Datapipe Acquires Newvem: My Take

newvem we analyze you optimize I began my journey in the world of cloud computing roughly about 9 years ago, leading cloud and SaaS products and development teams. Two years ago, as part of my position as Cloud Evangelist for Clicksoftware, I had the pleasure of meeting two progressive entrepreneurs, Zev Laderman and Ilan Naslavsky.  At that time, they had just begun developing cutting edge technology that supported AWS cloud users, optimizing usage and utilization. They had asked me to test this innovation, which was in its early alpha stage. So, being the optimistic and supportive early cloud adopter that I am, I immediately gave them the AWS keys (back then, you had only one option – the full right keys). Ilan, who came up with the idea, went over the AWS account Newvem’s analysis with me.  During his explanation, we came across a single Windows SQL EC2 instance that sat underutilized in the region of Japan.  Apparently, it had been running for nearly 5 months, resulting in approximately $6000 worth of Amazon operating costs. Eventually I managed to save around 40% of the AWS bill (tens of thousands of dollars).
(more…)

Continue ReadingDatapipe Acquires Newvem: My Take

The Purely Public Cloud Deployment: The Perceived Risk

In this post series, I will raise some basic questions and will delve deeply into this topic to debate the common resistance to what I call “pure cloud deployment”.
Let’s begin with a leading question: Can’t the hybrid economy model live within the public cloud? From the enormous number of conversations with top cloud thought leaders, CIOs, startups, and the like, it seems that the answer is YES. 
The Pure Public Cloud
(more…)

Continue ReadingThe Purely Public Cloud Deployment: The Perceived Risk

Ravello Systems: The MVNO of Cloud

Ravello Systems LogoThe cloud market is young, despite AWS’ growth and current worth of a few billion dollars. Most of the enterprise’s IT resources are still hosted on the organizational premise of using VMware hypervisor. The enterprise hybrid cloud challenge is hidden in the cloud utility model’s basic notion of hardware as software, whereas legacy application performance and usages are still based on physical resources capabilities. This difference is the greatest factor when it comes to discussing the evolution pace of the `enterprise grade cloud`. The CIO today is required to show cloud adoption and IT operations’ efficiency. This is consequentially triggering new startups to evolve in efforts to facilitate IT resources to close this existing gap. What follows is a story of such a startup that, in my opinion, has a real chance at becoming a leader in this intermediary cloud adoption phase and the hybrid cloud ultimate enabler, Ravello Systems.

(more…)

Continue ReadingRavello Systems: The MVNO of Cloud

The CloudChronicle Show: VMware, Ravello and Openstack (birthday party)

cloudchronicleI recently joined forces with  Patrick Pushor of CloudChronicle.com to discuss timely news in Cloud Computing.

In this episode we discuss VMWare. Based on recent article in GigaOm, “VMware Hotseat Getting Hotter by the Minute”. We end up  discussing how the virtual machine changed its nature to become a cloud instance and how the cloud quickly takes the place of the expensive traditional VMWare layer. That takes the discussion straight to an interesting new startup –  Ravello  that already made start up financing round of $26M . Ravello allows you to encapsulate a complete application (load balancers, app servers, web servers, databases, etc.) AND it’s environment (networking, storage, etc.). The result is complete portability across clouds and between on-premise and public clouds.

Continue ReadingThe CloudChronicle Show: VMware, Ravello and Openstack (birthday party)

Who are you, Cloud Broker?

cloud value chain bgCloud brokers were recognized and described by Gartner analysts as the `Intermediary services that support fast cloud adoption`. From their customers’ perspectives cloud brokers are the system integrators (SI) or the `cloud enablers` that support fast adoption and maintenance of cloud technologies. For example, the independent software vendor (ISV) can benefit greatly from a cloud managed service provider (MSP) starting with integrating into the underlying cloud infrastructure, all the way up to the offering stack wrappers, such as service provisioning methodologies’ implementation. From the cloud provider’s perspective, cloud brokers are key customers, value-added resellers and aggregators of its cloud services.
In this article, I cover the perceptions, evolution and future of cloud brokerage in great detail.
(more…)

Continue ReadingWho are you, Cloud Broker?

Amazon, Microsoft and Google: The Cloud Leading Trio

The Cloud Leading TrioFollowing several discussions with fellow bloggers and industry executives, I found it quite fitting that the natural cloud leaders are the top software and web giants: Google, Microsoft and Amazon. While Amazon’s AWS is The public cloud today Google recently reported that it is doubling its office space near Seattle, just miles from the campuses of Amazon and Microsoft, in order to expand its cloud technology team and engineers. Over two years prior to these Google’s expansion news, Microsoft reported that 90% of its R&D investment was earmarked for cloud technology. Last month they finally announced that Windows Azure Cloud Services now support auto-scaling. For these reasons and more, the following points will strengthen the trivial perception that cloud technologies should and will prosper in the hands of this software giant trio.
(more…)

Continue ReadingAmazon, Microsoft and Google: The Cloud Leading Trio

The Inevitable Cloud Outage: 5 Key Essentials to Safe Guard Your Application

image
A while back, I was starting up an EC2 instance on the AWS cloud when it entered an endless restart loop. All the application deployment efforts we’d made (installation and service configuration) over two weeks just went down the drain. So we called support. The support rep redirected us to his team leader who simply told us that, as indicated in the SLA, we had to abide by the shared responsibility model and they were not liable for our loss.
(more…)

Continue ReadingThe Inevitable Cloud Outage: 5 Key Essentials to Safe Guard Your Application

Enterprise Grade Cloud Enabled by the Ecosystem

While investing in building new data centers all over the world and creating the management overlay in order to be able to sell their hardware, IaaS operators are also relying on their ecosystem to support the evolving enterprises that go to the cloud (e.g. the “Enterprise Grade Cloud”).

API First – The move to the cloud pushes the data center to re-invent itself within the new environment. It is a fact that, although the cloud is a pure revolution (at least in MHO), terms such as SLA, TCO and ROI are still valid in this new IT era. Thanks to industry leaders such as Salesforce.com that realize the notion of “API first”, vendors such Amazon cloud present new capabilities first through their APIs. In this way, the cloud operator platform enables development of its ecosystem.

(more…)

Continue ReadingEnterprise Grade Cloud Enabled by the Ecosystem

Guest Post: The Case for NoOps

No OpsSomething that amuses me is the fact that 80% of so-called “Introduction to AWS” stuff is mainly geared at EC2. While I don’t have any problem with it, I think they’re missing the main point in Cloud as a full stack platform, which is to manage more and maintain less.
Let me explain this further: I’m a huge fan of NoOps, even before the name was coined. What we’ve learnt from using AWS Services like S3, Dynamo, and the SNS/SQS Sisters, is that managers actually LOVE not having to consider additional servers to maintain. But how did we get to this point?

In the Beginning…

(more…)

Continue ReadingGuest Post: The Case for NoOps

5 Key Essentials of Cloud Workloads Migration

imageThe benefits of migrating workloads between different cloud providers or between private and public clouds can only truly be redeemed with an understanding of the cloud business model and cloud workload management. It seems that cloud adoption has reached the phase where advanced cloud users are creating their own hybrid solutions or migrating between clouds while striving to achieve interoperability values within their systems. This article aims to answer some of the questions that arise when managing cloud workloads.

(more…)

Continue Reading5 Key Essentials of Cloud Workloads Migration