Technical things go wrong. So what should businesses think about to ensure reliable and consistent operations with an added layer of complexity? The first step is recognizing that things will go wrong. Whether operations are in an in-house data center, an external commercial collocation data center, or in a hybrid cloud arrangement with workload split between in-house and cloud, the principles are the same. Cloud Isn’t New No matter what marketing would have us believe, […]
architecture
In his latest book, titled “Architecting the Cloud: Design Decisions for Cloud Computing Service Models,” Mike Kavis, a seasoned chief technology officer and IT architect, shows how cloud proponents can map out their cloud plans. Mike identifies the six key questions that are essential to cloud architectural planning: 1) Identify the problem statement (why): “The single most important question to answer,” Kavis observes. While cloud is a no-brainer for startups, more established enterprises need […]
Just as virtualisation has transformed data centre operations, the emergence of cloud computing represents a significant shift in the way IT operates applications today. Up until now, IT ops teams have been driven by a server-centric operations model, where the application itself played a secondary role. Cloud computing, on the other hand, is an application-centric operations model. As applications get more distributed, virtualised and pushed into the cloud, application developers and architects are faced with […]
Platform as a service (PaaS) is a core layer of the cloud computing architecture, and its evolution will affect the future of most users and vendors in enterprise software markets, according to Gartner. “With large and growing vendor investment in PaaS, the market is on the cusp of several years of strategic growth, leading to innovation and likely breakthroughs in technology and business use of all of cloud computing,” said Yefim Natis, vice president and […]
Zynga was created in 2007 with the idea that “play — like search, share and shop — would become one of the core activities on the internet.” Just 5 years later, the company has about 150 million monthly unique users in 166 countries, and has just filed for what could become one of the most important IPOs of 2011. There’s little doubt that Zynga is one of the fastest and most interesting growth stories on […]
Two recent events reminded us this spring that cloud computing infrastructures are vulnerable to the same genetic IT flaw that plagues traditional data center operations: everything fails, sooner or later. The failure modes of cloud vs. traditional data center architectures may differ in nature and frequency, but the threat is the same – outages, downtime, lost revenues and damaged customer trust. Ironically, these same recent events also highlight how cloud infrastructures, when managed correctly, actually […]
Cloud computing will become the dominate architecture for IT, according to a Colt study. The survey of 500 CIOs across UK, France, Germany, Spain and Benelux highlights that, while few businesses in Europe have company-wide implementations of cloud computing to date (16%), many believe the cloud will be their most significant IT operating method by 2014 (60%). The biggest challenge adopting cloud computing is ease of transition (58%). Quality assurance (55%), cost justification (55%) and […]
If you treat the cloud as a mere hardware weight-loss plan, you’ll soon find your datacentre piling back on the pounds. Cloud computing is not some voguish weight-loss programme. To get the most from it requires a transformation of the whole datacentre, not just individual applications, says Lori MacVittie. Consolidation and more efficient use of resources are behind many moves to the cloud. But for long-term success and control over costs, we need to view […]
When we first heard about cloud computing, public clouds got most of the attention. But as IT managers looked at the security risks of having data outside the corporate firewall, they turned their attention to private clouds, which analysts and various surveys suggest will get more enterprise investment in the next few years. But private clouds have their share of challenges too. There are management issues and operational processes to figure out. And, of course, […]