Cloud Users Group, Bangalore - December '09 Session

Session: Round Table on architecting apps for Cloud - 1

Date & Time: 23rd Dec 2009 at 6.30 PM

Venue : Cafe Coffee Day, Koramangala, Bangalore

This was the 1st session in this Round table series. We had around 14 folks (out of 20 registered) who attended this event and the energy level was pretty high :). Plan is to have such session every alternate month.

The discussion started with general questions on Cloud adoption by enterprises. Sameer of Deloitte gave a perspective on the expectations from enterprises.

Post, we had an interesting discussion about using Amazon's infrastructure like SimpleDB and other services. The discussion went around the need for NoSQL databases and few usecases were discussed

We also briefly touched upon challenges of migrating applications to Cloud, around how big ISP and Telcos are emerging as Cloud providers and the strengths of them which make them better player.

We also had an industry veteran Ramesh Babu who visited us from US. He gave his view points on how this domain is shaping up.

We had good participation from academic side with folks coming in from IIIT,Bangalore and Dayanand Sagar college.

Cloud Computing Security

This is the first of the blogs in this series about Cloud Computing Security.

Security concern is cited as one of the major reasons hampering migration to Cloud. There are bunch of startups in this arena who is trying to solve this issue. I am doing a research in this area.

IBM has been doing a lot of research in this area. This article discusses about how the security tool would help remove the malicious code in cloud - Self Policing Cloud Computing

Also, recent MIT Technology review article on Security concerns may expose the threats in a typical IAAS environment. The user has shown how the spurious VM can snoop and steal data - http://www.technologyreview.com/web/24166/?nlid=2615

Some recent developments are in the area of accessing seamlessly the encrypted data - http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1827871101?bctid=57759044001

Cloud Service Broker

This has been one of the areas which would really benefit Cloud users in the long run. Gartner has done quiet a detailed analysis and arrived at 3 categories:

- Cloud Service Intermediation
- Aggregation
- Cloud Service Arbitrage

For further details, you visit - http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1064712

In addition, there has been a lot of research happening in the area of cloud service cost arbitrage.

Vordel has already a product announced in this space and they have a very nice white paper written around CSB.

Cloud User Group Bangalore Seminar - 1

Seminar on AWS and Cloud Computing by Jinesh Varia, Technology Evangelist, AWS, Amazon

The session started with a Welcome speech given by Vinod, Founder of Attribo.
Prem Sankar, Co-founder of Cloud Users Group gave an overview of the objectives and vision of Cloud Users Group.

Jinesh began the seminar by giving an introduction to Cloud Computing. He presented the various building blocks and went on describing the building blocks of Amazon EC2.

Around 50 cloud enthusiasts attended the session. Pizza and Coke refreshed the audience. Post session participants socialized and networked with each other.

Cloud Computing Product Overview Series - 1

I have started a series where I analyze products and provide a brief overview about the products


3LeafSystems - Company develops products so that a grid of resources can be looked at a single pool or resource. They have developed Distributed Virtual Machine Monitor that can provide capability of providing unlimited resource power to VM and allow VM to scale beyond physical resource boundaries.

AppZero - Develops product to create, control and maintain Virtual Application Appliances. Also, has a concept called ZeroOS where it claims that the appliances can be created and portable to compatible OS. It eventually detects the files needed for the VAA and bundles them together. This includes executables and config files.

It may sound that it is similar to Application Virtualization. AppZero claims that this is for server applications as against desktop applications. This is a Server Application Virtualization product.

Google Fusion Tables

Google Fusion table is an experimentation data management system for cloud. I tried with couple of data files I had and it was amazing. It provide visualization and lots of other activities.

http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/06/google-fusion-tables.html

Verizon, Intuit, Boomi Jump Into Cloud Services

Interesting offering as companies moves to next level. Boomi has a nice framework for SaaS-SaaS integration

http://www.informationweek.com/news/services/saas/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=217701667

Boomi AtomSphere is the framework - http://www.boomi.com/files/boomi_datasheet_atomsphere.pdf

Cloud Computing Use cases

A new google groups to create use cases for Cloud Computing

http://groups.google.com/group/cloud-computing-use-cases

Cassatt snaped by CA

CA acquired assets of Cassatt. Not sure whether it would be beneficial for Cassatt. For quite some time, Cassatt was looking for buyers.

http://www.ca.com/us/press/release.aspx?cid=207716

Cloud Slam 2009 videos

All video sessions of Cloud Slam can be downloaded from -
http://neotactics.com/blog/cloud-computing/cloudslam-09-conference-materials#more-200

Very good collection of Cloud products introduction and tutorials

CSC announces new family of Cloud computing services

They are

1. Cloud Orchestration Service
2. Trusted Cloud Service
3. World Class Consulting Capabilities

More details can be found at -

http://www.csc.com/financial_services/press_releases/27609-csc_announces_new_family_of_cloud_services

Silver (lining) from Tibco

Silver is a platform aimed at large enterprises that want to develop and deploy applications in cloud-computing environments, but still harbor uncertainties about that model

http://silver.tibco.com

NIST defines Cloud Computing

Nist is working on defining cloud computing. Here is the URL -

http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/cloud-computing/