Cloud Computing: What everyone should know

Cloud computing is an evolutionary step in the delivery of information technology as a service. This transformation will impact every organization. And make no mistake, its time is here.

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Introducing Company Profiles: Highlighting Today's Cloud Computing Leaders

Cloud computing is defined as much by the companies delivering these new services, as it is by technology or anything else. Our company profiles highlight the leaders in this emerging market, with new ones added weekly.

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Articles

Dear Cloud API, Your Fault Line is Showing

By William Vambenepe, Software Architect, Oracle, submitted by: William Vambenepe, Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Most APIs are like hospital gowns. They seem to provide good coverage, until you turn around.
I am talking about the dreadful state of fault reporting in remote APIs, from Twitter to Cloud interfaces. They are badly described in the interface documentation and the implementations often don’t even conform to what little is documented.

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Architectural Multi-tenancy

By Lori MacVittie, Technical Marketing Manager, F5, submitted by: Lori MacVittie, Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Almost every definition of cloud, amongst the myriad definitions that exist, include the notion of multi-tenancy, a.k.a. the ability to isolate customer-specific traffic, data, and configuration of resources using the same software and interfaces. In the case of SaaS (Software as a Service) multi-tenancy is almost always achieved via a database and configuration, with isolation provided at the application layer. This form of multi-tenancy is the easiest to implement and is a well-understood model of isolation.

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Understanding Cloud Data Center Economies of Scale

By Randy Bias, Founder, Cloudscaling, submitted by: Randy Bias, Monday, May 24, 2010

James Hamilton’s recent MIX’10 presentation on economies of scale for large cloud providers was quite impressive. James “gets it” like few others in the industry. If you haven’t watched his hour-long presentation, I suggest you do.

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From VMware and Salesforce.com (VMforce) to VMware and Google: VMware's PaaS Milestones

By William Vambenepe, Software Architect, Oracle, submitted by: William Vambenepe, Thursday, May 20, 2010

Three weeks ago, VMware and Salesforce.com launched VMforce, a Salesforce-hosted platform as a service (PaaS) solution based on VMware runtime technology and force.com application services. In my analysis of the announcement, I wrote:

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Cloud Computing as Commodity

By Geva Perry, Cloud Computing Advisor and Blogger , submitted by: Geva Perry, Tuesday, May 18, 2010

My partner in crime on the Overcast podcast, James Urquhart, published a nice blog post titled: Cloud computing and 'commodity'. Read the post and come back. I'll wait.

Done? OK.

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Cloud Load Balancing Fu for Developers Helps Avoid Scaling Gotchas

By Lori MacVittie, Technical Marketing Manager, F5, submitted by: Lori MacVittie, Monday, May 17, 2010

If you don’t know how scaling services work in a cloud environment you may not like the results

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Is PaaS Just Outsourced Application Server Platforms?

By Lori MacVittie, Technical Marketing Manager, F5, submitted by: Lori MacVittie, Thursday, May 13, 2010

There’s a growing focus on PaaS (Platform as a Service), particularly as Microsoft has been rolling out Azure and VMware continues to push forward with its SpringSource acquisition.

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What Goes Up Must Come Down

By Lori MacVittie, Technical Marketing Manager, F5, submitted by: Lori MacVittie, Wednesday, May 12, 2010

No, scalability may not be rocket science but it is computer science and not nearly as easy as it might appear

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InMage Builds On Core Strengths to Help Customers Leverage Cloudbursting

By John Panagulias, Editor-in-Chief, submitted by: John Panagulias, Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Cloud computing is opening doors for traditional software companies in ways some people might not expect. Sometimes it’s not about how to transition on-premise software to software as a service (SaaS), which has its own inherent issues for those contemplating the move. Rather, it’s about thinking how a given piece of software might work in a cloud computing environment. In fact, there is some software that has been designed to solve a particular set of needs in a traditional data center environment that can cross-over and work well in a cloud computing environment.

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Dealing with the Cloud's Latent Tendencies

By John Considine, Founder and CTO, CloudSwitch, submitted by: John Considine, Thursday, May 6, 2010

One of the frequent questions we get when we engage with customers moving applications to the cloud is: what about the latency issues when using a cloud?  This question arises because most IT departments have had to struggle with application performance issues and the idea of adding a big chunk of latency when integrating the cloud is very troubling.  Here is how we address this:

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