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Posts from the ‘Amazon Web Services’ Category

Infographic of Cloud Computing Outlook 2011

Today Cloud.com, Zenoss and BitNami released the results of a recent survey to determine the key IT objectives and obstacles to cloud adoption.  The survey respondent base consisted of the development communities from BitNami, CloudStack and Zenoss Core, all open source projects, and included more than 500 IT professionals.  For an analysis of the results see Cloud Computing Survey Finds Scalability and Cost Savings Driving Cloud Adoption on CloudTweaks.com.  The following Infographic is based on the survey results.

Gartner Search Analytics Shows Spike in Platform as a Service (PaaS) Inquiries in 2011

Trends of search terms from user accounts and topics of their inquiries form the catalyst of research agendas in many IT advisory firms.  At Gartner these two factors and others like them are commonly regarded as leading indicators of future IT spending.

Gartner has been delivering short analyses of these subject areas to clients in the form of reports, with the latest being Search Analytics Trends: Platform as a Service published on June 9, 2011.  This report covers user search activity from April, 2009 to March, 2011. For purposes of the report, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is defined as cloud application infrastructure services delivered as a service.  Gartner makes the point that PaaS includes no traditional software license and is expensed on a metered or utility basis.  Presented below is the time series of searches by month from the report.

A few key take-aways emerge from the report, and they are presented below:

  • Cloud Middleware Services including Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) are still unknown to many Gartner IT user clients.  As a result this area is seen with skepticism by many of their clients.  In studies of PaaS adoption from other analysts at Gartner and Forrester, it is evident that internal software development will make or break the credibility of PaaS initiatives for the long-term.
  • When Gartner IT users search for PaaS on the website and throughout online research, the four most common secondary terms are IaaS and SaaS (7.05%), Magic Quadrant (6.12%) and cloud (5.72%).  Clearly Gartner IT user clients are looking to define their own technology stack in this area and looking for a framework of reference of where PaaS fits into their own IT plans and architectures.  The competitive intensity across the analyst community will most likely go up as a result of the uncertainty many IT buyers have over PaaS.
  • The top three vendors that Gartner IT users search for are Microsoft (18%), Amazon (13%) and Tata (11%).  Additional vendors include IBM (11%), Salesforce.com (11%), SAP (7%), Google and Oracle (4%).

Bottom line: The key to PaaS adoption in larger enterprises, many of which are IT user clients of Gartner, is how successfully Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) clarify their value proposition and how their apps add value to the platform layer.

Performance Architecture for Cloud

Adrian Cockcroft, Director, Cloud Architecture at Netflix posted the following presentation, Performance Architecture for Cloud on Slideshare yesterday.  In this presentation, he shares the concerns Netflix has with AWS Load Balancer limitations, and how SimpleDB needs a memcached front end in addition to several other limitations Netflix has found.  He makes additional recommendations through the presentation deck that are worth checking out given the extent of the AWS outage over the last four days.  His brief but insightful coverage of Performance Tools Architecture and assertion that AWS is challenged by data center tools and metrics is prescient given the outage that occurred.

Of the hundreds of blog posts, videos and stories filed by industry and mainstream media on the AWS outage, the following are the three best I’ve seen.  Ray Wang’s post, Monday’s Musings: Lessons Learned From Amazon’s Cloud Outage is excellent along with George Reese’s thorough and excellent blog post  AWS Outage: The Cloud’s Shining Moment and Phil Wainewright’s Seven lessons to learn from Amazon’s outage.  All three posts are excellent for getting informed perspectives on the AWS outage and how companies need to plan and respond.

Building Powerful Web Applications in the AWS Cloud


Jinesh Varia, Technology Evangelist at Amazon.com created the following presentation to illustrate how Amazon EC2 instances are being used for creating high performance Web applications.   He relies heavily on the integration technologies that unify the AWS Cloud Stack, which is shown to the right.  To see a larger image of the stack, please click on it.

What is interesting about this slide deck is the detail it provides in explaining the more complex programming concepts of AWS.  He provides useful insights into how  Cloud Elasticity as an application platform component works through the use of detailed system-level diagrams.  For example slides 21 and 22 are examples that show how Cloud Elasticity can be achieved with AWS Scaling Zones.

There are system-level definitions of AWS workflows including security that rely on EC2 instances as well.  At 70 slides, this is an excellent overview of Web application development on AWS.

Data Without Limits – Insights from Werner Vogels of Amazon.com

O’Reilly Media’s Strata, Making Data Work Conference held February 1rst – 3rd, 2011 in Santa Clara, California was one of the most interesting and multifaceted events of the year.  Included were presentations on data science, real-time data processing and analytics, data acquisition and crowdsourcing, visualization, in addition to many other topics.  You can find the complete list of speaker slides and videos for the event at this link, Strata 2011 Speaker Slides & Videos.

What enriches this conference is the quality of the case studies presented.  Be sure to check out the presentation from DJ Patil of LinkedIn on Innovating Data Teams.  His discussion illustrates just how critical big data is to LinkedIn and how their approach to managing it enriches the user experience, and is transforming LinkedIn functionality at the same time.

One of the best overall presentations features Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com titled Data Without Limits.  The video is provided below and provides a glimpse into how pervasive AWS is becoming as a foundation for accessing, aggregating and transforming data in real time.

Building a High Performance Cluster with Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services has released the following video that provides a fascinating look at how straightforward it is to create, launch and monitor high performance cluster instances.

CPU utilization, disk I/O and network utilization are tracked as part of the metrics, and guidance on how to define hardware virtualization (HVM) is also defined.   Creating an 8-node, 64 core, ad hoc cluster is defined in the steps in this video with the intent of running a molecular dynamics simulation.

What is interesting about this video is how Amazon Web Services continues to show the practicality of its broad spectrum of server capacities on the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).   This is the first in a series of videos Amazon Web Services will be releasing on creating high performance clusters.  It’s worth checking out as the walk-through of steps shows how rapidly EC2 is maturing as an enterprise platform.

Implications for the Enterprise

EC2 has language-agnostic Web Services APIs that show potential for integrating legacy systems, databases, master data management (MDM), CRM and enterprise systems.  For enterprises that have data-centric operations and business models, EC2 could become the foundation of contextual search and role-based access of their legacy data.  Decades of data accessed via contextual search would provide insights that aren’t possible today using existing methods of data access, integration and analysis.

Bottom line: Creating high performance clusters in AWS EC2 shows potential to increase the accuracy and precision of business intelligence and analytics, and potentially solve the most complex data-driven challenges of social CRM.

Flickr attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vitroids/2586785504/

Roundup of Cloud Computing Forecasts and Market Estimates, 2011

During the last four months of 2010 the pace of published forecasts on cloud computing, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS forecasts quickened, yielding an eclectic and at times conflicting view of this emerging market. From the daily Google Alerts, RSS feeds, e-mail subscriptions and offers to buy research reports on cloud computing received, the pace is being matched by the variety of research being completed.


I did a quick review of the term “cloud computing” on Google Insights for Search, which produced the following graphic.  Google Insights for Search is an excellent analytical tool, as it will render a forecast based on previous results and show geographic concentrations.  Please click on the image to expand it for easier viewing.

Cloud Computing Was Gartner’s Most Popular Inquiry Topic Last Year

Gartner analyst Ben Pring sums it all up when he writes in the report, The Influence of Cloud in Outsourcing, 2010-2011 that cloud computing was the #1 area of inquiry for the advisory firm in 2010. The Google Insights analysis and the proliferation of reports underscore that point.

Before reviewing all these forecasts, it’s good to also take a look at the latest Gartner Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2010.  Back in October 2010, Intel started offering it on their website for free.  You can get a copy of the Gartner Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2010 by clicking here.

2011: When Cloud Computing Customer Results Became King

You can debate which area of the hype cycle the industry is on, yet after reviewing all these forecasts and projections the urgent need for real-world results is clear. As 2011 begins, any software company who has measurable results from customers, not just projections, of their cloud and SaaS-based strategies will be much further ahead of the mainstream.

Hopefully this year the research firms will cite more users than ever before an anchor these forecasts, as varied as they are, back to customer results.  That said, the energy and intensity going into forecasting the cloud computing and SaaS markets is impressive.

Here is the roundup of cloud computing forecasts and predictions for 2011:

  • Experton Group is forecasting that the German cloud computing market is forecast to grow from EUR 1.14 billion in 2010 to EUR 8.2 billion in 2015. This is equal to average annual growth of 48 percent. In 2015, cloud computing will account for around 10 percent of total IT expenditure in Germany. Around half of revenue in 2015 will be generated from cloud services, with a third coming from investment in cloud infrastructure, mainly data centres. The use of so-called ‘private clouds’ by businesses will account for EUR 2.6 billion in revenues by 2015, up from EUR 400 million in 2010. Source: http://professional.wsj.com/article/TPDMEUR00020101007e6a700061.html
  • Gartner analysts write in the report Predicts 2011: New Relationships Will Change BI and Analytics, that by 2013, 33% of business intelligence functionality will be consumed via handheld devices, and 15% of BI deployments will combine BI, collaboration and social software into decision-making environments. By 2014, 30% of analytic applications will use in-memory functions to add scale and computational speed. In addition, 30% of analytic applications will use proactive, predictive and forecasting capabilities and 40% of spending on business analytics will go to system integrators, not software vendors.  All of this is predicated on the security and scalability of cloud-based analytics.
    Source:  Predicts 2011: New Relationships Will Change BI and Analytics
  • TechMarketView predicts the value of the UK cloud computing market will more than double between now and 2014 from £2.4bn to £6.1bn according to the study UK Software and IT Services Market Forecast published in December by the firm.
  • MarketsandMarkets.com in their report, Cloud Computing Market – Global Forecast (2010 -2015) predicts that the global cloud computing market is expected to grow from $37.8 billion in 2010 to $121.1 billion in 2015 at a CAGR of 26.2% from 2010 to 2015. SaaS is the largest contributor in the cloud computing services market, accounting for 73% of the market’s revenues 2010. Source: http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/cloud-computing-234.html
  • Renub Research has made the following predictions in their latest report titled Cloud Computing – SaaS, PaaS, IaaS Market, Mobile Cloud Computing, M&A, Investments, and Future Forecast, Worldwide.Here are the key take-aways from the summary sent to me of the study:
    • Worldwide Cloud Computing market is growing at a rapid rate and it is expected to cross $25 Billion by the end of 2013
    • Renub predicts the Platform as a Service (PaaS) market size will reach US$ 400 Million by the year 2013
    • Renub also predicts that Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market will increase at a CAGR value of 52.53% for the period spanning 2010 – 2013
    • US Federal IT budget devoted to Cloud Computing Spending will reach nearly US$ 1 Billion by 2014

Source: http://www.reportlinker.com/p0293136/Cloud-Computing-SaaS-PaaS-IaaS-Market-Mobile-Cloud-Computing-M-A-Investments-and-Future-Forecast-Worldwide.html

You can also find additional market forecasts in my post from July 19, 2010 titled Sizing the Cloud Computing Market and IDC Predicts SaaS Will Re-Order Software Landscape by 2012.

Happy New Year and I hope you find these links useful.  I’ve been tracking this activity a while and thought this would be a good time to publish the list.

Best Regards

Louis

Google Cloud Technologies Overview

Google’s efforts at App Engine evangelism continue to accelerate with the announcement of new APIs and products from Google Labs.

The complete listing of Products in Labs and Graduates of Labs are listed on the Google Code Labs site.
Where Amazon Web Services (AWS) changes many different elements of their platform, pricing, and services often, Google is taking an incremental approach to rolling out new features based on innovation and extensive work in Google Labs.

The following slide deck authored by Chris Schalk is case in point.  Included in this presentation is an update on the Google Storage, Google Prediction API, and Google Big Query.  It’s an excellent overview of these APIs and services, explaining the evolving role of Google’s cloud technologies in the process.

High Performance Computing on AWS – Keynote for SC10 by Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon

Dr. Werner Vogel’s pre-recorded keynote for SC10 provides insights into the early adopters of the latest generation of AWS enhancements and additions.  SC10 is the leading conference globally for high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis.

His co-presenter is Deepak Singh, Sr. Business Development Manager who describes the role of Hadoop MapReduce in the AWS strategy.  At just over eight minutes, this keynote is worth watching for the insights and updates on the latest customer and technology news on AWS .

Amazon Announces S3 Storage Price Reduction

Amazon Web Services announced a new pricing schedule for S3 storage that takes place immediately today, November 1rst.  Existing customers could see as much as a 19% reduction in monthly fees.  Amazon also created a new pricing tier at the 1TB level and have also deleted the current 50 – 100 TB tier.  Amazon says these pricing changes apply to the US Standard, EU – Ireland, and APAC – Singapore regions.

The full price list can be found on the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) page here .

AWS link: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/11/what-can-i-say-another-amazon-s3-price-reduction.html

Flickr attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/timparkinson/930660427/sizes/m/in/photostream/

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