It’s unlikely there’s anyone in IT today that doesn’t understand the role of load balancing to scale. Whether cloud or not, load balancing is the key mechanism through which load is distributed to ensure horizontal scale of applications. It’s also unlikely there’s anyone in IT that doesn’t understand the relationship between load balancing and high-availability (reliability). High-Availability (HA) architectures are almost always implemented using load balancing services to ensure seamless transition from one service instance to another in the event of a failure.
What’s often overlooked is that scalability and HA isn’t important just for applications. Services – whether application or network-focused – must also be reliable. It’s the old “only as strong as the weakest link in the chain” argument. An application is only as reliable as its least reliable component – and that includes services and infrastructure upon which that application relies. It is – or should be – ops first rule; the rule that guides design of data center architectures.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Cloud Spectator has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Cloud Spectator offers cloud computing education to an enterprise audience; constantly analyzing this dynamic industry to keep information up-to-date, as well as providing custom reports to cloud providers.
Cloud Expo 2012 New York, June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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Essar Group is a large, Mumbai-based company with US$17 billion in revenues, operations in 25 countries, and interests in steel, energy, power, communications, shipping ports, logistics, and construction. It is also migrating toward the cloud with some of its Web-based apps with Microsoft Azure, according to company CTO Jayantha Prabhu.
“With Windows Azure, we don’t have to spend money on hardware and software, and we don’t have to spend time on administrative tasks related to infrastructure,” he says. “A scalable, well-defined platform gives us much fewer problems to solve and more time to focus on the overall experience of the application.”
Prabhu says the company “can obtain the benefits of both public and private cloud computing” with Azure, providing on-demand computing and storage when needed through Microsoft datacenters.
Essar has been working with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner MindTree to migrate four of its apps – reporting, visitor-management, and gate-pass systems – and values the flexibility it says it’s gained along with “a lower total cost of ownership compared with an on-premises solution,” according to Prabhu.

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PaaS is nothing but uploading your small kernel of code with business logic and the PaaS service provider will run that code on allocated computing and storage instances. The aim of PaaS is to let the developers concentrate on developing their code rather than creating and maintaining their ecosystem required for it. When Google launched App Engine in 2008 it had very basic functionalities but gradually it has evolved to support much good functionality like Channel APIs. But when it comes to language support, selection of cloud, selection of database, control over database, Cloud foundry gives great amount of flexibility as compared to App Engine. Also, when it comes to supporting Java packages also, Google App Engine doesn’t allow developers to free their arms as there are quite a few important packages which are still not part of App Engine’s white list.

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While many companies are leveraging Cloud Computing to limit their infrastructure and footprint, the reality is cloud computing is driving a massive data center build out. In fact, this data center expansion is growing at an unprecedented scale and is not sustainable based on the parallel growth in data and storage requirements. This is ironic given the spirit of the Internet is decentralized, distributed architecture, where global bandwidth, processing power, content and infrastructure are accessible via the largest peer-to-peer network in history.
In their session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Margaret Dawson, Vice President of Marketing for Symform, and Praerit Garg, President and Co-founder of Symform, will challenge the audience to think about their own infrastructure and cloud strategy with a distributed filter. They will review distributed cloud models you can leverage today, as well as discuss the inherent benefits and challenges of a decentralized approach. This is a vendor-agnostic session with no product pitch.

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Every technologist I know has been working to learn more about Hadoop. I bet you are already somewhat familiar with some of the neat use-cases of this technological framework. But let me ask, wouldn’t you like to be able to express what Hadoop is in a clear, succinct way?

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Recently Amazon Web Services has launched the AWS Marketplace. It is certainly a welcome move that brings all the available software on Amazon EC2 under one roof. This is especially good for ISVs to get visibility and become more accessible to potential customers. The interface inherits the classic look and feel of Amazon shopping experience […]

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Lately some have been suggesting that the internet is at risk. Much if not all of the hoopla stems from a recent interview with Sergey Brin from Google (GOOG). Brin says the biggest threats come from government crackdowns, attempts to control piracy, and “the rise of ‘restrictive’ walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms.”

If you look at the arguments, they essentially break down to “If Google can’t spy on your every behavior, then the internet will collapse.” This is because all information in applications that aren’t web-based can’t be crawled by web crawlers, and user behavior inside the application also cannot be monitored.

It sounds pretty ridiculous, when you think about it. People have been using applications for years on the desktop. Some of them are local to the desktop …