Congratulations to Werner Vogels, the now legendary CTO of Amazon and one of the principle drivers of the Amazon Web Services vision. InfoWorld announced Sunday that Werner earned its CTO of the Year award. The accolades are rolling in from all over, but I think all agree that this was a well-deserved recognition for Werner and his team. In fact, Werner's recognition of the team effort that led to this award just makes him that much more of a class act.
What leaves me shaking my head, however, is that it took this long to see the incredible feat that Amazon pulled off, and the leadership that pushed a retail goods company to see compute capacity as a logical extension of their business.... Read more
From Jason Boche's blog:
Today at the Minneapolis VMware User Group (VMUG) meeting, VMware employees disclosed to a group of 150+ attendees the new name for the next generation of Virtual Infrastructure many have been referring to as VI4 or VI.next. The new name is VMware vSphere. I value and respect the various relationships I have with VMware and thus before posting this news, I checked with authoritative sources inside VMware. VMware Marketing has endorsed the release of this information to the public. VMware also released a few new configuration maximum details on vSphere but for now I am keeping that information to myself. Other audience members in attendance may decide to break this news.
Why does this matter to cloud computing fans, you ask?
VMWare's vCloud vision depends greatly on the upcoming features that expand the scale in which VMWare's core products can operate; expanding beyond the server to the data center as a whole and beyond. Rumors of features such as over-WAN migration of virtual machines in VI4 are key to the vision of federated VMWare-based clouds becoming a reality. So, create a Google Alert for vSphere, sit back and watch the show.
Microsoft detailed on Tuesday its road map and pricing for Web-based software suites built for big companies and growing businesses.
Enabling telecommuting, which many employers and workers increasingly favor, is likely to be a selling point for the productivity and "deskless worker" tools within the Microsoft Online Services lineup.
The move is part of Redmond's push to integrate online and desktop software, shifting much of the heavy lifting to the "cloud."
"Microsoft Online Services is a key component of the software plus services initiative, and we're seeing customers, partners and even competitors embrace this flexible approach to the cloud," Stephen Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division, said in a statement.
Details were unveiled Tuesday in Houston at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference.
Microsoft's per-user monthly fees for its online business services.
(Credit: Microsoft)For $15 per month per person, the business productivity suite offers an Outlook-integrated Exchange Online for e-mail and calendars, Office SharePoint Online collaboration, messaging via Office Communications Online, and Office Live Meeting video-enabled Web conferencing.
The software giant will charge another $3 per month per user for the Deskless Worker Suite, which combines flavors of SharePoint Online and Exchange Online. The SharePoint portal offers access to internal company sites and search. E-mail, calendars, security filters, and Outlook Web Access Light are included with Exchange Online Deskless Worker.
Microsoft aims to simplify otherwise complex corporate tasks managed by engineers or IT technicians. For instance, a WYSIWYG interface would enable an IT worker to give a new employee access to the company tools in a series of steps that could be shorter than setting up, say, a free Hotmail or Yahoo e-mail account.
One can sign up online to try the beta services.
Exchange Online and Office SharePoint Online remain in beta, with final availability set for sometime in the second half of 2008, when Office Communications Online beta is also due. Microsoft plans for international availability in 2009.
The company offers to pay resellers of its Online Services 12 percent of the price of each contract secured during the first year, and 6 percent per subscription year thereafter. Interested companies can learn more at Microsoft's QuickStart Web site.
Microsoft partners and resellers of Online Services include Accenture, CDW, and Unisys. Nokia is among the companies using the online tools for messaging and collaboration.
Microsoft Online Services includes these tools.
(Credit: Microsoft)The Economist's Ludwig Siegele opens up one of the most important questions for the next 10 years of software: What happens to Microsoft after Bill Gates leaves?
In Ray Ozzie's (and, perhaps, Microsoft's) view, Microsoft's new goal is the same as the old goal: dominate everything. But the battle has shifted to the "cloud" now. Complicating the matter further, Microsoft no longer has a technical leader, one who combines vision, tenacity, and introspection. Instead it has an aggressive, sometimes bumbling bloodhound of a CEO, Steve Ballmer.
Can Mr. Protect-My-Desktop-Monopoly-By-Whatever-Means-Necessary really push Microsoft to the future? Can Ballmer deliver on this goal? According to Siegele, Microsoft's goal:
...is to become the dominant force in the forthcoming era of cloud computing--or, to refresh Microsoft's original mission: "to supply services to every desk, to every home and to every hand."
To understand what that means, and the difficulties it poses Microsoft, start with the idea that computing is undergoing one of its great periodic shifts....Now communications is catching up with hardware and software and, thanks to cheap broadband and wireless access, the industry is witnessing a pull back to the middle. This is leading much computing to migrate back into huge data centers. Networks of these computing plants form "computing clouds"--vast, amorphous, delocalized nebulae of processing power and storage.
This is a huge opportunity for Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and others. But only Microsoft brings a massive ball-and-chain to the party called the Windows desktop business, which accounts for the vast majority of its revenue and pervades its company culture. The very thing that makes Microsoft so successful may well ensure that it will play a bit part in the future of computing.
... Read moreAs part of its latest reorganization, Yahoo created a Cloud Computing & Data Infrastructure Group, which is chartered with developing computing infrastructure that balances scalability with cost effectiveness, according to the press release. It could also lead to Yahoo getting into the business of selling pay-as-you-go cloud infrastructure to developers and companies.
Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh
(Credit: Dan Farber)Yahoo has been building massive scale infrastructure (now known as cloud computing) for years, but the intent of the new organization is to streamline development by bringing the various people and teams working on the core technologies into a single group, according to Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh, who reports to CEO Jerry Yang.
"The primary focus for the new group is internal," Balogh said. "But much like Amazon and Google, when you have something at scale and integrated, there are opportunities to offer services." Microsoft is also expected to go down a similar path.
Balogh thinks that Yahoo can leapfrog Google and Amazon with its cloud-based, infrastructure services for internal or external use.
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"There are some more recent innovations around the cloud and grid. It's a hot topic in research," he said, maintaining that Yahoo is applying newer technology concepts from 2005 to 2007, than competitors.
Balogh mentioned open source, such as Hadoop (software for scalable, distributed computing), and new ways to implement data abstraction as differentiators, as well as "loosening ACID requirements (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability, which are a set of properties that guarantee reliable database transactions).
Balogh said that Yahoo's global fabric foundation will have self-healing capabilities that allow it to "operate at a higher level of availability with fewer people than we understand others have."
Besting Microsoft, Google and Amazon in optimizing cloud computing would be a major and unanticipated win. Raghu Ramakrishnan, one of Yahoo's chief scientists, is working on Yahoo's cloud computing research efforts. Below are the principles guiding Yahoo's platform from a presentation (PDF) Ramakrishnan gave earlier this year.
(Credit:
Yahoo Research)
At lunch with Michael Coté from RedMonk on Wednesday, we talked a lot about how open source has really split into "free" and "open source," with the former typically associated with basement developers and Apache licenses, and the latter generally associated with the General Public License and some set of enhanced features.
As I was following Coté's Twitter feedearlier, I started to wonder whether everything really will go to the cloud and all of our open-source musing will go away, as software becomes consumed versus installed.
Realistically, there is a vast array of software that really can't move outside the enterprise in the foreseeable future. Consider, for example, banking and stock-trading systems, or telecommunications infrastructure. On the other hand, consider pretty much everything else. Even when you take into account the complexities of back-office systems, odds are that in a green-field situation, you could find a software-as-a-service application to solve your problems.
So here's the paradox that I think about: Let's consider a company like Google, which writes, buys, and installs a lot of software. Some is unique to its business and isn't available as an online service. Other products are packaged applications. Yet it wants the rest of the world to stop buying software, instead just consuming it from Google.
I'm not seeing a way that on-premise software disappears forever...
Mosso, the cloud computing division of hosting provider Rackspace, has added a new Web-based control panel and a behind-the-scenes provisioning system to its Hosting Cloud service.
The company said Wednesday the control panel makes it easier for users to set up and manage hosted applications. It includes a new Web-based file manager that gives users access to stored data so that they can create and decompress archives and change access permissions more easily.
The Mosso control panel includes a new Web-based file manager.
A snapshot tool, within the control panel, lets users access and reinstate previous versions of files in the case of accidental overwrite, the company said.
The provisioning system--used to deploy applications--shrinks the time needed to get an application up and running. The company built the new system using Apache's ServiceMix, according to co-founder Todd Morey. "We wrote our initial provisioning system in Java. As we have grown, we started to see some real strain on that system. The new provisioning system is a competitive advantage versus Amazon EC2, for example. We do a lot of the hard work for (the customer)."
Mosso's service, along with a hosted storage offering called CloudFS now in beta testing, competes against services from Amazon and others. Morey says Mosso's selling point versus competitors is that it is easy to set up and run. "Our key differentiator is that we're tightly integrated and easy to use."
The Hosting Cloud service is priced from $100 per month. "You pay for what you use--as you expand, your bandwidth expands," said Morey.
Click here to see more stories from the Structure 08 conference and on cloud computing generally.
I've been using the tag line "information security is worse than you think" for several years. Every once in awhile, I meet with a security vendor who backs up my words with scary metrics. Last week in New York, Trend Micro filled this role.
According to Trend Micro's Chief Technology Officer Raimund Genes, the volume and potency of Web-based threats is now exceeding the industry's capacity to fight back. For example, Trend Micro says that it added approximately 50 new anti-malware patterns to its database each day in 2005. In 2008, the volume has grown 100 times, Trend Micro adds about 5,000 new patterns a day. As Phil Rizzuto used to say, "holy cow."
With traditional security software, vendors like Trend Micro develop new patterns or signatures and then upload them to customers running their software. The more patterns the vendors write, the more network bandwidth, storage, memory, and processor resources they use. Pretty soon your PC is using an inordinate amount of its horsepower for security.
Trend Micro believes this model is not sustainable and proposes an alternative. Its new service (aka Trend Micro Smart Protection Network) uses a lightweight client to communicate with Trend reputation services in the cloud. Reputation services proactively scan Web, e-mail, and file content, identify attack patterns, and then block this content in the network. The goal here is to use network connectivity and real-time communication to block bad stuff from happening in the cloud rather than relying on local pattern-matching databases and manual scans. The company says it believes it can provide better security with its new cloud-based model while freeing up resources on endpoints. A true win-win.
So will it work? Yup. Whether it's Trend Micro or its competitors, many security vendors are creating new hybrid models that enhance native endpoint security safeguards with additional network intelligence. The company may be the first vendor to walk down this road but it certainly won't be the last. All in all, this is a beneficial trend. Everyone wants strong security but when it takes 10 minutes to boot your PC each day, something is wrong with the current model.
Cloud computing is growing in popularity, thanks in large part to the availability of Web-based services that take some of the pain out of IT.
But when things break, it isn't always easy to know why: Is the problem in the application or in the cloud?
CloudStatus works with Amazon Web Services now. Hyperic plans to support additional cloud service providers later this year.
Hyperic, a San Francisco-based company specializing in Web management tools, has one answer. It's launching a new service, called CloudStatus, that reports on the health and performance of Amazon Web Services.
The free service, in beta testing now, works with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, Simple Storage Service, SimpleDB, Simple Queue Service, and Flexible Payment Service.
The company says that CloudStatus will report on service availability, latency, and data throughput.
Hyperic says it plans to add the capability to monitor other cloud computing services later this summer.
Parascale said Monday that it raised $11.37 million in Series A venture funding from Charles River Ventures and Menlo Ventures, the latest in a string of cloud computing investments.
The Cupertino, Calif.-based Parascale, which provides storage in a networking "cloud" for digital content providers, said it plans to use the money to develop and market its upcoming Parascale Cloud Storage (PCS). PCS is an application that "aggregates disk storage on multiple standard Linux servers providing one highly scalable storage cloud," according to the company.
Charles River partner Bruce Sachs and Menlo's John Jarve will join the company's board of directors. The company was founded in 2004.
In April, Benchmark Capital invested $4.5 million in RightScale, a software service provider for applications that run on Amazon.com Web services.
