What is this event?

Now in its third year, CloudSlam® covers the latest trends in the world of cloud computing. The conference has evolved from a purely virtual format to a hybrid Cloud Computing conference spread over 5 days. Day 1 of the conference will take place at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Campus in Mountain View California on Monday 18 April followed by 4 days of virtual cloud content.

Conference tracks for 2011 will include technology & innovation, implementation experiences, social & mobile cloud, security in the cloud and cloud for business.

How can you win Free Pass?

Simply click the button below or like the new OnDemand Beat Facebook Fan Page, for a chance to win the pass. The fifth person to like the page will win a pass to CloudSlam’11.

If you don’t win the pass you can still receive 10% off either the VIP or virtual conference fee by using discount code OnDemandBeat when registering.

What you need to know

1. The Winner will receive 1 virtual conference pass (Day 1 VIP pass not included)
2. The CloudSlam® Conference Pass Winner will be contacted via email.
3. Contest deadline is Wednesday April 13th and the winner will be announced on the OnDemand Beat Fan Page on Thursday April 14th.
4. No purchase is necessary to win.

Good Luck!

Elastic Beanstalk runs with Amazon EC2, S3, Elastic Load Balancing, Auto-Scaling and Simple Notification Service on the Amazon Linux AMI.Elastic Beanstalk allows a developer to upload an application to Elastic Beanstalk using the AWS Management Console, API’s or the AWS toolkit for Eclipse and automatically deploys and provisions the necessary services required to run the application.

Developers upload their applications via a standard war file and after deployment the application can be accessed via an auto generated or custom url.

Management features that are standard in Beanstalk once an application is deployed include CloudWatch monitoring metrics, email notifications, runtime deployment of applications and the ability to restart Amazon EC2 application servers with one command.

After deployment, developers can adjust default application settings such as database options, storage services and load balancing with Elastic Beanstalk. One of the key features that will appeal to developers is the ability to pass environment variables through the Elastic Beanstalk console.

The beta iteration of Beanstalk is ready for Java Developers running Apache Tomcat and has initially been launched only in the AWS United States East Region. Once out of beta Amazon expects to release Beanstalk to multiple regions and for additional development stacks such as PHP.

The release of Beanstalk might affect the fortunes of PAAS providers like Rightscale, Elastra and Cloudkick (Although Cloudkick  was recently acquired by Rackspace) who have created Cloud Management solutions specifically for Amazon AWS. Pricing for Elastic Beanstalk service is free and users only pay for the managed resources such as EC2 and S3 that their deployed application use on AWS.

One of the issues that has held cloud computing back from even faster market adoption is a lack of understanding by rank and file business and consumer users of the benefits of moving to the cloud.

Spearheaded by Box.net, CEO’s of a number of prominent cloud vendors have banded together to talk about the benefits of the cloud with the; I Choose the Cloud, initiative. Other vendors who have joined include Xobni, SocialText, Zuora, Get Satisfaction and Freshbooks.

Will be interesting over time to see if other cloud vendors join this or similar initiatives as the cloud continues to becomes even more mainstream.

Randy Hearn, a senior research analyst with Info-Tech Research Group; gives food for thought on how PAAS vendors can make their solutions more appealing to developers.

Microsoft announced a number of new capabilities and services for Windows Azure at its PDC10 conference.

New capabilities and services include:

• Support for Virtual Machine (VM) roles. VM roles will allow users to move their legacy applications to Windows Azure eliminating the need to change code to work within Windows Azure

• Remote Desktop Functionality will finally be offered on Windows Azure. The capability to log into a running Cloud Instance has been standard on most competing PAAS offerings for some time.

• Windows Azure Connect allows users to configure IP based virtual networks between Windows Azure and on premise systems.

• “Extra Small” and “Small” Windows Azure Instances priced from .05 cents per hour per server. With the recent roll-out of competing free usage tiers from Amazon and free ITiS solutions from start-ups like Cloud Share, Microsoft might want to think about offering free usage tiers as well for this market segment.

• Windows Azure Marketplace is billed as an online market for developers and partners to buy and sell, services, training, applications and code components.

Amazon rolls out new functionality for it various Cloud services at a fever pace and the slew of new features for Windows Azure should help Microsoft keep pace in the PAAS space; especially amongst its core Enterprise and Developer users.

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.

Microsoft technical strategist  Steve Marx outlines the  Windows Azure Platform for developers in the following video.

The Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang and Ray Wang will publish a SaaS Customer’s Bill of Rights next week. The Bill Of Rights is a collaborative effort that has input from a veritable who’s who of SaaS providers and thought leaders.

The SaaS Bill of Rights follows similar efforts/reports that have been created for Cloud Computing and ERP customers.

The timing of the SaaS Bill Of Right’s is fortuitous as new SaaS deployments are gaining more traction by the month in both large and SMB enterprises.

The document will be published under Creative Commons so that should give others a chance to lend their real world contractual and service experiences to the Bill of Rights.

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″

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