This has been a big week in cloud computing. Most importantly, Amazon removed the “Beta” label from EC2 and is now offering an SLA for EC2. This is essential for businesses that want to move core systems onto EC2. As I have stated before, though, EC2 is not really a cloud platform in and of itself, rather a highly advanced server provisioning infrastructure. Amazon also took several steps towards moving closer to a true cloud platform. In particular, they have added support for load balancing...

This has been a big week in cloud computing. Most importantly, Amazon removed the “Beta” label from EC2 and is now offering an SLA for EC2. This is essential for businesses that want to move core systems onto EC2. As I have stated before, though, EC2 is not really a cloud platform in and of itself, rather a highly advanced server provisioning infrastructure. Amazon also took several steps towards moving closer to a true cloud platform. In particular, they have added support for load balancing...

Finally getting around to my fourth cloud principle: In the cloud it should be easy to consume and produce web services. When you build something in the cloud, you should be able to focus on the essential innovation of your site or service and be able to rely on other web services for everything else. Conversely, it should be easy for you to expose any part of your site or service as a web service that someone else can consume. Together this is what I call “ease of assembly.” We have made hug...

Finally getting around to my fourth cloud principle: In the cloud it should be easy to consume and produce web services. When you build something in the cloud, you should be able to focus on the essential innovation of your site or service and be able to rely on other web services for everything else. Conversely, it should be easy for you to expose any part of your site or service as a web service that someone else can consume. Together this is what I call “ease of assembly.” We have made hug...

Today I get to give a talk about a topic that I am very excited about: cloud computing. As I scanned the program at Web 2.0 Expo I found that there are 10 presentations with ‘cloud’ in the title and I suspect that many more will mention it. While it has become a buzzword and may therefore suffer the fate of other buzzwords, I am convinced that the basic ideas behind it are sound and will have profound impact on everything we do (I already had a series of posts on that but will sure revisit of...

Today I get to give a talk about a topic that I am very excited about: cloud computing. As I scanned the program at Web 2.0 Expo I found that there are 10 presentations with ‘cloud’ in the title and I suspect that many more will mention it. While it has become a buzzword and may therefore suffer the fate of other buzzwords, I am convinced that the basic ideas behind it are sound and will have profound impact on everything we do (I already had a series of posts on that but will sure revisit of...

Most of the companies in the USV portfolio started out quite small. Some even with just a single server, many with a couple of web servers and a single DB server. At that stage testing is straightforward. In fact developers generally have a complete setup on their laptops and stuff that works there is highly likely to work in production. Fast forward a year or two (in some cases only a few months) and the production setup includes master and slave DBs, dedicated servers for API and RSS, sophi...

Most of the companies in the USV portfolio started out quite small. Some even with just a single server, many with a couple of web servers and a single DB server. At that stage testing is straightforward. In fact developers generally have a complete setup on their laptops and stuff that works there is highly likely to work in production. Fast forward a year or two (in some cases only a few months) and the production setup includes master and slave DBs, dedicated servers for API and RSS, sophi...

Dell Trademark: Cloud Computing: There is something broken in the trademark process when a company can get a mark on a term of art that is already well established. Dell filed this application in March of 2007 when “cloud computing” was already in use. For instance, by simply googling for “cloud computing 2006” the first result is an article in ZDNet that has “cloud computing” in the headline. As several blog posts point out, a previous application by someone else had been rejected in 1998. F...

Dell Trademark: Cloud Computing: There is something broken in the trademark process when a company can get a mark on a term of art that is already well established. Dell filed this application in March of 2007 when “cloud computing” was already in use. For instance, by simply googling for “cloud computing 2006” the first result is an article in ZDNet that has “cloud computing” in the headline. As several blog posts point out, a previous application by someone else had been rejected in 1998. F...

At OSCON, I listened to a bunch of talks about distributed file systems (including HDFS) and scalable databases (including hypertable). What is intriguing is that both need to solve a similar problem at their core because they store stuff across machines: they need a way of tracking where stuff is. In HDFS that’s the job of the namenode and in hypertable the hyperspace – which in both systems at the moment are single servers. The approach at the moment is to build the scalable DB on top of th...

At OSCON, I listened to a bunch of talks about distributed file systems (including HDFS) and scalable databases (including hypertable). What is intriguing is that both need to solve a similar problem at their core because they store stuff across machines: they need a way of tracking where stuff is. In HDFS that’s the job of the namenode and in hypertable the hyperspace – which in both systems at the moment are single servers. The approach at the moment is to build the scalable DB on top of th...

It’s not just the wikipedia entry that should carry these warnings.

It’s not just the wikipedia entry that should carry these warnings.

This is my third post on cloud competition. Today I want to address the question of how cloud computing changes competition at the infrastructure layer. A part of the answer comes from yesterday’s post on the changing boundary between the application layer and the infrastructure layer. As infrastructure pushes up ever higher, the lower portions of infrastructure become further hidden and abstracted away. AMD has not had a lot of luck in their effort to compete with Intel and make money at the...

This is my third post on cloud competition. Today I want to address the question of how cloud computing changes competition at the infrastructure layer. A part of the answer comes from yesterday’s post on the changing boundary between the application layer and the infrastructure layer. As infrastructure pushes up ever higher, the lower portions of infrastructure become further hidden and abstracted away. AMD has not had a lot of luck in their effort to compete with Intel and make money at the...

Yesterday, I started a series of posts about how the move to cloud computing is affecting competition. The second question I posed was how cloud computing changes the boundary between “infrastructure” and “applications”? At the most basic level I believe that some things that were standalone applications will become features that are provided by the cloud. We have seen this play out with content. Essentially, the web to date has been “content in the cloud.” And one of the most important devel...

Yesterday, I started a series of posts about how the move to cloud computing is affecting competition. The second question I posed was how cloud computing changes the boundary between “infrastructure” and “applications”? At the most basic level I believe that some things that were standalone applications will become features that are provided by the cloud. We have seen this play out with content. Essentially, the web to date has been “content in the cloud.” And one of the most important devel...

In preparing for my Web 2.0 Expo presentation “Forecast: Partly Cloudy,” I have been looking at how existing code can be reused in the cloud. There are several big challenges to reusing existing code in the cloud:Many cloud platforms support only one specific language (e.g. Python for Google App Engine, Ruby for EngineYard). That excludes a lot of code written in PHP, Perl, Java and other languages. Almost all cloud platforms have a non-SQL data access model. This matters for code that has ex...

In preparing for my Web 2.0 Expo presentation “Forecast: Partly Cloudy,” I have been looking at how existing code can be reused in the cloud. There are several big challenges to reusing existing code in the cloud:Many cloud platforms support only one specific language (e.g. Python for Google App Engine, Ruby for EngineYard). That excludes a lot of code written in PHP, Perl, Java and other languages. Almost all cloud platforms have a non-SQL data access model. This matters for code that has ex...