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Virtualization let IT automate the entire life cycle of a server, from provisioning and initialization through steady-state and change management to termination. But this is only the first step on the path to fully coordinated, automated and managed systems. The ultimate goal: orchestration, where business needs can be defined and executed without human intervention. We’ll examine the essential elements of orchestration, focusing on public and private clouds.
Read the full piece at InformationWeek Reports.
The good news about cloud standards: They’re not as necessary as Internet standards were at this same point in the development of the Internet. The bad news? The cloud standard situation is a bit of a mess. We have standards-developing organizations creating cloud standards that aren’t being used, we have vendors creating proprietary APIs that are being adopted as de facto standards without anyone’s permission, and everything that even resembles a standard is more vendor-driven than anything we’ve seen in the past. Whether that will come back to haunt us remains to be seen.
To read more, please visit InformationWeek Reports: Cloud Standards.
Amazon is the clear number one in Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings. So who’s got the best chance of beating Amazon?
Read my full piece at SitePoint.
Infrastructure-as-a-service lets companies focus on their core competencies, instead of on installing and maintaining computer hardware. But with so many vendors in the market, how do you know which one is the best fit for your company? We look at 9 IaaS providers and 10 services categories to help IT pros answer that question.
The decision to move an application from in-house into the public cloud is a significant one. Organizations have to consider a range of issues, from business drivers to application availability to compliance and security to user adoption. We have nine questions you should ask and answer to help you pick the right course of action.
Zencoder’s new benchmarks find that Google Compute Engine offers a powerful and competitive infrastructure-as-a-service option to Amazon.
Google Compute Engine is a stable, reliable, and fast provider of on-demand computing resources. But it offers fewer features than rival Amazon Web Services.
Please click below to read my InformationWeek rebuttal to Art Wittmann’s argument that IaaS is a bad deal:
Follow the link below to read my InformationWeek report on static-dynamic hosting on Amazon S3. Since writing the article, I have discovered Firebase, which could be the first real Database-as-a-Service that could hook into static hosting (they have to finish their security features first, though).
Amazon S3: Web Hosting on the Cheap (InformationWeek Reports)
Hosting data in the cloud has many advantages, but it usually has the distinct disadvantage of being beholden to a single vendor. Outages do happen, even with S3 (see July 2008). Until now, it was a huge pain–and a significant cost–to establish any kind of mirroring between S3 and any another major cloud storage vendor. This is because you need to compare the file lists at both locations, and then copy whatever files are needed, which means that you need to have a server that is at least partly dedicated to this mirroring task.
However, as I have intimated, mirroring between Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloud Files (“CF”) is now much easier, and very cheap. Read on for the gory details.
