Cloud computing, hybrid cloud, PaaS, Stratos, WSO2

WSO2 Opens Beta for Stratos 2.0 PaaS Offering

Today WSO2 unveiled the beta release of WSO2 Stratos 2.0. Newly re-architected, WSO2 Stratos 2.0 is a foundation for implementing a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that combines support for heterogeneous applications and service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform runtimes with native, secure multi-tenancy. WSO2 Stratos 2.0 also adds the capability to run on any cloud infrastructure, including VMware, Eucalyptus, Amazon and OpenStack.

WSO2 previewed the latest release of WSO2 Stratos at WSO2Con 2013, which runs February 13-14 in London. The company also announced that it has begun accepting customers for the WSO2 Stratos 2.0 beta program.

“Increasingly enterprises view the cloud as a platform for innovation. However, until now they’ve had to make trade-offs between using their favorite development tools and middleware or capitalizing on the multi-tenancy of a native cloud environment. With WSO2 Stratos 2.0, these organizations no longer have to compromise,” said Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, WSO2 founder and CEO.

The Stratos 2.0 approach to multi-tenancy goes beyond other PaaS environments to support multiple levels of virtualization—from standard virtual machines, via Linux Containers to intra-JVM isolation. This choice of sharing resources while providing the correct isolation level for multiple tenants is a significant factor in enabling lower costs, greater flexibility, and easier on-ramping into a private or public cloud environment.

The new tenant-aware elastic load balancer in Stratos 2.0 is a first-of-a-kind capability that allows the environment to provide highly tunable performance to different tenants, ranging from “economy class” for low priority workloads up to “private jet” mode for workloads that require dedicated resources.

At the heart of Version 2.0 is a new cartridge architecture for plugging software into WSO2 Stratos to take advantage of cloud-native capabilities, such as multi-tenancy, elastic scaling, self-service provisioning, metering, billing, and resource pooling, among others. As a result, WSO2 Stratos 2.0 is able to run, not only 13 WSO2 Carbon enterprise middleware products, but also a choice of frameworks, databases, and other application services.

WSO2 Stratos 2.0 also significantly enhances PaaS deployment through an integration layer that uses the popular jclouds technology to allow it to run on any infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) including OpenStack, VMware, Eucalyptus and CloudStack. Additionally, use of the Puppet open source tool for infrastructure deployment in this release makes it easier than ever to install and configure Stratos in a private or public cloud environment. Like all WSO2 software, WSO2 Stratos 2.0 is 100% open source and will be made available under the Apache License 2.0.

Ideal candidates for the WSO2 Stratos 2.0 beta program are enterprise IT professionals who are planning or evaluating ways to deliver new applications and/or migrate existing ones to the cloud. Participants also must be committed to participating and giving feedback. For more information and to contact WSO2 about joining the beta program, please visit the product Web page: http://wso2.com/cloud/stratos.

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Cloud Expo New York: Time to Mission @ the Speed of Cloud

Organizations want extraordinary results from their IT units. Today’s mantra is faster delivery, better quality, cheaper solutions, and safer environments. Many CIOs are implementing cloud computing enterprise architectures to address these challenges with results varying greatly. Why are some organizations seeing only limited results from cloud computing implementations while others are increasing market share, decreasing costs, generating value, and innovating faster? will explore fundamental shifts organizations need to consider to get the most value from cloud computing and deliver «time to mission @ the speed of cloud.»
In her session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Jill Tummler Singer, CIO for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), will explore fundamental shifts organizations need to consider to get the most value from cloud computing and deliver «time to mission @ the speed of cloud.»

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Compuware Announces Cloud Best Practices

Compuware Corporation on Monday announced the publication of its latest Application Performance Management (APM) Best Practices collection, titled: «Optimizing Cloud & Virtualized Applications.» Written by thought leaders from Compuware’s APM Center of Excellence, this new volume provides best practices and techniques that enable senior managers, IT team leaders and practitioners to manage and optimize application performance in cloud environments.
Cloud and virtualization are two of the most transformational technology trends in the IT industry today. Initially, a common concern with the migration to these environments is centered on data integrity and security. As adoption moves from departmental applications and test environments to business-critical applications, managing performance and availability has become a critical issue. This volume examines the business and operational challenges associated with these changes.

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There Is More to PaaS Than You Think

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.

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cloud brokerage, Cloud computing

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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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 …

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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 …

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