Thinking Out Cloud

Links for 2008-12-01 [del.icio.us]

2008-12-02T00:00:00-06:00

Unchaining CIOs From IT - Foreward
A CIO explains how the move to cloud computing changed his job

Links for 2008-11-30 [del.icio.us]

2008-12-01T00:00:00-06:00

The First-Time CEO’s Recession Survival Guide
Excellent advice for all entrepreneurs and start-up execs

Overcast Show #3 Is Up

2008-11-28T17:12:24-08:00

In podcast #3 of Overcast, James Urquhart and I join forces with John WIllis, a thought leader in cloud computing, to talk about some of the most fundmaental questions about cloud computing, such as "what is it?"

We also go over other topics including infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-services, software-as-a-service, cloud bursting and more.

Check it out on the Overcast blog.

Links for 2008-11-24 [del.icio.us]

2008-11-25T00:00:00-06:00

Amazon Web Services Seeks Public Data Sets - ReadWriteWeb

Links for 2008-11-21 [del.icio.us]

2008-11-22T00:00:00-06:00

Links for 2008-11-19 [del.icio.us]

2008-11-20T00:00:00-06:00

Redmond Channel Partner Online | Lee Pender: Microsoft Online Services: SaaS-y, Sort Of

Gaming: The Last Bastion of "Not for Cloud" Conquered?

2008-11-18T09:01:02-08:00

In the various cloud computing events and discussions I participate in, gaming is often given as an example of what types of applications cloud computing is not suitable for. That never sat right with me. Although games such as World of Warcraft having very thick clients you need to install (I think 2 or 3 GBs), and much of their processsing is done in the local machine, even more of it is done in the remote servers run by Blizzard (the company that makes WoW). As I have written, however, WoW is in no way a cloud, unlike what some have argued.

But I just read a piece on VC Cafe, a blog that tracks Israeli start-ups and venture funds, about a company called Playce. The CEO and VP BD characterize their company in this interview as Gaming Infrastructure-as-a-Service, although I would say that Platform-as-a-Service is probably more accurate. IaaS refers to raw compute resources such as CPUs, memory and storage, while Playce actually provides a software platform for 3D high-end game development in the cloud.

At the heart of their technology, according to the company execs, is the ability to stream very rich high-bandwidth content to the client machine. Furthermore, they are opening the platform so that other developers can create their own games and provide them with ways to monetize their developments.

Is this an indication that cloud computing is overtaking the last bastion of resistance?

Check out the profile of the company on TechCrunch.

Links for 2008-11-18 [del.icio.us]

2008-11-19T00:00:00-06:00

Could the Cloud Save Yahoo?

2008-11-18T02:08:51-08:00

Om Malik posted a great blog about Yahoo following Jerry Yang's resignation and the search for a new CEO. Among other things, Om lists some of the things Yahoo should and shouldn't do now. Some of the items in Om's "should do" list are:

Focus its energies on Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Flickr, Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Search, as well as Yahoo’s e-commerce platform.
Keep building on its Mobile offerings, for this is one area where its independence can help it win friends amongst operators who are worried about Google, Microsoft and Apple.
Yahoo’s ad-serving platform needs to become more real-time, with a drastic improvement in customer service.

While all of the above (and the other things Om writes) seem like good advice, I think there is one thing missing: cloud computing.

For the past few months whenever I tried to speculate on who are the next major vendors that will go into cloud computing, Yaho always initially was high on the list. But after some further thought I had to move them down, because they first need to get their act together as a company.

As I wrote in a comment to Om's post, Yahoo is exceptionally well-positioned for cloud computing with technologies such as Hadoop and Pipes and in-house expertise in building and running extremely scalable infrastructure. In addition, the next phase in cloud computing is going to revolve around Platform-as-a-Service. This is where Yahoo can really shine, especially compared to Amazon.

Moreon that in a future post.

Big Cloud Week Coming Up

2008-11-14T14:23:45-08:00

Next week is shaping up to be a big week for cloud computing (again).

Monday

Microsoft will be making an announcement in San Francisco about the launch of Online Services. I've been invited to attend that as well as a Blogger Roundtable that Microsoft is hosting for cloud computing bloggers. Should be interesting.

In the evening, Joyent is hosting Enterprise Cloud Computing Seminar: Addressing the Practical Questions of CIOs and CTOs. I will be participating in a a panel entitled The Future of Cloud Computing for the Enterprise, moderated by Jason Hoffman, CTO at Joyent.

Tuesday

On Tuesday (10 AM PST), GigaSpaces and CohesiveFT are hosting a joint webinar entitled Cloud Enablement with Security and Control. The highlight of this webinar is a wicked cool live demo of running a web application across two public clouds (Amazon EC2 and Flexiscale) with the ability to scale out on demand based on SLAs, fail-over, self-healing -- all in a secure environment. So as the Cohesive guys wrote on their blog, make sure to brush up on your cloud computing buzzwords, because we will show it all: cloudbursting, cloud storming, cloud spanning, virtual private clouds, hybrid clouds, interclouds -- you name it.

You can read more details on Nati's blog and Dekel's blog. Sign up here.

Wednesday-Friday

Sys-con's Cloud Computing Expo will take place in San Jose. Seems like everyone is coming in to the Bay Area for this one, so I am looking forward to meet a lot of the folks active in cloud computing at this event. There is also talk of another Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum get together around this event as well as a Silicon Valley CloudCamp.

So it's going to a fun week. If anyone wants to get together at one of these events, just let me know in the comments or via twitter.

Cloud Computing on Twitter

2008-11-14T12:23:08-08:00

Just thought it would be useful to list some of the folks I follow in Twitter who write about, talk about or practice cloud computing (in no particular order):

James Urquhart (jamesurquhart) - my fellow podcaster on Overcast and author of Wisdom of Clouds, now at the Cisco office of CTO doing cloud related stuff (congrats again, James!)

John Willis (botchagalupe)

Randy Bias (randybias)

Duncan Johnston Watt (duncanjw) - founder of Enigmatec and now CloudSoft

David Berlind (dberlind)

Alistair Croll (acroll)

Jian Zhen (onsaas) - stream of cloud computing related news

Michael Sheehan (hightechdad) - Evangelist for GoGrid

Lance Wicks (lancew)

Alexis Richardson (monadic) - Cohesive FT guy

Kent Langley (kentlangley) - Joyent guy and cloud blogger

Sam Charrington (samcharrington) - Appistry guy

Christine Gupta (mrsboogie) - marketing person at Flexiscale

Jeff Barr (jeffbarr) - Amazon web Services evangelist

Deepak Singh (mndoci) - Amazon Web Services BD guy

Werner Vogels (werner) - Amazon CTO

Simone Brunozzi (simon) - Amazon Web Services evangelist in Europe

Martin Buhr (tallmartin) - Amazon Web Services Biz dev guy in Europe

Paul Retherford (paulretherford)

Bob Lozano (boblozano) - Appistry founder

Rich Miller (datacenter) - Tech journalist from Data Center Knowledge

Christofer Hoff (beaker) - Security expert

Dekel Tankel (dekt) - Cloud guy at GigaSpaces

Ynema Mangum (ymangum) - Cloud Computing Product Line Manager at Sun

Paul Lancaster (paullancaster) - GoGrid guy

Daryl Plummer (darylplummer) - Gartner analyst

Cohesive FT (elasticserver)

GoGrid (gogrid)

GigaSpaces (gigaspaces)

Joyent (joyent)

Appistry (appistry)

On Demand (ondemand) -- SaaS news

Cloud Camp (cloudcamp)

And of course, please follow me.

Please recommend anyone that's not on the list in the comments to this post.

Links for 2008-11-16 [del.icio.us]

2008-11-17T00:00:00-06:00

Scalable, Low Latency Web Tier on Amazon EC2

2008-11-07T12:24:17-08:00

Shay Hassidim, deputy CTO at GigaSpaces, posted an impressive write-up of a benchmark the team ran on Amazon EC2. What's nice about it is that they took a standard web app, in this case the Spring PetClinic, and dropped it into the GigaSpaces container, achieving instant low-latency and scalability, with out-of-the-box load-balancing and fail-over. Extremely cool.

The other components in the app include standard and open source components: Jetty, MySQL, Apache load-balancer, JMeter and Ant.

Also, Shay posts a screen shot (I think it's the first-ever public one) of the new GigaSpaces cloud framework. Check it out:

See the full benchmark numbers on Shay's post. And you can sign up for a GigaSpaces pay-per-use EC2 license here.

Overcast Podcast #2 is Up

2008-11-05T10:26:09-08:00

James and I released show #2 of Overcast. Here are the show notes with the topics discussed:

In this podcast we discuss two main cloud computing related announcements from recent days:

Salesforce.com's Force.com Sites and the new relationship between Salesforce and Amazon Web Services. You can can read more about this on James's blog.
The announcement of cooperation between RightScale and the open source EUCALYPTUS project from the University of California Santa Barbara. You can read more about this on Geva's blog here and here.
Also mentions of CohesiveFT, Elastra, Google App Engine, Microsoft and more...

Go to the show page to listen in your browser, download the MP3 or:

Enigmatec to Spin-Off Cloudsoft

2008-11-03T23:47:49-08:00

I saw a LinkedIn network update today that Duncan Johnston-Watt is now Founder & CEO at Cloudsoft Corporation. I was intrigued as I've known Duncan for several years as founder & CTO of Enigmatec. According to Duncan's blog he is leaving his operational role at Enigmatec to lead a spin-off that leverages Enigmatec technology to provide "cloud services". The details are sketchy as the company is in stealth mode. Here's an excerpt from the Enigmatec press release:

“The goal of Cloudsoft will be to deliver enterprise class Cloud Services orchestrated by Enigmatec software,” explained Duncan Johnston-Watt, Founder and CEO, Cloudsoft Corporation. “The first of these will leverage IP acquired from Enigmatec to host electronic marketplaces in the Cloud.”

Enigmatec will continue to build on the success of its data center automation solutions such as Enigmatec Virtual Orchestrator (EVO) and Automated Disaster Recovery (ADR), which enable the dynamic allocation of IT resources in response to minute-by-minute operational changes.

“Having established our technological leadership, we felt that the timing was right for Enigmatec to create this spin out and that Duncan was the ideal person to lead this initiative,” added Kevin Lomax, Chairman, Enigmatec Corporation. “We are delighted that as Founder he has agreed to remain on the Board of Enigmatec and we look forward to working closely with Cloudsoft in 2009.”

Good luck, Duncan!

RIghtScale and Eucalyptus Team Up

2008-11-03T20:44:52-08:00

Congratulations to the RightScale and EUCALYPTUS teams for joining forces. Both teams have extremely cool technology and smart people. It is going to be interesting to see how both technologies evolve with the cloud computing landscape so rapidly evolving and maturing.

Internal clouds are still in their infancy but both these technologies have the potential to play a role in them. See my earlier post on EUCALYPTUS and its potential for commercialization. But internal clouds start playing into the notion of data center management and automation, a crowded, complex space, and it seems that the two teams are positioning this only for evaluation purposes for enterprises (not so for universities and start-ups).

It would be great to see more and more of the tools and frameworks that support EC2 also support Eucalyptus, which should be fairly simple given that Eucalyptus has implemented the EC2 and S3 APIs.

In any case, good luck to Rich, Michael and their teams.

See the full press release on John Willis's blog.

Cloud Computing. Literally.

2008-11-03T11:19:35-08:00

Last week we made a very exciting announcement about Miwok Airways selecting GigaSpaces as the application server for running their reservation and pricing engine which will run on EC2. This is a great case study for cloud computing.

For one thing, you have to love the fact that it is cloud computing used for a business that literally runs in the clouds (the actual meteorological kind). Second, it is an on-demand compute infrastructure for a business that has an on-demand business model in the real world. A perfect fit.

There is a great piece in the LA Times that describes Miwok, but let me give you a brief description from the software application angle.

The idea is that for so-called ultra-short flights (typically, less than 250 miles), as a traveler you have a terrible dilemma: use commercial airlines or drive your car. I don't need to tell you the hassle and costs involved in both options these days.

Miwok overcomes the hassles of these options by providing you with an on-demand "air taxi" service. You book your flight when you need it. So, say, you want to fly from Santa Monica to Orange County or Palm Springs. You go to the Miwok web site and say when and where, you get pricing and you can book the flight on the spot. The flight you are booking is for a private Cirrus SR22. You can park 100 feet from the airplane itself (at a local airport, not just the major ones) and you don't need to go through security (imagine that!). All of this at the same cost of a commercial flight.

But here's the part I really like:You can connect to other people via Miwok's own social network, or through a Facebook app (and others to come). As the Cirrus can seat 3 passengers, you can split the costs with other passengers who need to make the same trip. So the flight could end up significantly cheaper than a commercial airline.

Think about it: This is the exact opposite pricing model of big airliners, where the more people go on a flight, the price goes up. From a marketing point of view, this has tremendous viral potential.

One of the biggest technology (technology as in software, not aviation) challenges Miwok was facing was developing an extremely sophisticated real-time pricing engine. It needs to take many parameters into account to offer you a price on the spot, including location, path, season, date, time of booking, number of passengers and several other criteria. It needs to be able to grow and shrink on-demand, especially because of the social networking and viral effect.

The architecture Miwok selected uses MySQL and Hibernate for the persistence layer, but the database is not used as the system of record for calculation and reservations. Instead they use GigaSpaces' in-memory data grid, which gives you in-memory speeds and can also grow and shrink dynamically in the EC2 environment. The benefit for Miwok is that having very little advance knowledge on the traffic they will get, and expecting extreme peaks and troughs in activity, they don't need to pre-plan and invest upfront in the infrastructure. They use GigaSpaces and EC2 and will only pay for hardware and software on a per-use basis -- when and if they actually need it.

They also use GigaSpaces XAP (which includes the in-memory data grid) as the container for the business logic, written in Java, and as a bus for integrating the various underlying services involved in generating pricing and booking reservations.

In short, on-demand application scalability for an on-demand air travel service.

Check out Miwok's web site.

Does Eucalyptus Have a Commercial Future?

2008-11-02T23:53:04-08:00

The Eucalyptus project from Dr. Rich Wolski and his team at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) is one of the most interesting open source projects in cloud computing. Although it is a research project, I can't help but think about potential commercial applications for it.

The idea behind Eucalyptus -- which is actually an acronym for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems -- is quite simple: it is a frameowrk for implementing a cloud computing environment similar to Amazon Web Services. Taking EC2 as their first target, the team implemented many of the APIs and much of the functionality of EC2, such as the ability to bundle machine images and share them, the ability to deploy and kill machine image instances, user management on the cloud and so on. More advanced features such as Availability Zones are also supported, and reading through the discussion boards, it seems that more is on the way. The APIs, mind you, are compatible with Amazon's.

So what would be the use cases for such a system? Here's a few I came up with.

Private Cloud for the Enterprise: Implement an Amazon EC2 -like infrastructure in-house. Seems to me that a lot more needs to be in place for this be a viable option.
Hybrid Cloud
Cloud Portability
Cloud Testing
Public Cloud Framework for Hosting Services, ISPs and other providers

It would be really interesting to hear others thoughts on this. Right now I understand that the software is mostly used by those who mean to deploy on EC2 but want to perform development and testing in-house, mostly for cost-savings. That kind of makes you wonder...

Cloud Computing Podcast

2008-11-02T23:42:08-08:00

James Urquhart (Wisdom of Clouds blog) and I are starting a new podcast series on cloud computing and related topics (virtualization, software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service, utility and on-demand computing, etc.).

The series is entitled Overcast. We plan to do it at least on a weekly basis, discussing topics and news of the day. We're also planning on having guests join us -- namely notable executives, techies, analysts and bloggers active in the cloud computing space.

Check out the Overcast blog and listen to the first podcast: Show #1

Here are some of the topics we discuss in it:

New features from Amazon Web Services, such as auto-scaling and load-balancing, and how it affects Amazon's eco-system of partners such as RightScale, GigaSpaces and others; as well as AWS coming out of beta and offering SLAs
Microsoft Azure and whether or not it will help Microsoft attract non .Net developers to it
CohesiveFT's new VPN-Cubed product
IBM's announcement that they are offering Lotus Notes as software-as-a-service

We also discuss:

The potential roles of IBM, HP and Sun in cloud computing
The recent debate between Tim O'Reilly and Nick Carr on the Network Effect in cloud computing
The notion of vendor "vision lock-in" -- announcements aimed at making potential customers take pause before selecting a cloud vendor
and much more...

Please listen in and let James and me know what you think.

Also, you can:

GigaSpaces Cloud Framework - Private Beta

2008-10-05T03:49:01-07:00

As Dekel has already written on his blog, we are releasing our cloud framework for private beta. This was intended as a very "soft launch" sent to about 30 customers and partners already using GigaSpaces on public clouds (such as EC2, GoGrid, Joyent and Flexiscale) to help us test it out and provide feedback on how we can improve it.

But given that James Urquhart and a couple of others have already given it some more exposure, I might as well give some more public details about it.

First, let me clarify that GigaSpaces XAP, as is, is not only ready for the cloud now, but is already being used as a "cloud application server" on EC2 by several large and start-up companies. Even before the advent of public clouds, such as Amazon EC2, GigaSpaces was already being used by corporations in on-premise grids and by Web 2.0 start-ups for handling peak loads and the need to rapidly scale.

Because it allows on-demand scalability, provides transparent fault-tolerance, enables data affinity and is extremely high-performance, as a technology, GigaSpaces XAP is ideally suited for public cloud environments. But there were a few pieces missing in terms of the "customer experience" -- and we are working hard to provide them.

One of them was pricing suitable for the on-demand model. We had already taken care of that as part of the announcement of GigaSpaces availability on EC2 back in June by providing a pay-per-use pricing model (CPU/hour).

Another one was simplifying and automating the deployment of applications to a public cloud environment. That's what the "cloud framework" is about. It enables rapid cluster configuration and "one-click" deployment on public clouds through a Web interface. The current version supports EC2, but was built in a way that allows us to easily add other public clouds, which we will gradually implement. To learn more, see the documentation for the cloud framework.

If you are interested in or considering using GigaSpaces on EC2, if you are part of our Start-Up Program, or an existing "on-premise"customer, please let us know if you'd like to participate in the private beta (email cloud at gigaspaces.com). You'd first need to sign up for a GigaSpaces EC2 license.

The official public beta release of the cloud framework will be announced soon. Shortly thereafter I hope to announce tighter integration with our partners at RightScale, CohesiveFT and others. And there's more to come...

Cloud Computing and the Financial Crisis

2008-09-29T01:43:20-07:00

On-Demand Enterprise just published a piece I wrote about some of the lessons learned from the current financial crisis and cloud computing. Although there is of course no direct connection, there are some interesting conclusions.

Here's an excerpt:

Although I'm not suggesting that it was the crux of the current crisis, one of the questions that has come up recently is why Wall Street's massive investments in value-at-risk analysis system did not curb the downfall. We have not heard (at least not yet) that these risk analyses were blinking with red lights and were ignored. In an HPCwire piece entitled "The Quantitative Models Tanked Too," editor Michael Feldman tackles this issue. Although not the only explanation, one of the issues raised in the article is the fact that the models used were over-simplified. Feldman explains that "in some cases, limits in computational power made these simplifications necessary so that the valuation models could be run."
Done right, cloud computing offers nearly limitless computing power. Had they used a cloud service such as EC2, and software that is built to scale on the cloud, the quants on Wall Street could have easy, cheap and on-demand access to massive computation power.

Read the full story.

Ellison's Anti-Cloud Computing Rant

2008-09-28T20:42:51-07:00

Once again, in either complete self-unawareness or a calculated manipulation, Oracle comes out with a cynical statement. Ben Worthen reports that on the Oracle earnings call, Larry Ellison said the following:

The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?
We’ll make cloud computing announcements. I’m not going to fight this thing. But I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing other than change the wording of some of our ads. That’s my view.

More than a couple of people that I respect, including Ben Worthen and Dan Farber, have written publicly or told me in person something to the effect of "you have to admit he has a point."

Although, I agree that the term cloud computing has been hijacked by many vendors to become meaninless in some cases, that's missing the point of what Ellison is saying here. What he's saying, in no uncertain terms, is that other than using cloud computing in Oracle marketing, they are not going to change anything. You still think that makes sense?

To answer Larry's question, here are three things Oracle can do differently:

Offer their middleware and database customers a pay-per-use pricing model on cloud environments such as EC2, Joyent, GoGrid and Flexiscale. Charge by the hour and only for cpu/hours actually used.
Offer all of their application software on a SaaS/on-demand subscription basis
Develop products that are suitable for virtualized highly-distributed environments, and therefore, or are not highly dependent on centralized components such as their database. [UPDATE: adding some more specifics based on additional research]] Specifically:
1. Enable Oracle RAC on EC2
2. Enable WebLogic clustering (!), despite the fact there is no multicasting on EC2
3. Support Amazon AMIs (as opposed ot providing some AMIs with no support)

Oracle won't do this. Why?

As I and others have already pointed out several times, Oracle is the company of status quo. Things are very good for Oracle the way they are exactly now -- any change is unwelcome. They make money by having high-paid aggressive sales people shove big stacks of software down customers throat, forcing them to buy this software with up-front, fully paid-up prepetual licenses. They then continue to make profit from these customers by selling them annual maintenance fees, most of which customers don't need or use, as Safra Catz herself admits.

Oracle does not share in any way in the customer's risk. If the customers ends up canceling the project. Too bad. It's now shelfware. If the customers ends up not needing to scale up as much, too bad. If the customer hits bad times or any other reason where the software is no longer needed -- too bad. Oracle has already pocketed its profit and it's off to sucker in the next guy.

So take Larry at his word when he says Oracle is not going to change anything but marketing.

GoGrid's "No Hardware" Campaign

2008-09-26T16:53:27-07:00

I really like the new "No Hardware" campaign from our friends at GoGrid, picking up on Salesforce.com's "no software" slogan. John is hilarious in the role of Dr. GoGrid.

GigaSpaces on the Joyent Cloud

2008-09-24T22:02:05-07:00

Kent Lagley writes on the Joyent blog about the work he has done with Dekel and Owen running GugaSpaces on the Joyet Accelerators. It's a well-written detailed blog and in a post entitled Cloud Computing with Java, Kent adds some more info on his personal blog, ProductionScale.

My favorite quote from the Joyent blog:

Some other exciting things about this exercise in the lab was that it was, in general, easy. We added and removed nodes, scaled linearly, pulled nodes out, re-deployed the application in seconds to minutes, we processed large amounts of data, and we did all this in the cloud with really minimal efforts.

Some formal announcements about our partnership with Joyent coming soon.

Oracle and Cloud Computing. Funny.

2008-09-24T00:40:03-07:00

The announcement by Oracle this week that they are "on the cloud" was once again quite an amusing piece of public relations. I don't know if Oracle is serious when they make these announcements or if they are secretly smiling to themselves.

Not everybody ate it up (although many did). Vinnie Mirchandani, a keen observer of the enterprise software space, wrote: "It will not reduce costs of Oracle licensing or even worse, the annual maintenance cost."

Oracle seemed to have missed one of the main points of cloud computing -- that it's an on-demand approach and that includes software licensing costs. In case you didn't notice, Oracle is not offering pay-per-use pricing for the cloud. All they are saying is that you can use the regular perpetual, upfront, fully-paid software license on EC2. Big Whoop.

The other major problem with the Oracle announcement is that their software really isn't suitable for a cloud environment. It can't grow and shrink on-demand, it's not self-healing, it's dependent on centralized components, it's complex. It's just not right.

I discuss this in greater detail in GigaSpaces and the Economics of Cloud Computing, where I also discuss another amusing press release from Oracle. Reposting it here for your convenience:

Another interesting comparison is revealed by this amusing press release from Oracle about a start-up customer named Qtrax. Look at the stack Oracle managed to sell them to build their application. I put in brackets the price per CPU for each Oracle product from the official price list, and I quote:

"Qtrax's implementation includes Oracle Database [$17.5k to $47.5k], Oracle Real Application Clusters [$23k], Oracle Enterprise Manager [$3.5 to $20k+] and components of Oracle Fusion Middleware [?], including Oracle Application Server [$10k to $30k] and Oracle Coherence [$4k to $25k]. With this software now in place, Qtrax will have the ability to support millions of concurrent users [they better!]."

On top of these numbers (which total in the range of $58k to $145.5k per CPU¹)add a 22% annual support fee. As these are perpetual licenses, let's break the license numbers to an hourly rate by assuming 24/7 for 3 years: we get $2.20 to $5.54. Even if you decide to be generous and divide by 4 years, you get $1.65 to $4.15. Now, let's not forget that Oracle doesn't actually offer any special pricing for it's products on EC2 (i.e., an hourly rate)² so you would have to buy the licenses upfront, as Qtrax apparently did.

A True Cloud Practitioner

2008-09-22T16:08:58-07:00

This is a long overdue acknowledgment of my friend and colleague at GigaSpaces, Dekel Tankel's blog - Thoughts from the Clouds. A lot of people out there are talking about cloud computing, without truly understanding the issues, and without real-world experience -- and so we need more blogs such as Dekel's.

Dekel is out there every day working with the people who are truly practicing cloud computing. And I am not talking about the pundits, but the real-life customers who are using platforms such as EC2, Joyent and GoGrid -- and of course, running on the GigaSpaces cloud application server. And Dekel is doing it hands-on, helping GigaSpaces customers get on the cloud.

So check out his blog and encourage him to write more!

The Mysterious Case of the Google Cloud Computing Group

2008-09-18T22:33:04-07:00

I just posted the following to the Cloud Computing discussion board on Google Group. Let's see what happens.

Folks,

Are we going to publicly discuss these posts:
http://samj.net/2008/09/enomalism-vapourware-lands-enomaly-in-c.html
http://blog.jamesurquhart.com/2008/09/what-hell-is-going-on-with-cloud.html
http://blog.jamesurquhart.com/2008/09/cloud-computing-on-google-groups-is.html
Or is this whole thing going to be ignored?
Geva

UPDATE: I was informed by Khazert that my message will not be posted on the list and the whole thing will indeed be ignored. He told me he was especially offended by the fact that James and Sam posted his and Reuven's photo (huh!?).

Even before this incident I heard quite a bit of frustration about the Google Group. Some interesting alternatives have been created -- they are mentioned in the comments to this post. I also found this one to be quite promising: http://www.cloudave.com/.

James Urquhart also suggests 9 cloud news sources you may not know about, but my advice is just read James's blog. He covers it all.