Although cloud hosting has been a massive boom it’s not necessarily a disruptive technology model.
While Amazon is certainly doing it to a much larger scale than ever before, it more represents an ongoing maturity of the simple web hosting we began in the early 90s. It may now be on steroids but it’s still fundamentally the same virtualized shared infrastructure model.
It’s also still just a technical decision, not one of business transformation. The Marketing and other business managers don’t care whether an app is run in-house, in the Cloud or anywhere else, as along as it works and provides them the software functionality they need.
So it is usually the technical teams making these decisions , with no real impact on how the organization overall performs their work, or in how the software that it runs works in terms of information models.
The world’s largest and most successful private cloud operations are revolutionizing their approach to demand management. These organizations have recognized that while self-service portals are a component in the overall cloud architecture, these tools do not enable demand management. In fact, in many cases the portals and end-user interfaces don’t actually capture anything to do with demand, but instead force the user to enter the capacity “supply” requirements that they think will meet their demands. This is very different. Large enterprises have recognized the need to look beyond immediate requests to also model the “pipeline” of new demands that will be coming down the road. It is only by capturing new immediate requirements, an understanding of the pipeline and what is running in environments that organizations can possibly hope to accurately model demand and properly allocate compute, storage and network resources.
This whitepaper shows how corporate IT can manage its environment as if it is “deployed to the cloud.” So, if and when different parts of the environment are deployed to the cloud, day-to-day management of the environment remains unchanged—regardless of where it is running: on premises or at a service provider.
From Wired comes a good opinion read on the author’s experiences and insights derived from setting up his own private cloud server using Tonido.
It’s Time for You to Take the Cloud Back From Corporations (Clive Thompson)
“…it’s a “personal cloud”: I own and run the hardware. The simple act of building and running it has given me a glimpse of a possible alternate future for the Internet. It’s an increasingly popular one too.”
“Another outcome: You realize that, holy Moses, putting stuff online is not rocket science anymore.”
“Granted, personal clouds create new problems. A blizzard knocked out my DSL for a day, taking my cloud with it. A house fire destroys not just your laptop but your cloud backup as well.”
The cloud ecosystem for information technology today is an interesting mix of companies, products and solutions. Information Communications Technology (ICT) refers to the convergence and expansion of telecommunications with information processing and storage. In short, ICT and the cloud mean a combination of compute, storage and network, running a variety of applications.
These resources have been commonly located on premise by businesses, ranging from a few racks of equipment in a room for small businesses to football-field size facilities for large companies. Separately owned data center facilities, called Multi-tenant Data Centers (MTDC) enable organizations to augment on premise resources by placing equipment in a rented MTDC space without owning the facility.
CIOs cited reducing enterprise costs; improving IT applications and infrastructure; improving efficiency; and improving business processes among the top 10 business priorities, according to a Gartner Executive Program Survey conducted last year.
To address these business priorities, many CIOs are rethinking how they architect their IT infrastructure to better deliver applications and services to end users. A study conducted by IDG Research Services[1] in 2013 surveyed 333 IT directors or higher titles at enterprise companies with more than 500 employees and reported that 77% of IT leaders globally believe data center transformation will play a highly important role in delivering business goals to their organizations.
APM is entering into a period of intense competition of technology and strategy with a multiplicity of vendors and viewpoints. While the nomenclature used within its space has five distinct dimensions that elucidate its meaning, the very acronym of APM is in question: Application Performance … Monitoring vs. Management.
It’s strange to think that we would not normally use monitoring and management synonymously, but when used in the APM vernacular they seem to be interchangeable. This may be a visceral response, but I see the APM idiom converging on itself and becoming a matter of expectations vs. aspirations.
Financial Services companies operate in a difficult environment. Many of their applications are absolutely vital to the proper workings of the global economy. They are one of the most heavily regulated industries in the world, and they are a constant target of hackers. Their systems need to be available, performant, and secure while generating the revenue sought by Wall Street and their shareholders.
In the last post I covered several architectural techniques you can use to build a highly scalable, failure resistant application in the cloud. However, these architectural changes – along with the inherent unreliability of the cloud – introduce some new problems for application performance management. Many organizations rely on logging, profilers, and legacy application performance monitoring (APM) solutions to monitor and manage performance in the data center, but these strategies and solutions simply aren’t enough when you move into the cloud. Here are a few important considerations for choosing an APM solution that works in the cloud.
The new wonder metal, graphene, is being looked at as a building block for communications and electronic devices on the level of what the transistor was sixty years ago.
Graphene is a one-atom thick, mesh-like (think hexagonal honeycomb or chicken wire), semi metal that will add more battery-life into a smartphone among other breakthrough ideas like bendable displays. It is also ten times stronger than diamonds so its resiliency is perfect for use in a smartphone or any other device that requires super-ruggedness.
