Archive for September, 2009

Cloud Portability: Force.com vs Google App Engine vs Amazon

September 16th, 2009 by jeremychone | Comments Off

One of the biggest fears of any IT manager about cloud computing is the lack of openness. In other words, they ask, “How easy is it to get in and out? Or they might ask, “How portable is a cloud application?

Ideally, enterprises should be able to take applications and data in or out of a cloud as business requires without having to rewrite the application or transform the data.

As discussed in the article “Don’t Get Stuck in a Cloud ,” cloud portability tends to be a factor related to the type of cloud one uses.

Here is a quick portability analysis of the three big Clouds on the market:

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Enterprise Cloud: IT vs SaaS

September 16th, 2009 by jeremychone | Comments Off

Now that we have established that cloud computing is a real phenomenon that provides real technological and business value, the next question is how does it apply to the enterprise market?

To fully analyze this market opportunity, we need to realize that there are two related but different types of enterprise customers for cloud computing.

The first type is internal information technology (IT) organizations within the enterprise that are looking for more agile and cost-effective ways to manage their Internet application and services. The second type is the enterprise SaaS providers who want to leverage proven, highly-scalable architectures and integrate them into some cloud applications to increase functionality and maximize distribution.

IT and SaaS cloud customers have similar requirements but different priorities.

Here is a high-level view of some of the differences.




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Don’t Get Stuck in a Cloud

September 15th, 2009 by jeremychone | 2 Comments »

Mysterious, comforting, scary, and attractive are all possible adjectives to describe a cloud. Interestingly enough, this is true of all kinds of clouds, from the meteorological to the computing. During the last few years, we have a seen a proliferation of clouds forming from every corner of the Internet. Nowadays, it is very rare to see any Internet technology presentation without at least a few clouds.

So is cloud computing simply vaporware, or something tangible?

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Is Microsoft as Free as Open Source?

September 11th, 2009 by jeremychone | 9 Comments »

Jon Davis posted an interesting article discussing whether the Microsoft stack is really more expensive than open source alternatives.

Jon has a point; Microsoft’s restricted (i.e., Express) editions are as free as the open source alternatives. This is undeniably true, since the purpose of many software vendor’s “Express” edition is to compete against open source on price. However, the difference is that with open source you get the full-powered editions. For example, Linux (e.g., CentOs), Xen (for virtualization), PostgreSQL/MySQL, Apache, Java, Tomcat, AspectJ, Lucene, Hibernate, and Eclipse are all robust, full-featured, and powerful technologies available for free to developers. The variety and the quality of product available from the open source community are just astonishing.

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