fundamentals : elemental cloud computing

May 27th, 2010

@ Forrester IT Forum: James Staten, How much of your future is in the Cloud?

Keynote Speech: How Much Of Your Future Will Be In The Cloud? Strategies For Embracing Cloud Computing Services, James Staten, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Cloud computing has shifted from being a question of “if” to one of “when” and “where” in your IT future and portfolio. Is it best to stick with SaaS, or should you be deploying new services directly to the public clouds like Amazon EC2 or Windows Azure? What applications are candidates for the cloud, and which should remain in-house? And for how long? This session will explore the enterprise uses of cloud computing thus far and synthesize the thinking across Forrester on this issue to present you with a road map and a strategy for embracing the cloud that benefits both your business and the IT function. Cloud can be a catalyst for the IT-to-BT transition so long as you harness it effectively.

Session attendees can expect to learn:

How to tell a true cloud solution and its relative maturity from simple cloud washing.
The truth behind the economics of cloud computing.
The best places to start and strategies to build your own path to cloud efficiency.

Prior to the conference, James wrote a positioning/discussion piece, which is published on ZDNet. From what I saw on Twitter, the most controversial idea was the “Pay per use or metered consumption” requirement to be consider cloud computing.

James opens more >>

Tagged as: Forrester, ITF10, JamesStaten

Posted by brenda michelson at 12:29 pm in analyst positions, Blog, fundamentals | Permalink | Comments(1)
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April 12th, 2010

Scale-up is Great. Don’t Forget Scale-out.

Eric David Benari contributed a post to MIT CIO Symposium’s CIO Corner blog on Building Sustainable IT ROI:

“When analyzing IT ROI, the ROI-sustainability factor is often overlooked. A frequent scenario involves architecture plans that call for multiple diverse technologies that may each be practical choices on their own, but are virtually incompatible together or require completely different skills/teams to integrate and maintain. To build IT ROI that proves itself beyond the planning stage it is critical that the entire IT-infrastructure, including the human-resources that interact with it, are analyzed as a whole.”

I constantly soapbox on understanding and accounting for the value of IT investments over time, so I enjoyed the entire post. One point though, the essentialness of planning (architectural planning) is especially pertinent to cloud computing. [Emphasis is mine.]

“Fundamental to sustainable IT-project ROI is the concept of more >>

Tagged as: Eric David Benari, MIT, scale

Posted by brenda michelson at 11:05 am in Blog, fundamentals, performance & reliability, software architecture | Permalink | Comments(1)
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February 16th, 2010

F5’s Lori MacVittie: Users use Applications. Applications use clouds.

In response to yet another mainstream press bungling of “cloud and cloud computing”, Lori MacVittie offers a clear and concise cloud computing delineation: “Users use Applications. Applications use clouds.” Lori expands on this point:

“Cloud computing is not a synonym for cloud. And vice-versa. Cloud computing is perhaps the first case of “technology for technology’s sake” that is actually a good thing. That’s because cloud computing is for applications. It’s not for users, it’s for applications. A cloud computing environment without an application is pretty much useless. A dynamic collection of compute resources that remains unfulfilled, idly spinning disks and catching CPU interrupts willy nilly without purpose.

Users, i.e. consumers, never really interact with a cloud computing environment, they interact with an application. Many folks identify SaaS (Software as a Service) as “cloud” because many of the properties associated with cloud computing – scalability, multi-tenancy, on-demand usage and dynamic adjustment to capacity – are inherently part of the offering. That may – or may not – be because the underlying infrastructure on which those applications are deployed is, in fact, a cloud computing infrastructure.”

“…Let’s say that again: an application is not “a cloud”, its supporting infrastructure and environment are “a cloud.” An application may be a cloud-based application or service, but it is never, ever a “cloud” itself nor are you using “cloud computing” by simple virtue of accessing that application. You are using an application, the application is using cloud computing.”

After a much appreciated reference to my cloud-o-gram, Lori continues with an analogy to the SOA-world:

“A “cloud” is really an architecture that exhibits particular characteristics (on-demand, multi-tenant, rapid elasticity, resource pooling) that enable applications deployed atop that architecture to appear “infinitely scalable.” Saying an application is or is not cloud is like saying an application is or is not SOA. The application may leverage a SOA, it may be comprised of services (a “composite application”) but it is not SOA. It can’t be because SOA is an architecture, a design and deployment model, a means of interaction between services.”

So, the next time you witness cloud / cloud computing bungling, repeat after Lori: “an application is not “a cloud”, its supporting infrastructure and environment are “a cloud.””

Tagged as: F5, Lori MacVittie

Posted by brenda michelson at 1:47 pm in cloud computing environment (cce), Cloud Watch, cloud-o-gram, fundamentals, SaaS, services architecture | Permalink | Comments(0)
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January 12th, 2010

100-day Cloud Watch: Enterprise Cloud Computing Considerations

To date, I have applied a wide lens to my cloud watching to get a good feel for the entire space. As a result, I published my "cloud-o-gram" and numerous posts on developments, perspectives and conversations that caught my attention.

For the start of 2010, specifically the next 100 days, I’m going to narrow my cloud watching lens to enterprise cloud computing considerations. My plan is to apply 2 – 5 research sessions to each enterprise consideration and publish my findings along the way, via elemental cloud computing cloud watch entries and blog posts.

At the end of my list, or 100-days, whichever comes first, I’ll summarize my findings in a research report.

Reviewing my current calendar, the 100th research day is May 21. Like all good (former) developers, I’ve buffered with Saturday mornings.

In additional to my standard categories and tagging schemes, I’ll use the “100-days” category and “enterprise considerations” tag.

My starting list of enterprise cloud computing considerations follows. more >>

Tagged as: enterprise considerations

Posted by brenda michelson at 1:05 pm in 100-days, adoption, Blog, fundamentals | Permalink | Comments(0)
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January 6th, 2010

5 Enduring Aspects of Cloud Computing

Forgoing the hyperbole of cloud computing predictions – sensational outages to a cloud-in-every-pocket – I want to start 2010 discussing the enduring aspects of cloud computing on enterprise business-technology. Regardless of the final manifestation of cloud computing, and the tally of deployments, successes and failures, I believe cloud computing will influence the expectations and practice of enterprise business-technology throughout the decade.

I have identified five enduring aspects from a practitioner perspective. Certainly, there are enduring aspects on the provider side as well, such as advances from Infrastructure 2.0 and disruptions created by new economic and pricing models. However, I will leave that list for provider-side specialists.

The first three enduring aspects focus on the expectations from business-technology organizations.

1. Resource Optimization – Cloud computing has raised Executive awareness to the disproportion of installed versus utilized computing capacity, along with the requisite expenses of space, power, software licenses and support personnel.

If they have not already, Executives will mandate infrastructure ecology initiatives, starting with the consolidation and pooling of compute and data resources, and progressing to software execution efficiency.

more >>

Tagged as: 2010 hypothesis, brenda michelson, capability delivery, popular post

Posted by brenda michelson at 5:59 pm in Blog, economics, elasticity & scale, fundamentals, infrastructure 2.0, performance & reliability, platform, pundit positions, software architecture | Permalink | Comments(4)
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December 4th, 2009

IBM SOA Newsletter: SOA and Cloud, like Books and Library

In IBM’s November 2009 SOA Newsletter, Fill Bowen, Program Manager responsible for Smart SOA in IBM Software Group, discusses the relationship between SOA and Cloud Computing, and shares prerequisites for providing services in a cloud and consuming services in a cloud.

The newsletter emphasizes that SOA and Cloud Computing are complements. SOA is an architectural style, while Cloud Computing is a deployment model. These concepts can come together in the design of the cloud computing environment:

"’SOA is an architectural style for building applications, loosely coupled, allowing composition,’ says Jerry Cuomo, CTO of IBM’s WebSphere business. ‘Can we build a datacenter infrastructure on SOA principles? Yes, and that’s the cloud, so it’s a service-oriented infrastructure,’ he adds. ‘It’s taking that architectural principle of SOA and applying it to an infrastructure.’" – InfoWorld, “The cloud-SOA connection”

In discussing the SOA-Cloud Computing relationship, Fill offers a helpful analogy using books and a library:

“An interesting analogy for cloud and SOA is to think of books in a library. The books represent the services that customers can access once the library acquires them, and the library building represents the cloud where people come to check out the books/services. Books are reusable, and several books might make up a series or topic. Someone writes the book once and it is reused many times.

Using our analogy of books in the library, there are two components to consider when thinking about services in a cloud environment. One is the providing of services (books) to the cloud (library). And the other is the consuming (checking out) of those services (books). Each has different requirements.”

Read the article to learn of the prerequisites for providing and consuming services in a cloud.

[Disclosure: IBM is not a direct client of my firm, Elemental Links, however IBM is a founding sponsor of the SOA Consortium, which is a client.]

Tagged as: Fillmore Bowen, IBM, soa

Posted by brenda michelson at 11:11 am in cloud computing environment (cce), Cloud Watch, fundamentals, governance, provider positions, services architecture, virtualization | Permalink | Comments(0)
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