Cloud in 2012? Start Planning Now

Thinking about utilizing cloud services in 2012 and want to start mitigating some potential risks today.  InfoWorld’s Tim Greene recommends that you start working over you network provider today.

Is Zoho's CRM App Growing Up?

Zoho “software as a service” (SaaS) company has always impressed me.  I use their Invoicing application and reviewed it last year.  According to InfoWorld’s Chris Kanaracus, Zoho is gunning for SalesForce.com with their latest upgrade to their CRM application.  Zoho is claiming they are making inroads into the CRM SaaS market that SalesForce.com is known for.   I like the fresh approach they take to their applications, making them more inviting, easier to understand than their stodgy old school counterparts. Looking at the flashy new capabilities, mobile access, and continious improvement without the hassle of upgrades, I can't help but think they are the next big force in small business solutions via SaaS.

I think that in 2012, we will continue to see more fireworks in the SaaS and infrastructure as a service” (IaaS) cloud industry.  

- Chris Claborne
 

Using Amazon’s AWS

In my last article, “Exploring Amazon’s Cloud IaaS & PaaS”, I introduced Amazon Web Services (AWS), and I used AWS to describe the terms “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS), and “Platform as a Service” (PaaS).  In order to better understand the value of AWS, I deployed a real world application.  In this article, I’ll step through how I deployed and scaled my example application on AWS and comment on where I found the greatest value to be.  If you haven’t read my first AWS article, “Exploring Amazon’s Cloud IaaS & PaaS”, I suggest you read it as an introduction to AWS.

Gartner Has First Ever IaaS Magic Quadrant Report

From ReadWrite Cloud's David Strom,  "Gartner Has First Ever IaaS Magic Quadrant Report"

A new Gartner Magic Quadrant report is available this week covering the public cloud computing vendors. Not surprisingly, AWS received top honors, although Terremark, Savvis and CSC were also praised. Bluelock, a smaller vendor, also got props. The report is very detailed in the usual Gartner manner and is a must-read for enterprise IT architects who are evaluating players in this space.

I don't have access to the report but am interested to read it.

Exploring Amazon's Cloud IaaS & PaaS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a large offering of various compute and applications services that I will use for this article to help describe what “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS) and “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) are.  

AWS is used by many large Internet companies like active.com, Ericsson, the guardian news, Yelp,  IMDB and others to deliver their web applications or services.  Although I’ve covered Software as a Service” and related benefits, risks, and some specific applications, this article will take the next big step into another side of cloud computing, using public scalable infrastructure to deploy your in-house applications.