Emisonian: Joe Emison's Blog

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.

Read More at InformationWeek Reports.

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.

Read More at InformationWeek Reports.

Zencoder’s new benchmarks find that Google Compute Engine offers a powerful and competitive infrastructure-as-a-service option to Amazon.

Read the full article at InformationWeek.

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.

Read the full article at InformationWeek.

Please click below to read my InformationWeek rebuttal to Art Wittmann’s argument that IaaS is a bad deal:

IaaS a Bad Deal? Not So Fast…

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)

A version of this post appeared on ReadWriteWeb on March 28, 2011.

More and more companies are moving from traditional servers to virtual servers in the cloud, and many new service-based deployments are starting in the cloud.  However, despite the overwhelming popularity of the cloud here, deployments in the cloud look a lot like deployments on traditional servers.  Companies are not changing their systems architecture to take advantage of some of the unique aspects of being in the cloud.

Read more of this post

A version of this post appeared in the February 2011 edition of Live Valuation Magazine and is also available for download as a PDF.

“The most accurate way to value a property is to find out how much someone will pay for it. Unfortunately, sales data is only updated when a home sells. However, building permit data allows us to take property sale values and bring them up to date, thus giving us a newer, better way to value properties.”—Holly Tachovsky, president of BuildFax, a national aggregator of building permit data.

Most automated valuation models (AVMs) estimate property values by looking at the internal characteristics of properties as part of a “hedonic model,” and by looking at historic sales around the properties as part of a “repeat sales index.” In theory, the combination of the hedonic and repeat sales evaluations captures the full range of factors necessary to value a property automatically. In practice, the quality of the data that drives the hedonic model leads to imperfect results. This article describes a better type of AVM using building permit data.

  Read more of this post