Cloud Computing News

The shift ...

2010-09-03T22:22:00.001-07:00

More and more product companies are redefining their focus and vision towards reaching the bottom of Pyramid. A decade back it was more about specializing in a specific areas for the companies. Now it is more of generalization and get into any area that is driven by volume.

Is this due to the fact that "Enterprise in Americas" are no more giving needed business?

Need to ponder about this...

Also, as more individuals in the BRIC countries are becoming tech savvy, this is driving a new market which is worth billions and everyone wants to pitch in to get their share...

CloudCamp India Tour 2010 - Complete Coverage

2010-03-13T20:10:00.000-08:00

Prelude:

With the grand success of the first CloudCamp Bangalore in 2009, plans for having an all India event started in early Jan between me and Dave Nielsen, Co-Founder of CloudCamp. Discussion started and thanks to Manish Dhingra,Founder and COO, Tekriti Software, who agreed to help us Delhi and Pune camp that gave us more confidence and headstart to conduct the India tour. We began our planning and decided to conduct the event during Feb. Meanwhile, I had a discussion with Yahoo folks for possible sponsorship and eventually ended in a partnership to host First India Hadoop Summit along with CloudCamp in Bangalore. In the end, we decided to organize CloudCamp's in Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune and Bangalore.

For any feedback on CloudCamp India tour '10 write to me.

India Tour Summary:

CloudCamp Delhi - Feb 20th

CloudCamp India Tour'10 started on Feb 20th in New Delhi. The venue was carefully selected to be accessible from all corners of the National Capital Region. Sure enough, with the help of Prof. Sorav Bansal and Gaurav Bhatnagar (CEO, Mediology Software), the Bharti Building at IIT-Delhi was selected as the venue. The lead organizer Manish Dhingra (Founder and COO of Tekriti Software) did a fantastic job in lining up speakers from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Salesforce and Slideshare as part of the conference. Prof. Sorav Bansal drew on his experience and research done on Virtualization during his PhD at Stanford University, to kick start the proceedings with a great talk on the topic.

With the strong grounding set on Virtualization, the audience, an interesting mix of students and professionals started participating in the UnPanel. Led by Dave Nielsen, the UnPanel got so interesting that Simone Brunozzi, Technology Evangelist with AWS decided to skip his session and take on the UnPanel questions as below:

How to move our existing apps onto the cloud?
How can a cloud provision 10K new servers?
How does software licensing work?
How to achieve dynamic and scalable data storage?
How secure is a cloud network?
How fast can we recover a server that Crashed in cloud?
What is the breakeven point for moving an app to the cloud?
How can P2P cloud work?
How is versioning handled in the cloud?
Has cloud overtaken Grid?
Where does cloud configuration take place and how?

Post Lunch saw sessions from Microsoft on Windows Azure, Salesforce.com and an interesting case study by Slideshare on their experience with Amazon Web Services.

Delhi event was fully supported by Tekriti Software and Windows Azure. Check the pictures here:

http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=cloudcamp+delhi
http://picasaweb.google.com/rajeshjhajjar/CloudCampDelhi20Feb2010?feat=email#

CloudCamp Chennai - Feb 23rd

Cloud Camp India Tour moved on to Chennai which was hosted at Anna University on Feb 23rd.

Thanks to

ChandraKumar, President, SPIN Chennai and Prof. Hansa, Dept. of Management Studies, Anna University who were instrumental for getting the venue.
Ezhil of CSS Labs
Suresh and his OrangeScape team who provided full support by sponsoring virtually everything
Yara Pavan
Delhi Babu and his volunteers from SSN Engg college

and the sponsors (OrangeScape, ZOHO and Microsoft Azure)

the event went on well. People who attended expressed that there had been lots of learning and appreciated the unconferencing format.

We had pretty interesting session from CSS Labs, Congizant, Microsoft and OrangeScape team. There were sessions on Key-value pair, Private cloud, business aspect of Cloud

Snaps from Chennai - http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=cloudcamp+chennai

The Chennai event was attended by a mix of industry, researchers and students.

CloudCamp Hyderabad - Feb 25th

Sudhakar of Microsoft and his team of volunteers had got things put up nicely. The event happened in IIIT, Hyderabad. It was supported by HexaGrid.

A glimpse of Hyderabad event - http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=cloudcamp+hyderabad

Unpanel Questions of Hyderabad:

How will CC Change how IT supports?
How is Private Cloud different Data Center?
How is CC different than Virtualization?
How secure is CC and can banks use it?
How difficult is it to move applications to cloud?
Are there standards for PAAS?
Why is more players not providing IAAS ?
In Layman's term what is CC?
Where can PHP developers put your code?
Will CC co-exist with traditional systems?
How can we reproduce a Ghost image in CC?

Cloud Camp Pune - Feb 27th

Persistent systems hosted the Pune event in the Dewang Mehta Auditorium. There was good response to the event with about 70 people showing up for the event from Pune region. There was a strong showing of students as well as professionals from IT industry.

VMware sponsored the event as well. We had some interesting sessions from VMware, Prashant Advani presented the overall VmWare cloud enablement vision.

Mukund Deshpande from Persistent presented on the area of Analytics in the Cloud.

Dr Deepak Singh from Aamzon dialed in during the event and spoke about Amazon offerings and how Amazon provides some of its services.

Shreekanth of Persistent systems was pretty much the man behind Pune camp along with Manish of Tekriti Software.

Security was one of the top topics at this event and lot of people had several comments and experiences to share. There was a healthy debate around PaaS as well as various offerings in this space

Unpanel questions:

What security precautions are made to prevent accessing my data ?
What standards are evolving w.r.t security?
When not use Cloud?
Will AI merge with cloude to create skynet?
What can the developer do to protect data?
What is the difference between SaaS, hosted apps and cloud?
What type of apps make sense in India?
What standards are needed for data?
What hardware and what inefficiencies?
What is ane example of hybrid cloud?
How to measure cloud performance?

Photos from the session - http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=cloudcamp+pune

CloudCamp Bangalore & India Hadoop Summit- Feb 28th

This being the second year for Bangalore CloudCamp, there were lots of expectation. India Hadoop summit induced further interest.

Morning session started with a Intro to CloudCamp India tour and Welcome note by me. It was followed by Keynote session. This was presented by Hemanth of Yahoo. It sort of kickstarted the Hadoop Summit part of the event.

There was a short and provoking talk by Dr. TRG Nair. He spoke on the research avenues and future of Cloud.

The event was supported by Nair's RIIC team of Dayanand Sagar College. In addition, event was supported by India Cloud Users Group

Then we had bunch of Lightning talk by sponsors.

Unpanel brought in lots of interest and audience geared up themselves and actively participated.

Following are the questions from Unpanel:

How secure is the Cloud?
How to handle unstructure data?
What is the cost of building cloud?
Impact of Mapreduce patent
Standards and avoiding vendor lockin
Are there any challenges w.r.t cloud in the context of mobile computing
Types of database in cloud
Impact of cloud on dev tools and SDLC
Why RDMBS are not suitable for Cloud
Difference between Grid and Cloud
Data in Enterprise and Compute from outside (bridging them)

The Unpanel consisted of folks from VMware, Google, Yahoo, Bell Labs, Microsoft. And it was a pretty informative discussion. This also gave a good base for the Open Space discussions.

The second half marked the Open Spaces and Hadoop track sessions.

Hadoop track had many interesting sessions and it ended with a Panel comprising of industry experts.

Panel discussed about many interesting topics that included future of Cloud in India.

Presentations from Hadoop summit can be accessed at - http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2010/03/india_hadoop_summit.html

To sum it up, it was a proud moment for organizers to be part of this India tour. Thanks to Dave who flew to India and made it happen.

Bangalore camp photos -

http://picasaweb.google.com/103004133641542975573/CloudCampIndiaTour2010Bangalore02#

http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=cloudcamp+bangalore

Few blogs that covered the Cloud Camp India Tour :

http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/02/a-sign-of-arrival-cloudcamp-to.php

www.elasticvapor.com/2010/02/incredible-india-cloud.html

Chennai CloudCamp:

http://cssinnovations.blogspot.com/2010/02/cloudcamp-chennai-23rd-feb-2010.html

Hyderabad CloudCamp:

http://himabinduvejella.blogspot.com/2010/02/cloud-camp-hyderabad.html

Bangalore CloudCamp:

http://www.yourstory.in/news/3359-cloud-camp-and-yahoo-hadoop-summit--ys-exclusive

http://www.janakiramm.net/blog/cloudcamp-bangalore-hadoop-summit

Cloud Camp '10 , India

2010-02-05T04:47:00.000-08:00

Cloud Camp '09 in India happened on March 29th in IIM, Bangalore. This was the 1st Camp in India.

This event was supported by ACM. We had around 400 registrations and 300+ people turned up for the event. Attendees of the event felt useful because of the nature of the sessions.

Continuing, the trail, Cloud Camp '10 is planned for pan India. This time happening in 5 cities (Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Pune and Hyderabad).

For Bangalore, Yahoo! would be partnering and be hosting the 1st Hadoop Summit in India (#indiahadoopsummit)

This event is free and open to all Cloud Computing enthusiasts. To register please visit - http://cloudcamp.org/India

Cloud Users Group, Bangalore - December '09 Session

2009-12-29T08:25:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-22T03:24:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-23T02:37:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-09T08:15:00.000-08:00

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

2009-06-20T21:36:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-15T09:08:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-03T21:18:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-03T08:52:00.001-07:00

A new google groups to create use cases for Cloud Computing

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

Cassatt snaped by CA

2009-06-03T08:46:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-03T08:32:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-03T08:28:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-03T07:29:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-03T07:04:00.000-07:00

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

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