of the security. there are two main parties involved - service providers and customers. Read more »

If you have had to deal with SLA (service level agreements) from your internal IT or an external vendor, the availability (uptime) is one of the first questions. This is a number usually presented as a percentage (usually 99.9%. Adding or removing a few 9 after decimal might not seem to matter much, but in reality it could. The table depicts the points: Total downtime (HH:MM:SS)

I saw the Gartner report on Cloud providers recently. Having worked on EC2 a bit, I am more familiar with EC2 API and features. But I have colleagues who are currently struggling with Terramark integration. Terramark is using vCloud API from VMWare. But given how nascent vCloud APIs are currently, they are mostly scripts that one has to download and consume. EC2 API on the other hand are far more polished and they have been quicker to respond to customer demands and requirements. I am not necessarily advocating EC2, but I find it more favorable than some of the other cloud providers so far. Based on the instance definition of EC2 and their pricing model, they seem to be cheaper than GoGrid pricing Sample pricing from some of the options from both providers is listed as under (as of this post): Read more »

One of the prime concerns of anyone using the public cloud (like Amazon EC2, etc) is the security of the data stored in the physical cloud. Data security is of concern at both stages

1. Data-at-rest: Stored data on the physical storage volumes
2. Data-in-transit: While the data is being transferred between servers.