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Right now, some may look like the online equivalent of a quaint corner store. But catalogs of online applications are the front lines of a brewing battle among platform-as-a-service providers.

Start-up Coghead on Tuesday plans to launch Coghead Gallery, an online store where people in small businesses can hunt for applications.

There's more than one 'app exchange' in town. Coghead launches Gallery for third-party applications.

(Credit: Coghead)

The applications, written with Coghead's visual-development tool, run on its hosted platform. The platform, built using Adobe Systems' Flex, runs on Amazon Web Services.

At the start, there will be about 30 partners listing their business applications. Coghead's software is aimed at small development shops or tech-savvy businesspeople.

Although far smaller, its approach is similar to that of Salesforce.com's AppExchange, where people can find more than 800 customized applications written for Salesforce's development platform.

Hosted development platforms and tools, also called platform-as-a-service, are where a lot of software development is going, according to Web entrepreneurs. Rather than purchase a rack of servers and a software stack to run applications, developers can rely on a hosted platform to offer on-demand applications.

For platform providers, building the largest ecosystem of online Web developers helps accrue business, much the way Microsoft woos users of its development tools to drive sales of Windows and other stack software.

Although not a complete development environment, the latest entrant to this platform-as-a-service category is Google, with its App Engine, still in beta test version. Google now lets developers run their Python applications on the company's massive computing infrastructure.

Last week, Google opened up its own marketplace for listing third-party applications written for its enterprise products, including Google Apps and its search appliance. And on Monday, Google and Salesforce announced that Salesforce's customer relationship management, or CRM, applications, will be integrated into Google Apps through the Salesforce development platform, Force.com.

Open source comes to platform-as-a-service
Coghead's development service and gallery are specifically aimed at small businesses, both developers and customers. It is aiming to recruit value-added resellers or independent consultants with 2 to 20 people, according to company CEO Paul McNamara.

With a hosted development environment, they can write a Web application and get into the software-as-a-service business, he said.

"They used to sell their time for money by doing custom application development. It's a tough business because you're always chasing your next lunch, and if you take vacation, you aren't billing," McNamara said.

"Our value to them is that we let them transform the business by building an application for one customer and then selling it to other customers around the world," he said.

Ultimately, this model is disruptive because many more companies can get off the ground without the need for a large capital investment from venture investors, McNamara said. He added that Salesforce's AppExchange tends to focus more on large independent software vendors, or ISVs.

Developers on the Gallery can choose to take an open-source approach to listing, called the Open Definition model. They can make the template for their application available to others to copy, modify, and distribute--much like open-source projects allow people to tweak the source code.

Since most people don't actually work with source code when they use the Coghead service, they aren't actually using the source code. Another class of applications will be "IP protected," which means that customers can't copy and modify the applications.

Coghead plans to make money from Gallery by collecting a monthly fee for using the platform and listing the applications.

It's just like an unformatted hard drive, Amazon.com Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels explained. The difference is that it's in the "cloud" somewhere and you get to it through an API.

Amazon Web Services executives on Sunday described a forthcoming persistent storage feature, called EC2 Persistent Storage, which they say will make its hosted computing services more flexible and far more reliable.

People can sign up for an early beta test program now before Amazon opens it up for a wider release later this year.

The service works with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) hosted server offering. It allows developers to set aside a storage volume online, on which people save files in different file systems. This differs from what is available now with EC2 because once a compute instance is taken offline, the data associated with it goes away.

With a persistent storage service, data can remain linked to a specific computing instance. Significantly, people can take a snapshot of that data and store it on Amazon's S3 storage service. That effectively acts as a way to create a back-up of their computing operation on the "cloud," according to Amazon executives.

"The snapshot is extremely powerful technology and allows for building highly fault-tolerant applications operating worldwide. Combine these snapshots with Availability Zones and Elastic IPs and you have all the tools to manage and migrate even the most complex of applications," Vogels wrote on his blog.

"And the great thing is it that it is all done with using standard technologies such that you can use this with any kind of application, middleware or any infrastructure software, whether it is legacy or brand new," he added.

Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr also describes the service on his blog, saying it was one of the most requested features from developers.

Thorsten vok Eiken at RightScale, who has been testing the service, talks about the implications of this feature and says his company is making tools to make it easier to use these services.

Von Eiken says that persistent storage is a dramatically important feature that will lead many more companies and developers to hosted development platforms.

"It's going to be like agile software development: if you want to survive as an Internet/Web service you will have to compute in the cloud or your competitors will leave you in the dust by being able to deploy faster, better, and cheaper," he said.

Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud Web service was knocked offline earlier Monday, but the company appeared to get it back online within a few hours.

A thread on the Amazon Web Services support forum started at 1:51 a.m. PDT. By just past 4 a.m., a support person said all servers that had been unreachable could be contacted again.

(Credit: CNET News.com)

It's a far milder outage than the one that occurred in February, when Amazon's Simple Storage Service went down, which appeared to affect hundreds of Web sites.

It's also a reminder of the scrutiny on new hosted computing services, which many software developers are using because of the low up-front costs and simplicity.

Although there has been talk of utility computing for years from the likes of IBM and Sun Microsystems, Amazon is increasingly recognized as a leader in the field.

Google is rumored to be making an announcement on Monday of hosted database services around Bigtable, which my CNET News.com colleague Dan Farber described here. Microsoft, too, is expected to offer more of these sorts of services as well around its Live development services.

Customers of an Amazon Web Services support forum lauded Amazon for providing regular feedback on the company's efforts to resolve the problems. A representative of Amazon also said it would hold an investigation to get more details on what caused the problem.

Network Solutions has suspended a Web site that a Dutch lawmaker was using to promote a yet-to-be-released film critical of Islam.

The Web hosting service said it is investigating whether content on the site--Fitnathemovie.com--is in violation of the hosting service's acceptable use policy.

The 15-minute movie, called Fitna--an Arabic word that means "test of faith in times of trial"--describes Islam as "the enemy of freedom," according to comments made by Geert Wilders, a Dutch lawmaker and the film's maker. Dutch officials fear the movie could spark violence, as happened after Danish newspapers published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. The movie is set for release at month's end.

Wilders had been using the site to promote the movie, but the site was pulled after the Web-hosting company said it received a "number of complaints" regarding the site.

"In this situation with the dialogue that's happening throughout the world ,we've made the choice to suspend the site as of last night," Susan Wade, spokeswoman for Network Solutions, told the Associated Press on Sunday. "This site is suspended so people can't see the content right now. But the customer still has access to their site. They can make whatever changes are necessary as we complete our investigation."

Wilders plans to show his film despite the setback, Dutch news agency ANP reported.

"If need be, I will personally distribute DVDs in the Dam," ANP quoted him as saying. The Dam is the central square in Amsterdam.

Cloud computing, the notion of outsourcing hardware and software to Internet service providers, is showing the classic signs of disruptive technology--it's not good enough for the masses yet, but it has clear potential to shake things up.

Forrester Research on Monday released a report written by James Staten, an IT operations and infrastructure analyst, saying that cloud computing does not meet the needs of large businesses. But that could be only temporary.

The services offered by a new crop of hosting providers, such as Amazon Web Services, are where the overall hosting market is going, according to Staten.

"Cloud computing looks very much like the instantiation of many vendors' visions of the data center of the future; it's an abstracted, fabric-based infrastructure that enables dynamic movement, growth, and protection of services that is billed like a utility. It also has all the earmarks of a disruptive innovation: It is enterprise technology packaged to best fit the needs of small businesses and start-ups--not the enterprise," he wrote.

(Credit: Forrester Research)

Cloud computing differs from existing hosting services in that services are based on consumption and the technology infrastructure is optimized for hosting several customers. Providers use virtualization extensively and grid computing software.

Forrester identified a wide range of companies as "cloud providers," including Amazon.com, Akamai Technologies, Joyent, Rackspace's Mosso software, and Salesforce.com's Force.com development platform. Microsoft and Google are also rumored to be developing pay-per-drink computing services, such as hosted server processing and storage.

Because these providers are optimized for large-scale hosts, they could eventually serve corporate customers, Forrester said.

"As the gap widens between enterprise and Web giant economics, it may get to the point that it no longer makes financial sense for many businesses to run their own servers. When this happens, will you be a cloud or a cloud customer?" Staten wrote.

What does running software in the network mean exactly?

This is one of the questions that users are exploring as they start to increasingly poke at what "cloud computing" means for them.

On the one hand, cloud computing can refer specifically to running some sort of fixed software service--frequently through a browser's user interface--over the network. This is cloud computing in the Web 2.0 sense. We don't necessarily even think of Flickr, Facebook, or Google as "applications" as such. At the other end of the scale, services such as Amazon's EC2 and S3 just rent bare CPU cycles and storage capacity for whatever software a user wants to load up.

However, between these extremes lies a continuum of customization and malleability. Application programming interfaces that allow third-party customization and extension are rapidly becoming a de rigueur companion to software as a service. At the same time, virtual appliances and other predefined software loads offer at least a degree of preassembly when renting raw computing by the hour.

Tuesday's announcement by Mosso, a start-up funded by hosting provider Rackspace, offers up yet another variant. The core concept behind Mosso's Hosting Cloud is that many Web-based applications or sites are built up using largely common stacks of technologies such as PHP and MySQL databases. Mosso takes advantage of this fact by providing the means to provision applications running on one of these common stacks. Mosso is effectively offering cloud computing at a level of abstraction more akin to that of a Web hosting provider. For example, Mosso takes care of patching and updating the operating system and other software stack components. This is unsurprising given Rackspace's historical business, but it's a bit different than what's generally discussed in the context of cloud computing.

A user sets up a site by logging into Mosso's management application, entering a domain name, the technology stack to be used (Mosso supports Windows/.Net as well as Linux), and additional services required--such as databases. Mosso will then provision the site on a cluster of servers at which time the user can upload custom code.

The big difference from a typical hosted Web site is that Mosso monitors the site's resource use and will scale up available hardware resources as needed automatically. The pricing model is as follows:

Base pricing is $100/month, which includes:

• 24x7 live technical support (phone and chat)
• 50GB disk space
• 500GB bandwidth
• 3 million Web requests/month  (A Web request is the retrieval of any item from a Web server, i.e. a Web page with two photos counts as three requests)

Additional disk space is 50 cents per gigabyte, bandwidth is 25 cents per gigabyte, and requests are 3 cents per 1,000 requests.

Mosso does not currently provide any means to throttle or otherwise limit the traffic or resource use by a site. This seems reasonable enough in the context of businesses that would typically be more concerned with their site going down than in having an unexpectedly large hosting bill at the end of the month. In addition, by partially pegging charges to Web requests, Mosso is aligning its fees to a measurement that has direct relevance to many companies operating Web sites--especially if they are advertising-supported in some way.

Writing Defining Cloud Computing last month really crystallized for me that it would be a mistake to narrowly define this trend as only about Web 2.0 or software as a service. Announcements such as Mosso further emphasize this point. More and more computing may go out into the network. But the way that it moves into the network will take a multiplicity or forms--especially as users experiment in these early days.

It could be a sincere form of flattery or a way to vent two years of frustration, but after losing YouTube's business in December, hosting company ServerBeach filmed a four-minute video of staffers describing how annoying YouTube was to have as a client.

"For being a social site, these guys aren't very social," one ServerBeach employee said in the video, which it posted on YouTube in recent weeks.

Despite the harsh words, the video is a creative exercise in sarcasm, according to Angela Ramirez, manager of client loyalty at ServerBeach, a 6-year-old hosting company. She said that during her company's two years hosting YouTube's servers, their laid-back geek cultures were very similar. To pay homage to the relationship, ServerBeach wanted to send a creative, funny goodbye, she said.

Ramirez joked in the video: "Just because you got acquired by Google you think you're big shots now. You're on the Oprah show, The Today Show. Did you forget the little people that helped you grow to the company you are today. Now that you're millionaires, you just forget about us," said Ramirez, who later in the video asked YouTube co-founder Steve Chen if he's single.

One truth in the clip, Ramirez said, is that ServerBeach had to manually invoice YouTube for hosting services throughout its business relationship, despite ServerBeach's automated billing system. The manual invoice, which required more sign-off and work, was the result of the complexity and heft of YouTube's bill--the company sucked up as much as a petabyte a month in bandwidth.

"They had more than 200 servers here. We had to have the bill approved by corporate accounting, and they had to mail in checks," she said.

Despite the loss of the account, ServerBeach's business hasn't suffered, she said. YouTube is still a customer of its parent company Peer 1, but it likely replaced ServerBeach with Google's corporate data centers. Ramirez said that ServerBeach has gained a lot of business in referrals from YouTube.

As for YouTube's feeling on the matter, Ramirez said she sent the video to Chen and the guys, and they loved the sarcasm. "They asked us to put it up on YouTube. We're going to miss them."

Salesforce.com on Thursday introduced a cheaper way to access applications written with its Force.com platform and detailed an Eclipse-based development tool.

Right now, the fee to use applications written for Force--Salesforce's hosted development platform--is $50 per user per month for an unlimited amount of time.

Saleforce.com's Force integrated development environment for building hosted Web applications.

(Credit: Saleforce.com)

The company added another option, in which applications cost $5 per log-in with a maximum of five log-ins per month. This option is meant for applications that are accessed only occasionally, like vacation request programs, said Adam Gross, vice president of developer marketing at the company.

Salesforce also announced enhancements to its Eclipse-based development tool that are designed to make it easier to write the user interface portion of a Web application.

Programmers can also save their Force code into source code management systems. It also added Force "Sandbox," a service for testing applications during development.

The new components to the development platform are designed to give programmers more sophisticated tools for on-demand applications, Gross said.

If you visit www.vivoleum.com today you'll find nothing, but last month the site was the home of the Yes Men's latest experiment in political theater and a protest against Exxon Mobil. Apparently Exxon Mobil was not amused, and as The Inquirer reports, the Yes Men soon found themselves without a Web site and their e-mail access severed. Broadview Networks, the group's Web host, refused to restore their e-mail until they had removed all mention of the oil company.

Sadly, the Yes Men's story is not unique, and Jimmy Atkinson of The Dedicated Hosting Guide has recently compiled a list of Web host companies that won't buckle so easily. Atkinson's list notes 11 Web hosts that have made a commitment toward protecting free speech. Among those included are Computer Tyme, whose motto is "No Anti-Bush Site Left Behind," and the German Zensurfrei, which was created following a case of wrongful arrest. The list also includes no-cost solutions like 1st-Amendment.Net.

While each of these providers prohibits using their services for illegal activities such as child pornography and illegal file sharing, they do promise to protect your right to engage in political dissent. One Web host that Atkinson fails to mention is Riseup.net, a small tech collective that has been providing free activist Web services for years. Of course, there are probably dozens of companies and organizations out there with a commitment to protecting free speech, and it's a bit much to expect Jimmy Atkinson to have found them all.

If you know of any other Internet services companies who will uphold freedom of speech, then please leave a comment in order to develop a more comprehensive list.