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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.

Posted by Rich Miller April 17, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter

April 15, 2008

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.

Posted by Rich Miller April 15, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter

March 31, 2008

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."

Posted by Rich Miller March 31, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter

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.

Posted by Rich Miller March 31, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter

March 25, 2008

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 – to go beyond the VM and toward virtualizing complex applications that span many machines and networks," said Kirill Sheynkman, president & chief executive officer of Elastra.

Posted by Rich Miller March 25, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter

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.

Posted by Rich Miller March 25, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter

March 24, 2008

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.

Posted by Rich Miller March 24, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter

March 17, 2008

HP Launches Cloud Platform, Data Center Tools

HP today announced Data Center Transformation portfolio, a suite of services to help companies modernize and consolidate their existing data centers, or shift their operations to a cloud-based service hosted by HP.

The most intriguing new piece of HP's strategy is the company's entrance into cloud computing with HP Adaptive Infrastructure as a Service (AIaaS), which lets customers host applications in HP data centers optimized for Microsoft Exchange, SAP applications and other critical business apps. The HP platform joins a growing number of software as a service (SaaS) offerings, most notably Amazon's utility hosting services and Salesforce.com.

"Within a matter of hours, customers can rapidly access additional computing power to meet their fluctuating needs," HP said in its announcement. "With HP AIaaS, customers can realize improved service levels and convert traditional capital investment into an ongoing operating expense because all assets are owned and managed by HP."

Posted by Rich Miller March 17, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter

March 06, 2008

Big Spike for The Big Switch

Tim O'Reilly has noted a sudden surge in sales of The Big Switch, Nick Carr's book about the emergence of utility computing and its impact on Internet life and enterprise IT. Tim writes:

We were curious about this huge jump. We see some recent activity in the blogosphere, but nothing jumps out at us as driving this spike.

Chris Anderson, the author of The Long Tail, wonders in the comments if the jump might be due to a single big buy for a conference. Interest in Nick's writing have been helped by two recent posts about Microsoft's web apps and data center strategies. But those didn't appear until March 1-2. What explains the pop in sales starting the week of Feb. 24? In following the blog links, I came across a piece of interesting timing.

Posted by Rich Miller March 06, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter

February 22, 2008

EMC's Cloud Offering Taking Shape

As the Internet fills with computing clouds, which will be the largest? Much of the speculation has focused on the usual suspects - Google, Microsoft, Amazon - along with newer contenders like Facebook and Salesforce.com. With online storage likely to account for a significant chunk of the cloud, storage giant EMC has emerged as a wildcard. It's been clear for months that EMC is assembling a cloud offering, with its acquisition of Mozy representing an initial beachhead.

Yesterday's acquisition of a small startup called Pi has raised the visibility of EMC's infrastructure ambitions. Pi is short for "personal information," and is developing an online service to "enable individuals to control how they find, access, share and protect their increasing volumes of digital information." Pi founder and CEO Paul Maritz, a Microsoft veteran, will become President and GM of EMC's new Cloud Infrastructure and Services Division.

Chuck Hollis, Vice President of Technology Alliances at EMC, said that although EMC has bought many companies, the Pi deal "isn't your everyday acquisition."

Posted by Rich Miller February 22, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter

February 19, 2008

Sun Preps Cloud Platform to Vie With Amazon

Sun Microsystems (JAVA) is preparing a new utility computing platform designed to compete directly with Amazon's S3 and EC2 services. The new service is code-named Project Caroline, and will be formally unveiled at the JavaOne conference in May, according to The Register. Sun appears to be positioning the service to be more accessible to startups and small businesses than its current cloud offering at Network.com. Here's Sun's description of the project:

Project Caroline is a hosting platform for development and delivery of dynamically scalable Internet-based services. It is designed to serve an emerging market of small and medium sized software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers. Anticipating needs driven by new SaaS business models and processes, Project Caroline helps SaaS providers develop services rapidly using high-level programming languages like the Java(tm) programming language, Ruby, Python, and Perl, to update in-production services frequently, and to automatically flex their use of platform resources to match changing runtime demands.

Sun Distinguished Engineer Bob Schiefler is scheduled to make a presentation about Project Caroline at the JavaOne event, which is available online and provides developers with some details on how the service will work.

Posted by Rich Miller February 19, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter

January 15, 2008

Joyent Backup Services Down for Three Days

Two online storage services operated by utility hosting provider Joyent have been offline for the last three days, apparently due to corruption problems with the ZFS file system. Strongspace and BingoDisk have been offline since Saturday night (Jan. 12). On Tuesday Joyent CEO David Young said the extended downtime was caused by complex corruption issues with ZFS, a new file system for pooled storage originally developed by Sun Microsystems for its Solaris 10 Operating System.

"We got bit by a massive ZFS bug," Young wrote in an advisory to customers. "That's the long and the short of it. The ZFS corruption got onto/into the backups. The good news is we can unravel the corruption. The bad news, given the fact that Strongspace and BingoDisk ran on a Thumper (aka SunFire X4500), was that we have to use other Thumpers to stage the uncoding of the ZFS mess. Moving so much data around to decode the ZFS corruption has taken time." UPDATE: See our follow-up story for more. Joyent was using an older version of ZFS, and the bug in question was fixed nearly a year ago.

It will likely take more time to sort out the issues and recover user data, Young said.

Posted by Rich Miller January 15, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter

Reliability in the Cloud: SLAs Will Matter

PRINCETON, N.J. - As Web-based "cloud computing" services become essential to Internet users and businesses, the operators of these services will need to improve their reliability and offer service-level agreements (SLAs) to define user expectations. That's the prediction of experts at "Computing in the Cloud," a workshop organized by the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University.

Some cloud-based services could become so vital that they become candidates for government regulation, according to panelists at the event, which was organized by Princeton professor Ed Felten, a popular blogger with expertise in Internet security and intellectual property.

While we are in the early stages of cloud computing - services that run in a Web browser and store information in a provider’s data center - some of these services are already essential to their users. "People depend on these new technologies we're creating," said Jesse Robbins, a technologist and blogger at O'Reilly Radar. "When they go away, there's the potential for people to be hurt."

Jonathan Rochelle of Google (GOOG), the project manager for Google Docs and Spreadsheets, said the reliability of cloud-based services is improving and will improve more. "Capitalism is going to drive improvement," said Rochelle. "These (improvements) will come because consumers demand it."

The Role of SLAs

SLAs, which define a service provider's responsibilities for performance and uptime, are a big part of the solution. "Right now there's a lot of considered avoidance of SLAs," by some cloud service operators, said Rochelle, who predicted this would change.

Amazon (AMZN), which is seen as an innovator in cloud computing with its Amazon Web Services offerings, only recently adopted an SLA for its S3 storage service promising 99.9 percent uptime. Amazon implemented the agreement after an API outage on its EC2 utility computing service wiped out customer application data.

In some cases, SLAs must evolve to address unanticipated scenarios in a Web 2.0 world in which collaboration is a central theme. "There is no obvious ownership model on some of this stuff," said Rochelle, who cited an instance in which a document on Google Docs was jointly developed by 10 collaborators, only to have the account owner remove the document and close the account.