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Gartner's CIO New Year's Resolutions: Start Taking Cloud Seriously

sam — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 06:53:48 +0000

In a report issued Monday entitled CIO New Year’s Resolutions, 2009 (subscription required), Gartner analysts Mark Raskino, John Mahoney and Patrick Meehan outline 10 tactics that will help CIO’s “survive in 2009,” and put them “ahead of the crowd.”

Given the state of the global economy, and the fear, uncertainty and doubt this creates for CIOs and IT organizations in general, this year’s set of resolutions takes a very future-oriented tack: Gartner’s advice to the CIO is to do what is necessary to survive in ‘09, but to be sure to also invest in the future by building and preparing for what lies beyond. One key finding of the report… “It's time to prepare yourself for what comes next — this recession is already a year old.”

Cloud computing figures prominently in Gartner’s CIO resolutions: CIOs are advised to “start taking cloud seriously.”

“You will need to start leading your organization safely in this inevitable direction, or risk being sidelined by its progress”

CIOs are encouraged to immerse themselves (albeit only for a day) in the issues, terms and trends of cloud; test-drive different cloud (SaaS) applications; identify areas in their portfolio that are already helping to explore the cloud landscape; spin up a cloud app development project in ‘09; and start to assess the cost of internal applications of a utility (per-seat, per-month) basis. Later in the report they are encouraged to experiment with EC2-style cloud development.

This guidance is similar to the advice I presented back in August at the Next Generation Data Center (NGDC) conference:

All in all, I think this is great advice for CIOs, but I think Gartner isn’t pushing them to be aggressive enough. Cloud represents a fundamental shift in “the way of doing things,” and is about more than just SaaS. Many CIOs will benefit from a deeper look into the cloud stack, i.e. at the platform and infrastructure layers as well.

How do you think cloud computing should figure into a CIO’s resolutions for 2009?

Cloud Forecast 2009: Replay Now Available

sam — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 19:40:09 +0000

Two weeks ago Appistry announced our cloud computing market predictions for 2009. The predictions were well received, save a few haters over at Oracle :-).

To elaborate on our predictions we held a Webinar last week called “Forecast for 2009: Cloudy!” We wanted to try something new-and-different for the Webinar so we decided to run it like a panel discussion. The format not only turned out great, but was a lot of fun to do. In fact, it was such a good time that we’re planning to make it a tradition!

I moderated the panel of Appistry executives, which consisted of:

Kevin Haar, CEO
Bob Lozano, Chief Strategist
Michael Groner, Chief Architect

Each of them discussed one of the predictions and I peppered them with my own questions and audience questions throughout.

The recording has been posted and I encourage you to take a look to learn more about our thoughts on the quickly-evolving cloud computing market. There is an on-line version, pdf slides, an mp3 podcast, and even an iPhone version for you to download.

BONUS LINK: In a separate but related note, I was quoted in a recent article in the San Jose Mercury News entitled “Forecast for computing: cloudy.” Much of the nuance in my assessment of the market was not captured in that quote, but I stand behind the statement: SaaS aside, the real cloud opportunity for the enterprise is in private clouds.

Golden Ticket II Contest!

guerry — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 18:38:19 +0000

Appistry's Golden Ticket II Contest is launched!

Members of the Peer2Peer Development community have a chance to win a MacBook Air!

How? Simply take Appistry EAF Community Edition for a drive in four easy steps.

The contest is open to both current and newly registered Peer2Peer members.

So, jump to it, and maybe you'll catch some Air!

The contest runs through 11:59pm on January 18, 2009.

Reaping the Benefits: Is your code cloud-ready and multi-core friendly? (part 6)

guerry — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 18:41:40 +0000

As part of an ongoing series, we have been discussing design principles that influence how ready our code is for distributed computing in the cloud, as well as for multi-core utilization. Today, we conclude the series with discussion about…

How to Reap the Benefits

Today we shift our discussion to how atomicity, statelessness, idempotence, and parallelism in our code help us gain the benefits of cloud application platforms. Cloud application platforms allow our code to "inherit" capabilities like scaling out horizontally, scaling up across multiple cores, availability, reliability, manageability, load balancing, and command and control. Throughout this blog series, we have touched on these benefits, but now in our conclusion, we will discuss how cloud platforms deliver these benefits to our code.

First, we need to define what we mean by a cloud platform, and why we as architects and developers should care in the first place.

What is a Cloud Platform?

First, we need to orient ourselves in the cloud. The diagram below helps to categorize different cloud technologies into simple architectural layers. The break out is not perfect as some products may touch more than one layer, but it will serve fine here.

The Infrastructure-as-a-Service Cloud

Infrastructure-oriented cloud architectures, including Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings, provide access to virtualized, on-demand computing resources. Amazon EC2 is a well-known example of this approach. The user can request Linux and Windows virtual machine instances be created on the fly and billed based on actual usage. The cloud infrastructure allows the user to manage their virtual machines and associated resources like IP addresses, and configuration. Regarding EC2, clients do not know where the machines are geographically located or what kind of hardware is being used. This is what makes the service cloud-like.

"Cloud Platforms" vs "The Platform-as-a-Service Cloud"

Platform-oriented approaches to cloud, including Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and cloud application platforms, run atop an underlying cloud infrastructure. Cloud platforms abstract applications away from the underlying cloud infrastructure, and provide supporting services and functionality to those applications. The distinction between cloud infrastructure and cloud platforms is a critical one for architects and developers to understand as they spoon about in the alphabet soup of cloud hype and reality.

Salesforce.com's Force.com and Google's AppEngine both typify the PaaS approach. The AppEngine user is solely concerned about the application they are creating to run on the platform. To deliver an application they simply package it and deploy it to AppEngine. The deployment happens in a single step and the end-user does not know whether the application is being run on one virtual machine or ten at any given point in time. In addition, the application can take advantage of special services provided by the AppEngine platform, such as authentication or data access.

Cloud application platforms, like their PaaS cousins, allow the developer to focus solely on the application deployed on the platform. Likewise, cloud application platforms offer the same or similar benefits described briefly for AppEngine above, such as virtualizing your application across the infrastructure, simplifying deployment, providing special services, etc. A key difference between some cloud application platforms and their PaaS cousins is portability across cloud infrastructures (only Google provides AppEngine deployment for example), the ability to run your cloud platforms in-house on a private cloud rather than on the public cloud, and flexibility in the choice of implementation languages, IDEs, and tools among other differences.

Typically, you should not have to care what the underlying cloud infrastructure is. Likewise, you should not be concerned with writing application code to implement scalability, reliability, and other cloud and distributed computing features that a cloud platform could provide. Your focus should be on the business logic that brings your "value add," while the cloud platform virtualizes your application, manages its lifecycle, and leverages your application over the underlying cloud infrastructure. Cloud platforms take your code, (which is ideally atomic, stateless (and likely stateful too), idempotent and parallelizable) and does the heavy distributed computing and multi-core lifting, giving you benefits that are otherwise hard to achieve on your own.

What benefits you ask?

Scaling Out, Scaling Up, and Scaling Down Gracefully

Cloud platforms horizontally scale out your application by running it across many servers or "workers." When transaction loads are high or we anticipate the need for more through put, we can add more workers. When loads drop, workers can be shutdown (offering "green" dividends by using less power), or shunted over to another application that needs the workers now.

Why do you as a developer care? If you have provided the cloud platform with a well-designed application, the cloud platform should be able to scale your application for you. Therefore, you don't have to write the scalability code. In most cloud platforms, your code doesn't know it's in the cloud, much less being scaled out.

What about scaling up across multiple cores to utilize all the available processing power? The same principles apply. If your code follows the principles we've outlined throughout this blog series, then the cloud platform can automatically scale the execution of your code across whatever cores are available without you having to use any special language primitives or tools. The ability to do this varies by the cloud platform, but they are out there, and it works great.

By running stateless, atomic code on a cloud platform, and having a cloud platform that allows you to take advantage of availability and reliability, you get resilience and the ability for your cloud application to scale up and down gracefully. If you need more resources, you can add more nodes, and scale out horizontally, and if your cloud platform utilizes multi-core efficiently, you get to scale up across cores. If one or more nodes die, availability assures that new work will get done, and reliability assures that in-flight work has a chance to complete. Either way, you can scale down with a degree of grace, even in the face of hardware failures.

Availability

Cloud platforms distribute your code across the cloud in different ways. Some platforms put all of your code on every worker and execute your code on any of those workers at any given time. Other platforms specify workers to given tasks or roles. Sometimes all of a transaction will occur on one worker until it is done. Other platforms may optionally distribute even the execution of a single transaction. Regardless of the model, cloud platforms make your application code highly available by distributing and managing it across multiple workers.

When your code is atomic and stateless in nature, your code can then reside anywhere in the cloud that the cloud platforms puts it, and in an ideal setup, the code can execute anywhere without you having to think about it. At its root this means you automatically have high availability. If a given compute node dies, who cares? The other nodes have the code and can fulfill transactions.

Reliability

What do I mean by reliability? Say I request code to execute, and something bad happens, then reliability means that the requested work still gets done, or at least the environment does it best to complete it instead of just giving up, or worse, losing the work entirely.

There are a number of models for attaining reliable execution in cloud platform environments. If the cloud platform is designed to provide reliability to executed code, then you’ll likely get this functionality almost for free or through how your application is deployed at runtime. If not, well, then it can be a lot of work to do it yourself.

We’ll focus on one reliability model that directly shows the benefit of the atomic, stateless and idempotent nature of your code. Say I’ve requested code to execute in the cloud, and a failure occurs. Perhaps the worker doing my work suffers a power supply failure. The cloud platform detects the loss of work, and, depending on packaging-time configuration, retries that work on a different worker instead of returning the failure immediately to the requester. The cloud platform then retries that work until success is achieved or some configured threshold is met, and failure is returned.

If your code takes advantage of the attributes of atomicity, statelessness, and idempotence, then you can have the flexibility to reach for reliability, especially if the environment leverages this functionality for you. Without these attributes, your options are narrowed. For example, consider atomicity in the reliability model just discussed. If the executed code encapsulates multiple non-atomic steps, then the complexity of retrying that step goes way up. Likewise, if the code is a long running series of steps, rather than stand-alone atomic steps, then a retry must rerun the entire series when failure happens, instead of just picking up at the step that failed.

Of course, not all code is idempotent and repeatable, often because it affects state of some sort. In this case the cloud platform needs to be able to deal with that, preferably in an application configurable manner. We’ll address possible solutions under “Command and Control” below.

Manageability

Even as developers, we are affected by how difficult or easy it is to deploy and manage code in the runtime environment. When the runtime environment, even in development and testing, is distributed across multiple servers, the complexity and time to manage the application goes up dramatically. Cloud platforms take this into account (more often than not because the developers that are creating and maintaining the cloud platform are affected by the same complexities!).

Some cloud platforms that I am aware of allow the developer to code and test their application on one box rather than many, and some Cloud Application Platforms allow you to develop most or all of your applications outside the cloud platform with your normal development and testing tools (this is not true for many Platform-as-a-Service environments).

Beyond this point, there are varying levels of difficulty in deploying and managing your application on the various cloud platforms. I'll focus on what I consider the easier to deal with feature sets. Your mileage will vary based on what cloud platform you choose to run your code on.

Okay, so you have some code ready to run. Typically, you will package the application in some way, bundling with it configuration information that tells the cloud platform how you want the application managed. Next, you will deploy that application "into" the cloud platform with a single command. Some, but not all, cloud platforms will automatically distribute your application to all of its workers (or some workers--depending on the platform's model), and bring your application up and running. You are done, now use your client and access your cloud application.

Subsequent versions of your code are handled the same way. You will usually repackage the code and redeploy it, probably handling the "version" of the package in some way. The cloud platform will take care of updating the code for you.

Why do I even bring this up in a blog series primarily focused on developers? Deployment is not a production and testing-only concern. Anything that affects time usage during development needs to get the hairy eyeball. At least the pragmatic programmer roots think so.

Of course, this level of manageability goes way beyond the developer. We are aware of one company with over three hundred workers (500+ cores) that manage their private, production cloud running multiple cloud applications with less than one-third of an administrator's time.

Load-balancing

Cloud platforms utilize various types of load balancing. It may be as simple as using software or hardware-based load balancers between the cloud application and its clients. Or, it could be as sophisticated as the cloud platform utilizing its own built-in software-based load balancing. Load balancing affects both scalability and availability. When your application's work is distributed across many workers, you want to make sure that each worker in the cloud is being utilized in a maximum manner.

The situation gets more complex when one introduces the possibility of heterogeneous workers in the cloud. If your cloud is made up of workers that range from older single-core processors up to quad-core boxes or more, then you have workers with very different capability footprints.

Either way, wouldn't it be great if you as a developer did not have to worry about this? Instead of having to sweat the application infrastructure and/or architecture to make sure the application load balances across the cloud, some cloud platforms take care of this for you.

Command and Control

Utilizing atomic, cohesive code opens up the possibility of using declarative state machines. Declarative state machines have been around for a while. They allow us to design flows of steps in a declarative way, often in XML or some other domain specific language (DSL). They are often used in middleware and in defining business logic and work flows. Spring Web Flow is based on this concept, as is Microsoft Windows Workflow, and Appistry’s own Process Flow technology. There are many other examples.

Typically the model runs something like this: a state machine of different steps is defined. Each step or state is tied to a unit of executable logic or task. Which state the state machine branches to next is determined by the task execution results of the prior step. If a step succeeds then the next step takes some happy path. If a step fails then the next step may execute a compensating task to deal with the failure, or request help, or return failure. Success or failure is usually defined by conditional logic, rules, data values, thrown exceptions, and other conditions.

By using declarative state machines to orchestrate atomic, stateless, perhaps idempotent code in the context of distributed environments like cloud platforms, we get surprising levels of robustness, reliability and flexibility. Additionally, the declarative state machine allows us to handle reliability more readily for that code that must be stateful or that cannot be safely re-executed because its operations are not idempotent. The declarative nature of the state machine allows design for how to deal with failures in these conditions, without putting the failure handling inside our code. Also, some state machines allow for snap shooting progress in the state machine steps, so that a process interrupted by failure can be resumed and completed. Again, this is something that would not be possible without making sure our code breaks down nicely into atomic steps or tasks.

When this technology is seen in cloud platforms, it allows the orchestration of our code across many workers in a reliable, scalable, available, and load balanced way without our code knowing about it.

Where To From Here?

Immediately once must ask, do these cloud platforms exist? Yes, they do. Google AppEngine, our earlier PaaS example, focuses on web service-based applications written in Python. In my first post, Michael quoted Bill Gates in regards to a coming need to change how we code to take advantage of these new paradigms. Since that first post, Microsoft has gone on to announce Microsoft Azure for .NET and its suite of related services and tools. Though Azure really touches all three tiers of the pyramid shown above, there is a cloud platform at its heart. Likewise, Appistry EAF is an excellent example of a cloud application platform that is cloud infrastructure agnostic, and allows you to deploy cloud applications written in JAVA, .NET, C/C++, and even native command line utilities. And, there are other cloud platform choices. There are differences from cloud platform to cloud platform, both in features and focus, but typically each cloud platform hides the cloud infrastructure from your application, and virtualizes your application to manage and leverage it in a cloud-like manner, and provides essential services so that you as a developer do not need to re-invent the wheel.

This concludes our exploration of the types of changes in store for how we design code in the face of cloud computing. Like any design principles, they have to be applied with some common sense. There are no magic or silver bullets, and hammers aren’t the right tool for every job. However, considering these principles will help you leverage your code on cloud platforms now and in the on-rushing future.

Cloud Taxonomy: Applications, Platform, Infrastructure

sam — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 17:49:03 +0000

This has come up a lot recently, most recently when Coté tweeted:

@cote: Is the cloud categorization getting down to "apps, platform, and infrastructure"? I keep hearing that divide-up: http://tinyurl.com/4ghj7x

This taxonomy is far from perfect, but I think it does a good job of separating out the different types of clouds out there. Michael Sheehan from GoGrid was one of the first to publicly illustrate the cloud taxonomy with a pyramid (and I think he’s trying to apply for a trademark on it :-). (Image to the right stolen from Michael!)

As provider of a cloud platform, I am frequently called on to differentiate between cloud platforms and cloud infrastructure. Anyone who has used both Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine groks the difference between these two concepts, so I tend to use those offerings to illustrate the difference.

It’s really all about level of abstraction. And this translates directly to the end-user experience. With cloud infrastructure like Amazon EC2, the central theme is the virtual server. The user is (sometimes painfully) aware of the number and type of servers/virtual machines that they have running and management is done by individually logging in to each server, e.g. via SSH. Note that the user doesn’t know things like the brand and physical location of the servers, nor does the user expect complete or exclusive control of the machine. Those are all things that contribute to making the relationship cloud-like.

On the other hand, consider the end-user experience with App Engine. The central theme is really the application itself. The user develops their application and with a single invocation of a command-line tool, packages and deploys the application to the cloud. The platform takes care of actually deploying the application to the right machines, based on policy, utilization or whatever. The user never logs into an individual server. The don’t even know at a given point in time how many machines their application is deployed out to. The platform takes care of all of that, plus provides APIs and services to the applications themselves. (Much of this is true for Appistry EAF as well, but the model is very different from App Engine.)

I’ve got some slides I use to elaborate on the distinction between the layers. Please take a look and let me know what you think:

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: cloud computing)

Stephen O’Grady wrote up a nice post back in November called Cloud Types: Fabric vs Instance, where he described the Platform and Infrastructure layers as Fabric and Instance respectively. (Fabric has a nice ring to it, for obvious reasons :-) He has a nice description of each that is worth checking out.

The Forecast for 2009: Cloudy with a Chance of Jack Bauer

sam — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 18:16:17 +0000

As a wild 2008 comes to a close, we thought it appropriate to see what might be on tap for what promises to be a rather unpredictable 2009. So, earlier this morning we released Appistry's predictions for 2009 based on what we see swirling in our snow globe/crystal ball.

And what we see is a cloudy forecast. And cloudy is good! 2008 saw cloud computing emerge as perhaps the most discussed enterprise technology of the year. We saw industry behemoths like Google, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft lay down some serious stakes in the cloud market. We saw others, such as Oracle, dismiss the evolution that is occurring in the market. We saw companies like GoGrid and SkyTap make moves to improve the experience enterprises have in public clouds. And, I'd be remiss in not mentioning, a seven-year-old company called Appistry took bold steps to build out a platform that lets enterprises develop and move apps to both public and private clouds. Exciting times indeed.

So, what do we see coming up in 2009? Let's take a look at what we predicted in the press release:

2009 Will Herald the "Year of the Cloud" for Enterprises

Virtualization has matured; the economy is sinking while business costs are rising; and private clouds have already captured enterprise attention for their inherent security and reliability. These factors and more have created an ideal environment for enterprise cloud computing to thrive in 2009.

Cloud Platforms Will Begin to Overtake the App Server in 2009

Oracle and others will continue to fight a losing battle to keep their legacy application server cash cows alive. Oracle will do everything it can to protect its Oracle Application Server and BEA WebLogic franchises. In no way should they be counted out of the market, but newer, cloud-specific platforms are poised to further erode aging middleware options.

HP Finally Works Its Way into Middleware

While competitors scramble to save the app server, companies such as HP will be presented with an opportunity to capitalize on their competitors’ app server weaknesses. Without the constraints of older middleware that must be retrofitted for the cloud, HP is poised to use cloud computing to take market share from IBM's traditionally reliable middleware business. In the past, these two behemoths have battled it out around hardware and services, but HP could smell blood in '09 and look to take advantage of a rare IBM weakness in software.

Several Organizations Will Offer Standards for Cloud Computing – Standards Debate Rages On

Historically, technologies have evolved and succeeded because of standards. The process of getting to these standards is often a dirty, political and hard-fought mess. 2009 will see this same evolution take shape around the cloud. Already we're seeing several attempts at standardization, including IBM's RCC. The year ahead is just the beginning; we don't expect true standards to emerge until well into 2010. The question is: Who will win the battle and drive the process?

Amazon Will Release Tools to Enter the Platform Arena

While most eyes are on Google and Microsoft, Amazon has emerged as the company doing the heaviest lifting to advance cloud computing. Look for Amazon to move up the stack by offering additional tools for cloud developers in 2009, putting them at odds with the partner ecosystem they’ve built around companies such as RightScale, Elastra, 3tera and Appistry.

Oh, and there's one more I think will happen, but the lawyers yanked it out of the release for "copyright" reasons:

Jack Bauer Will Take Advantage of Cloud Computing during Episode of 24; The Cloud Will Never be the Same

Jack Bauer – the only man to win a game of Connect4 in 3 moves – will take advantage of cloud computing during this season of 24. In an attempt to stop a global threat of epic proportions, Jack Bauer will deploy himself into a public cloud effectively saving all of mankind

I encourage you to contribute your own predictions in the comment section of this post (and send these around to your friends and colleagues to see what they predict). I also invite you to participate in an interactive webinar we are hosting next Thursday, December 18, 2008, from 2:00 PM (EST) to 3:00 PM (EST), where a panel of Appistry executives -- Kevin Haar, our CEO; Bob Lozano, our co-founder and chief strategist, Michael Groner, co-founder and chief architect, moderated by yours truly -- will take an in-depth look into each of these predictions (even the Jack Bauer one). Those interested can register for the webinar at: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/580758866

Here's to a very cloudy and prosperous 2009!

Is Amazon the Wal-Mart of Cloud Computing?

sam — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 22:05:49 +0000

John Pescatore, information security analyst at Gartner, recently reflected on an analogy he used to illustrate the different security options available with cloud computing.

You see, if I want a tomato I can go to Wal-Mart and buy a really cheap tomato that was grown God knows where. If I need a tomato that is a bit tastier, I can go to my local grocery store that has a decent produce shop and the tomatoes are still fairly inexpensive. If I want a really good tasty tomato and am willing to pay a good bit more, I can go to a local farm stand - yum…

Or if I want the best tomatoes possible, I can grow them myself in my home garden…

In his analogy, John identifies all the players in what I call the cloud computing ecosystem: public cloud infrastructure providers, virtual private cloud providers, and the enterprise itself as a private cloud provider.

John makes the connection between tomatoes and cloud computing a bit more explicit further down in his post, but I was still left wondering who is the ‘Wal-Mart’ of cloud computing in his mind.

For my money it would have to be Amazon.

As I started thinking about it, I found interesting parallels between the two and their roles in their respective industries. And, just as with Wal-Mart, there are both good and bad effects to Amazon’s dominant role in the cloud:

Accessibility: Just as Wal-Mart has brought discount retail goods to many, Amazon has made public cloud infrastructure readily accessible to the masses.
Innovation: Wal-Mart has used its heft to motivate its industry and supply chain to adopt more efficient practices such as RFID and supplier-managed inventory. Amazon has delivered innovation in the cloud realm with technologies such as Dynamo.
Low Prices (Commoditization): The effect here on the cloud-side is best characterized by the words of a CloudCamp San Francisco attendee: Amazon’s hourly pricing model has created a “race to zero” for cloud CPU-hours.
Competition: Wal-Mart has long been maligned for forcing smaller retailers out of business. At this point in time I think Amazon has done more to create the cloud market than to stifle it. One possible area of long-term impact is with traditional Web hosting. Hosting is an extremely fragmented market with lots of small players and it will be interesting to see how that market responds. Over time these markets must converge.
Supplier Power: I think there’s an analogy here but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Any thoughts on how Amazon has driven changes at Dell, Rackspace and other suppliers?
Sweat-Shop Labor: Ok, this one’s mostly a stretch, but there is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. :-)

What do you think? Is Amazon the Wal-Mart of cloud computing?

BONUS LINKS: In researching this post I found an interesting series of articles by the LA Times on the Wal-Mart effect (2003), and a more recent book with the same name by Charles Fishman who is (or was) a writer at Fast Company.

Update: James Urquhart called this one way back in October in a very nice blog post.

Video: Appistry and Cloud Platforms in Under 5 Minutes

sam — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 17:03:41 +0000

Our partners over at Apptis were kind enough to post video footage from the recent CloudCamp Federal event. At the beginning of the event, each of the sponsors was given the opportunity to present a five-minute “Lightening Talk” on some aspect of cloud computing and where they fit in the big picture. My session is posted below. At the end of the video you’ll have the opportunity to review the other presentations from the event.

The slides are a bit difficult to make out, so I’ve included them below as well.

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: application cloud)

Unlocking the Power of the Cloud for Application Development

sam — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:19:21 +0000

We talk to a lot of developers and architects about cloud computing, and one of the things that we run across from time-to-time is an element of skepticism due simply to the incredible amount of hype out there in the marketplace. I know it’s hard for you to believe that software engineers are a skeptical bunch, and maybe it’s just that we talk to so many in the “Show Me” state, but it’s true.

Fortunately, once we get beyond all the buzzwords and hype, the substance behind cloud shines through and we’re able to have great conversations about the implications of cloud on software development.

There are many implications… By making infrastructure more readily available, cloud can streamline a process that is frustrating for many organizations. (It seems like there are never enough boxes around!) And certainly cloud changes what users expect of our applications (e.g. QoS characterstics), impacting the choices we make during application architecture and development.

These are some of the issues we’ll be addressing, along with our partner Skytap, in an upcoming webinar called “Unlocking the Power of Cloud for Application Development.” I invite you to join us for for the hour-long session, to be held on Wednesday, December 17th at 11 AM Eastern Time (2 PM Pacific).

Some of the topics we’re planning to discuss include:

* Benefits of a cloud-based development environments to build, test and deploy your applications

* Best practices for building cloud-ready applications, and retrofitting legacy applications for the cloud

* Case studies featuring end-user successes with enterprise cloud computing

but I’d love to hear your feedback. What else would you like us to address on this topic?

Please do join us for the event. You can register here.

Appistry to Host First "Lambda Lounge" Meeting; Stop By for Lively Discussion on Functional and Dynamic Languages

sam — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 02:55:04 +0000

Tomorrow evening, Appistry will host the first meeting of a new group “Lambda Lounge,” spearheaded by Alex Miller (of Terracotta). The group is an open forum for exploring various topics related to programming in dynamic and functional languages.

The agenda for the first meeting has shaped up nicely:

[Alex is] planning on kicking off the meeting with an open discussion about what functional and dynamic languages are and we can maybe arm wrestle about whether the two have anything to do with each other.

Next, Matt Taylor of ~~G2One~~ SpringSource will talk about Groovy MetaProgramming with Categories and Mixins.

Finally, Ryan Senior of Ferguson Consulting is going to do an overview of OCaml, of which I know not much, other than that it is a mixture of object and functional styles, dervied from a ML-style static type system (but with type inference).

More details are available on the Lambda Lounge site. If you’re in St. Louis we encourage you to stop by Appistry HQ at 6 pm for the meeting.