The Cloud Replacing Enterprise Hardware Vendors

In David Linthicum's latest article, he had this quote from Barclays to substantiate his claim that dollars will shift from hardware provider's to cloud:

Barclays, in its global technology outlook, has reached the same conclusion: "We believe the deflationary impact from the cloud ($1 spent on cloud infrastructure actually results in several dollars coming out of other IT end-markets) should prevent IT spending from growing meaningfully in 2014 and 2015. ... We believe global IT spending will remain challenged in the lower single-digit growth range."

In addition, according to 451 Group, IaaS revenue will jump at an annual rate of 57% through 2016!

Salesforce is taking it up a notch???

Last week we saw AWS VP James Hamilton talk about how they are hosting data, transactions, and raw compute for companies at a scale like we’ve never seen before.  Then he gave us a peek at how they do it, using custom servers, routers, power substations and software in order to achieve economies of scale and deliver incredible capabilities for pennies.  On Monday, Salesforce.com announces they are going toinstall HP servers for customers to use.  So, Salesforce is going to kill it (profit wise) with big iron they are buying from HP.  Hmmm, I wonder.

- Chris Claborne

Is the Apple A7 part of a Long Term Strategic Play?

This article by Simon Bisson at ZDNet points out that the Apple A7 chip that was just announced as part of the iPhone 5S (and most likely will carry over to the rest of the product line as they refresh) is bigger than a lot of people think.  I think he may be right.  The implications to a more secure OS is delightful.

With a virtualisation-ready processor in its new phone, Apple can now start to move iOS in the direction of a hypervisor-controlled sandbox environment, perhaps using a technology like Microsoft's research OS Drawbridge.
Here the operating system component of a VM is tailored to the application it is hosting – minimising the attack surface of each secure partition. Combined with a fingerprint sensor to identify users, Apple has the tools it needs to deliver biometric access control, allowing devices to support multiple users, with files and apps for one user hidden from another using hardware encryption.

This article in Apple Insider, is another good read.  It describes what the author thinks is Apple catching one of it's biggest competitors and the field flat footed.

-- Chris Claborne

Clouds Bringing Suite Rain (pun intended)

Clouds Bringing Suite Rain (pun intended)

According to an IDG survey, top IT Mgt. continues to see value in cloud.  The following is a portion of David Linthicum’s recent article on the topic.

Three takeaways emerge from this survey: Cloud computing does not have much of a downside, considering the largely positive response from this and other surveys. The bubble that many predicted does not seem to be coming any time soon. Indeed, the use of cloud computing seems to be more of an evolution and slower growing style of technology adoption, not a mass movement. Businesses are beginning to understand the true value that cloud computing can bring. This means the strategic use of business data and access to mission-critical enterprise applications they would not be able to afford, were it not for the cloud. That's a good development away from the initial focus on just cheaper infrastructure.

- Chris Claborne

Using Amazon Glacier

I’ve been wanting to test out Amazon Web Services (AWS) Glacier storage service since it was announced in August 2012.  If you’ve been reading my BLOG for a while, you’ll know that I am a little crazy when it comes to backing up my data.  The attraction of Amazon’s Glacier is low cost ($0.01/GB) and it’s high durability (11 9s).   I was waiting for some client side tools so that I could test (which I now have).  Windows based easy to use clients came out pretty quickly, FastGlacier was one of the first and has since seen a major release in the last month. I decided to give it a try and backup my family and client photos as well as music.  I think I have a strong use case for it and I’ve estimated that I can save $180+ per year by moving some of my archives to Glacier.  So, I’ll save some money while I’m having some fun.

Going All in on the Google Cloud

Mike Elgan of InfoWorld wrote an interesting article about what he learned by going all-in on Google Apps, gMail, etc. What's surprising is he decided to stay there.

You can't get the ultimate mobile computing experience by using nothing but Google products, but it's possible and enjoyable to use only Google products. I had a lot of fun with this experiment.

...

'm going all-in on cloud services, and sticking with Drive, Keep, and Docs, as I found them to be better than the alternatives I used previously.

Go here for Mike's full article.

-- Chris Claborne

aka Christian

Cloud Based Development Environments

[Updated 5/1/2014] In some ways, developers have done themselves a disservice in the tool department, like the shoemaker’s children going without shoes.  As a cloud user for some years now, I’ve always felt it was kind of strange that I have to setup a complex integrated development environment (IDE) on my workstation in order to develop for the cloud.  In addition, tools to push my code to the cloud platform for testing my cloud apps were missing. As a Google Docs user, I expect to have the same collaboration capabilities in my IDE.

This may be changing with the advent of cloud IDEs.    Mark Downey, a Product Manager at Codenvy, posted a comment to Infoworld saying that “they believe editing the code close to where it is meant to be executed provides countless advantages that have yet to be explored.... it’s just a matter of time before desktop IDEs are completely obsolete.”

When The SaaS Ship Sinks

I, like many others, received a letter from OfficeDrop, telling it’s customers they were closing the doors on the company.  To it’s customers, this means an eventual shutdown of their web software as a service (SaaS).  OfficeDrop is a cloud SaaS company that allows it’s customers to upload PDF documents (normally scanned documents) and then search for them after they are indexed on the OfficeDrop cloud servers.  The OfficeDrop service also allows it’s customers to send them the physical documents and then scans them as a service.  

HP Moonshot Servicability

I enjoyed this comment to the article Will HP Moonshot Ignite or fizzle.  Is this what cloud infrastructure is coming to?

PeterNic • 2 days ago

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Why are these even user serviceable? If they are cheap enough and plentiful enough, just give me a rack with hundreds of them... if any fail, bypass them, the same way as we bypass bad sectors on hard drives. This will remove a lot of the cost/sheetmetal and maintenance. Just a thought!

Collaboration, A Key Indicator of Performance

According to a report published in McKinsey Quarterly, “Givers take all: The hidden dimension of corporate culture”, corporate performance can predicted by how much employees freely share information, ideas and help one another.  Nowhere does it say that strong leadership, clear objectives and rewards aren’t factors but that the leading indicator is how much help and collaboration happens.  This article from TLNT covers many of the basics, but I’ve never seen anyone publish research with this perspective.

Total Cost of Local Compute

Do companies really know the total cost of local compute and storage?  This article in USA Today (hardly a tech mag) suggests that cloud is only lower cost in the short term or cap cost, renting vs. buying.  Cloud computing isn’t always lower cost but there are a lot of instances where it’s definitely lower cost.  I get the AWS model where you can closely match your compute costs to your demand when your demand is spiky.  What the article doesn’t cover is the TOTAL cost of local compute.  It’s NOT buying vs. renting.  Buying ties you down into a lot of long term costs.

Retooling for the Cloud

To truly utilize the new paradigm of cloud computing’s scalable architecture, developers need to rethink their application design from the ground up.  To leverage the lower cost of on-demand scalability (ability to scale only when needed) of cloud IaaS, applications need to be designed to run on multiple systems and assume that there are multiple implementations of that function doing the same thing.  Requiring a single instance of a class or function be running at a time eliminates scalability and introduces a single point of failure.

Amazon Dropping Prices Again

Amazon is dropping prices again.  Is the cloud prepping for hockey stick growth?  Maybe we are already there?   Another fun year in cloud computing coming your way.

- Chris Claborne