Platform as a Service is one of the least used cloud computing services also has a great opportunity for providing value to users. Vendors need to create transparent services to grow adoption.
As enterprise cloud adoption increases, CIOs are looking not just to use the cloud as the next shiny technology but harvest major benefits. Regulations and compliance bring a set of new challenges when transformational technologies are adopted. Although large technology vendors have widely promoted private clouds, recent surveys show CIOs are likely to bypass embracing the private cloud trend until public cloud matures enough for broader use. In the same manner, many enterprises bypass some Windows releases until an upgrade is announced that is proven to deliver reliable and significant bottom-line revenue.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) is hawked as a technology that can improve application development by abstracting the infrastructure layer. We can visualize a future where business users log on to a portal and assemble an innovative application without involving technical folks. For CIOs with large enough application development budgets, PaaS can deliver significant improvement to efficiency by embracing the DevOps model. For smaller enterprises and start-ups, PaaS can be a game changer by enabling custom applications to be built and delivered at lightning speed leveraging public cloud resources.

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A recently released infographic from CloudCheckr sheds quite a bit of light on the importance of expert advice when an enterprise decides to deploy to the cloud.
When AWS made Trusted Advisor free for the month of March, they took that opportunity to conduct an internal survey of their customers’ usage. CloudCheckr compared the initial scans of 400 users against a list of 125+ best practice checks. The survey was limited to users with over 10 EC2 instances. In aggregate, the users represent a total of just over 16,000 EC2 instances.
They categorized survey results into 3 main categories: Cost, Availability, and Security; and that over 99% of their users were operating with at least one serious best practice exception. Their primary conclusion was that although cost often grabs the headlines, users suffer from a large number of availability and security issues

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Open-source cloud solutions are on the rise, and Red Hat is at the forefront of this movement. While other open-source vendors like Fedora are just now getting into the cloud game, Red Hat is continuing to advance and expand its cloud capabilities. One of the most visible examples of this is Red Hat CloudForms.

CloudForms relies on over 60 open source projects in order to create a solid and robust Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution. It supplies capabilities for managing the lifecycle, the ability to configure both private and public clouds using the widest possible array of computing resources. It’s portable across cloud, virtual as well as physical resources, making it a capable solution for most needs.

CloudForms technologies

Here’s a look the primary technologies that power Red Hat CloudForms:

• CloudForms Cloud Engine: This is the component that manages all of your cloud resources. It handles image lifecycles, virtual instances as well as applications. It’s based on the open source Aeolus.
• CloudForms System Engine: This component manages how systems run across their physical, virtual and cloud environments. It includes managing content and image definitions, as well as managing software updates. It’s based on the open source Katello.
• CloudForms Application Engine: This component manages applications via a template base.
• CloudForms Cloud Services: This component gives you the ability to function consistently across various types of cloud environments. It provides the ultimate level in flexibility for services like availability and storage.

Red Hat CloudForms is designed with a robust cloud-based workflow in mind. Rather than displacing your current virtualization management infrastructure, it gives you a layer of abstraction that’s above virtualization. It uses deltacloud technology to communicate with RHEV manager, VMware vCenter and even Amazon EC2.

CloudForms is changing the way that we manage the cloud. Its ability to operate across an increasingly diverse technology base means that it promises to be the IaaS that everyone else wants to be like.

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Stagnant budgets, overwhelming data growth, and new user and application demands, are just a few of the many challenges that are putting IT organizations under more pressure today than ever before. As a result, a new approach is required. This session by Hitcahi Data Systems’ Jeff Lundberg at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York [June 10-13, 2013] will discuss why object storage based private cloud is necessary for evolving into a next-generation of IT that supports a new world of applications and storage service delivery models.

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PayPal is moving its 15,000 nodes off on VMware, the proprietary cloud
platform, to the relatively unstable OpenStack, the anti-Amazon open source
cloud platform backed by IBM, HP, Dell, Red Hat and Rackspace.

If the migration is successful, then eBay, PayPal’s parent company, is likely
to follow suit and move its 65,000 physical nodes to OpenStack, retaining
some sort of VMware reserve if VMware is lucky.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced global availability of Elastic Block Storage (EBS) optimized support for four additional Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) instance types. The support enables optimized performance between standard and provisioned IOP EBS volumes and EC2 instances to meet different bandwidth or throughput needs (learn more about AWS EBS, EC2, S3 and Glacier here).
The four EBS optimized instance types are m3.xlarge, m3.2xlarge, m2.2xlarge and c1.xlarge for dedicated bandwidth or throughput between the EC2 instances and EBS volumes. The performance or bandwidth ranges from 500 Mbits (500 / 8 = 62.5 MBytes) per second, to 1,000 Mbits (1,000 / 8 = 125MBytes) per second depending on the type of instance. As a refresher, EC2 instances (why by time you read this could change) vary in size and functionality. This includes different amounts of EC2 Unit of Compute (ECU), number of virtual cores, amount of storage space included, 32 or 64 bit, storage and networking IO performance, and EBS Optimized or not. In addition to instances, different operating system images can be installed using those licensed from AWS such as various Windows and Unix or supply your own.

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Gartner’s been gazing at its crystal ball again, and has forecast that service-led solutions – software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and so forth – will displace more traditional sourcing methods by 2015.

The analyst house stresses that IT companies need to “bridge legacy offerings and new services”, again pointing a future to the cloud for service providers.

And cloud services appear to be growing at a much quicker rate than other elements of the IT services market. Hardware and software support will grow slowly compared to IaaS and BPaaS (business process as a service), which will grow 13.1% and 47.3% in 2013 respectively according to Gartner.

There are three recommendations Gartner has for service providers this year; stopping undifferentiated marketing messages, emphasising business value to ‘transform clients’ existing operations’; improving service delivery by reinventing the service portfolio; and determining …

The recent meteor blast over the skies of Russia served a reminder that humanity lives in a constant state of mortal peril. Surely, we can be serious, even as we make fatuous references to movies like “Airplane” along the way.

Despite our solar system’s occasional warnings of potential doom, humans continue to pose the most lethal threat to themselves. We continue all manners of mayhem against one another on scales large and small, justifying the large-scale stuff by waving our national flags and elevating them to near-divine status.

I’m reminded of all this on a grim, grey early-spring Sunday in northern Illinois, as I read of President Obama’s and Secretary of State John Kerry’s visits to the Middle East, of the intriguing death of a Russian oligarch, of a coup in Central Africa, and of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Africa.

Xi’s visit was covered today by an excellent Reuters story, and is the only one mentioned above that’s not directly related to violence. But the sub-text of Xi’s visit is China’s increasing influence in all regions of the world, and its intentions.

China seems perilously close to war with Japan, the Philippines, and Malaysia in disputes over a few resource-rich islands, it remains in an unresolved political standoff with Taiwan, and its friend North Korea seems ready to go off the deep end any day. Do China’s leaders wish to build good long-term relations in Africa, or is the country intend to impose Colonialism 2.0?

Now, To Our Research
We’ve been conducting research about national ICT commitments over the past two years, and have found China to be lagging. This may sound surprising given the rate of China’s economic growth, and numerous stories (many of which I’ve written) about its investments in cloud computing.

But relatively speaking, China has not been as aggressive with ICT as many of its Asian neighbors. It badly trails South Korea, for example, but also trails Japan, Malaysia, and the Philippines, among others. Our research takes into account income disparity and cost-of-living, areas in our rankings that penalize a Chinese economy that is seeing increased disparity and higher overall costs. China today seems more focused on ensuring its future through acquisition of natural resources than through technology.

We’ve found some promise in the Middle East, although this region trails Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and both Northern and Eastern Africa in the way we rank ICT commitments and potential. The region will surely improve if peaceful solutions are ever brought to bear to its numerous conflicts.

But the Middle East does lead the so-called BRICs nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) in both commitments and potential. Again, this may sound surprising, but the reality is the BRICs were chosen for their sheer size more than anything. Each of them has an individual, complex story, but it seems that none of them are focusing enough on ICT.

Our rankings now cover 102 countries, and it should be no surprise that most of the world’s leaders are peaceful, from the Baltic and Scandinavian countries, to Canada, to New Zealand and South Korea. (The latter does have a potentially hair-trigger border, but does not routinely embroil itself in other disputes, as does its U.S. ally and as do so many other Asian nations.)

So we carry on with our research, just as diplomats carry on with their ostensible efforts to bring peace to the world. We believe that technology can be a great playing-field leveler, for developing nations as a whole and for individuals everywhere. We will continue to push and expand our research, advocate for peace, and hope that a fireball – natural or man-made – doesn’t consume us all.

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Symantec recently took a stroll down memory lane to revisit the first seeds of cloud computing that took hold more than a half-century ago.
Symantec created an interactive timeline that illustrates the history of cloud computing, highlighting just how far the technology has progressed.
The interactive map, however, does more than just recall the roots of cloud computing; it provides an opportunity to look ahead as well.
Symantec has plans to help usher in an era of safe, agile and efficient cloud computing. It recently outlined a strategy to get there, which includes providing companies with a variety of cloud solutions to address their specific needs and current IT environments, according to an article on CMSWire.com.
The future of the cloud holds plenty of challenges. As cloud computing becomes the new normal, many companies are looking to move their businesses to the cloud. To meet these needs, and to continue to evolve alongside changing technologies, businesses should look to cloud computing not as a means to an end, but rather as an enabler of change, according to the article.

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Last week seems to have been an important week for the Windows Azure team at Microsoft. They have provided some new and improved features to Windows Azure. There were also some new feature releases from Google, Amazon and Eucalyptus. And, Hortonworks releases new version of the Sandbox.
Here’s a quick sum up of Cloud happenings over the last week.
To start with, Microsoft has added a number of new features to Windows Azure over the last week. The new features include HDInsight sevice, support for Dropbox and Mercurial repositories, and a few updates to Mobile Services.

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