As described in the last week’s post NIST defines three different cloud computing service models – IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. IaaS and SaaS are really easy to grasp but I see people struggling to understand the PaaS model. As a long-time application developer though I find the PaaS model the most compelling one for new applications. Here is why.
I will look at two examples: one enterprise and one from the consumer world.
Let’s start with the enterprise scenario. If you examine any enterprise application portfolio you will find out that almost every development team has implemented it’s own code for handling common functionality like authentication, authorization, database access etc. There are also numerous cases when the same team developed the same functionality over and over in each new project. Even the componentization model doesn’t help in this situation because either developers are often not aware of the existence of the components or there are too many options they can choose from and they cannot find the right fit for their scenario. The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was the holly grail for this problem but many enterprises are still far from achieving this goal.
Guest Post: Who Controls the Cloud Market – Providers or Consumers?
Guest Post: Ilyas Iyoob, Director, Advanced Analytics and Sr. Research Scientist, PhD at Gravitant
We first went from reserving cloud capacity to securing capacity on-demand, and then we even started to bid for unused capacity in the spot market – all in an effort to decrease cost in the cloud. Can we take this one step further? Instead of us bidding for capacity, wouldn’t it be interesting if we can get providers to bid for our demand?
Retail Supply Chain Market Analogy
In fact, this is a common phenomena in the retail supply chain industry. For example, Walmart has a large amount of freight that needs to be shipped between different cities over the course of the year. So, every year an auction is conducted in which Walmart lists all their shipments, and carriers such as JB Hunt, Schneider, Yellow etc. bid for the opportunity to carry these shipments using their fleet of trucks. The reason carriers are bidding for retailer demand is because in general, capacity exceeds demand in the retail industry.
Cloud Computing Market
Keeping this in mind, let us now take a look at the Cloud Computing Market. Does capacity exceed demand or is it the other way around? A quick way to find out is by observing spot prices in the cloud market. In today’s market, Amazon’s Spot Instances are 86% cheaper than their on-demand instances, and Enomaly’s SpotCloud also shows lower spot prices across the board. This leads us to believe that capacity exceeds demand in the cloud market as well. A related indicator is the predominance of data center consolidation initiatives in both the commercial and government marketplaces.
Since capacity exceeds demand, consumers have an upper hand and are in control of the cloud market at the moment. Moreover, they should be able to replicate what is being done in the retail supply chain industry. In other words, cloud consumers should be able to auction off their demand to the best fit lowest price cloud provider.
So, …
Consumers should seize the opportunity and control the market while the odds are in their favor i.e. Demand < Capacity. At the same time, Service Integrators and Value Added Resellers can help Enterprise IT consumers in this process by conducting Primary-Market auctions using Cloud Service Brokerage technology.
This post was originally published on Gravitant’s blog.
Opposition to Dell Buy-Out Mounts
Michael Dell may be facing a stockholders’ revolt.
T. Rowe Price, the mutual fund biggie that held 4.4% of Dell at the end of the third quarter, isn’t prepared to support the company’s leveraged buy-out at the price the Dell board agreed to last week.
T. Rowe Price chairman and chief investment officer Brian Rogers released a statement saying, “We believe the proposed buyout does not reflect the value of Dell and we do not intend to support the offer as put forward.”
His position mirrors that of Southeastern Asset Management, which is understood to hold 8.4% of Dell and faces a loss of nearly $400 million if the deal goes down at the $13.65 or $24.4 billion agreed to. It claims Dell is worth $24 a share, a price it hasn’t fetched in a long time.
Dimension Data Introduces WAN Optimization Across Its Global Cloud
Dimension Data announced on Tuesday that it has introduced WAN optimization capabilities to its cloud globally. By deploying WAN optimization technology in Dimension Data’s Managed Cloud Platform™ (MCP) cloud data centers, Dimension Data clients are reporting a significant increase in application performance across the entire cloud. Organizations using the cloud for database replication, file synchronization, and backup and disaster recovery between data centers have realized the greatest improvement in performance. An enhanced capability, WAN optimization is provided as part of the company’s standard public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering at no additional charge.
According to Steve Nola, CEO of Dimension Data’s Cloud Solutions Business Unit, “we are helping our clients overcome the latency and bandwidth constraints often associated with public cloud services.”
Cloud, Virtualization, Storage I/O Trends for 2013 and Beyond
It is still early in 2013, so I can make some cloud, virtualization, storage and IO related predictions, or more aptly, talk about some trends, in addition to those that I made in late 2012, looking forward and back. Common over-riding themes will continue to include convergence (people and technology), valueware, clouds (public, private, hybrid and community) among others.
Certainly, solid state drives (SSDs) will remain popular, both in terms of industry adoption, and industry deployment. Big-data (and little data) management tools and purpose-build storage systems or solutions continue to be popular, as are those for supporting little data applications. On the cloud storage front, there are many options for various use cases available. Watch for more emphasis on service-level agreements (SLA), service-level objectives (SLO), security, pricing transparency, and tiers of service.
4 aspects to maximise mobile cloud computing
Many clients I talk to are simply not ready for the ever-changing conditions in the business world as cloud computing gains in popularity. My company started using it years ago, when we needed to expand our horizons in our IT department, to include flexibility in transferring data when our workers were away from their desks.
We quickly realised we could maximize mobile cloud computing technologies to our company’s benefit, with virtually no additional costs of buying needed equipment or extra personnel. The model we use in optimising mobile cloud computing technology can easily be incorporated into any business model.
Mobile Applications Will Be Common for the Workplace
With the ever-increasing popularity of laptops, tablets and smartphones in the workplace, the mobile network will soon replace all other preferred methods of Internet connectivity in the United States. Mobile devices are expected to increase up to over 250 million individuals by …
Firewalls in the cloud era: They improve the cloud and the cloud improves them
Firewalls will always be required as they are the sole devices that analyse and control communication of data and applications.
Firewall technology ensures networks are running the way we want them to. As a result I came to the conclusion that the question is not ‘will on-premise firewalls disappear’, but ‘how will firewalls be influenced by cloud technologies?’.
In order to address this we have to look at some of the history.
Enter Unified Threat Management
10 years ago the first perimeter architectures consisted of a fast packet processor (the firewall) and a battery of content scanning servers. Each server was dedicated to a specific task (a duty) such as locating spyware or virus scanning. Each was from a different vendor and each was managed separately – it was genuinely best of breed and from a pure performance perspective it was ideal.
However this design is a complicated multi-component perimeter infrastructure …
iScan Online Brings Opportunistic Scanning from the Cloud to the Endpoint
iScan Online officially launched today. The company has been in stealth mode since June 2012 and made its SaaS, cloud-based security scanning solution available on a limited pre-release basis. iScan Online fills the growing gap in security scanning as BYOD, remote workers and mobile technology create challenges that traditional security scanners cannot meet.
iScan Online was co-founded by Carl Banzhof and Billy Austin, both renowned security industry veterans with experience helping to guide leading security companies, including Citadel Security, SAINT and McAfee. Banzhof serves as Chief Executive Officer and Austin as President. The company has secured seed capital from a strategic investor who understands the important problem iScan Online is solving.
iScan Online Brings Opportunistic Scanning from the Cloud to the Endpoint
iScan Online officially launched today. The company has been in stealth mode since June 2012 and made its SaaS, cloud-based security scanning solution available on a limited pre-release basis. iScan Online fills the growing gap in security scanning as BYOD, remote workers and mobile technology create challenges that traditional security scanners cannot meet.
iScan Online was co-founded by Carl Banzhof and Billy Austin, both renowned security industry veterans with experience helping to guide leading security companies, including Citadel Security, SAINT and McAfee. Banzhof serves as Chief Executive Officer and Austin as President. The company has secured seed capital from a strategic investor who understands the important problem iScan Online is solving.
BillingPlatform.com to Exhibit at Cloud Expo New York
SYS-CON Events announced today that BillingPlatform.com, a flexible, high-volume, cloud-based billing platform, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
BillingPlatform.com is the industry’s most flexible, high-volume, cloud-based billing platform for rating any combination of metered, subscription and ad-hoc services while managing customers, products and rate plans. BillingPlatform.com makes it easy to quickly and accurately implement any pricing and rating model and roll out new products and services so customers can rapidly turn ideas into cash.