Weekly roundup

These are the Cloud Computing news or announcements that I found most interesting this past week, in no particular order:

• IBM's announcements at Lotusphere. I think this is a brillinat move by IBM: incrementally expanding their current offering to leverage leading cloud services. 
  
• The New York Times reports that CISCO plans to launch a computer server with virtualization software. This is an intriguing move. I'm not sure I can see CISCO being very successful in this market but they are a world class company and I'm looking forward to see how it plays out.
  
• This article on the Business Mirror describes how the US Department of Defense is looking to leverage the lessons learned from leading Cloud Computing providers.
• The New York Times released their Best Sellers API. This is a nice addition to their Congress, Movie Reviews, Campaign Finance and Community APIs. 
  

Challenges for Cloud Computing adoption

Bernard Golden wrote a great article on "The Case Against Cloud Computing". In this article he cites several interesting challenges slowing the adoption of Cloud Computing in the enterprise, along with his thoughts on how they will be addressed. 

Several months ago I was watching a presentation by Google's Jeff Ragusa, and he made a point that really caught my attention. Many years ago the information technology available to corporations or governments was significantly superior to anything available to consumers. But over the past 10 or 15 years there has been a significant change. Open standards and economies of scale have put powerful technology on the hands of consumers and small businesses. Today, as Jeff points out, there are many instances where small business or individuals are able to deploy solutions faster, easier and cheaper than many leading corporations. 

This brings me back to some of Bernard's points. I agree with him that most of the challenges that he mentions will be overcome over time. But I think the solutions will be the result of different approaches, different laws and different expectations. I think the technical evolution will foster a business evolution. Processes, regulations and business models will change. These changes will come not as a way to adapt to the cloud but as a way to harness its power.

Cloud Computing and SOA

In a blog posting earlier this week David Linthicum writes about the synergies between SOA and Cloud Computing. He mentions that "... the real value of cloud computing is the ability to identify services, data, and processes that can exist outside the firewall in somebody else's data center"

This is an interesting thought. While I tend to agree that one of the benefits of Cloud Computing is the ability to outsource resource management (in this case data center capacity), in my mind the true value of cloud computing goes far beyond. 

The true value of cloud computing is that it enables the creation of never before seen applications. The scalability, openness and speed to market are already reshaping the traditional monolithic and rigid corporate applications. This will be a transformational change. Enabling and supporting this transformation is the true value of Cloud Computing.

David also mentions that "... one can consider Cloud Computing the extension of SOA out to cloud delivered resources ...". The way I see it, Could Computing is the ultimate instantiation of Service Oriented Architectures. I think software architectures like REST and programming frameworks like Ruby On Rails will drive the evolution of SOA towards ROA (Resource Oriented Architectures) like Sam Ruby and Leonard Richardson like to call it. Not really an extension but rather an evolution. 

Google Developer Conference

Google has opened up registration for  Google I|O, Google's yearly event for software developers. This year the key topics will include Android, App Engine, Chrome, Google Web Toolkit and the AJAX APIs among others.

Here you can find session videos and slides from last year's event. I have found them to be a very valuable resource. Enjoy.

About this blog

Over the past several months I have become extremely interested in cloud computing. I am marveled at the potential of the programmable web and elastic computing resources. I believe these technologies will enable a fundamental transformation of corporate IT applications and infrastructure. This blog will contain informal thoughts and observations about Cloud Computing, Mahups and Analytics. From time to time I will post links to news articles and resources that I find interesting.

The views and opinions expressed in this pages are strictly mine.