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Just Blogging -
Platform as a Service & Cloud Computing
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Finally, an open initiative with industry support for cloud computing. Until now, several cloud vendors were taking advantage to be first movers, and proposing technology to lock customers into their platforms.
RackSpace has proposed the project OpenStack: http://openstack.org.
... and the technology is backed by: Rackspace, NASA, Citrix, Dell, NTT, Data, PEER 1, SoftLayer, Rightscale, Cloud.com, iomart Group, Opscode, Puppet Labs, FathomDB, ANSO, CloudKick, Zenoss, Limelight, Enstratus, Cloudscaling, Scalr, AMD, Intel, Autonomic Resources, Riptano, Zuora, Nicira, Spiceworks, Sonian, and CloudSwitch.
It's focused to "to allow any organization to create and offer cloud computing capabilities using open source software running on standard hardware". So it's very infrastructure specific. I hope they'll fulfill the initial purpose and move up along the stack.
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Last Updated ( Monday, 19 July 2010 12:29 )
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Just Blogging -
Shaking Enterprises
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All the cloud marketing is forcing a public review of all computing concepts... now it's time of... databases. SQL.
SQL language rules the current generation of databases. Since its birth (1970), it became the most widely used language for relational databases. We can fairly say SQL is well structured and with a solid foundation, very matured. Today, it's omnipresent. We are talking about MySQL, Oracle, SQLServer, etc. Everyone in the computing business has created at least some tables to model a system.
When I said SQL has a solid foundation, I mean the language is formally proved to be consistent (ACID properties), to guarantee transactions in order to preserve the information. The problem comes when we try to keep the consistency in a networked and distributed environment.
In a cloud fashion, there's a movement claiming for no more SQL, NoSQL. "NoSQL is a movement promoting a loosely defined class of non-relational data stores that break with a long history of relational databases.". So we have to forget the nice SQL place, and begin to think about Blobs (big large binary objects), data distribution, clustering, and redundancy.
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To name some actors, we have several categories:
- Wide Column Store / Column Families (e.g. Hadoop / HBase, Cassandra)
- Document Store (e.g. CouchDB, Jackrabbit)
- Key Value / Tuple Store (e.g. Amazon SimpleDB, Azure Table Storage)
- Eventually Consistent Key Value Store (e.g. Amazon Dynamo, Voldemort)
- Graph Databases (e.g. Neo4J)
- Object Databases (e.g. Objectivity, Gemstone)
- Grid Database Solutions (e.g. GigaSpaces)
- XML Databases (e.g. EMC Documentum xDB)
- other databases (e.g. IBM Lotus/Domino)
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Hype comes from vendor-oriented technology, trying to standardize a solution (as open source project... or not). Also, we are talking about young technologies, being developed along versions (missing features or performance issues are frequent). At the beginning, most of them were developed for a specific internal need, and further developed.
In our company, OQUMA, we have successfully implemented Jackrabbit as our core document management technology. The experience was smooth, and it's works pretty fine. Also, (very important) there's a wide ecosystem of companies working with it (Day Software, Nuxeo, Hippo, JBoss GateIn + EXO, Drools Guvnor, etc)
To be fair, SQL is always to be between us, because it's proved to be solid and solves the most frequent scenario. So, now the misleading term "nosql" is translated by the community mostly to "not only sql".
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 11 May 2010 11:16 )
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Just Blogging -
Platform as a Service & Cloud Computing
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Following the excellent thread of articles from ArsTechnica, now they publish "Cloud platform choices: a developer's-eye view". In the overview, we can find the state of the art for a tech business development in the cloud. As bullet point we can have a tech business running on:
- A DIY model (buying servers, building a network, etc)
- Traditional hosting/dedicated services
- Cloud-based Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) (e.g. Amazon or Rackspace)
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) (e.g. Google's App Engine or Saleforce.com's Force.com)
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To add a note to the original article, thinking to begin small, in an entrepreneur or SMB context:
A "DIY model" is out of the question, too expensive and complex. There's no way to leverage in time the initial costs. It's better to relay on someone.
"Traditional hosting/dedicated services". It's already commoditized. There's a lot of price choices, satisfied (or not) customers, opinions, etc. A whole market.
"IaaS" (Amazon or Rackspace)... Immature ... Only for experts / early adopters. My advice, begin small... E.g. dumping part of your web server static files... and evaluating the cost. The question is: Which is the benefit between a traditional dedicated server vs. a fully 24x7 deployed instance?
"PaaS"... If IaaS is immature, PaaS is only for hardcode innovators. There's no standard to compare implementations, no previous experience, and you are going be locked in with one vendor.
So, to be practical, go ahead with the traditional services, and keep an eye on the IaaS competitive new offering.
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 24 February 2010 16:16 )
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About my Blog -
Lost & Found
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 Just a quick note. United Nations Climate Change Conference Copenhagen 2009 took place at a 0º location. A curious place to talk about climate change and global "warming"..... you know... It was snowing. 
But when we talk about climate change, It's not only about "warming". Also, the climate change is about severe weather changes in the extremes.
A week after the conference, with a sense of irony, a freeeeezing storm is on the north hemisphere.
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Last Updated ( Monday, 21 December 2009 16:33 )
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Just Blogging -
Shaking Enterprises
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A quick note from the daily news, just to remember it before a laptop / netbook buying decision investing your full salary into a new gadget, this paper from SquareTrade Research has warranties data about malfunction rates:
| Manufacturer |
Malfuction Rates |
| Asus |
15.6 % |
| Toshiba |
15.7 % |
| Sony |
16.8 % |
| Apple |
17.4 % |
| Dell |
18.3 % |
| Lenovo |
21.5 % |
| Acer |
23.3 % |
| Gateway |
23.5 % |
| HP |
25.6 % |
Source: SquareTrade Research: Nearly 1 in 3 Laptops fail over 3 years
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Last Updated ( Friday, 20 November 2009 12:00 )
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Just Blogging -
Shaking Enterprises
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Yesterday, I was talking with Marta Cruz, from Nextperience. This is the brief review about the chat (to don't forget it ;-) ):
I've been reading The Innovator's Dilemma, by Clayton M. Christensen. According to the author, it's very difficult for a traditional company to innovate its business. Several examples along history support the idea. E.g. Hard Disk Industry, Mechanical Excavator Industry, and Minimill Steel Technology.
In a legacy business, the value network is built for a purpose. It can not be changed to support a disruptive technology.
When a disruptive technology is taking its first step, it's going to be incomplete, not ready for prime time. The legacy customers are not going to see with good eyes the new idea. Management is not going to be supportive for wasted budget in a new field; refurbished ideas are going to win. The scenario is posed to support projects oriented to "update" old technologies.
So, new technologies are developed by new companies. The new company has no other choice to develop its new  business (cutting the old ties). Even with imperfections, the company will find a market to survive. In the mean time, it will improve the innovation to better compete and win new market. At the end, it will surpass the old technology.
SaaS is growing based on new companies understanding how to adapt the software to be selling as a service. It's a paradigm shift. It's easier to say it, than to apply it. (Remembering the ASP Bluff from the .com era)
Traditional software companies have no good chances. They are fighting in a new arena with a legacy structure and narrowing revenues; trying to keep their traditional customers happy, reuse the current bolts, and cutting costs.
If we are standing in a new company with brand new ideas, let's cut the old ties. We have to forget the habits, and rethink the business for the new customer (I'd like the idea of a natural-born digital native). Let's deconstruct the products and services and rebuild them around the digital native.
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 12 November 2009 21:00 )
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Just Blogging -
Platform as a Service & Cloud Computing
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Excellent article from ArsTechnica "The Cloud: a short introduction". Visual clues to understand the concepts:
- The lowest cloud tier is infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), which looks to the client like a dynamically scalable pool of compute and/or storage resources. The basic metered unit of IaaS is usually either a single virtual machine (e.g., Amazon EC2) or an abstract storage object of a certain size (e.g., Amazon S3).
- Next up the ladder of abstraction is platform-as-a-service (PaaS), which provides API-level access to a cloud infrastructure layer. Examples of PaaS are Google AppEngine and Force.com....
- The final and most popular tier of cloud service is software-as-a-service (SaaS). Google Apps and Salesforce.com are the two paradigmatic SaaS examples...
No need to write more, please, follow the link to the original article: ArsTechnica "The Cloud: a short introduction".
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 10 November 2009 11:55 )
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