Gartner, in his recent report “The what, when and why of Cloud Computing”, analyzes many aspects of Cloud computing, and what we can expect to happen in this field in the next future. A very interesting prediction of this report is the raise of Cloud Brokerages, new entities in the Cloud ecosystem that will ease the Cloud users tasks by integrating several Cloud services in an unified access point. Read the rest of this entry »

Cloud Storage is one of the most straightforward applications of Cloud systems. For ALL organizations, is critical to find efficient ways to keep, share, backup and manage their data. However, many times this implies huge investments on hardware, software and IT staff to take care of the storage systems. And the expertise required to properly manage such a sensible resource is not easily found.

So having external Cloud providers of IT infrastructure to supply and manage the storage resources that the organization needs seems an idea to be taken into account by any organization. But, which Cloud Storage solutions are available (apart from the well-known Amazon S3 for storing ‘data objects’ i.e. files)? It turns out there are many of them, offering different services that suit different needs. In this post we try to group these solutions into four categories categorized by the functionality they offer: data warehouse, backup, remote file storage and databases. Read the rest of this entry »

After a long time sink and struggle, the cloud conversation is moving from “what is it?” to “how would I use it for my business?”

Although a final and static Cloud definition is still missing, which shows the dynamism and vitality of Cloud technologies, the market seems to have come to the conclusion that cloud computing has a lot in common with pornography: you may not be able to define it, but you’ll know it when you see it.

The best result of this shift is that we should start seeing real business cases and applications that start making money out of their investments in Cloud technologies. A lot of Cloud-enabling tools and technologies are born every day, but what we need is seeing more running successful business examples. A lot of application domains can benefit from the inherent scalability that the Cloud provides them with: financials, data mining, biotech, manufacturing to mention a few.

These success stories are indeed needed to generate the confidence required to bring the Cloud from the peak hype to a plateau of productivity without a hard trough of desillusionment.

Very recently, a well-known researcher in the Grid community, Thomas Sandholm, published a paper in the First International Conference on Cloud Computing, held in Vancouver.

The scientific contribution of the paper is very limited and it does not mean to be a full state of the art on Cloud technologies, as recognized by the very same authors. However, this work draws a nice architectural design and maps currently existent products to the different layers of the architecture.

Importantly, the authors identify a gap that fits well in the interest of Telecom operators.  Administration and Business support tools still lack an appropriate offer to meet enterprise requirements. Deployment, configuration, monitoring and life-cycle managent at the SaaS level need support from the underlying PaaS layer. The PaaS (e.g. programming and execution environments) and high infrastructure services (e.g. Google Bigtable or Amazon’s Dynamo) layers of a complete Cloud architecture are key enablers for an appropriate scalability of the system: Cloud scaling power is not just about placing new (virtual) hardware and deploying services in there. Scalability also needs to be supported by really scalable data or event PaaS/High Infrastructure-level services.

Even though this may seem way too obvious, we have recently seen many examples of Cloud architectures overlooking or disregarding the creation of “scalability-enabling” services. We strongly believe these elements are the cornerstone to offer actually scalable services to millions of end-users over our Cloud.

A recent study by Gartner suggested that software vendors are not satisfied with the SaaS approach since it  “is not quite the panacea it often promised to be”. Developers have realized that to deliver services on the Cloud they have to make the same huge efforts towards, for instance, scalability, security and data management they did before the Cloud. Is offering appropriate PaaS means underlying the SaaS layer the actual panacea?