Dear Google, Your Cloud Is Great, but..Here Is a Little Feedback

Dear Google, Your Cloud Is Great, but..Here Is a Little Feedback

gcplogoAs a developer with fifteen years of experience in IT, I’ve dedicated the past five years to working with the cloud. I’ve been involved with cloud services from AWS cloud (since 2010) and Azure. A bit over nine months ago, I started working almost exclusively with Google Cloud (GCD) and Google Compute Engine as part of a consulting project I led. The project involved building a backend for a high performance web application. At first, the customer thought to use their own data center, which I discouraged. Then, Google approached them and offered a package that included free support and better pricing for their services, which the customer agreed to take.
I’ve been working on this project for a few months now and in many ways, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has been great to work with. However, it’s the first time that I’ve seen such great challenges compared to my experience working with other clouds. It feels like these challenges stem from Google’s isolated development culture, with their “my way or the highway” approach. In this article I would like to address these thoughts and provide you with a few suggestions.
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Surviving in the Public IaaS Cloud Market

Surviving in the Public IaaS Cloud Market

bezoswernerIf we look at market growth rates and the concentration of power within a handful of providers, using the terminology coined by Geoffrey Moore, it could easily be argued that the public IaaS cloud market is in the tornado and approaching Main Street. Despite a lack of publicly available market share data, for many in the industry, it seems like a two or three-player race, with one clear “gorilla”: Amazon Web Services (AWS).
In this article I will attempt to briefly characterize the competitive positioning of the key players in the public IaaS market, and highlight some of the alternative strategies used by other providers to carve their own niches. The question that needs to be kept in mind is, can anyone else survive in the face of the steep competition presented by the two or three American mega-clouds?
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Software Load Testing: A Perfect Match for the Cloud

Typhoon.jpgThe cloud has allowed modern, web-scale IT companies, like Airbnb and Netflix, to grow and flourish into booming enterprises all over the web. With its flexibility and efficiency, it supports the demand of an organization’s growth from zero to millions of users, allowing them to prepare for this potential growth, as well. Before the cloud, simulating millions of concurrent users and running scalability, stress, or stability tests was very hard to implement, if not impossible. Cloud technology has brought software testing, especially performance testing, to a whole new playing field.

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Cloud Model 2014: Hybrid, Google, Brokerage, Startups and The Enterprise

I am OnDemand Predictions2013 has been incredibly eventful for the cloud industry, mostly for making itself an eminent presence in the mainstream IT market. Businesses of all sizes have made their ways to the cloud, confirming my 2013 predictions. Government agencies worldwide take the cloud seriously, as demonstrated by the CIA’s contract switch over to Amazon from IBM. AWS has proven its rapid pace of innovation and has introduced great leaders who have completely replaced the concept of sluggish IT servers with instances. While the market is still small, I believe it will take over the IT market sooner than some of us think. I am not alone in my forecast… another analyst predicted that AWS will become a $50B business in 2015, which means it will multiply 12 times its size from last year. So, have a look at my 2013 predictions and read on to see what 2014 has in store for the world of cloud computing. (more…)

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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
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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.

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Newvem's April Webinar

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Dear IAmOnDemand reader, I would like to personally  invite you to join an interesting webinar that will take place this  Wednesday, April 3rd. 

As part of my job at Newvem, I have assembled a power-house panel of some of the top thought-leaders in cloud computing to discuss the importance of a healthy cloud, focusing on cost efficiency, risk tolerance, and resource optimization.
Moderated by my great cloud colleague Patrick Pushor, CTO and founder of  CloudChronicle.com, panelists include –

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The Cloud in HP’s Cloud (Part 2): HP Discover, the Enterprise and AWS Cloud

imageLast month I attended HP Discover (disclosure: my participation was funded by Ivy World). The IT war already started however HP stands still not taking initiatives and real risks as true leaders should take. At the three-day conference I learned why some companies don’t last and why this IT giant is at a great risk of losing in this new era IT battle. This is a story of a lasting company that might have already lost.
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Who Stole my CPU? A Few Basics on CPU Steal Time

One of the most important features of the cloud is the sharing of resources by multi-tenants.

Without sharing and being able to optimize utilization of resources, the cloud operator can’t provide scalability and support “economies of scale” for its business.

The IaaS public contains its “cloud magic” as well as real hardware such as computing, storage, and network devices. The utilization of these resources should be optimized by meeting demand (by time), hence they must be shared between the cloud consumers.

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The IaaS Management Market: Evolution, Vendors and More

A lot has already been said about the false cloud use where the IaaS platform utilized as an hosting extension of the IT organization’s data center and not taking advantage of the elasticity benefits to generate a cost effective and scalable IT operation. Using the public IaaS whether it is Amazon, Rackspace or any other vendor means using a highly dynamic environment which presents an increasing complexity hence loss of control. Checking the list below I can say that cloud (including all its layers IaaS, PaaS and SaaS) control basically contains the same aspects as the good old system management.

What is “System management” ?
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