Cloud Computing

In this post on the MYOC cloud development series, I will share an offline processing design pattern where certain computation tasks are offloaded to another execution task using queues and that can help reducing the overall processing time of online transactions. This is a very useful pattern to use, if you plan to build highly scalable and compute intensive application on the web today. This patterns is also used by many popular websites. Here I will demonstrate how we've used this pattern to help reduce the poll creation time.

Continue reading "MYOC - Offload compute intensive tasks on Azure using the Offline Processing pattern" »

Posted by Sidharth Ghag at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What could possibly be some of the business imperatives for hybrid cloud adoption by enterprises? In my opinion one of foremost imperatives is the taxation laws to be enacted by governmnets that are based on corporate emissions. Considering the fact that a significant percentage of the carbon footprint includes emissions from the datacenters, government regulations to bring down corporate emissions could act as a trigger for multiple organizations to share hosting resources within the same data-center. It is in these contexts that we may see more of hybrid cloud model perhaps taking shape.

Posted by Sumit Kumar Bose at 05:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The taxonomy of cloud computing consisting of private clouds, public clouds and hybrid clouds is by now well established in the cloud computing literature and discussion forums. Inspite of the fact that proponents of cloud computing are gung-ho about associated technologies such as cloud burst -- the technology that ultimately helps realize hybrid clouds, Gartner predicts that businesses will use private clouds as of now. Even Forrestor backed private cloud in its report earlier this year. Does that mean the end of technologies associated with cloud burst? In my opinion it is not!!! While it is true that we may be witnessing a slowdown in hybrid cloud adoption, yet I believe that enterprises will be amenable towards adopting the cloud burst technology in the coming days. As different lines of business within an organization continues to invest in building their own private clouds, we will witness a scenario where an enterprise has multiple private clouds. The private clouds could belong to different lines of business or it could belong to one line of business possibly spread across multiple geographies. Typically, the private cloud of a particular business line on one hand can remain under-utilized for a major fraction of the time and on the other hand a short surge in demand could result in over-utilized servers and reduced quality of services even though spare capacity is available in the private cloud belonging to the other business line. Using cloud burst technologies, it possible to create a shared and yet private cloud. Each of the different LOBs has a dedicated cloud so that the applications belonging to a particular LOB runs only in its cloud under normal circumstances. Though discrete, these clouds form a shared virtual infrastructure so that an application in an overloaded cloud can procure the computing resources from an under-loaded cloud. That means, during overload situations, an application requiring more computing resources can procure these resources from a cloud different from its current host cloud. Both these cloud, however belong to the same organization; albeit different lines of business.  Scenarios such as this are likely to be more common in future and can be termed as internal cloud bursts. As enterprises adopt cloud technologies organizations are going to witness internal cloud burst more frequently than external cloud burst where applications move to an external cloud provider’s environment such as Amazon, Mosso or Rackspace when faced with scarcity of resources. 

Posted by Sumit Kumar Bose at 04:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last couple of months; I had several exciting opportunities to interact with large ISVs in formulating the business strategies, technology strategies & GTM strategies to align and adopt cloud computing trends. I noticed that the ISVs are shifting the gears: the drivers are many, major one being the recent economic slowdown puts lot of growth & price pressures for ISVs as enterprises are conservative on IT spend. Also, the recent technology innovation trend – cloud computing – brings value in terms of cost efficiency and business agility.

Cloud On-boarding Roadmap

The large ISVs are changing the business strategies and business models – expanding the offerings from large enterprise customers to SMB & retail customers to drive growth, increase market penetration and offer competitive & cost-effective IT solutions out-of-the-box (managed). They are considering Cloud & SaaS technology strategies in realizing these business goals and analyzing the impact on the existing product & service lines to size the cloud adoption effort. They are also looking for innovative platform accelerators that can help reduce the time-to-market for cloud / SaaS on-boarding. In some of the more strategic discussions, I also noticed that the ISVs are asking for sharing the risk of cloud adoption – it is somewhat new venture from many of them from both business & technology perspective. By the way it was not new for me; I have seen the latest business trends around ISV sector, wherein the innovation in product engineering is accelerated through trusted partnerships, alliances and joint go-to-market solutions with large system integrators.

Industry Trends

Some of the large ISVs are leading this change and driving the industry trends for e.g. Microsoft, SalesForce.com etc, many of them are still catching-up some-of-them in more strategic-way & some-of-them in more tactical-way forced by the industry. I also feel that there is a sense of fear – the cloud computing infrastructure-as-a-service wave had a significant impact on hosting providers, anyone who has not aligned it with this trend, is almost going to go out-of-business very soon. Similarly, the ISVs are the next players who will be hit by cloud computing platform-as-a-service and software-as-a-service waves. Of course, the system integrators are the next in terms of changes in the outsourcing models largely driven by ADM solutions & services to managed solutions & services based outsourcing, the recent leading analyst firm reports that 8% of the outsourcing models will run on SaaS based models in next 1 year.

From business ecosystem perspective, ISVs On-boarding on Cloud creates a new, sustainable and economically scalable business environment for all stakeholders – customers, ISVs and system integrators. ISVs achieve growth, Customers get more cost effective solution options and System Integrators find new revenue channels.

The economy, customers & technology is driving the change: the hosting providers, ISVs and Outsourcing providers have to shift the gears to survive & grow!

 

Posted by Bhavin Jayantilal Raichura at 05:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)