Cloud Computing Info

I recently had the opportunity to spend some time on the phone with Kevin Hakman, the Director of Evangelism at Aptana.  Aptana makes the popular open source web development IDE, Aptana Studio and offers a cloud service for moving your web applications out to the cloud.

We had a great discussion where we talked about Aptana Studio, Aptana Jaxer and Aptana Cloud as well as some additional topics.  On the topic of the cloud service, we discussed pricing.  Aptana is one of the lowest, if not the lowest, of all the service providers out there.

I really thought we would be talking about vmware in that role by now.

I’m not sure that cisco has the right background for this role. Who else might?

Amazon SHOULD be working on that, at least in the AWS space. I’m not seeing it though.

IBM can and probably will at some point. IBM just isn’t the technology leader that they were at one point.

I upgraded to Windows 7 today.  All is well in the cloud.  My Live Mesh still works.  I use Live Mesh to keep all of my writings in synch.  I tend to move from machine to machine as my needs change and I like to always have the latest version of my docs available.  This way, I do.

Click on the thumbnail for a better view.

While I am happy that Live Mesh does work, I am disappointed that Microsoft chose to remove the quick launch toolbar.  That just sucks (although there is a hack to add it back).  I sent feedback that I really wanted my quick launch toolbar back.

I’ve been waiting for and Amazon built AWS management console for a long time now.  Ironically, it couldn’t come at a worse time.  I’m just about finished my AWS Cloud Computing book and now I have to figure out how to work in the console.

Anyway, this is a great thing for new users.  There are so many tools out there now that experienced developers will take their time and pick a favorite.  However, for new users, it’s nice that Amazon is offering the basic experience from a trusted source (themselves).

3 Leaf Systems is working on a very interesting product that they call the next generation of server virtualization. Basically, they say they can take a pool of low cost commodity hardware and create a transparent cloud cluster.

3Leaf Systems enable a “cloud computing” environment to be built from low-cost commodity servers by providing virtualization of CPU & Memory for an entire server farm. With 3Leaf technology, a group of servers can look like one big server that has one pool of CPU processing and one pool of memory that can be dynamically allocated and/or repurposed to applications as needed, without any modifications to operating systems.

This is a very cool concept and one that I will be watching very carefully.

Amazon announced a nice new feature for S3. You can now let Amazon charge a third party for the storage they use on your account. The nice thing about this is that if you offer a storage service (say images or documents), you can provide your service and let Amazon bill them directly.

Bits For Sale – The New Amazon S3 Requester Pays Model

If you read the AWS blog entry, you’ll see that you can use this new feature in two ways: a special, signed request or via devpay.