OnDemand Beat » Amazon

Review of The New Polymath

Ameed Taylor — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 21:45:02 +0000

Vinnie Mirchandani’s new book; The New Polymath, is full of profiles and case studies that illustrate how the New Polymath’s within many industries are creating disruptive innovation to leapfrog their competition and introduce innovation to their respective industries and customers.

The book’s chapters on Technology and Cloud Computing profile innovations of technology vendors. In particular, Mirchandani uses many examples from the Cloud Computing industry. Calling Cloud Computing the convergence of Marc Benioff’s “Democratization of Technology” with Marc Manos’ “Industrialization of Technology” Mirchandani cites diverse case studies from Japan Post Network to Salesforce.com in the New Polymath to prove his point.

One profile focuses on how Netsuite uses its shared cloud infrastructure to quickly adjust its business based on market conditions and to benchmark against its competitors. Netsuite hopes to use its collected customer metrics to create Business Process Outsourcing Partnerships that will allow its customers to monitor business process metrics that up to now have been extremely difficult to gather.

In yet another example of the innovation inherent within the cloud, Mirchandani cites Cloud Computing poster child Appirio. Appirio has not owned any servers since its inception and runs all of its operations from lead generation to payroll in the cloud. Unlike its competitors Appirrio only used 2% of its revenue on internal IT versus the industry average of 7%. This type of advantage allowed Appirio to utilize more of its venture funding and initial revenue’s for R&D and customers activities thus allowing the company to grow from 5 to 200 employees without an IT department.

Like the Cloud Computing vendors; who are Polymath’s for bringing disparate technologies together for customers, Mirchandani deftly brings together disparate examples in an engaging book that provides readers a guidepost in how to also become a Polymath.

IBM rolls out Beta Cloud to Developers

Ameed Taylor — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:42:29 +0000

IBM last month rolled out its Beta Cloud to the general public. The Beta Cloud is IBM’s dynamically provisioned runtime environment that includes tools to develop and test application code on IBM software.

With this new offering on the market it will be interesting to see who dominates amongst Amazon, IBM, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure and Force.com as the environment of choice for Cloud development.

The following video shows developers how to create environments on the Beta Cloud.

OnDemand Speed Links 21 December 2009

Ameed Taylor — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 17:38:39 +0000

E-Books in the Cloud
Will the use of the cloud for storage of E-Books lead to even greater adoption of cloud storage in the coming years?

Enterprise 2.0 year in Review
Dion Hincliffe posts an insightful review of Enterprise 2.0 in 2009.

Practical SOA Applications
Joe McKendrick has compiled 17 examples of SOA being put to real world use with fairly good results.

Oracle’s Enterprise 2.0 Assessment Tool
Oracle has created a useful (if not somewhat irritating at times) Enterprise 2.0 assessment tool.

Is BI Ready For The Cloud?

Ameed Taylor — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:38:35 +0000

On Demand Business Intelligence has picked up traction in the past year as both SMB’s and their larger brethren turn to hosted BI solutions to deploy BI projects faster with less risk and at lower cost. Initially reserved for analyzing excel files and for small departmental projects, BI in the cloud is now being utilized for extremely large data sets and data warehousing projects.

GoodData is one of the first firms to offer BI in the cloud and just recently won the Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge. GoodData offers standard BI functionality and tools for Analytics, and Dashboard and Report creation but due to its Cloud architecture offers scalability and collaboration ability not available with on premise BI tools.

A few of GoodData’s competitors include SAP Business Objects, Swirrl, and SQLStream. Expect to see more competitors jump into the space as both computing cycle costs come down and as more companies make the transition to the cloud for BI projects.

V2 of Cloud Computing Use Cases Published

Ameed Taylor — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:51:43 +0000

Version 2 of the Computing Use Cases White Paper has just been published. V2 of the Cloud Computing Use Cases focuses on developer roles and what is necessary for Open API’s to work with Cloud Computing.

V2 of the Use Cases series follows the release of the the initial Cloud Computing Use Cases document in August 2009 that focused on requirements that need to be standardized in a cloud environment to ensure integration, portability and interoperability.

The Cloud Computing Use Cases Group is now soliciting input on V3 of the Cloud Computing Use Cases series and has identified the topics of Moving to the Cloud, Security in Cloud Computing and SLA’s for Cloud Computing as potential focuses of V3.

OnDemand Speed Links 28 October 2009

Ameed Taylor — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:26:58 +0000

Amazon Launches Relational Database Service
Amazon this week launched its Relational Database Service.(RDS) Amazon RDS is a MYSQL 5.1 database offering that will compete directly with Joyent’s recently announced MySQL Accelerator and indirectly (but not at an enterprise level) with Microsoft SQL Azure.

Cloud Wars Begin
Amazon also announced a 15% drop in pricing for all EC2 instance families and sizes. This is significant due to the fact that one can expect EC2 competitors like GoGrid and Softlayer to follow suit and lower pricing as well.

Stephen Baker Researches Enterprise 2.0 Consulting
Over on BusinessWeek; Stephen Baker is creating a few articles on Enterprise 2.0 Consulting. Will be interesting to see whether his research indicates that Enterprise 2.0 consulting is a viable industry or more of the sometimes dubious Social Media consulting with an Enterprise twist.

W3C announces OWL2
The Semantic Web group within W3C released the OWL2 recommendation. OWL2 is part of the W3C’s Semantic Web Toolkit and is a standard for representing knowledge on the Web.

Q&A with Rackspace Cloud’s Emil Sayegh

Ameed Taylor — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 17:11:32 +0000

San Antonio based Rackspace is a global web host and cloud provider known for their high end managed hosting and dedicated services. The company delivers managed services to over 16,000 customers from eight data centers worldwide.

Rackspace has recently made quite a splash within the Cloud Industry with the launch of a number of Cloud Services under its Rackspace Cloud division (formerly Mosso)

I recently had the opportunity to interview General Manager Emil Sayegh about the Rackspace Cloud.

OnDemand Beat – “Emil, What is your role as General Manager of the Rackspace Cloud?”
Emil Sayegh – “The Rackspace Cloud is a self contained Entrepreneurial Business Unit within Rackspace, with a great startup culture. My day to day role is to run all the facets of the Cloud business. I spend my days both strategizing, and continuously working with my team to evolve and improve our offerings to our customers. I ensure that our customers are getting the best value for our services, that our shareholders are getting the best return on their investment, and that our employees (we call them Rackers), have a great professional environment to work, and grow.”

OnDemand Beat – “What areas of the Rackspace Cloud are growing the fastest?”
Emil Sayegh – “Cloud Servers have taken off tremendously; the momentum we are seeing to date is amazing. As Guy Rosen said “The big surprise here is Rackspace, which seems to be just a stepbehind Amazon”.
Cloud Sites also is Number 1 in terms of market share and has a 60% larger market share than Google App Engine per the Wall Street Journal.
Cloud Servers has certainly grown the fastest, since we opened up the Cloud Server API allowing partners to create applications that interface with Cloud Servers. Now our growth is compounded not only by the appetite of our customers, but also by the appetite of our partners’ customers. We are lucky to have such great customers and partners that do not hesitate to recommend us. That is what powers and energizes me, and all other Rackers every day.”

OnDemand Beat – What type of customer has Rackspace noticed to date as being the most enthusiastic adopter of the Rackspace Suite?
Emil Sayegh – “The early adopters of the Rackspace Suite have been startups, SaaS companies, designers and developers. But we have recently seen a steady shift of the Rackspace Cloud customer base to Fortune 1000. These large enterprises are creating many new projects in the cloud.
Essentially the Cloud has become applicable for everyone in IT, but not for every IT workload. As an example, 4 major TV networks moved their online election coverage sites to the Rackspace Cloud on Election night 2008. They found that it was very economical not to scale up their own in house DC infrastructure for just one night of heavy traffic. Instead, their web pages applicable for the election coverage moved to the Cloud. They sustained extremely heavy traffic the night of the election. The TV networks of course only paid for their usage for one night of peak load. Otherwise, they would have to incur the high cost of buying and maintaining 100s of extra servers in their DC just to be used once every 4 years.
Many Fortune 1000 company CIOs are finding exactly what designers, developers, and SMBs had discovered – that the Cloud is great for starting and scaling new projects. Projects where predictability of success is variable are ideal for the cloud. The risk is very low due to the pay for use nature of cloud. Projects that have legacy or custom code, on the other hand, may not be suited for the Cloud.”

OnDemand Beat – “Cloud Servers support a number of popular operating systems – What operating systems and or Linux Distributions have turned out to be the most popular so far among Rackspace customers?”
Emil Sayegh – “Cloud Servers currently supports a variety of popular Linux Distributions: Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, Centos, Fedora, Arch and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Ubuntu has been in the lead. But as you may know, we also are working on a Windows offering on Cloud Servers, that is coming up very soon. We get a lot of demand for that as well.
Also, keep in mind our Cloud Sites platform is the only Platform Cloud in the market that supports both Windows (.Net), and Linux (LAMP) technologies. Demand Linux is still dominant on Cloud Sites, but Windows is not too far behind.”

OnDemand Beat – “A key differentiator I have noticed with Rackspace vs. other cloud service providers is the Rackspace SLA. Has the Rackspace SLA helped in convincing larger enterprises and government agencies to try the Rackspace Cloud Suite?”
Emil Sayegh – “Rackspace has always stood for our top quality of service. Our Fanatical Support® is a key differentiator that customers have gotten used to with Rackspace and do notice when compared to the other Cloud Service providers.”

OnDemand Beat – “Rackspace just recently launched its Cloud Tools Site. Can you give an overview of what the Cloud Tools Site is and the benefits of the site for Rackspace customers?”
Emil Sayegh – “Cloud Tools is a destination for Rackspace customers that are looking to expand the functionality and the power of the Cloud by leveraging third-party tools and applications. These tools are built by our partners using the open source API, launched in July 2009, to create custom, value-add applications for the Rackspace Cloud.
To date Rackspace partners have created over 40 applications that are available on the Cloud Tools Site with many more coming online soon.”

OnDemand Beat – “To date, Rackspace Cloud Tools are available for Monitoring & Reporting, Development, System Management and Client Software. What are some of the additional Cloud Tools you see forthcoming in the near future?”
Emil Sayegh – “Honestly, it is hard to predict all the different categories that will emerge. Harnessing the power of the cloud will be up to the imagination, and innovation of our partners. Just to give you a taste (no pun intended), we have a new partner named Vanilla that is using our API to power their forum hosting service. Also, we are seeing partners like Sonian using us for email Archiving, or like SOASTA for load testing. So there is a myriad of use cases that are emerging, and we encourage our partners to submit their applications.”

OnDemand Beat – “Emil; you have mentioned in the past that Rackspace has a startup culture with all the benefits of an established company—how does Rackspace maintain that balance?”
Emil Sayegh – “Lew Moorman (Rackspace Cloud President) and I have worked hard at maintaining an environment where employees always have the ability to impact change. We accomplish this by keeping the number of management levels low. We also hire people who we fully trust to make important decisions.
The Rackspace Cloud, through recent acquisitions and growth, is composed of a number of groups; however, the principal is always the same…treat the customer like a king and wow them with our service, and with our technology. Give them the best user experience from end to end, better than anywhere else they go.”

OnDemand Beat – “What upcoming conferences and events can OnDemand Beat readers meet the Rackspace Cloud team?”
Emil Sayegh – “Here is the list of events we will be at. I really hope to meet some your readers there. Please look me up, I love to talk to folks about the Cloud. My email is emil.sayegh {at} rackspace(.)com, and my twitter account is @esayegh.
Twitter Conference LA 9/22/2009
Blog World 10/15/2009
No SQL 10/28/2009
Cloud Computing Expo 11/2/2009″

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Rackspace

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OnDemand Speed Links 26 August 2009

Ameed Taylor — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:52:44 +0000

Amazon Rolls Out Virtual Private Cloud
Amazon today introduced its Virtual Private Cloud Service. This service allows customers to connect resources within the AWS Cloud, to resources within their own your own datacenter using encrypted IPsec VPN connections

Help Shape Enterprise 2.0 San Francisco
The Enterprise 2.0 San Francisco Conference Organizers have set up a survey for the Enterprise 2.0 community to vote for sessions they would like to see at its inaugural west coast conference

VARS To Get a Slice of Cloud Computing Pie
Anthony Ha discusses Salesforce.com’s recently announced program for VARS to build applications on its Force.com platform

Cloud Computing Budgets Approved at Most Large Firms (pdf)
F5 recently released a survey of 250 large enterprises that indicates that funding for Cloud Computing projects and trials is in place at over 85% of the surveyed firms.

Is VMWare Making a Move into SAAS market
Interesting article from Sam Dean that delves into the real reasons behind VMware’s recent acqusition of SpringSource

Deploying a Web Server on Amazon EC2

Ameed Taylor — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:16:56 +0000

Want to learn more about Setting Up Web Servers on Amazon EC2? Subscribe to OnDemand Beat today and be sure to check out the OnDemand Beat Amazon EC2 Resource Page.

Detailed tutorial on setting up and deploying a web server on Amazon EC2.

Amazon Elastic MapReduce Beta Launched

Ameed Taylor — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 18:20:36 +0000

Amazon Web Services today announced the public beta of its newest addition to its web services portfolio; Amazon Elastic MapReduce.

Elastic MapReduce is a web service that allows researchers, analysts and businesses to process and analyze data using a hosted Apache Hadoop “data processing engine” that runs on Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2.

Much like the Mathematica and Mathworks EC2 computational solutions, Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a metered service that is designed to be used for applications like data mining, machine learning, financial analysis or scientific research. Amazon’s entry into the market will provide a bit of competition (to say the least) to Cloudera for users interested in running Hadoop in the Enterprise.

Elastic MapReduce will initially only be available in the USA and users can choose standard Amazon EC2 Instances or High CPU EC2 Instances to run their applications. Pricing for Elastic MapReduce ranges from 10 cents per hour for a small standard EC2 instance to 80 cents per hour for an extra large High CPU instance. Elastic MapReduce supports Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and Perl.

Elastic MapReduce will be appealing to users that need to scale up quickly as the High CPU plans allow users to run up to hundreds of instances running Hadoop and instances can be run concurrently. Amazon EC2 and S3 have to date been very stable and the fact that EC2 and S3 are integrated with Elastic MapReduce and that instances can be managed via the AWS Console or command line are key selling points.

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Amazon

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