Create them now and stifle innovation or create them later when it’s too late? That seems to be the breadth of the discussion on cloud standards today. Fortunately, the situation with cloud computing standards is not actually this muddy. In spite of the passionate arguments, the reality is that we...

More and more it’s becoming apparent that VMware and Amazon are headed for a serious collision.  Amazon is eager to capture more of the enterprise business market, VMware’s bread and butter.  Meanwhile, VMware is actively supporting a new crop of Amazon competitors with its recent vCloud Express release.  More importantly, what...

We’re in the midst of a monumental transformation of the IT space, namely cloud computing, and the transformation is stalled.  Or, it was, until today when VMware released their vCloud API at VMworld under an extremely permissive license.  A FAQ is here. So what’s the big deal you say? What’s...

An infrequently talked about, but very important aspect of cloud computing performance is ‘oversubscription’.  Oversubscribing is the act of selling more resources than you actually have to customers on the assumption that the average usage will be equal to or less than the actual resources on hand.  This is the...

Spectrum of Cloud Computing Providers There will soon be two major paths for cloud computing providers: commodity and premium.  If you read my series, Cloud Futures, you’ll know that I broke down cloud service providers into three major old_categories: service clouds, consumer clouds (previously ‘commodity’)[1], and focused clouds. In retrospect...

There was recently a small brouhaha on twitter regarding whether a ‘private’ or ‘internal’ cloud is really a ‘cloud’.  There was a very high level of chatter including a ton of the clouderati such as @jamesurquhart, @samcharrington, @boblozano, @jesserobbins, @ITKLcameron, @samj, and many more.  The argument of the folks who...

Frequently new readers are curious about this blog. It helps when I periodically summarize the most popular blog postings. So, without further ado, here’s the top 5 posts in the first half of ‘09. Be sure to also check out my top blog post summary of 2008 if you haven’t...

It can be confusing to understand how to scale computing systems, but it’s not rocket science.  There are really only two main axes of scale: out and up.  Closely related to the axis of scale is the general type of architecture: centralized or decentralized.  In this article I’m going to...

Today SOASTA announced their performance certification program for websites.  This is a pretty interesting development as far as I am concerned.  I’ve watched SOASTA from afar since their inception and I have always though it was a particularly clever use of cloud computing.  Their approach is essentially to use someone...

The vast majority of web applications have what I call The Secret Sauce Problem.  Every commercial web service of any kind needs to be differentiated in order to be interesting and attractive to customers.  There isn’t any kind of differentiation in a typical 3-tier or N-tier[1] web application stack. This...