Cloud Computing Info

VMWare is the virtualization king and I have been wondering when they would chose to enter the cloud competition. Until now, it’s pretty much been Amazon’s game to win or lose. According to this article, VMWare is opening a data center in Washington state. The new data center will be 189,000 square feet, of which VMWare will use over 100,000 square feet of it. That’s a nice size data center.

An interesting side note os that VMWare is not the first to build a data center in the area. Microsoft, Yahoo, Intuit, Ask.com and base partners also have, or are building, data centers in the area.

Is Cloud Computing a new idea? As a matter of a fact, it is not. Is comparing cloud computing to the electric utilities a new concept. As a matter of a fact, it is not. What does this sound like:

ANALOGY WITH ELECTRICITY

The computing machine is fundamentally an extremely useful device. The service it provides has a kind of universality and generality not unlike that afforded by electric power. Electricity can be harnessed for any of a wide variety of jobs: running machinery, exercising control, transmitting information, producing sound, heat, and light.

If you are not familiar with it, Google App Engine is Google’s entry in the cloud, specifically a PaaS or Platform as a Service. With the Google App Engine, you get an IDE (python) to code your applications and then you deploy it to the Google cloud. You can integrate with other google services (as well as other http services) and use BigTable as a data store.

One of the limitation, IMHO, of Google App Engine is that it limited to Python. While I can do a little bit of python coding when I have to, I’m not a big fan of it.

One of the big difficulties of the cloud is properly defining it. I don’t think it will be completely defined for a while yet. Since that is the case, I think I would like to muddy the waters a little more.

Is VOIP a cloud service? It’s a service, runs on the internet, on someone else’s servers, in a location that I have no clue about. Isn’t that SaaS? Ok, maybe something like Vonage, Cable Phone or Verizon is really a utility. Those actually have hardware in my house.

What about Skype, MSN Messenger or Yahoo Messenger?

LewisC’s An Expert’s Guide To Oracle Technology

Larry Ellison is a technology leader. I think that’s generally accepted. Some people might not like him, but you can’t really deny what he has done with Oracle. Larry apparently has one giant weakness though. He’s way ahead of his time. I ran across this news story from 1996.

New York — Oracle Corp. CEO and Chairman Larry Ellison told a group of customers here that the first network computer conforming to the company’s specifications will be launched in October, and priced at $299.

..a keyboardless, diskless NC with 8 megabytes of RAM.

Do you think Cloud Computing will hit $100 billion? When? Merrill Lynch thinks it will pass $100 billion and by 2011 it will be worth $160 billion in combined business value and advertising. They also expect that cloud computing will be the next wave of investment for venture capitalists.

Merill Lynch figures right now that 10 companies are the big boys. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. They see VMWare and Citrix as major players which I don’t quite see. They own the vitalization market but cloud computing is a lot more that virtual servers.

Amazon ships a handful of tools to use EC2 and S3. There are some freely downloaded scripts that make life a bit easier. Personally, I want to use a GUI. I use SSH enough when I connect remotely. If I’m in Windows, I want a windows tool.

Today I downloaded Cloud Studio from Cloud Services, Ltd. Cloud Studio is an free S3 browser with a little bit of EC2 support. It’s a version 1.0 product so you can’t expect too much. According to the site:

Cloud Studio is a visual tool designed to make the development of applications for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) more convenient.