Tag Archive for ‘the Cloud’ rss

I Hate “Some Assembly is Required” Services!

Posted by Tom Lounibos on Mar 10, 2009. Leave a Comment

Recently, I read a blog that suggested that there were now only three players in cloud computing. They were listed as Platform vendors (PaaS), Infrastructure Vendors (IaaS), and Software Vendors (SaaS). It seemed logical to me, until I began to think that what do not want, is having to buy three services to do one thing and then to find a big sign reading “Some Assembly Required”.  I have always hated those three words at Christmas time, but perhaps I hate them even more when I’m at work. Then why is it, that when I buy many of the “Software as a Service” solutions out there these days, I then have to go out and buy the platform (Cloud) and infrastructure to run them on. Why isn’t software, infrastructure and platform all packaged and delivered as a single priced, easy to consume service? Isn’t that what cloud services were intended to be? Seems to me that we need a fourth category!

contact me at: tlounibos@soasta.com; twitter.com/lounibos

CLOUD: Performance Intelligence Delivers Certainty

Posted by Tom Lounibos on Mar 04, 2009. Leave a Comment

Tom Wailgum wrote an interesting piece in CIO Magazine this past weekend about enterprises “still crazy for BI after all these years”.  He notes that  companies still see business intelligence as transformational, but he also notes, many execs are still relying on their gut to make critical business decisions.  Take web site deployment for example. Even though web usage has risen to amazing levels in recent years and sites have become every organizations’ primary sales and marketing channel, we still push out new sites every day without a clue as to how they will perform in LIVE production. Don’t get me wrong, we all test our applications functionality, but rarely do we load and performance test these sites. Testing is so damn expensive. The fact is, more often then not, we don’t have a clue IF our NEW sales organization (our web sites) will actually  show up to work today. Where is the business intelligence in web deployment?

The answer could be found in Cloud Testing. First, we definitely need a new, affordable, and scalable test model that moves web performance analysis away from a simple math exercise. In the past,  if we had done any load testing (cost) we simulated only a fraction of the expected traffic to a site  (5%-10%).   Then, we would calculate what the impact of the other 95% of load would have on the site and application. A very inexact science, that has led to some pretty big and damaging headlines in the Wall Street Journal as many sites have crashed under stress and load. In another words, we need an affordable and scalable test model that allows us to regularly test 100% or 200% of our potential or expected load. Next, we need business intelligence tools specifically built to analyze the data that these tests produce.  Performance testing and monitoring produce huge amounts of data that needs to be analyzed to the tiniest detail. Finding the sources of latency and stress in applications and networks can be incredibly difficult if you have the wrong tools that only provide a single dimensional view of your results such as log files or excel spreadsheets. There is simply too much test data to review. What you really need are sophisticated BI tools that provide  an aggregated and correlated multi-dimensional view of the data in order to pinpoint and understand potential trouble spots. Given that our web sites are our new sales and marketing channels, web site deployment is an amazing area of uncertainty for all of us. We need a new testing model that delivers performance-based business intelligence before our sites go LIVE. We need CloudTest.

contact me at: tlounibos@soasta.com; twitter.com/lounibos

TechCRUNCH: The Gorillas are NOW in the Room

Posted by Tom Lounibos on Feb 28, 2009. Leave a Comment

Last November at a cloud computing conference here in the Valley, I mentioned to a friend that what I found most significant about that specific conference  was who wasn’t in the room. Of course, Amazon was there giving their terrific pitch, but none of the traditional giants were there in any significant way. Where were Microsoft, IBM, SUN, Google, HP, Dell, Oracle, and  Yahoo? After all, each had been making “place setting” pronouncements in the previous months regarding their emerging cloud offerings. There weren’t any CTO’s (except for Werner), no big name sponsorships, no big booths full of sales guys chatting up their new cloud offerings. They were all missing from this action . . . and, subsequently, the action was missing from that conference.  I felt a little like I was attending a John McCain town hall meeting when I knew O’Bama was packing a stadium in a city somewhere close by. Something was missing.

Well NOT anymore. Yesterday’s Cloud Computing conference put on by TechCrunch was cloud computing’s version of Oscar Night.  This time, all the Gorillas were in the same room, at the same time, and NOW all talking cloud.  In fact, loudly proclaiming “Software is Dead”, “Cloud is the new .com”,  ”Cloud is the Future of Technology”, etc.  Each statement made even more significant by who was making them . . . the CTOs of Google, Microsoft, SUN, Facebook, Rackspace, and even the CEO of Salesforce.com.  All proclaiming their long lasting love of the Cloud and cloud services. Now, all sitting at the same table smiling and making nice (although some did poke fun at each other a few times), laying out the future of cloud computing.  There were a few MIA’s even from this conference,  most notably  IBM and HP.  But, all in all, it was quite an impressive group as it was an illustrative moment in time for cloud computing. It was, for many young start-ups, a few large firms like Amazon, and  visionaries like Reuven Cohen who have been toiling for years on bringing us first Elastic then Cloud Computing . . . validation!  A significant sign that the Cloud “game” is changing.  I fully expect that this change will pick up some significant momentum on a global scale in the coming months. After all, everyone knows that you can’t start the really big party until the Gorillas arrive!

contact me at: tlounibos@soasta.com; twitter.com/lounibos

The Path to Enterprise Cloud Applications

Posted by Tom Lounibos on Feb 27, 2009. Leave a Comment

What would be a considered an enterprise cloud application anyway?  I heard someone suggest recently that the only enterprise applications that will move to the Cloud will be email. Really?   Clearly enterprises are just as concerned about Op EX cost these days as everyone else is, so a lower cost, highly scalable, deployment option like the Cloud would seem to be a pretty logical choice for enterprises as well. That is, if it wasn’t for those pesky concerns over the security, stability, and control of the Cloud as a platform. These issues just seem to freeze most enterprises from making the shift to this new option. However, eventually and despite these concerns, even the most conservative enterprise will get comfortable enough with this new idea and embrace it as it is just too compelling.  But, isn’t there some low hanging fruit (applications) right now that enterprises might want to consider sooner then later? After all, we are in a global recession.

So what are they . . . the most obvious is email and calendaring services. But there is also SOASTA’s cloud testing application. Testing really is the most perfect enterprise cloud application! Testing in the Cloud delivers all the benefits of cloud computing without any of the risk. When leveraging the Cloud as a test platform there is no reason to worry about data security because it’s not real data that is being used . . . it’s just test data. If the platform fails, there is no customer kick back because the customers are not real. If you decide you want to use a different PaaS to test, you just do it. You aren’t locked into a vendor. Seriously, if there was ever a perfect match for an enterprise application in the Cloud, it has to be testing. So, if your an enterprise company looking for a way to reduce your operational costs look to the clouds and start testing.

contact me at: tlounibos@soasta.com; twitter.com/lounibos

Cloud Adoption: It’s All About the Application

Posted by Tom Lounibos on Feb 26, 2009. 1 Comment

There has been a lot of  discussion recently about cloud adoption. Will the enterprise ever move to the Cloud? Will the Federal government move toward the Cloud to reduce spending? Is the Cloud ready for “prime time” in regards to security, interoperability, and control? These are all great topics and areas that do require our focus in the years to come. However, to some extent they are missing the point of what is actually happening in the real world. In a recent report posted by InformationWeek that surveyed 500 CIOs, over half the respondents in the U.S. indicated they are “already using cloud computing”. These were CIOs responding, not developers on Amazon or Google! Another recent survey found over 67% of U.S. companies “already” use cloud computing in the form of Gmail, calendaring, or CRM.  For all the posturing and positioning about the future of cloud computing, it appears the future is now at least for some companies.   Moving to the Cloud seems to depends more on the Application, then it does the Cloud platform!

contact me at: tlounibos@soasta.com; twitter.com/lounibos

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