Chris Read takes a look at clouds from the operations perspective, presenting various types of clouds and their tradeoffs, their strengths and weaknesses, the problems clouds solve but also the new problems that appear, and the process change the organization needs to go through to make a successful use of the cloud.
Bitcurrent and Webmetrics have run a number of tests for a month on 5 different cloud platforms - Amazon, Google, Rackspace, Salesforce.com, and Terremark -, attempting to measure the performance of each platform. One of their conclusions is that each platform works better for different application types.
"as-a-Service" offerings are approaching parity with the more traditional software models on the market. Recent developments from both new and well established vendors in areas such as SaaS applications, infrastructure, cloud computing, development tools, runtime platforms, and configuration have increased the functionality, and perhaps the acceptance, of "as-a-Service" among more clients.
Amazon Web Services' popular Simple Storage Service (S3) suffered a major outage last week that caused some to question their reliance on S3. InfoQ discussed the outage with Amazon and affected users and examines the risks of SaaS and cloud architectures.
Software as a Service (SaaS) has had some mixed success in the last few years. If SalesForce.com is the winner then IBM, Microsoft, Google, and others view it as a major battleground. One major issue is to convince users that there is enough value in moving their core data to the control of a service to overcome a less than optimal user experience and possible access outage.
In this virtual panel, InfoQ wants to find out from leading cloud experts what are the benefits brought by cloud computing as well as the constraints in using them, what is better to use, a public or a private cloud, is the cloud interoperability needed, what is the difference between providing infrastructure or a platform, and how can a client enforce regulatory compliance.
After a brief introduction on Cloud Computing, Matthieu Hug, CEO of RunMyProcess.com provides his insight on a new class of information systems: Multi-Enterprise Information Systems. He argues that they are poised to replace inflexible partner extranets.
Craig Weissman, Chief Software Architect at Salesforce.com, presents their multi-tenant architecture, one shared database and one application stack, that has proven to scale well over the years.
Dave Carroll presents Force.com as a platform for creating enterprise applications in the Cloud using Web service APIs, server side logic, service oriented application support and application lifecycle management service: delivering your application offline or to a mobile device. Dave covers issues, like scalability, huge data sets, security and developer success.
