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.

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'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

Do Govt. Laws Present Undue Risk To Cloud Computing?

(updated 12/12)  There has been a bit of a buzz regarding access to citizen and company data by the U.S government and the associated risks of Cloud computing in that regard.  I’m talking about the recent searches of gMail and Facebook of WikiLeaks supporters.  Paul Carr’s Tech Crunch article  and  David Linthicum’s InfoWorld story refer to these events.  In addition, the New York Times ran a story on secret F.B.I. subpoenas. When you move your data to the cloud, you lose some control over government access to your data during what may (or may not) be a legal search.  I touched briefly on this last year (here), in my article on the Challenges and Risks to Cloud Computing.  For the purposes of this article, I’ll assume your data is still in the US, not a foreign country data center, which poses an entirely different set of risks.

At issue: an individual or business person’s ability to stop an illegal search of their data when law enforcement shows up at your data’s door (that “door” being the door to your cloud provider’s data center).  There is also worry that Fourth Amendment rights will be trampled on because application data has moved to the cloud.  Because your data now lives in a data center, presumably operated outside your company or home, you lose the ability to know when you are being searched, to stop warrantless searches, and to analyze the warrant and validate that the search is, in fact, legal.  Unless you (or preferably your lawyers) are at the data center during the search, you can’t ensure that it adheres to the boundaries set by the warrant to prevent fishing expeditions.  At the same time, you may lose control of privacy or company secrets as part of that search.  How do you protect your Fourth Amendment rights if you don’t even know you are being searched?  If your data is co-located with other individuals or businesses that are being searched, how are you protected from information leakage when they are searched?

Cloud Management Tools Bring Sanity to Cloud Operations

A cottage industry of Cloud management tools has emerged to solve many of the issues companies face as they move to the cloud, like multi-cloud deployments, costs, governance, and security (see my earlier post).   I had the chance to sit in on a live demo of enStratus last week to see how they attack the issues mentioned above.  The enStratus cloud management solution provides a suite of tools for managing a cloud infrastructure, gaining control of costs and providing governance without sacrificing the agility the cloud can provide.

Plan Before You Cloud

IT has a history of solving problems, but in the process, creating new problems that must be dealt with in the future.  For example, back in the early days, IT helped the business digitize everything but as they did that, they ran into scaling issues, and then had to invent a way to store and access all of that data.  Businesses are moving to the cloud to lower costs, improve agility, and scale to meet new demands of their customers. But without proper planning, the potential to create a lot of new cleanup projects still exist when moving to the cloud.

Election 2012, A Case Study For Cloud Computing

There’s a lot of media coverage on the use of cloud computing by this year’s election teams and as a GigaOM article points out:

No matter if you voted for Red or Blue, you have to be impressed by the quick scaling up of systems, including applications, processes, and data to support the massive needs of the campaign.  This included spinning up the instances, operating them during the spikes of use, and spinning them down when not needed.  This is a great case study for the power and value of cloud computing.

For me though, it’s not just the “quick scaling up” but the ability to obtain this amount of computing just when you need it and move your costs to zero when the the campaign is over at a very low cost.  Before cloud computing the expense of deploying an entire data center’s worth of computing to do this would have been prohibitive and if a campaign did have the money to spend, the capability couldn’t be built fast enough.

Another factor that acts as an accelerant to cloud computing in this case  is mobility.  Campaigns had access to developers from all over the world, and built applications that connected candidates, voters and campaign workers via any internet connected device.  

-- Chris Claborne

Higher Risk in Data Loss than Security in the Cloud

In this article in InfoWorld, Gartner makes an interesting point.   Data loss is a bigger risk than security in the cloud.   They almost seem to intimate that  businesses using the cloud assume that they don’t need to have a backup and recovery plan if things turn ugly.

 Moving to the cloud doesn’t mean you can quit thinking about business continuity.  Whatever the service, IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS, you still need to understand what the backup and recovery plan is and how the vendor ensures recovery and up to what point in time.

Not So Fast NoSQL Evangelists

I found the comments in this InfoWorld article about the capabilities of MySQL vs a noSQL DB interesting.

"A lot of people think they have a big data problem, and a lot of times they don't," said Daniel Austin, who is the chief architect for PayPal. "They have an urge to find a big data solution to a problem, because it looks good."

I still wonder if companies like PayPal and Twitter are too closely tied to MySQL to pan it or if you can tile and shard your way to high performance without going to NoSQL.

Platform as a Service and Force.com

I haven’t written much about "Platform as a Service" (PaaS) up to this point but given Salesforce.com’s growing presence the buzz generated from annual user love-in, Dreamforce, this is a good time to talk about PaaS and Salesforce.  According to this article, Gartner predicts that PaaS platforms will grow from $900 million in 2011 to $2.9 billion in 2016, representing a 26.6 percent rise each year.

Although SalesForce.com (SFDC) is best known for its customer relationship management solution delivered as a service via a cloud, force.com is SFDC’s “platform as a service” offering.  By giving their customers a foundational component for sales and also providing an environment that allows customers to add on the pieces that they need while leveraging a common user interface, authentication framework, it accelerates the potential ROI to customers (and revenue streams for SFDC).  This article will review  PaaS, touch on the advantages, and then talk a little more about why PaaS at SFDC is such a powerful combination.