Google I/O 2012 Day 2 Keynote by Urs Hölzle, Senior VP of Engineering: Google Compute Engine Announcement

YouTube’s video archive of Urs Hölzle’s Google Compute Engine announcement during the Google I/O 2012 Day 2 Keynote includes an interactive transcript. Following is a excerpt from the transcript starting at 00:36:07 and ending at 00:47:01:

>> Sundar: To do that, I want to invite Urs Hölzle, our first V.P. of engineering, one of the first ten employees at Google, and the person, more than anyone, responsible for building all of Google's infrastructure. Urs.

[ Cheers and applause ]

Thank you, Sundar. We've heard a great many things today about applications, clients, and -- but I'm here today to talk about servers and the infrastructure that powers all these applications.

A long time ago, at Google, we started working very hard to build the world's fastest, most scalable, and most reliable infrastructure. We needed our infrastructure to deliver incredible scale and incredible performance at a very low cost. And over the years, we built one of the world's largest set of data centers connect these data centers. And then we started looking at ways to deliver that infrastructure to you so that you can build great applications for your users.

So in 2008, we launched App Engine. App Engine lets you write simple, intuitive code to build your apps. And then we take them and we manage them and we scale them for you. So if you have one request per second or 1,000 requests per second, it just works.

We're thrilled about the popularity of App Engine. Today, it's supporting over 1 million active applications, 7.5 billion hits per day every day, and 2 trillion data store operations per month. That easily makes it the largest public, NoSQL data store infrastructure in the world.

[ Applause ]

Thank you.

So more and more developers are using App Engine. And every day, we hear success stories from them. Here's one from Japan, where earlier this month, a fully one-third of Japan was watching a national song contest. And App Engine was powering the live streaming and the voting for this event. At its peak, it ran at 24,000 requests per second. Yet, no other App Engine user noticed that this was going on. So the ability to sail through this kind of traffic spike allows you to focus on your application while we focus on handling the traffic.

So we're very proud of what App Engine has enabled all of you developers to do.

But many of you have said you want even more options. And, specifically, you've told us that you want virtual machines on demand with industry-leading performance, with industry-leading scalability, and so easy and cheap to run that you'd prefer them to your in-house servers.

Well, today, I'm going to show you what it is like to run in Google's cloud.

00:39:25

I'm here to announce Google Compute Engine, infrastructure as a service that delivers the kind of performance --

[ Cheers and applause ]

-- and scale and value --

[ Applause ]

You haven't seen anything yet. Thanks.

But the infrastructure as a service that delivers the performance and scale and value that only Google can deliver.

So Compute Engine gives you Linux virtual machines at Google scale. Spin up two VMs or 10,000 VMs. It just works. You have multiple storage options, high-performance networking between VMs so that you can form them into a cluster and great connectivity to your end users using Google's global backbone.

So let me show what Compute Engine and App Engine together can do. One of our beta testers was the Institute for Systems Biology. The ISB uses genomic analysis to decipher how genes function and to find relationships between the genes that signal the potential for new cancer drugs. They wrote an App Engine app that connected to Compute Engine virtual machines. And you'll see it here on the screen here.

They show the human genome in a circular form. And the application allows researchers to visually explore the associations between genes, mutations, and other factors. And each of these associations is shown with a blue line like that.

00:41:11

Now, this may look simple, but this kind of analysis requires a tremendous amount of computation. So ISB built an in-house cluster with 1,000 nodes to handle this kind of computation.

Yet it still took them ten minutes to compute just a single association using the entire cluster. So, fortunately, it took only a few days to port this application to Compute Engine. And let's see how Compute Engine performs on this application. Now, remember, on their in-house 1,000-core cluster, what you would see here is one line appear, you know, click, and then you'd wait for ten minutes to see the next line. So let's see what Compute Engine can do with this. (Ticking).

All right. So this is what happens when you add 10,000 cores to your application. Instead of it taking ten minutes, you get a new association every few seconds.

That's the kind of scalability and performance that Google can deliver.

And so today, anyone with large-scale computing needs can now access this same infrastructure with Compute Engine virtual machines. And this infrastructure comes with a scale and a performance and a value that is unparalleled in the industry, because you benefit from the efficiency of Google data centers and our decade of experience in running them.

What you get from Google is not just the scale, but also amazing stable performance.

So our virtual machines and storage are predictably fast so you can rely on a consistent level of performance, no matter who else is running on Compute Engine right now, just as App Engine was able to handle a huge spike in the Japanese application.

For example, when Invite Media ported their ad server from another cloud provider to Compute Engine, they were able to double the number of connections that each single VM can accept at -- using VMs of comparable size, and, more importantly, they were able to reduce the number of connection errors by over a factor of ten because of the predictable performance.

You can hear more directly from Compute Engine beta users in the technical sessions about Compute Engine which you will see show up on your I/O calendar after this talk. So be sure to check them out. Now, finally, we know that you want top scalability and top performance. But you also need value. And Compute Engine is a great value, delivering up to 50% more compute per dollar than other cloud providers, so you don't have to choose between getting the best performance and getting the best price. We worked very hard for a decade to lower the cost of computing, and we're passing these savings on to you.

[ Applause ]

Compute Engine is now open in limited preview. And it's amazing to finally be able to talk about this. It's amazing to see 10,000 cores working for a single application and what that can do. So 10,000 cores, I think that's really cool. But you know what really cool?

[ Laughter ]

Well, we know that some of you need even more scale. And we have the technology to help you.

For computations that are very, very computationally intensive but don't need that much I/O, we can scale much, much higher. You may have noticed this ticker counting up since the start of my presentation. Well, this ticker is not a conceptual counter. It shows the actual count of the number of cores available to the genome app right now. And they've all been adding since the beginning of this presentation. So what would you say to 770,000 cores available to your app?

[ Cheers and applause ]

So if you're ISB, you would say, actually, my app kind of taps out at 600,000 cores. It doesn't scale any further. So let's leave 170,000 idle and allocate 600,000 to the genome app and see how fast it runs. Switch to the app. Right. There's a little initial delay. And then we really get going.

[ Cheers and applause ]

So this is the same computation now running on 600,000 cores. That is cool!

[ Laughter ]

And that is how Infrastructure as a Service is supposed to work.

So this, ladies and gentlemen, truly is the best time ever to deliver and to build for the Web. You now have access to the scale and performance of Google's infrastructure at a great price. And it's up to you to figure out how to make the best use of that. So with that, back to Sundar. Thank you.

[ Cheers and applause ]

00:47:01

Very impressive. Adding 761,886 cores in an 00:04:07 demonstration period corresponds to 3,085 cores per second. For more details about ISB’s genome project, see Google’s Behind the Compute Engine demo at Google I/O 2012 Keynote article.

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Technorati Tags: Google Compute Engine,Google App Engine,Google I/O 2012,Google Genome Explorer,Institute for Systems Biology,Cloud Computing,BigData,MapReduce,Hadoop

Cloud Platform Sessions at Google’s I/O Conference in San Francisco 6/27 through 6/29/2012

Google is holding their annual I/O Conference at San Francisco’s Moscone Hall on 6/27 through 6/29/2012. Here’s the schedule of sessions related to App Engine in the Cloud Platform track:

Rumor has it that Google will announce it’s entry into the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud provider sweepstakes during Wednesday’s keynote, which will be streamed live starting at 9:30 AM on 6/27/2012.

---

Check out Barb Darrow’s (@gigabarb) Google App Engine: What developers want at Google I/O post of 6/26/2012 to GigaOm’s Structure blog, which begins:

Most of the noise coming out of Google I/O this week will be around the company’s long-percolating infrastructure as a service plan. But many developers who have banked on Google App Engine, the company’s platform as a service, will be looking for other things.

For many, Google App Engine has seemed a sideline for the big search company, a perception some Google execs have labored to correct. Google claimed 150,000 active GAE developers going into the show, a number it will doubtless update.

…

Barb continues with a nine-point developer wish list.

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Technorati Tags: Google,Google I/O,Google App Engine,App Engine Datastore,BigTable,BigQuery,Big Data,MapReduce,Go Language,Cloud Computing

Windows Azure and Cloud Computing Posts for 10/19/2009+

Windows Azure, Azure Data Services, SQL Azure Database and related cloud computing topics now appear in this weekly series.

• Update 10/20/2009: MSDN: Premium Subscribers and BizSpark Members Receive Windows Azure and SQL Azure Benefits; IDC: IDC UK analyst slams cloud economics while IDC US touts cloud conference; Leena Rao: VS 2010 is cloud-ready but where are Azure Tools for Beta 2; ADO.NET Data Services Team: SharePoint lists support Astoria; Ben Kepes: EuroCloud Forms; Eugenio Pace: Claims based Identity & Access Control Guide updated; James Urquhart: Cloud computing and the future of IT; and more.

Note: This post is updated daily or more frequently, depending on the availability of new articles in the following sections:

• Azure Blob, Table and Queue Services
• SQL Azure Database (SADB)
• .NET Services: Access Control, Service Bus and Workflow
• Live Windows Azure Apps, Tools and Test Harnesses
• Windows Azure Infrastructure
• Cloud Security and Governance
• Cloud Computing Events
• Other Cloud Computing Platforms and Services

To use the above links, first click the post’s title to display the single article you want to navigate.

Cloud Computing with the Windows Azure Platform published 9/21/2009. Order today from Amazon or Barnes & Noble (in stock.)

Read the detailed TOC here (PDF) and download the sample code here.

Discuss the book on its WROX P2P Forum.

See a short-form TOC, get links to live Azure sample projects, and read a detailed TOC of electronic-only chapters 12 and 13 here.

Wrox’s Web site manager posted on 9/29/2009 a lengthy excerpt from Chapter 4, “Scaling Azure Table and Blob Storage” here.

You can now download and save the following two online-only chapters in Microsoft Office Word 2003 *.doc format by FTP:

• Chapter 12: “Managing SQL Azure Accounts, Databases, and DataHubs*”
• Chapter 13: “Exploiting SQL Azure Database's Relational Features”

HTTP downloads of the two chapters are available from the book's Code Download page.
* Content for managing DataHubs will be added when Microsoft releases a CTP of the technology

Azure Blob, Table and Queue Services

• The ADO.NET Data Services Team’s Share your data across data sources (Sharepoint, SQL Server, Azure, Reporting Services, etc) & applications (.NET, Silverlight, Excel, etc) using Data Services post announced on 10/20/2009:

This week at the SharePoint conference, Pablo Castro will be announcing that the next version of SharePoint natively integrates with data services such that all SharePoint lists will be exposed as an ADO.NET Data Service.  This means you can now program against SharePoint list data using all the VS tools and runtime client libraries (.NET, Silverlight, AJAX, Java, PHP, etc…) which support ADO.NET Data Services.  Also, since the Data Service interface is just plain HTTP and XML/Atom or JSON, pretty much any environment with an HTTP stack can now browse, update and interact with list and document data in SharePoint. We are very excited to be able to talk about SharePoint’s data service integration (more code-centric blogs to come on this topic) as this has been an ask we hear a lot each time we present data services.

This integration is also a good example of a step towards our larger vision for data services and, more generally, open data access on the web.  The remainder of this post outlines our roadmap around data services and what parts of that roadmap we are announcing this week. …

Developer tools:

We updated the protocol itself as well as our frameworks and developer tools in Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4.0 (starting with Beta 2) and Silverlight 4.  We’ll also release an update to .NET 3.5 SP1.

Reporting Services:

Starting with SQL Server 2008 R2, all reports created with SQL Server Reporting Services will expose an option to render as an Atom feed that follows the Data Services convention as well. This makes it possible for developers and information workers to see the data “underneath” a report (whether it displays as tables, charts, etc.) and use it in their own applications.

Excel and Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel 2010 (aka “Project Gemini”):

Also starting with SQL Server 2008 R2, the PowerPivot plug-in for Excel allows information workers to bring data from all sources for analysis will natively understand and load data from any Data Service. Now information workers can obtain data from reports, SharePoint sites, public sites that expose reference data and even custom applications and load it directly into the data analysis environments.

• Pablo Castro’s Every SharePoint 2010 server is a Data Services server post of 10/19/2009 begins:

I haven't been writing much here, mostly because I've been way too busy but also because I couldn't discuss publicly many of the things I'm doing. Now that SharePoint 2010 has been announced and its feature set published everywhere, I can finally discuss one of the coolest things we've been up to lately.

SharePoint is a repository of resources (list items and documents in document libraries) that are collected and manipulated collaboratively. Resources have a bunch of security and business logic attached to them, such as who can see each item, who gets to change it, or whether a particular column in a list needs to conform to a particular validation formula.

When SharePoint folks said they wanted a RESTful interface this was great news...the system is just a perfect fit. Not only it's a perfect fit for RESTful services in general, but also for Astoria in particular. In the end SharePoint is very data-centric in nature, it already supports queries and business logic as part of the uniform interface.

So we're really excited to announce that as of SharePoint 2010, every SharePoint server is an Astoria server out of the box. No configuration required or anything, just make sure the proper version of ADO.NET Data Services is in the box. For SharePoint 2010 beta, the "right" version is ADO.NET Data Services v1.5 CTP2. We'll put details out there for future iterations as they come.

The Data Platform Insider blog announced in its At SharePoint Conference, Project “Gemini” name officially revealed as Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel post of 10/19/2009:

Finally, the Microsoft ADO.NET Data Services team announced that, starting with SharePoint 2010, all SharePoint sites are automatically exposed as RESTful data services that follow the ADO.NET Data Services convention. Now, any client with an HTTP stack can read and write to SharePoint just by using simple HTTP methods and Atom (XML) or JSON formatted data. Also, clients can post documents and read documents easily by using the HTTP interface. Since SharePoint exposes full metadata through the service, all Data Services tools such as Visual Studio, .NET client, and cross platform clients (e.g. PHP, Java clients recently announced) will work out of the box with SharePoint.

Furthermore, all the Silverlight support for data services will work as well, making it straightforward to front SharePoint sites with Silverlight applications that directly access SharePoint data without the need of server-side code. By enabling a standard based REST-style interface, ADO.Net Data Service greatly simplifies the programmatic access to SharePoint sites. For more details, visit the ADO.NET Data Service team blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/astoriateam/.

I’m curious to learn from the SharePoint Conference 2009 whether SP2010 enables Azure tables as data sources for lists. The Externalizing BLOB Storage in SharePoint 2010 session (#SPC399 on Twitter) might shed light on connecting to Windows Azure Blob Storage Services. Use Jeremy Thake’s SPC09 Session codes and titles list to follow Tweets by session code.

Michael Desmond delivers a synopsis of the SharePoint Conference 2009 (SPC09) in his Microsoft Gives SharePoint A Facelift post of 10/19/2009 to the Visual Studio Magazine blog:

Microsoft today previewed the next generation of its popular SharePoint Server family, which will sport a new user interface, tighter integration capabilities, a cloud-based version and much-needed support for the company's Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE).

The new release, dubbed SharePoint 2010, will be available for general beta testing in November and should be released to manufacturing in the first half of 2010, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in the opening keynote address at the SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas.

During a detailed presentation, Microsoft offered a rundown of SharePoint SKUs and versions. With the 2010 wave, Microsoft is renaming Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) SharePoint Foundation, while the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) product becomes simply SharePoint Server. The new release will also come with an improved SharePoint Designer, the freely available tool for building custom SharePoint sites and behaviors. Designer will gain the Office Ribbon UI and other enhancements to help end users build mash ups, connect to external data and enable workflows, said Jeff Teper, Microsoft corporate vice president for SharePoint Server, in a blog post.

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SQL Azure Database (SADB, formerly SDS and SSDS)

• SearchSQLServer.com’s Q&A: Moving forward with SQL Server in the cloud of 10/19/2009 is an interview with “Brent Ozar, a SQL Server expert with Quest Software, about the potential promise and pitfalls of cloud computing and how enhancements to Microsoft's SQL Azure Database could change the way people view databases in the cloud.”

For those who are relatively unfamiliar with cloud computing, what is the case for cloud-based databases? Is it all about performance?

Brent Ozar: It's about a different kind of performance – the job performance of the DBA. How many times has someone come to the DBA and said, "I need a database, but I can't tell you how it's going to perform, because we've never worked with this app or this code before. I can't tell you how many users we're going to have, because I have no idea how popular this application is going to be. Just give me a database and we'll let you know if performance is bad. Oh, and by the way, we don't have much money in the budget."

Cloud computing gives us an answer to questions like that. In theory, we can deploy a database and scale it up based on demand with much less difficulty than scaling traditional database servers. Unfortunately, this really only means scaling up in terms of data size and user quantity – it doesn't mean we can whip out our credit cards and make the application twice as fast. If the queries are bad and the table design is bad, we're still going to be stuck with less-than-desirable performance.

Ozar is scheduled to present a session entitled Yes, I'm Actually Using the Cloud at PASS Summit 2009 in November.

The Microsoft Sync Framework team announced Sync Framework 2.0 Available for Download with this 10/19/2009 post:

Sync Framework 2.0 expands on the capabilities offered by Sync Framework 1.0:

• Adds features that cater to new scenarios or scenarios that were difficult to support.
• Reduces the amount of work required to develop providers.
• Supports more data sources with new built-in providers.

Still no word about SQL Azure and the DataHub, but the Data Platform Insider blog announced in its At SharePoint Conference, Project “Gemini” name officially revealed as Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel post of 10/19/2009:

Also today, the Microsoft Sync Framework team announced that Microsoft Office 2010 is replacing the internal synchronization engine that ties Groove Workspaces to SharePoint with the Microsoft Sync Framework.  This change supports synchronization for larger numbers of users sharing Groove Workspaces – up to 28 times the currently enabled number of users.

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.NET Services: Access Control, Service Bus and Workflow

• Eugenio Pace’s Claims based Identity & Access Control Guide – Updated drafts & samples available post of 10/20/2009 announces:

Yesterday, we uploaded a new release of the Guide and the samples. You can download the content from here. (Note: if you downloaded them yesterday, you might want to check again. We mistakenly uploaded the samples with no docs. It is fixed now).

You’ll find:

• Updated introduction & WebSSO chapters, incorporating quite a bit of feedback
• New updated samples, including scenario #2 (Federation with Partners). This is inspired in this article I wrote some time ago. 

Eugenio continues with an illustrated guide to using the samples.

The Geneva Team Blog’s How Geneva helps with access control and what is its relationship to AzMan post of 10/20/2009 discusses how the Windows Identity Foundation relates to Windows’ Authorization Manager (AzMan):

The new Identity and Access products wave from Microsoft brings a new, claims-based, approach to identity and access space. This new approach is based on the principles defined by the Identity Meta-System. Windows Identity Foundation (WIF), which is part of this new Identity and Access products wave, gives applications a much richer and flexible way to deal with identities by introducing claims-based identity concept. WIF also decouples the application business logic from the authentication and identity attributes lookup details by externalizing these processes into a component called security token service (STS). The primary goal of this new Identity and Access products wave is to enable this new, claims-based, identity and access model and make it as easy as possible for existing and new applications to leverage the exciting capabilities that this model provides. …

• Johan Danforth announced in a 10/20/2009: Just released [on CodePlex] a new version [0.2.2] of SQL Azure Explorer that works with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2.

Wade Wegner announced in a 10/19/2009 tweet “Minor updates to Passive Federation w/ Windows Azure & ADFS v2 post given feedback from @eugenio_pace.” 

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Live Windows Azure Apps, Tools and Test Harnesses

• Leena Rao reports Microsoft Moves Visual Studio Towards The Cloud in this 10/19/2009 post to TechCrunch:

Microsoft is making a significant announcement for developers today, upgrading and adding functionality to Visual Studio 2010 to make the product more cloud-friendly in anticipation of Microsoft’s release of its commercial cloud platform Azure. Visual Studio is Microsoft’s a development environment that can be used to develop web applications, sites and services based on Microsoft’s technology platforms. …

Microsoft is making it much easier for developers to build on the Azure cloud with these new tools. The specific Windows Azure tools for Visual Studio let developers build ASP.NET web applications and services that are hosted in Azure’s cloud services operating system. The tools also includes a SDK environment, and a simulated cloud environment that runs on the developer’s machine, so developers can test and debug their applications locally.

VS 2010 Beta 2 won’t be cloud-friendly until November when the Windows Azure team expect to release Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, as noted in Jim Nakashima’s post at the end of this section.

Vaibhav Bhandari’s Running HealthVault Apps On Windows Azure post of 10/19/2009 is a detailed tutorial for getting a simple HealthVault application running under Windows Azure (requires the HealthVault SDK):

HealthVault SDK 1.0 introduces an interesting capability by which an HealthVault application can read their application certificate from a file. Eric has some details about this on his blog.

I’m going to describe how this capability of reading an application’s certificates from the file store could be used to run HealthVault application on Windows Azure.

Check out a simple (HelloHV application) running on Windows Azure here.

You must have an existing HealthVault account that HealthVault Azure can access. Note that HealthVault Azure doesn’t provide the level of security of Microsoft’s official HealthVault application.

Vaibhav is a software engineer on the HealthVault Solution Provider team.

Wade Wegner announced in a 10/19/2009 tweet “Minor updates to Passive Federation w/ Windows Azure & ADFS v2 post given feedback from @eugenio_pace.”  (Repeated from the .NET Services: Access Control, Service Bus and Workflow section.)

Mary Jo Foley reports Free Silverlight streaming service to be replaced by paid Azure-hosted service in this 10/19/2009 post to ZDNet’s All About Microsoft blog:

Microsoft is discontinuing its free Silverlight Streaming service and replacing it with a paid, Azure-hosted service before the end of calendar 2009.

Microsoft is confirming the report I saw on LiveSide.Net from October 18, which is based on a blog post from Microsoft’s Silverlight Streaming team. Silverlight Streaming is a Windows Live beta service that supports hosted audio/video content. Microsoft officials described the offering as a companion service for Silverlight for delivering and scaling rich media.

The Softies are saying Silverlight Streaming will be discontinued at some time in the future, with no specific timeframe offered.

“A new Windows Azure-based hosting and delivery service will be launched by the end of 2009, though this is not a direct replacement for Silverlight Streaming and will have costs associated with its use,” according to the Silverlight Streaming team.

Alin Irimie asserts Visual Studio 2010 Is Cloud Friendly in this post of 10/19/2009 about the newly released (to MSDN subscribers) of VS 2010 and .NET Framework 4:

Microsoft announced today the immediate availability of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 to MSDN subscribers; general availability will follow on Oct. 21.

New testing options in Visual Studio 2010 will help ensure quality code. Enhancements to the integrated development environment mean that whether modeling, coding, testing or debugging, developers can use existing skills to deploy a growing number of application types. Built-in tools for Windows 7 and Microsoft SharePoint 2010, new drag and drop bindings for Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation, and interoperability with innovative technologies (such as those for the database, ASP.NET model view controller, unified modeling language, Expression, and multicore) allow developers to bring their visions to life.

With the .NET Framework 4, developers can experience immensely smaller deployments with up to an 81 percent reduction in the framework size when using the Client Profile. Other .NET Framework 4 developer benefits include additional support for industry standards, inclusion of the Dynamic Language Runtime for more language choice, new support for high-performance middle-tier applications (including parallel programming, workflow and service-oriented applications) and backward compatibility through side-by-side installation with .NET Framework 3.5.

Jim Nakashima reviews some new VS 2010 Beta 2 features in his Windows Azure Tools and Visual Studio 2010 post of 10/18/2009:

We’re really excited about this release as not only does it support Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, but it also adds a new UI over the service definition and configuration files, adds new template options for creating roles, improves debugging integration with the development fabric and integrates with a number of new platform features and improvements.

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Windows Azure Infrastructure

• My MSDN Premium Subscribers and BizSpark Members to Receive Windows Azure and SQL Azure Benefits post of 10/20/2009 describes details of eight-month introductory and subsequent free Windows Azure computing, storage and bandwidth quotas, as well as SQL Azure Web edition instances available to MSDN subscribers and BizSpark members. (But apparently not to WebsiteSpark members.)

• Steven Shankland reports cloud computing is Gartner’s #1 strategic technology for 2010 in his Gartner: Brace yourself for cloud computing article of 10/20/2009 from Orlando FL for CNet’s DeepTech blog:

Cloud computing isn't going to be vapor much longer, Gartner said Tuesday.

The general idea--shared computing services accessible over the Internet that can expand or contract on demand--topped Gartner's list of the 10 top technologies that information technology personnel need to plan for. It's complicated, poses security risks, and computing technology companies are latching onto the buzzword in droves, but the phenomenon should be taken seriously, said analyst Dave Cearley here at the Gartner Symposium.

Gartner's top trends to watch. (Credit: Gartner)

Specifically, companies should figure out what cloud services might give them value, how to write applications that run on cloud services, and whether they should build their own private clouds that use Internet-style networking technology within a company's firewall.

• Ben Kepes’ It’s All About Networks – EuroCloud Forms post of 10/20/2009 reports that Phil Wainewright is:

[P]art of a group setting up Eurocloud. EuroCloud is an:

“European network of local SaaS and cloud computing communities from Denmark, UK, Belgium, Finland, Luxembourg, France and Spain, including vendors and industry experts. It is aiming at developing the next generation of added value applications. EuroCloud plans to create further local communities in Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and Sweden, and will set up its headquarters in Brussels. Through its diverse membership, EuroCloud will promote cloud computing in Europe, including current state of the markets and future innovations, and will become a critical exchange platform across the different continents.”

EuroCloud is led by Pierre-José Billotte, President and Founder of the French ASP Forum, with a team of SaaS & cloud computing players from the UK, Denmark, Finland, Belgium, Luxembourg and Spain, EuroCloud gathers together leading SaaS vendors, enablers, integrators and industry experts to share best practice and expand their businesses across the continent.

• James Urquhart continues his The Wisdom of Clouds series with Cloud computing and the big rethink: Part 5 of 10/19/2009:

To date, this series has tried to guide you through the changes happening from the infrastructure, developer, and end user perspectives that signal the demise of the full-featured server operating system and the virtual server. Virtualization, and the large scale, multi-tenant operations model we know and love as "cloud computing," are enabling IT professionals to rethink the packaging, delivery, and operation of software functionality in extremely disruptive--and beneficial--ways.

So, what does this mean to the future of information technology? How will the role of IT, and the roles within IT, change as a result of the changing landscape of the technology it administers? What new applications--and resulting markets--are enabled by the "big rethink"?

Following are abbreviated versions of James’ observations:

1. Software packaging will be application focused, not server focused.
2. Enterprise IT will begin to bend enterprise and solutions architectures to align better with what is offered from the cloud.
3. The changing relationship between software and hardware will result in new organizational structures within the IT department.
4. The changing landscape of software development platforms will result in new philosophies of software architecture, deployment, and operations.
5. The need for tactical systems administrators will be reduced.

Larry Dignan asks How did IT fall so far behind the tech curve? in this 10/19/2009 post to ZDNet’s Between the Lines blog that was inspired by a session at Gartner Symposium from analysts David Mitchell Smith and Tom Austin:

Information technology departments are overloaded, missing the consumerization wave, and failing to use new developments to cut their budgets.

Those are some of the takeaways from a Gartner presentation at the IT Symposium in Orlando. The spiel by Gartner analysts David Mitchell Smith and Tom Austin revolves around the state of IT departments as technology is rapidly being changed by their users. How exactly did IT become so crotchety?

Here’s the scene setter:

Most IT professionals want the world to proceed in orderly, incremental fashion, with no massive overnight changes and with plenty of time to adapt to external change. Significant discontinuities are the stuff of which nightmares are made. For example, when assumptions about the useful life of an asset shift early in a project, plummeting from several years to several months, investors can get ruined, and people can lose their jobs and more. We see five major intersecting discontinuities on the horizon. They amplify each other. Any one of them can upset the balance of power between users and their IT organization (or between vendors in a segment). Put the five together and let them amplify each other’s dislocating impact, and there is major trouble looming.

These five amplifying developments are:

• Software as a service
• Open source
• Cloud computing
• Web 2.0
• Consumerization

More of the argument:

There is a fundamental mismatch between what enterprise IT is good at and what is happening on the Internet. For investment projects, IT organizations typically spend six to eight years from initial conceptualization through selling, planning, testing and implementation of the first release.  Project cycles, life spans and frequencies of Internet-related developments (and consumer-related product or service introductions) are radically different.

Jeremy Geelan interviews a Microsoft technical architect in this Infrastructure-as-a-Service Will Mature in 2010: Microsoft's David Chou post of 10/19/2009:

While acknowledging that lots of work is currently being done to differentiate and integrate private and public cloud solutions, Microsoft Architect David Chou believes that Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is the area of Cloud Computing that will make its impact most noticeably in 2010 - especially for startups, and small-medium sized businesses.

In this quickfire mini-interview with SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Journal, in the run-up to November's Cloud Computing Expo in Santa Clara, CA, Chou also mentions who he deems to be the Top Five Companies in the Cloud as at Fall 2009. One of the five he chooses, hardly surprisingly, begins with M.

This sounds to me as if Chou is damning Azure by faint praise or ignoring it completely.

Kevin Fogarty’s Five Problems Keeping Legacy Apps Out of the Cloud post of 10/15/2009 for CIO.com asks: “Did you think all those legacy apps would just float up into someone else's cloud infrastructure? Management, licensing and migration concerns highlight the list of troubles that vendors are now trying to address.”

The hype about cloud computing has gotten so loud that Gartner Group used Cloud as the lead in its hype-parazzi special report Hype Cycle 2009. The sharply sloping graph in the report places cloud, along with e-book readers, wireless power and social software suites, at or near the "Peak of Inflated Expectations," preparing for a dive into the "Trough of Disillusionment."

One thing that may drive it into that trough — other than the unrealistic projections by some providers of cost-savings and easy capacity planning — is the difficulty in getting certain applications to run on it effectively, according to analysts and vendors selling technology to help bridge the gap.

Following are abbreviated versions of Kevin’s five problems:

1. Today's clouds are not alike
2. Security worries
3. Licensing and interoperability concerns
4. You don't know your own legacy
5. Migration is manual and darn few tools will help

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Cloud Security and Governance

David Linthicum warns Beware of cloud computing consultants who focus on infrastructure in this 10/19/2009 post to InfoWorld’s Cloud Computing blog: “The rise of cloud computing has led to a lot of 'consultants' who care more about the simple relocation of systems than real architecture.”

Along with the rapid rise of cloud computing, an army of people with the phrase "cloud computing consultant" on their business cards has arrived. However, many of these individuals, while well intentioned, come from the infrastructure side and have a tendency to miss the core value of cloud computing. They disregard the potential for the cloud computing to better support the business, and instead view it simply as a change of platforms.

Let me be very clear: The movement toward cloud computing is an architectural issue, meaning that you have to take the whole business into account, understand all existing systems at a detail level, and only then begin to consider cloud computing options. Moreover, you need to think about how the systems are divided among on-premise and cloud-delivered platforms, the synergy of the architecture with the mission, and the future needs of the business. …

Christina Tynan-Wood asks Should I back up data stored in the cloud? in this 10/19/2009 post to InfoWorld’s Adventures in IT blog:

Yesterday, I participated in a blog radio discussion with some folks from Google, another journalist, and Sree Sreenivasan, dean of student affairs and digital media professor at the Columbia Journalism School. The topic was how journalists use Google Docs and cloud computing, but the conversation took some interesting turns. In the aftermath of the Sidekick data failure, we were worried: How backed up is the data we store in the cloud?

People who rely on Google Docs often have a great deal of important work there. And as Gunner points out in the comments to my last post, "While it could be argued that a customer is still liable for their own backup, this 'cloud backup' is a service that is touted as being a backup -- not 'another' backup. For a vast majority of users, it was intended as their only backup, and why not?"

Yesterday, I participated in a blog radio discussion with some folks from Google, another journalist, and Sree Sreenivasan, dean of student affairs and digital media professor at the Columbia Journalism School. The topic was how journalists use Google Docs and cloud computing, but the conversation took some interesting turns. In the aftermath of the Sidekick data failure, we were worried: How backed up is the data we store in the cloud? …

Windows Azure stores the original and two replicas on three separate servers in a single data center. If you’re concerned about catastrophic loss of the data center, you’ll need to adopt multiple geo-locations when Microsoft offers the feature, presumably at PDC 2009.

GovInfoSecurity’s Fed Regulation of Private Data Mulled post of 10/16/2009 is subtititled “House Cyber Panel Chair Suggests a National Data Breach Law.”

Congress should consider enacting legislation allowing the federal government to regulate how the private sector handles and stores data to battle the increasing problem of data breaches, says the chairwoman of a House panel that has jurisdiction over cybersecurity.

Rep. Yvette Clarke, the Brooklyn, N.Y., Democrat who chairs the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity and Science and Technology, says she hopes to hold hearings on what she calls the National Data Breach Law either later this year or in early 2010.

"There is no way that we can, giving the evolving nature of data breaches, not (to) regulate, bring some uniformity to our expectations on how data is managed, dealt with and stored," Clarke said in an interview with GovInfoSecurity.com on Friday. "Everyone has come to that realization."

Tanya Forsheit’s Legal Implications of Cloud Computing -- Part Two (Privacy and the Cloud) post of 9/30/2009, which I missed at the end of September, begins:

Last month we posted some basics on cloud computing designed to provide some context and identify the legal issues.  What is the cloud?  Why is everyone in the tech community talking about it?  Why do we as lawyers even care?  Dave provided a few things for our readers to think about -- privacy, security, e-discovery.

Now, let's dig a little deeper.

I am going to start with privacy and cross-border data transfers.  Is there privacy in the cloud?  What are the privacy laws to keep in mind?  What are an organization's compliance obligations?   As with so many issues in the privacy space, the answer begins with one key principle -- location, location, location.  For those of you who prefer to listen, check out my recent webinar on International Regulatory Issues in the Cloud, or you can download the slides (PPTX).

I also missed her earlier Legal Implications of Cloud Computing — Part One (the Basics and Framing the Issues) post of 8/18/2009.

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Cloud Computing Events

• Dmitry Sotnikov’s Cloud and BPOS sessions at Oct 21 Virtual Tradeshow post of 10/20/2009 observes that:

Quest Connect is a big online conference put together by Quest, Microsoft, Dell, NetApp, Vizioncore, Scriptlogic, Techrepublic, Oracle Magazine, Redmond Magazine, and The Code Project. The agenda is packed with a lot of useful material on Windows Server 2008 R2, AD, Identity Management, Exchange 2010, Virtualization, Cloud Computing, SharePoint, SQL, Oracle – see full agenda here – and they include some sessions specifically on cloud computing and Microsoft Online Services. …

See live session list here and on-demand list here.

• IDC announced its Cloud Computing Forum, Getting Down to Business with the Cloud, to be held November 4th at the Marriott Marquis, in New York City in this 10/20/2009 press release:

The IDC Cloud Computing Forum will feature a keynote session with Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC and the leader of IDC's Cloud Computing Team. This session will share the latest research and perspectives on new "cloud-enabled" IT models that leverage software-as-a-service, "mash-up" application models, next-generation on-premise systems, and very large, global solution marketplaces to "democratize" IT access and enable organizations to out-innovate and out-execute their competitors, based on the power of their ideas rather than the size of their IT budgets or skills. Gens will also serve as the Forum Chair.

Forum case studies and presentations will focus on key topics including:

• Here Comes the Cloud: New IT Models for Growth and Innovation
• Managing and Securing Information in the Cloud
• Golf in the Cloud? How the United States Golf Association has Leveraged the Cloud for Technology Advances in Tough Economic Times
• Making Private Clouds Part of Your Data Center Transformation
• Becoming a Cloud Services Provider: Issues, Patterns, and Considerations
• Core Business Apps in the Cloud: Which are Ready for Prime Time?

You can get more information or register for the IDC Cloud Computing Forum here.

• Leo King reports in his IDC: Use cloud as 'stop-gap' measure in recession article of 10/19/2009 for Computerworld UK:

Businesses should only use cloud computing as a "stop-gap" measure to help them survive the cost pressures of the recession.

That is the verdict of analyst house IDC, which said research showed cloud services only provided short-term cost savings. Within three years of implementing software as a service, it said, large businesses regularly found the costs exceeded that of running their own on-premise systems.

"Cloud costs need to come down much further to be a realistic long term option," said Matthew McCormack, IDC analyst, at the company's recent Cloud Computing Summit in London. "It could be useful in the short term financially for companies with severe cost overruns."

"Your datacentre would have to be really poorly run for it to be more expensive than cloud in the long run," he added.

Sounds to me like IDC’s UK and US analysts aren’t reading from the same page when it comes to cloud computing.

John Pescatore’s At Gartner Symposium: Gartner Uses Every Part of the Analyst, Including the Oink post to the Gartner blog of 10/19/2009 questions the lack of security-related sessions:

This week I’ll be sucked into the Gartner IT Symposium vortex, where life is pretty much a constant rotation of 1-1 meetings with attendees, giving presentations, doing the normal inquiry phone calls with Gartner clients, and sneaking time online to work off the never-ending flow of email.

Looking through my calendar at the one-on-one attendee meetings scheduled, the topics run the gamut. However, a few trends stand out:

1. Mobility – secure telework, secure use of smartphones and WLAN security questions.
2. Outsourcing – the terms are different (”use of the cloud” replaced “consume X as a service” which replaced “use an external hoster” which replaces “outsourcing”) but the questions are still about how the business can maintain security while outsourcing some function to external parties.
3. Threat update – what are the new threats we should worry about?

The questions I don’t see are to me the most interesting. Things like “How do I keep our corporate websites secure?” and “how do we make sure we aren’t already compromised by bot clients?” are missing. Essentially, there is a lack of attention to the current state of security.

Aaron Skonnard announced his return from the Heartland Developer’s Conference (HDC) ‘09 in this 10/19/2009 post:

I had a great time at the Heartland Developer’s Conference (HDC) ‘09 in Omaha last week. I really liked the size of the event (not to small, not too big), the overall energy/vibe, and the social elements they provided for attendees. The speaker line-up was quite good for a regional event. …

If you’re looking for my demos from the show, you can grab them here:

• Windows Azure – Lightening Round
• Programming .NET Services

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Other Cloud Computing Platforms and Services

ChrisW@AWS posted Announcement: Auto Scaling groups can now span multiple availability zones to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud forum on 10/19/2009:

We are excited to announce that starting today you can configure your Auto Scaling groups to span multiple Availability Zones. With Multi-AZ Auto Scaling groups, we provide a way to achieve a balanced group of EC2 instances that are spread across multiple Availability Zones for high availability, and provide a single entity for you to manage. In addition, we mitigate the problem of zones becoming unavailable or congested by temporarily allocating capacity in other zones and rebalancing the group back over time.

Please visit our Auto Scaling detail page for additional detail on EC2 Auto Scaling and our developer documentation for more information on the new functionality.

Andrea DiMaio posits Government as Cloud Service Provider: The Battle Has Started in this 10/19/2009 post:

Yesterday, I addressed our audience at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando on cloud computing in government about the possible competition between vendor cloud providers (like Google, Amazon, Terremark, and so forth) and government infrastructure owners (such as NASA Ames, DISA, NBC). I have blogged about this before and I also asked a related question to Vivek Kundra, the US Federal CIO, while I was interviewing him on stage. Before that, my colleague Jeff Vining moderated a panel with those same government agencies on stage.

By one of those coincidences that make life so interesting, pretty much at the same time NASA was announcing that the Office of Management and Budget is moving USASpending.gov to NASA Ames Research Center’s cloud computer infrastructure called Nebula.

On Tuesday Oct 20 at 12:30 pm I will moderate a vendor panel with Microsoft, Google, Salesforce.com, Terremark and CSC to have their views about where they think cloud computing in government should and will go and to provoke some discussion about whether they think the will cooperate or rather compete with NASA Ames and the likes.

James Staten’s 3 Keys to Using IaaS Public Clouds Wisely post of 10/19/2009 for CIO.com begins with the premise:

Public IaaS cloud computing is the delivery of compute (virtualized servers, storage, and networking) on demand as a shared service. The promises of IaaS clouds combine real flexibility and instant capacity with compelling economics like $0.10 per CPU per hour. While the economics are true, they are a tease.

The value of IaaS clouds lies in developer productivity and time-to-market more than cost, as IaaS clouds let developers entirely control the provisioning, configuration, and deployment of the VM themselves. The key is deploying the right kinds of applications, for the right types of uses, with the right business model behind this practice.

Following are abbreviated versions of James’ three keys:

1. Best Practice 1: Test and Development in the Cloud
2. Best Practice 2: Deploy Web Applications
3. Best Practice 3: High-Performance Computing (HPC)

Rich Miller asserts Google CapEx Spending Rebounds Slightly in this 10/19/2009 post:

The second quarter capital expenditure (CapEx) total was up slightly from $139 million in the second quarter but tically lower than the company spent during the same period in 2006 ($492 million), 2007 ($453 million) and 2008 ($452 million). Here’s a look at the recent trend:

John Treadway’s Cloud Computing in the Enterprise – Private (Internal) Clouds post of 10/19/2009 begins:

I’ve been doing a lot of work on private (internal) clouds lately – it’s a result of my new job with Unisys.  Part of that work has been spending time with customers on their plans for cloud computing — internal and external.  There’s some very interesting work going on in the private cloud space, and the solutions available to enterprises to build their clouds are many.

Note – I make the (internal) distinction for a reason.  The term “private cloud” is now starting to morph from purely internal, to internal and external clouds controlled closely by IT.  Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud is an example of a private cloud in an external provider setting.

I have seen charts from Gartner that show how private (internal) clouds will get more money from IT over the next few years than public clouds.  I’ve also seen the benefits of a private cloud in the development/test workload scenario here at Unisys.  The numbers are pretty staggering (we are publishing a paper on this).

Reuven Cohen asks Is IaaS (as a term) Doomed? in this 10/18/2009 post:

Interesting post over at thewhir.com by Joshua Beil, the Director of Market Strategy and Research for Parallels. In his post Beil asks a simple yet profound question. Is the term "IaaS" doomed?

He says "It’s not that the concept of “infrastructure-as-a-service” is flawed… it’s the acronym that is doomed. Let’s face it, “SaaS and “PaaS” can be said out loud, but when you say “IaaS” in same way, well, it just doesn’t work. I’m reminded about something my mother once told me about what happens when I assume."

He goes on to outline three options.

1. Migrate from IaaS to CaaS and make Verizon’s day (CaaS is Computing as a service, and what Verison calls their IaaS service)

2. Consolidate IaaS and PaaS into just PaaS, as the distinction between these two is getting blurrier as offerings from Amazon and Microsoft’s Azure evolve.

3. Replace IaaS with another term that’s not a “C”… but what? I spent some time looking at synonyms for the word “infrastructure” but just didn’t see anything that worked really well. …

Ruv continues by saying that he agrees with Joshua’s analysis and explains why.

M. Koenig and B. Guptill claim Best of Both Worlds: Here Comes the Hybrid Cloud! in this Saugatuck Research Alert of 10/15/2009 (site registration required):

On Monday October 12, 2009, Salesforce.com announced the availability of new, jointly-marketed Cloud-based CRM solutions from Salesforce.com and Dell Inc. Dell will offer Salesforce.com's SaaS-based CRM and sales automation applications to its SMB clients, and will provide implementation and integration with existing systems and databases. Subscription based pricing starts from $9 per user per month. The next day, at Oracle Corporation’s OpenWorld conference, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff appeared on stage, with special guest Michael Dell of Dell Corporation to deliver a keynote entitled “The Best of Both Worlds,” that laid out a vision of a hybrid cloud in which on-premises applications work together with on-demand applications.

Taken together, this week’s announcement and speech represent an acknowledgement by three of the biggest forces in software and hardware (Dell, Salesforce, and host company Oracle) that the IT model of today – and of the future – is one that integrates on-premise and Cloud-based hardware, software and services. …

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Technorati Tags: Windows Azure,Windows Azure Platform,Azure Services Platform,Azure Storage Services,Azure Table Services,Azure Blob Services,Azure Queue Services,SQL Azure Database,DataHub,SADB,SDS,.NET Services,Cloud Computing,HealthVault,Microsoft Sync Framework,SharePoint 2010

Windows Azure and Cloud Computing Posts for 9/24/2009+

Windows Azure, Azure Data Services, SQL Azure Database and related cloud computing topics now appear in this weekly series.

Note: This post is updated daily or more frequently, depending on the availability of new articles in the following sections:

• Azure Blob, Table and Queue Services
• SQL Azure Database (SADB)
• .NET Services: Access Control, Service Bus and Workflow
• Live Windows Azure Apps, Tools and Test Harnesses
• Windows Azure Infrastructure
• Cloud Security and Governance
• Cloud Computing Events
• Other Cloud Computing Platforms and Services

To use these links, click the post title to display the single article you want to navigate.

Tip: Copy •, •• or ••• to the clipboard, press Ctrl+F and paste into the search text box to find updated articles.

••• Update 9/27/2009: Added links to live Azure demo projects to my “Cloud Computing with the Windows Azure Platform” Short-Form Table of Contents and SQL Azure Chapters post of 9/26/2009, David Linthicum on MDM for cloud-based data, Krishnan Subramanian on EC2 growth, Andrea Di Maio on social sites and government record-keeping and Simon Wardley muses If Sauron was the Microsoft Cloud Strategist.

•• Update 9/26/2009: New Azure TechNet Events 9/29/2009, Chris Hoff (@Beaker) strikes a blow against the Operating System, Neil Ward-Dutton’s cloud research report and slide deck, and more. My “Cloud Computing with the Windows Azure Platform” Short-Form Table of Contents and SQL Azure Chapters post provides details about the book’s SQL Azure content.

• Update 9/25/2009: Steve Marx says in a comment that BizSpark includes Azure also, Bruno Tekaly intervews Juval Lowy about EnergyNet, Jim Nakashima uses the Web Platform Installer to set up Azure tools, Michael Arrington interviews Steve Balmer and elicits an explanation of “three screens and a cloud’’, James Hamilton delivers props to Microsoft for its Dublin data center, and more.

Cloud Computing with the Windows Azure Platform published 9/21/2009. Order today from Amazon.

Read the detailed TOC here (PDF). Download the sample code here. Discuss the book on its WROX P2P Forum.

Azure Blob, Table and Queue Services

••• My “Cloud Computing with the Windows Azure Platform” Short-Form Table of Contents and SQL Azure Chapters post of 9/26/2009 now has links to six live Azure demo projects from five chapters:

Instructions and sample code for creating and running the following live demonstration projects are contained in the chapter indicated:

• Chapter 4: OakLeaf Systems Azure Table Services Sample Project
• Chapter 4: OakLeaf Systems Azure Blob Services Test Harness
• Chapter 5: OakLeaf Systems Azure Table Test Harness (Secure Sockets Layer, Personally Identifiable Data Encrypted with AES-128)
• Chapter 6: OakLeaf Systems Azure Table Test Harness: HTTPS, Encrypted, with ASP.NET Membership Provider
• Chapter 7: OakLeaf Systems Azure Test Harness with Windows Live ID Authentication
• Chapter 8: OakLeaf Systems: Photo Gallery Azure Queue Test Harness

These sample projects will remain live as long as Microsoft continues to subsidize Windows Azure demonstration accounts. See my Lobbying Microsoft for Azure Compute, Storage and Bandwidth Billing Thresholds for Developers post of 9/8/2008.

Eric Nelson has posted a preliminary slide deck for his Design considerations for storing data in the cloud with Windows Azure slides to be presented at the Software Architect 2009 conference on 9/30 at 2:00 PM in the Royal College of Physicians, London:

The Microsoft Azure Services Platform includes not one but two (arguably three) ways of storing your data. In this session we will look at the implications of Windows Azure Storage and SQL Data Services on how we will store data when we build applications deployed in the Cloud. We will cover “code near” vs “code far”, relational vs non-relational, blobs, queues and more

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SQL Azure Database (SADB, formerly SDS and SSDS)

Amit Piplani’s Multi Tenant Database comparison post of 9/23/2009 distinguishes Separate Databases; Shared Database, Separate Schema; and Same Database, Same Schema models by the following characteristics:

• Security
• Extension
• Data Recovery
• Costs
• When to use

Amit’s Multi-Tenancy Security Approach post of the same date goes into more detail about security for multi-tenant SaaS projects:

 

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.NET Services: Access Control, Service Bus and Workflow

• Bruno Terkaly interviews Juval Lowy – The EnergyNet and the next Killer App in this 00:09:23 Channel 9 video posted on 9/23/2009:

Many people love to speculate on what the next Killer App might be. Juval Lowy will use his ideal killer app as the basis of his upcoming workshop at PDC09 on November 16th. He’d like to think that the EnergyNet … might provide such a cohesive blending of commercial and residential energy use, the devices which consume that energy and the resources that provide it, that this will become an important piece of our daily lives. It will save money, save energy, and perhaps even save the planet.

In his workshop, he is going to illustrate how the notion of an EnergyNet is made possible through technologies such as Windows Communication Foundation and the .NET Service Bus. [Emphasis added]

The Channel9 description page includes links for more information on the workshop and more details on EnergyNet.

It’s not all skitttles and beer for the SmartMeters that Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PG&E), our Northern California utility is installing to measure watt-hours on an hourly basis, as Lois Henry’s 'SmartMeters' leave us all smarting article of 9/12/2009 in The Bakersfield Californian:

… Hundreds of people in Bakersfield and around the state reported major problems since Pacific Gas & Electric started installing so-called smart meters two years ago. Complaints have spiked as the utility began upgrading local meters with even "smarter" versions.

It's not just the bills, many of which have jumped 100, 200 -- even 400 percent year to year after the install. It's also problems with the online monitoring function and the meters themselves, which have been blowing out appliances, something I was initially told they absolutely could not do. …

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Live Windows Azure Apps, Tools and Test Harnesses

••• Jayaram Krishnaswamy’s Two great tools to work with SQL Azure post of 9/24/2009 gives props to SQL Azure Manager and SQL Azure Migration Wizard as “two great tools to work with SQL Azure.” Jayaram continues:

SQL Azure Migration Wizard is a nice tool. It can connect to (local)Server as well as it supports running scripts. I tried running a script to create 'pubs' on SQL Azure. It did manage to bring in some tables and not all. It does not like 'USE' in SQL statements (to know what is allowed and what is not you must go to MSDN). For running the script I need to be in Master(but how?, I could not fathom). I went through lots of "encountered some problem, searching for a solution" messages. On the whole it is very easy to use tool.

George Huey applied some fixes to his MigWiz as described in my Using the SQL Azure Migration Wizard with the AdventureWorksLT2008 Sample Database post (updated on 9/21/2009). With these corrections and a few tweaks, MigWiz imported the schema and data for the AdventureWorksLT2008 database into SQL Azure with no significant problems.

• Jim Nakashima Describes Installing the Windows Azure Tools using the Web Platform Installer in this 9/24/2009 post:

Today, the IIS team released a the Web Platform Installer 2.0 RTW.  Among the many cool new things (more tools, new applications, and localization to 9 languages) is the inclusion of the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008.

Install the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 using the Web Platform Installer.

Why should you care?  As many of you know, before using the Windows Azure Tools, you need install and configure IIS which requires figuring out how to do that and following multiple steps.  The Web Platform Installer (we call it the WebPI) makes installing the Tools, SDK and IIS as simple as clicking a few buttons.

• Charles Babcock claims the Simple API Is Part Of A Rising And Open Tide To The Cloud in his 9/24/2009 post to InformationWeek’s Cloud Computing Weblog:

What's notable about the open source project announced yesterday, Simple API for cloud computing, are the names that are present, IBM, Microsoft and Rackspace, and the names that are not: Amazon, for one, is not a backer, and let's just stop right there.

The Simple API for Cloud Applications is an interface that gives enterprise developers and independent software vendors a target to shoot for if they want an application to work with different cloud environments. It is not literally a cross cloud API, enabling an application to work in any cloud. Such a thing does not exist, yet.

You can read more about Zend’s Simple Cloud API and Zend Cloud here.

Jim Nakashima’s Using WCF on Windows Azure post of 9/23/2009 announces:

Today, the WCF team released a patch that will help you if your are using WCF on Windows Azure. 

Essentially, if you use the "Add Service Reference..." feature in Visual Studio or svutil to generate WSDL for a service that is hosted on Windows Azure either locally or in the cloud, the WSDL would contain incorrect URIs. 

The problem has to do with the fact that in a load balanced scenario like Windows Azure, there are ports that are used internally (behind the load balancer) and ports that are used externally (i.e. internet facing).  The internal ports were showing up in the URIs.

Also note that this patch is not yet in the cloud, but will be soon. i.e. it will only help you in the Development Fabric scenario for now. (Will post when the patch is available in the cloud.)

While we're on the topic of patches, please see the list of patches related to Windows Azure.

The latter link is to the Windows Azure Platform Downloads page, which also offers an Azure training kit, tools, hotfixes, and SDKs.

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Windows Azure Infrastructure

••• Simon Wardley imagines If Sauron was the Microsoft Cloud Strategist in this 0/27/2009 scenario:

Back in March 2008, I wrote a post which hypothesised that a company, such as Microsoft, could conceivably create a cloud environment that meshes together many ISPs / ISVs and end consumers into a "proprietary" yet "open" cloud marketplace and consequently supplant the neutrality of the web.

This is only a hypothesis and the strategy would have to be straight out of the "Art of War" and attempt to misdirect all parties whilst the ground work is laid. Now, I have no idea what Microsoft is planning but let's pretend that Sauron was running their cloud strategy. …

With the growth of the Azure marketplace and applications built in this platform, a range of communication protocols will be introduced to enhance productivity in both the office platform (which will increasingly be tied into the network effect aspects of Azure) and Silverlight (which will be introduced to every device to create a rich interface). Whilst the protocols will be open, many of the benefits will only come into effect through aggregated & meta data (i.e. within the confines of the Azure market). The purpose of this approach, is to reduce the importance of the browser as a neutral interface to the web and to start the process of undermining the W3C technologies. …

Following such a strategy, then it could be Game, Set and Match to MSFT for the next twenty years and the open source movement will find itself crushed by this juggernaut. Furthermore, companies such as Google, that depend upon the neutrality of the interface to the web will find themselves seriously disadvantaged. …

Seems to me to be a more likely strategy for SharePoint Server, especially when you consider MOSS is already a US$1 billion business.

••• James Hamilton’s Web Search Using Small Cores post of 9/27/2009 begins:

I recently came across an interesting paper that is currently under review for ASPLOS. I liked it for two unrelated reasons: 1) the paper covers the Microsoft Bing Search engine architecture in more detail than I’ve seen previously released, and 2) it covers the problems with scaling workloads down to low-powered commodity cores clearly. I particularly like the combination of using important, real production workloads rather than workload models or simulations and using that base to investigate an important problem: when can we scale workloads down to low power processors and what are the limiting factors?

and continues with an in-depth analysis of the capability of a Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes (FAWN) and the like to compete on a power/performance basis with high-end server CPUs.

•• Chris Hoff (@Beaker) strikes a blow against the Operating System in his Incomplete Thought: Virtual Machines Are the Problem, Not the Solution… post of 9/25/2009:

Virtual machines (VMs) represent the symptoms of a set of legacy problems packaged up to provide a placebo effect as an answer that in some cases we have, until lately, appeared disinclined and not technologically empowered to solve.

If I had a wish, it would be that VM’s end up being the short-term gap-filler they deserve to be and ultimately become a legacy technology so we can solve some of our real architectural issues the way they ought to be solved.

That said, please don’t get me wrong, VMs have allowed us to take the first steps toward defining, compartmentalizing, and isolating some pretty nasty problems anchored on the sins of our fathers, but they don’t do a damned thing to fix them.

VMs have certainly allowed us to (literally) “think outside the box” about how we characterize “workloads” and have enabled us to begin talking about how we make them somewhat mobile, portable, interoperable, easy to describe, inventory and in some cases more secure. Cool.

There’s still a pile of crap inside ‘em.

What do I mean?

There’s a bloated, parasitic resource-gobbling cancer inside every VM.  For the most part, it’s the real reason we even have mass market virtualization today.

It’s called the operating system:

•• Neil Ward-Dutton’s Exploring the business value of Cloud Computing “Strategic Insight,” a 15-page research report of 9/23/2009 for MWD Advisors, which carries this abstract:

2009 has been the year in which Cloud Computing entered mainstream industry consciousness. Cloud computing – a model of technology provision where capacity on remotely hosted, managed computing platforms is made publicly available and rented to multiple customers on a self-service basis – is on every IT vendor’s agenda, as well as entering the research agendas of many CIOs.

But how does Cloud Computing really deliver business value to your organisation, and what kinds of scenarios are best suited to it? What’s the real relationship between “Public” and “Private” Cloud offerings in value terms? This report answers these questions.

See also Neil’s 13 slides from his Articulating the value of Cloud Computing presentation of 9/25/2009 at Microsoft’s Cloud Architect Forum, London.

• Michael Arrington interviews Steve Balmer and elicits an explanation of “three screens and a cloud’’ in this lengthy Exclusive Interview With Steve Ballmer: Products, Competition, The Road Ahead post of 9/24/2009, which includes a full transcript:

On Microsoft’s “three screens and the cloud” strategy: Ballmer says it’s a “fundamental shift in the computing paradigm.” He added “We used to talk about mainframe computer, mini computer, PC computing, client server computing, graphical computing, the internet; I think this notion of three screens and a cloud, multiple devices that are all important, the cloud not just as a point of delivery of individual applications, but really as a new platform, a scale-out, very manageable platform that has services that span security contacts, I think it’s a big deal.”

• Steve Marx said “[T]he Windows Azure Platform is part of BizSpark as well” [as Azure] in a comment to this post. Paul Krill wrote a “Microsoft launches BizSpark to boost Azure” article on 11/5/2008 for InfoWorld:

Looking to boost Web-based ventures and its new Windows Azure cloud services platform, Microsoft on Wednesday is announcing Microsoft BizSpark, a program providing software and services to startups.

"The cornerstone [of the program] is to get into the hands of the startup community all of our development tools and servers required to build Web-based solutions," said Dan'l Lewin, corporate vice president of Strategic and Emerging Business Development at Microsoft. Participants around the globe also gain visibility and marketing, Lewin said.

BizSpark will be leveraged as an opportunity to boost the Azure platform, with participants having access to the Azure Services Platform CTP (Community Technology Preview) introduced last week.

"We expect many of them will be taking advantage of cloud services," as part of their company creation, Lewin said.

Steve observed in his message to me: … “You don’t see it in the offering now because Windows Azure hasn’t launched yet (and is free for everyone).” But the Azure Services Platform CTP included with BizSpark hadn’t launched in November 2008 and was “free for everyone” also.

The question, of course, is “How many free instances of Windows Azure and SQL Azure will WebsiteSpark (and BizSpark) participants receive?”

Scott Guthrie’s Announcing the WebsiteSpark Program post of 9/24/2009 and the WebsiteSpark site list lotsa swag “for independent web developers and web development companies that build web applications and web sites on behalf of others” :

• 3 licenses of Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
• 1 license of Expression Studio 3 (which includes Expression Blend, Sketchflow, and Web)
• 2 licenses of Expression Web 3
• 4 processor licenses of Windows Web Server 2008 R2
• 4 processor licenses of SQL Server 2008 Web Edition
• DotNetPanel control panel (enabling easy remote/hosted management of your servers)

However, Scott’s ASP.NET marketing team didn’t mention:

• Several instances of the Windows Azure Platform (including .NET Services)
• A couple instances of SQL Azure

I’ve been Lobbying Microsoft for Azure Compute, Storage and Bandwidth Billing Thresholds for Developers since early September but haven’t received any support from the Azure team.

Steve Marx told me in a message this morning (Thursday):

I believe Windows Azure and SQL Azure will be included in WebsiteSpark.  You don’t see it in the offering now because Windows Azure hasn’t launched yet (and is free for everyone).

It seems to me that being upfront about Windows Azure and SQL Azure swag, including the number of instances, would “incentivize” a large number of Web developers and designers. (Would you believe the Windows Live Writer spell checker likes “incentivize?”)

How about including some Azure swag with BizSpark signups, too?

Mary Jo Foley’s Microsoft makes Web development tools available for free and Brier Dudley’s Microsoft giving free tools -- lots of them -- to woo Web designers posts of the same date throw more light on the WebsiteSpark program.

• James Hamilton delivers props to Microsoft for its Dublin data center in his Chillerless Data Center at 95F post of 9/24/2009:

This is 100% the right answer: Microsoft’s Chiller-less Data Center. The Microsoft Dublin data center has three design features I love: 1) they are running evaporative cooling, 2) they are using free-air cooling (air-side economization), and 3) they run up to 95F and avoid the use of chillers entirely. All three of these techniques were covered in the best practices talk I gave at the Google Data Center Efficiency Conference (presentation, video). …

Microsoft General Manager of Infrastructure Services Arne Josefsberg blog entry on the Dublin facility: http://blogs.technet.com/msdatacenters/archive/2009/09/24/dublin-data-center-celebrates-grand-opening.aspx.

In a secretive industry like ours, it’s good to see a public example of a high-scale data center running hot and without chillers. Good work Microsoft.

Microsoft EMEA PR announced Microsoft Expands Cloud Computing Capabilities & Services in Europe on 9/24/2009:

Microsoft today announced the opening of its first ‘mega data centre’ in Europe to meet continued growth in demand for its Online, Live and Cloud services. The $500 million total investment is part of Microsoft’s long-term commitment in the region, and is a major step in realising Microsoft’s Software plus Services strategy.

The data centre is the next evolutionary step in Microsoft’s commitment to thoughtfully building its cloud computing capacity and network infrastructure throughout the region to meet the demand generated from its Online, Live Services and Cloud Services, such as Bing, Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite, Windows Live, and the Azure Services Platform. [Emphasis added.]

UK, Irish and European Windows Azure and, presumably, SQL Azure users should find a substantial latency reduction as they move their projects’ location to the new Dublin data center.

Steve Clayton reported from Dublin at the data center’s opening in his I’ve seen the cloud…it lives in Dublin of 9/24/2009:

I’m in sunny Dublin today (yep, it’s sunny here) for the grand opening of Microsoft’s first “mega datacenter” outside of the US. What you may ask is a mega datacenter? Well basically it’s an enormous facility from we’ll deliver our cloud services to customers in Europe and beyond.

I had the chance to check the place out last month and have a full tour and it’s incredible. Okay there isn’t much to see but that’s sort of the point. It’s this big information factory that is on a scale that you’ll not see in many other places in the world and run with an astonishing level of attention to detail.

It’s also quite revolutionary and turns out to be our most efficient data center thus far. Efficiency is measured by something called PUE that essentially looks at how much power your use vs the power you consume. The ultimate PUE of course is 1.0 though the industry average is from 2-2.4. Microsoft’s data centers on average run at 1.6 PUE but this facility takes that down to 1.25 through use of some smart technology called “air”. Most datacenters rely on chillers and a lot of water to keep the facility cool – because of the climate in Dublin, we can use fine, fresh, Irish air to do the job which has significant benefits from an environmental point of view. Put simply, it saves 18 million litres of water each month.

David Chou claims Infrastructure-as-a-Service Will Mature in 2010 in this brief interview of 9/24/2009 with the Azure Cloud OS Journal’s Jeremy Geelan: “Chou speaks out on where he thinks Cloud Computing will make its impact most noticeably looking forwards”:

While acknowledging that lots of work is currently being done to differentiate and integrate private and public cloud solutions, Microsoft Architect David Chou believes that Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is the area of Cloud Computing that will make its impact most noticeably in 2010 - especially for startups, and small-medium sized businesses.

David Chou is a technical architect at Microsoft, focused on collaborating with enterprises and organizations in areas such as cloud computing, SOA, Web, distributed systems, security, etc., and supporting decision makers on defining evolutionary strategies in architecture.

What about Platform as a Service, Azure’s strong suite. When does PaaS mature, David?

Microsoft bloggers Jeff Barnes, Zhiming Xue, Bill Zack and Bob Famiiliar bring you the new Innovation Showcase Web site that Bob says is “devoted to keeping you informed of the great solutions being created by our customers and partners using Windows 7, Windows Azure, Silverlight 3 and Internet Explorer 8.”

So far, I haven’t seen any examples of showcased Windows Azure solutions, but maybe I didn’t look closely enough.

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Cloud Security and Governance

••• Tony Bishop starts a new series with his Enterprise-class clouds, part 1: Security and performance post of 9/23/2009 for InfoWorld:

The intent of the blogs is to provide the thought leadership for readers seeking to create a sound strategy for exploiting cloud computing for the enterprise.

••• Dave Kearns recommends checking out Forefront Indentity Manager 2010 if you’re considering Azure in his Microsoft to release identity product of 9/22/2009 to NetworkWorld:

My primary interest at last week's European version of The Experts Conference was Microsoft's upcoming Forefront Identity Manager 2010. If you haven't been following closely, you might know this soon to release product as Identity Lifecycle Manager (ILM) "2" (I don't know why there are quote marks around the number 2, but it is always written that way).

Thus, FIM is the successor to ILM, which was the successor to Microsoft Identity Integration Server (MIIS), which was the successor to the Microsoft Metadirectory Service (MMS) and on and on. None of these, if memory serves, ever reached version 2. I used to complain about how Sun Microsystems would constantly tinker with the name of their directory product, but even they occasionally got out a version 2 (or higher). …

All in all, this is the best identity product I've seen from Microsoft since Cardspace. If you're heavily invested in Microsoft technology, if you're looking at Microsoft Azure for cloud computing possibilities or if you feel that Active Directory should be the basis of your organization's identity stack, then you should definitely look at Forefront Identity Manager 2010, and even download the release candidate  to take it for a test drive. [Emphasis added.]

A quick review of the technical materials available on Microsoft’s FIM Web site doesn’t expose any references to its use with Windows Azure specifically.

••• Glenn Laffel, MD, PhD’s three-part series of Medical Data in the Internet “cloud” articles for Practice Fusion:

• (Part 1) – Data safety
• (Part 2) – Data security
• (Part 3) – Data privacy

is now complete and well worth a read by anyone who plans to process Electronic Medical Records (EMR) or Personal Health Records (PHR) in the cloud.

••• Andrea Di Maio’s Governments on Facebook Are Off The Records post of 9/26/2009 discusses conflicts between the Watergate-inspired Presidential Records Act of 1978 and posts by administration officials to social networking sites:

On 19 September Macon Phillips, the White House Director of New Media, posted on the White House blog about Reality Check: The Presidential Records Act of 1978 meets web-based social media of 2009, addressing the important topic of how to interpret in social media terms a law passed after the Watergate issue to make sure that any record created or received by the President or his staff is preserved, archived by NARA (the National Archives and Records Administration), which in turn releases them to the public in compliance with the relevant privacy act.

There is one very important passage in Phillips’ post:

“The White House is not archiving all content or activity across social networks where we have a page – nor do we want to.  The only content archived is what is voluntarily published on the White House’s official pages on these sites or what is voluntarily sent to a White House account.” …

••• David Linthicum posits MDM Becoming More Critical in Light of Cloud Computing in this 9/27/2009 post to the eBizQ blog:

Master data management (MDM) is one of those topics that everyone considers important, but few know exactly what it is or have an MDM program. "MDM has the objective of providing processes for collecting, aggregating, matching, consolidating, quality-assuring, persisting and distributing such data throughout an organization to ensure consistency and control in the ongoing maintenance and application use of this information." So says Wikipedia.

I think that the lack of MDM will become more of an issue as cloud computing rises. We're moving from complex federated on-premise systems, to complex federated on-premise and cloud-delivered systems. Typically, we're moving in these new directions without regard for an underlying strategy around MDM, or other data management issues for that matter. …

•• Hilton Collins summarizes governmental issues in his lengthy Cloud Computing Gains Momentum but Security and Privacy Issues Persist article of 9/25/2009 for the Government Technology site:

… "What tends to worry people [about cloud computing] are issues like security and privacy of data -- that's definitely what we often hear from our customers," said Chris Willey, interim chief technology officer of Washington, D.C.

Willey's office provides an internal, government-held, private cloud service to other city agencies, which allows them to rent processing, storage and other computing resources. The city government also uses applications hosted by Google in an external, public cloud model for e-mail and document creation capabilities. …

"Google has had to spend more money and time on security than D.C. government will ever be able to do," Willey said. "They have such a robust infrastructure, and they're one of the biggest targets on the Internet in terms of hacks and denial-of-service attacks." …

"If I have personally identifiable information -- credit cards, Social Security numbers -- I wouldn't use cloud computing," said Dan Lohrmann, Michigan's chief technology officer. "But if it's publicly available data anyway -- [like] pictures of buildings in downtown Lansing we're storing -- I might feel like the risk is less to use cloud computing for storage." …

• Jon Oltsik’s white paper, A Prudent Approach for Storage Encryption and Key Management, according to the GovInfoSecurity Web site, “cuts through the hype and provides recommendations to protect your organization's data, with today's budget. Oltsik shows you where to start, how to focus on the real threats to data, and what actions you can take today to make a meaningful contribution to stopping data breaches.” (Free site registration required.):

The white paper covers:

• What are the real threats to data today
• Where do you really need to encrypt data first
• How does key management fit into your encryption plans
• What shifts in the industry and vendor developments will mean to your storage environment and strategy

Jon is a Principal Analyst at ESG.

• John Pescatore’s Benchmarking Security – Are We Safe Yet? post of 9/24/2009 begins:

I still cringe at that scene in Marathon Man where Laurence Olivier puts Dustin Hoffman in the dentist chair and tortures him while asking “Is it safe??” In fact, now I cringe even more because it reminds me of so many conversations between CEOs/CIOs and CISOs: “OK, we gave you the budget increase. Is it safe now???”

Of course, safety is a relative thing. As the old saw says about what one hunter said to the other when they ran into the angry bear in the woods: “I don’t have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun you.” Animals use “herd behavior” as a basic safety mechanism – humans call it “due diligence.” …

John is a Garter analyst.

Amit Piplani’s Multi-Tenancy Security Approach post of 9/23/2009 goes into detail about security for multi-tenant SaaS projects. See the SQL Azure Database (SADB) section.

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Cloud Computing Events

•• TechNet Events presents Real World Azure – For IT Professionals (Part I) on 9/29/2009:

Cloud computing and, more specifically, Microsoft Azure are questions on the minds of IT professionals everywhere. What is it? When should I use it? How does it apply to my job? Join us as we review some of the lessons Microsoft IT has learned through Project Austin, an incubation project dogfooding the use of Microsoft Azure as a platform for supporting internal line-of-business applications.

In this event we will discuss why an IT operations team would want to pursue Azure as an extension to the data center as we review the Azure architecture from the IT professional’s point of view; discuss configuration, deployment and scaling Azure-based applications; review how Azure-based applications can be integrated with on-premise applications; and how operations teams can manage and monitor Azure-based applications.

We will additionally explore several specific Azure capabilities:

• The Azure roles (web, web service and worker)
• Azure storage options
• Azure security and identity options

If you are interested, we would like to invite you to our afternoon session for architects and developers. (See Below)

Project Austin is new to me.

When: 9/29/2009 6:30 AM to 10:00 AM PT (8:00 AM to 12:00 N CT)
Where: The Internet (Live Meeting) Click here to register. 

•• TechNet Events presents Real World Azure – For Developers and Architects (Part II) on 9/29/2009:

In this event we will start by reviewing cloud computing architectures in general and the Azure architecture in particular. We will then dive deeper into several aspects of Azure from the developer’s and architect’s perspective. We will review the Azure roles (web, web service and worker); discuss several Azure storage options; review Azure security and identity options; review how Azure-based applications can be integrated with on-premise applications; discuss configuration, deployment and scaling Azure-based applications; and highlight how development teams can optimize their applications for better management and monitoring.

If you are interested, we would like to invite you to our morning session for IT Professionals (see above).

When: 9/29/2009 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM PT (1:00 PM to 5:00 PM CT)
Where: The Internet (Live Meeting) Click here to register. 

•• Neil Ward-Dutton’s 13 slides from his Articulating the value of Cloud Computing presentation of 9/25/2009 at Microsoft’s Cloud Architect Forum, Cardinal Place, London provide an incisive overview of cloud computing services and architecture.

 

Neil is Research Director for MWD Advisors, which specializes in cloud-computing research. His The seven elements of Cloud Computing's value of 8/20/2009 provide more background on the session’s approach.

MWD offers an extensive range of research reports free-of-charge to Guest Pass subscribers. The research available as part of this free service provides subscribers with a solid foundation for IT-business alignment based on our unique perspective on key IT management competencies.

I’ve subscribed. See also his Exploring the business value of Cloud Computing “Strategic Insight” research report.

•• John Pironti will present a 1.5-hour Key Considerations for Business Resiliency webinar on 10/21/2009 and 11/9/2009 sponsored by the GovInfoSecurity site:

Organizations understand the need for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery in the face of natural, man-made and pandemic disasters. But what about Business Resiliency, which brings together multiple disciplines to ensure minimal disruption in the wake of a disaster?

Register for this webinar to learn:

• How to assemble the Business Resiliency basics;
• How to craft a proactive plan;
• How to account for the most overlooked threats to sustaining your organization - and how to then test your plan effectively.

When: 10/21/2009 3:30 PM ET, 12:30 PM PT; 11/9/2009 10:00 AM ET, 7:00 AM PT 
Where: Internet (Webinar.)  Register here.

• Kevin Jackson’s Dataline, Lockheed Martin, SAIC, Unisys on Tactical Cloud Computing post of 9/25/2009 reports “that representatives from Lockheed Martin, SAIC, and Unisys will join me in a Tactical Cloud Computing "Power Panel" at SYS-CON's 1st Annual Government IT Conference & Expo in Washington DC on October 6, 2009”:

Tactical Cloud Computing refers to the use of cloud computing technology and techniques for the support of localized and short-lived information access and processing requirements.

When: 10/6/2009 
Where: Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill hotel, Washington DC, USA 

Eric Nelson has posted a preliminary slide deck for his Design considerations for storing data in the cloud with Windows Azure slides to be presented at the Software Architect 2009 conference on 9/30/2009 at 2:00 PM in the Royal College of Physicians, London. For details, see the Azure Blob, Table and Queue Services section.

When: 9/30/2009 to 10/1/2009 
Where: Royal College of Physicians, London, England, UK

Tech in the Middle will deliver a Day of Cloud conference on 10/16/2009:

Calling all software developers, leads, and architects. Join us for the day on Friday October 16, 2009 as we discuss the 'Cloud'. The day is focused on developers and includes talks on all the major cloud platforms: Google, Amazon, Sales Force & Microsoft.

Each talk will cover the basics for that platform. We will then delve into code, seeing how a solution is constructed. We cap off the day with a panel discussion. When we are done, you should have enough information to start your own experimentation. In 2010, you will be deploying at least one pilot project to a cloud platform. Kick off that investigation at Day of Cloud!

Agenda

• 7:30-8:30 AM Registration/Breakfast
• 8:30-10:00 AM Jonathan Sapir/Michael Topalovich: Salesforce.com
• 10:15-11:45 AM Wade Wegner: Azure
• 11:45-12:30 PM Lunch
• 12:30-2:00 PM Chris McAvoy: Amazon Web Services
• 2:15-3:45 PM Don Schwarz: Google App Engine
• 4:00-5:00 PM Panel

Early-bird tickets are $19.99, regular admission is $30.00. As of 9/24/2009, there were 28 tickets remaining.

When: 10/16/2009 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM CT 
Where: Illinois Technology Association, 200 S. Wacker Drive, 15th Floor, Chicago, IL 60606 USA

Gartner Announces 28th Annual Data Center Conference December 1-4, 2009 at Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas:

Providing comprehensive research, along with the opportunity to connect with the analysts who’ve developed it, the Gartner Data Center Conference is the premier source for forward-looking insight and analysis across the broad spectrum of disciplines within the data center. Our team of 40 seasoned analysts and guest experts provide an integrated view of the trends and technologies impacting the traditional Data Center.

The 7-track agenda drills-down to the level you need when it comes to next stage virtualization, cloud computing, power & cooling, servers and storage, cost optimization, TCO and IT operations excellence, aging infrastructures and the 21st-century data center, , consolidation, workload management, procurement, and major platforms.  Key takeaways include how to:

• Keep pace with future-focused trends like Green IT and Cloud Computing
• Increase agility and service quality while reducing costs
• Manage and operate a world-class data center operation with hyper-efficiency

When: 12/1/ to 12/4/2009  
Where: Ceasar’s Palace hotel, Las Vegas, NV, USA

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Other Cloud Computing Platforms and Services

••• Dina Bass wrote EMC chairman detects sea change in tech market for Bloomberg News but her detailed analysis ended up in the Worcester Telegram on 9/27/2009:

Joseph M. Tucci pulled EMC Corp. out of a two-year sales slump after the dot-com bust. Now he’s gearing up for round two: an industry shakeup that he expects to be even more punishing.

Tucci, 62, says the global economic crisis and a shift to a model where companies get computing power over the Internet will drown at least some of the biggest names in computing. …

… Tucci says, EMC, the world’s largest maker of storage computers, will hold on to its roughly 84 percent stake in VMWare Inc., the top maker of so-called virtualization software, which helps run data centers more efficiently. He plans to work more closely with Cisco Systems Inc. and said he will continue to make acquisitions. …

EMC is headquartered in Hopkintown, which is close to Worcester.

••• Michael Hickens explains How Cloud Computing Is Slowing Cloud Adoption in this 9/24/2009 post to the BNet.com blog:

There’s the cloud, and then there’s the cloud. The first cloud everyone talked about was really software-as-a-service (SaaS), a method for delivering applications over the Internet (the cloud) more effectively and cheaply than traditional implementations installed behind corporate firewalls, as exemplified by the likes of Salesforce.com, Successfactors, NetSuite and many others.

Then along came this other cloud, the infrastructure that you could rent by the processor, by the gigabyte of storage, and by the month, and which would expand and contract dynamically according to your needs, which Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and many other vendors offer. …

Now, however, there’s another option for enterprise IT, which is to run applications in the cloud but continuing to use the applications that have already been customized for your purposes and enjoy widespread adoption within the organization. As Lewis put it, cloud infrastructure “allows you to take your custom applications that are sticky within your organization and put them into a cloud environment. …

That might not have been a primary motivation for Microsoft to start offering Azure, its cloud infrastructure play, but I’m sure that staving off threats to its enterprise applications business went into its thinking.

••• Krishnan Subramanian analyzes Guy Rosen’s 9/21/2009 Anatomy of an Amazon EC2 Resource ID post in his Amazon EC2 Shows Amazing Growth post of 9/27/2009:

Amazon EC2, the public cloud service offered by Amazon, has been growing at an amazing rate. From their early days of catering to startups, they have grown to have diverse clients from individuals to enterprises. Guy Rosen, the cloud entrepreneur who tracks the state of the cloud, has done some research on the resource identifier used by Amazon EC2 and come up with some interesting stats. I thought I will add it here at Cloud Ave for the benefit of our readers.

• During one 24 hour period in the US East - 1 region, 50,242 EC2 instances were requested
• During the same period, 12,840 EBS volumes were requested
• And, 30,925 EBS snapshots were requested

However, the most interesting aspect of Guy Rosen's analysis is his calculation that 8.4 million EC2 instances have been launched since the launch of Amazon EC2. These are pretty big numbers showing success for cloud based computing. Kudos to Amazon for the success. …

Krishnan goes on to criticize Amazon’s EC2 pricing in a similar vein to my complaints about Windows Azure not being priced competitively with the Google App Engine for light traffic.

•• Charles Babcock’s Develop Once, Then Deploy To Your Cloud Of Choice post of 9/25/2009 to InformationWeek’s Cloud Computing blog begins:

IBM's CTO of Cloud Computing, Kristof Kloeckman, says IBM has demonstrated software engineering as a cloud process. At the end of the process, a developer deploys his application to the cloud of choice. As of today, that cloud better be running VMware virtual machines. In the future, the choice may be broader.

One of the obstacles to cloud computing is the difficulty of deploying a new application to the cloud. If that process could be automated, it would remove a significant barrier for IT managers who want to deploy workloads in the cloud.

IBM, with years of experience in deploying virtualized workloads, is attacking the problem from the perspective of cloud computing. In China, it now has two locations where software development in the cloud is being offered as a cloud service, one in a computing center in the city of Wuxi and another in the city of Dongying.

•• Maureen O’Gara reports IBM’s Linux-Based ‘Cloud-in-a-Box’ Makes its First Sale to Dongying city and analyzes the apparent half-million US$ sale of two racks in this 9/26/2009 post:

… Taking a page out of Cisco’s book – from the chapter on so-called smart cities – IBM late Thursday announced that the city of Dongying near China’s second-largest oil field in the midst of the Yellow River Delta is going to build a cloud to promote e-government and support its transition from a manufacturing center to a more eco-friendly services-based economy.

Dongying, which can turn the widgetry into a revenue generator, means to use the cloud to jumpstart new economic development in the region.

IBM has sold the Dongying government on its scalable, redundant, pre-packaged CloudBurst 1.1 solution – effectively an instant “cloud-in-a-box” – that IBM is peddling as the basis of its Smart City blueprint around China and elsewhere. …

CloudBurst is priced to start at $220,000. Dongying is starting with two racks.

• Eric Engleman reports Amazon explores partnership with Apptis on federal cloud in this 9/25/2009 post to his Amazon Blog for the Puget Sound Business Journal (PSBJ):

Amazon.com is clearly interested in finding government customers for its cloud computing services. The ecommerce giant has been quietly building an operation in the Washington, D.C. area and Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels is making a big sales pitch to federal agencies. Now we're hearing that Amazon is exploring a partnership with Apptis -- a Virginia-based government IT services company -- to provide the federal government with a variety of cloud services.

Amazon and Apptis together responded to an RFQ (request for quotes) put out by the U.S. General Services Administration, Apptis spokeswoman Piper Conrad said. Conrad said the two companies are also "finalizing a general partnership." She gave no further details, and said Apptis executives would not be able to comment.

The General Services Administration (GSA) put out an RFQ seeking "Infrastructure-as-a-Service" offerings, including cloud storage, virtual machines, and cloud web hosting. The deadline for submissions was Sept. 16. …

Still no word about Microsoft’s proposal, if they made one for the Windows Azure Platform.

• Alin Irimie describes Shared Snapshots for EC2 Elastic Block Store Volumes in this 9/25/2009 post:

Amazon is adding a new feature which significantly improves the flexibility of EC2’s Elastic Block Store  (EBS) snapshot facility. You now have the ability to share your snapshots with other EC2 customers using a new set of fine-grained access controls. You can keep the snapshot to yourself (the default), share it with a list of EC2 customers, or share it publicly.

The Amazon Elastic Block Store lets you create block storage volumes in sizes ranging from 1 GB to 1 TB. You can create empty volumes or you can pre-populate them using one of our Public Data Sets. Once created, you attach each volume to an EC2 instance and then reference it like any other file system. The new volumes are ready in seconds. Last week I created a 180 GB volume from a Public Data Set, attached  it to my instance, and started examining it, all in about 15 seconds.

Here’s a visual overview of the data flow (in this diagram, the word Partner refers to anyone that you choose to share your data with):

B. Guptill and R. McNeil present Dell Buys Perot: Return of the Full-Line IT Vendor?, a Saugatuck Research Alert dated 9/23/2009, which explains, inter alia, “Why is it happening”:

First and foremost, Perot enables and accelerates Dell’s expansion into large enterprise data centers. In many regards, Dell’s hardware business has been totally commoditized, and it has had limited success moving upstream into larger accounts, which typically treat PCs, x86 servers, and low-end storage as adjuncts to larger data center-focused IT operations. In fact, Dell hopes that Perot will help Dell become more involved with conversations at the CIO level, related to standardization, consolidation, and other key initiatives, which Dell’s HW sales executives may not have had access to.

The alert goes on to analyze the market impact of the acquisition. (Free site registration required.)

•• Pascal Matzke adds Forrester’s insight in his Dell's acquisition of Perot Systems is a good move but won't be enough post of 9/21/2009 to the Forrester Blog for Vendor Strategy Professionals:

Together with some of my Forrester analyst colleagues earlier today I listened into the conference call hosted by executives of both - Dell and Perot Systems - to explain the rationale behind Dell's announcement to buy Perot for US$ 3.9 billion cash. There has been some speculation lately about Dell possibly making such a move, but the timing and the target they finally picked came as a bit of a surprise to everyone. The speculation was rooted in some of the statements made by Steve Schuckenbrock, President of Large Enterprise and Services at Dell, earlier this year where he pronounced that Dell would get much more serious around the services business. Now, you would of course expect nothing less from someone like Steve - after all he has spend much of his professional career prior to Dell as a top executive in the services industry (with EDS and The Feld Group). To this end Steve and his team finally delivered on the expectation, even more so as this had not been the first time that Dell promised a stronger emphasis on services. …

Pascal concludes:

… But the big challenge pertains to changing the overall value proposition and brand perception of Dell. Dell’s current positioning is still that of a product company that provides limited business value beyond the production and delivery of cost efficient computing hardware and resources. While there is a lot to gain from Perot’s existing positioning the challenge will be to do so by creating a truly consistent and integrated image of the new Dell. The question then quickly becomes whether this is about following in the shoes of IBM and/ or HP or whether Dell has something really new to offer here. That is something Dell has failed to articulate so far and so the jury is still out on this one.

US Department of Energy awards the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (run by the University of California) $7,384,000.00 in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) 2009 operations funding for the Laboratory’s Magellan Distributed Computing and Data Initiative to:

[E]nhance the Phase I Cloud Computing by installing additional storage to support data intensive applications. The cluster will be instrumented to characterize the concurrency, communication patterns, and Input/Output of individual applications. The testbed and workload will be made available to the community for determining the effectiveness of commercial cloud computing models for DOE. The Phase I research will be expanded to address multi-site issues. The Laboratory will be managing the project and will initiate any subcontracting opportunities.

Made available to what community? My house is about three (air) miles from LBNL (known to locals as the “Cyclotron.”) Does that mean I’ll get a low-latency connection?

184-inch Cyclotron building above UC Berkeley during WWII or the late 1940s.
Credit: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Luiz André Barroso and Urs Hölzle wrote The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines, a 120-page e-book that’s a publication in the Morgan & Claypool Publishers series, Synthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture. Here’s the Abstract:

As computation continues to move into the cloud, the computing platform of interest no longer resembles a pizza box or a refrigerator, but a warehouse full of computers. These new large datacenters are quite different from traditional hosting facilities of earlier times and cannot be viewed simply as a collection of co-located servers. Large portions of the hardware and software resources in these facilities must work in concert to efficiently deliver good levels of Internet service performance, something that can only be achieved by a holistic approach to their design and deployment. In other words, we must treat the datacenter itself as one massive warehouse-scale computer (WSC).

We describe the architecture of WSCs, the main factors influencing their design, operation, and cost structure, and the characteristics of their software base. We hope it will be useful to architects and programmers of today’s WSCs, as well as those of future many-core platforms which may one day implement the equivalent of today’s WSCs on a single board.

The acknowledgment begins:

While we draw from our direct involvement in Google’s infrastructure design and operation over the past several years, most of what we have learned and now report here is the result of the hard work, the insights, and the creativity of our colleagues at Google.

The work of our Platforms Engineering, Hardware Operations, Facilities, Site Reliability and Software Infrastructure teams is most directly related to the topics we cover here, and therefore, we are particularly grateful to them for allowing us to benefit from their experience.

James Hamilton reviewed the book(let) favorably in his The Datacenter as a Computer post of 5/16/2009.

Jim Liddle’s Security Best Practices for the Amazon Elastic Cloud of 9/24/2009 begins:

Following on from my last post, Securing Applications on the Amazon Elastic Cloud, One of the biggest questions I often see asked is “Is Amazon EC2 as a platform secure”? This is like saying is my vanilla network secure?  As you do to your internal network you can take some steps to make the environment as secure as you can …

and continues with a list of the steps.

Jim also authors the Cloudiquity blog, which primarily covers Amazon Web Services.

Business Software Buzz reports Salesforce.com Updating to Service Cloud 2 in this post of 9/23/2009, which claims:

Salesforce.com has had a pretty strong showing in 2009, due in part to the company’s introduction of Cloud Service (a SaaS application) at the beginning of this year. Early this month, Salesforce announced an upgrade to this application, Service Cloud 2, which consists of three phases to be launched from now until early 2011.

One of the Service Cloud 2’s web-based options is already available to Salesforce.com customers: Salesforce for Twitter. The company integrated Twitter into their platforms in March 2009—and was one of the first enterprise software developers to do so—and now the integration functions within the Service Cloud. This update allows users to track and monitor conversations in Twitter, as well as tweet from the Service Cloud.

Hot damn! Salesforce for Twitter! I can hardly wait to run the ROI on that one.

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