New Cloud Platforms Proliferating

It seems the floodgates have opened. New cloud computing platforms and services are coming fast and furious. Here’s a roundup, with links, of cloud computing news from this week:

• Financial software publisher Intuit is opening its Quickbase platform to developers. Quickbase features an online database that developers can use to create and sell add-on Web apps atop QuickBooks. Smoothspan and Webware have reviews and screenshots.
• On Tuesday 10gen Inc. announced it has begun the alpha testing phase of its new cloud computing platform, which has been running the Silicon Alley Insider blog. 10gen was developed by DoubleClick alumni Kevin P. Ryan, Dwight Merriman and Eliot Horowitz, and is an object-oriented application server designed to help developers more easily build and deploy scalable Web applications hosted on large grid computing environments. “We offer a turnkey solution that provides all the building blocks needed to create complex, high-volume sites at drastically reduced costs with considerably less time and effort,” said Kevin Ryan, 10gen’s CEO.

Jumping From Cloud to Cloud

When Google launched its AppEngine utility computing platform last week, one of the early criticisms was that the structure of AppEngine would make it difficult to build an application on Google and then move it to another service. Yesterday Tim O’Reilly addressed this concern in a post titled Is Google AppEngine A Lock-In Play?

The question was answered in the comments, as developer Chris Anderson posted a link to AppDrop, a service that allows users to deploy applications created in AppEngine on Amazon’s EC2 platform.

The Oprah Effect: Equal to Slashdot or Digg?

The popularity of Oprah Winfrey tested the limits of Internet streaming video in March, when the debut of Oprah’s webcast attracted 500,000 simultaneous users, causing capacity-related performance problems. It turns out Oprah is also wreaking havoc with web sites for companies mentioned on her syndicated talk show.

Phil Wainewright reports that being “Oprah’d” is a web traffic event on the equivalent of the Slashdot Effect or a TechCrunch-led blogstorm or front-page Digging. Phil says he’s heard several independent accounts of consumer web sites getting slowed or knocked offline after being mentioned on Oprah. Shaklee reports that one mention generated up to “ten months’ worth of average daily volume in one day.”

Is Google Prepping A Cloud Computing Platform?

There was fresh chatter over the weekend that Google may be preparing to launch a cloud computing platform similar to Amazon’s EC2 and S3 - and that it might be free. This rumor is being stoked by an oblique post Saturday by Dave Winer, in which a talking pig asks him if he’d like to run Amazon-style services “in Google’s cloud.” Dave’s post suggested the services would be free for bloggers and users “with modest needs,” but perhaps not for everyone. Is the talking pig a reference to Pig, the open source architecture from Yahoo for working with large data sets? UPDATE: Dave has more today, looking at why a Google service offering might be free.

As always, such rumors need to be taken with a grain of salt. Microsoft infrastructure architect James Hamilton writes that although this report has made the rounds before, a Google third-party service platform is “a matter of when rather than if.” An excerpt:

Why? Mostly because it makes too much sense. The Google infrastructure investment combined with phenomenal scale yields some of the lowest cost compute and storage in the industry. They can sell compute and storage at considerably above their costs and yet still be offering substantial cost reductions to smaller services. That’s if they chose to charge for it.

Microsoft is clearly staying busy on the architecture front as well, as Hamilton and new Microsoft colleague Greg Linden have been contributing some informative blog posts on the topic in recent weeks.

Elastra Cloud Server Extends SaaS

San Francisco startup Elastra seeks to “unlock the value of the cloud” with a new service that lets companies quickly create database applications on utility computing platforms like Amazon Web Services (AMZN). The company says its Elastra Cloud Server offers a simpler way to deploy applications on Amazon’s infrastructure, providing customers with two markup languages that can be used to create database-driven services. The Cloud Server uses a metered, pay-per-use software pricing model, and will be available in April.

Elastra is designed to make could cloud computing more accessible for small to medium-sized businesses that want to leverage Amazon’s platform but lack the in-house expertise to easily build database applications atop EC2 and S3. The company says the Cloud Server can provide “infinitely scalable, on-demand RDBMS (relational database management software) technology.” Dana Gardner at ZDNet said Elastra can provide onramps to cloud computing capabilities:

I suppose we can coin this as “middleware for cloud computing,” or maybe “APIs for cloud computing.” In any event, let’s hope these onramps become highly visual, automated and increasing based on widely accepted standards.

“We wanted to pick up where utility computing left off

What’s In A Name? Utility vs. Cloud vs Grid

In recent weeks there has been a rolling conversation on tech blogs about the definitions of utility computing and cloud computing, with contributions from Geva Perry at GigaOm, Simon Wardley, James Urquhart of Cassatt, James Governor at Redmonk and IBM’s Gerrit Huizenga. John Willis has sought to classify cloud computing providers.

And what about grids? The IEEE has published a classification scheme for grid systems (link via 3Tera’s Bert Armijo). Are all these definitions and classifications helping or just adding to the confusion about these terms? This week Derrick Harris of GRIDToday looks at the parsing of technology terms and how “grid computing” and “high performance computing” scored poorly in a recent Forrester report gauging enterprise interest in various technologies.

Computing At Scale: Parallel Programming

Bill McColl spent 20 years as head of research in parallel computing and scalable systems at Oxford University Computing Laboratory before leaving in 2006 to found Parallel Machines, a Silicon Valley startup developing scalable parallel systems. In recent weeks Bill has had a series of interesting posts on his blog, Computing At Scale:

• In a post on Parallel Programming Models, McColl looks at models for architecture-independent parallel programming that were developed in the 1990s, which are alive and well in 2008.
• In The End Of The Relational Era, McColl looks at recent developments in the database world. “Recent evidence suggests that we may indeed be reaching the end of the relational era, an era that has lasted for more than 30 years,” he writes.

BIll’s blog is new to me, and has gone through some quiet periods, but looks like a good resource if you’re involved in web scalability.