Three features that separate "the cloud" from hosting

There are three features that separate "the cloud" from previous notions of outsourced hosting or managed services:
- Multi-tenancy: You contract for a service, not a physical server. Your application may share hardware and other resources with other customers without any impact on the service level you receive.
- Elasticity: You can configure new services in minutes. The providers have large enough scale to be ready with excess capacity, and have created management panels that allow for self-service provisioning.
- Location independence: Your services can be moved quickly to other data centers in order to provide increased capacity, uptime, and/or disaster assurance. The "cloud" is a whole new paradigm made possible by advances in virtual server management.

Distributed software services to the cloud without breaking a sweat

Distributed software services to the cloud without breaking a sweat

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-Beautiful Latin America by Night -

Beautiful Latin America by Night (Maravillosa Latinoamérica de noche)

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- Beginning Android Development -

Beginning Android Development

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Fusion: Enterprise architecture has to build bridges between and integrate

Enterprise architecture (EA) has to build bridges between and integrate each of at least six architectures:
1. Value Architecture - strategies, targets, KPI-models
2. Business Architecture - governance, operational and support domains; Core value chains, business processes, workflows, business rules, products, etc.
3. Organizational Architecture - management models, organizational design, job descriptions, individual performance models
4. Information Architecture - data, information, knowledge requirements, etc.
5. Spatial Architecture - where things are located, location of assets, activities
6. Technology Architecture - enabling it all

Most EA approaches are insufficient in their integration, connectivity and fusion of these architectures to function in a seamless and optimal way.

FUSION

IBM DS 4800 SAN ARCHITECTURE

Last week, I was delighted to see 3 racks containing a built-in SAN architecture based on IBM DS 4800. This is a scalable and high-performance storage for on demand computing environments.
It was connected into a datacenter with a 10 Gbps Fibre Channel interface technology. Every green light in the picture below represents a storage disk, which is valuable more than 1000 US$.

Therefore count the amount of green lights and you will have an approximate costs of this rack storage architecture.

Is the cloud computing a technology?

Many people share a common mistake. The cloud is not a technology but a procurement model. Given an application, infrastructure component, service, or whatever, there is always the option to host it in your internal data center or put it in the cloud in someone else's data center. The underlying technology need not change.

It's just a marketing moniker in most cases, the cloud for most is the SaaS model aka ASP aka managed services... you get the picture.

The kind of cloud technologies that architects should be excited about are things like Platform As A Service (PaaS), http://cloudfoundry.org/ , http://www.openstack.org/ or http://www.heroku.com/

Add scalable data stores and things get interesting http://cassandra.apache.org/ and http://hadoop.apache.org/

New infrastructure for IT will include some form of cloud in it

It is inevitable that new infrastructure for IT will include some form of cloud in it. The cloud has been around for over 20 years so why move to it now? Because of timing and companies like Salesforce/NetApp, Google, and Amazon who placed the right business model behind the technology and brought it mainstream while other big names like IBM, Microsoft, EMC, etc… play catch up. Here are some interesting numbers associated with a move to the cloud.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/cloud-computing-market-241-billion-in-2020/47702

Reasons not to move now are security and proprietary platforms which will evolve over time. The key is to plan your IT infrastructure strategically in stages and demand cloud vendors build compatible data formats so your data is easily transferable between platforms and legacy systems. When you can walk away from a vendor and pick up where you left off with another vendor you have the upper hand.

http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/sizing_cloud/q/id/58161/t/2