This year cloud computing is front-and-center at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration (AADI) Summit in Las Vegas, NV. One of the many interesting items on the agenda this year was today’s no-BS enterprise cloud end-user panel, organized by analysts David Cearley and Gene Phifer, along with the OMG/SOA Consortium. The focus of the panel is on real-world, enterprise-grade cloud computing deployments. Really, the session abstract says it all:
Is your organization considering cloud computing? Are you tired of hearing about simplistic (email and calendaring), enterprise irrelevant (Twitter, Facebook), and extreme (Google Datacenter) use cases? You aren’t alone. In this session, government and enterprise practitioners will discuss the cloud computing use cases they are considering, actively pursuing, and rejecting. In addition to the use case specifics, the panelists will share insights on financial benefits, true implementation costs, assessing and managing risk, governance, standards and their cloud computing wish list.
Yes, it’s “get real or go home” time at AADI, and we’re proud that Appistry customer Clark Dorman was invited to participate on the panel, chosen from among the many cloud computing use-cases that Gartner sees every day. Clark and his team at Next Century are doing some pretty amazing things, so it was no surprise when we learned that he would be participating!
Next Century is pioneering the practical application of artificial intelligence applications in the cloud for their end-customer, the U.S. Department of Defense. Their challenge was essentially to teach computers to recognize objects–like ships–in large image repositories.
The original approach they pursued was the traditional one: They plunked down $18k on hardware, loaded and ran their software, and waited for the results. And waited. And waited. They finally got the output they were looking for in 8-14 days.
Realizing this would be insufficient, they turned to Appistry and the cloud. Using Appistry CloudIQ Platform with Amazon EC2–Appistry providing the brains and Amazon providing the brawn, as it were–they now get results in 12 hours, using a hundred virtual servers at a time for a cost of just $130 per run.
Yesterday afternoon, Appistry hosted a partner who flew in Asia, so I wasn’t able to make it to the panel. Fortunately for those of us who missed it, Brenda Michelson posted has a great blow-by-blow write-up of the panel.
Some highlights, compliments Brenda:
- Clark on his tools: Picked EC2 because it is the biggest. Could use Eucalyptus as way to hedge against lock-in. Uses Appistry to manage cloud, and orchestrate startup and runtime execution.
- Clark on security: VPN on their side, SSH into Amazon. Data isn’t classified, but still don’t want to “leak all over”. Data is encrypted on the fly. No data resides in the cloud. Data is brought up at startup. Have very specific startup process. (Again, use Appistry)
- Clark on SLAs: Matter of trust, trust that policy and agreements will be adhered to. Security isn’t a thing, it’s a process.
- Clark on data mobility: For this use case, 6-8 hours of processing, 20 minutes worth of data movement isn’t an issue.
- Clark on app dev for the cloud, standards: Want to develop application at highest level you can. Make the lower levels someone else’s problem.
- Clark on new job roles in the cloud: Systems administration changes to cloud administration. Don’t worry about hardware layer, but still need to manage the environment (to deliver the application).
- Clark on “is cloud new?”: What’s new is dynamic nature, speed that you can do things, low costs. 8 cents for CPU hour.
Stay tuned for more about Next Century’s exciting use case. We’re anticipating hosting them for a webinar in the new year.
In the meantime, visit Appistry’s Resource Library to view other customer webinars, white papers, and more.
Update: This post has been updated to reflect corrected data regarding the Next Century infrastructure investment.
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