AWS Disruption - Cloud Concerns Re-debated

In August of 2006, Amazon launched EC2 - Elastic Compute Cloud - a service that allowed for the first realization of the 4 tenets of cloud computing at the Infrastructure layer. - On demand elastic compute power was available on a pay per usage model. Developers and Enterprises could host applications by themselves and also program them to take advantage of the underlying infrastructure that could scale up and down with a call to exposed APIs by Amazon. 

Architected, designed and rolled out from CapeTown, South Africa, 5 years ago, AWS ran into its first major battle this week with a major disruption at a datacenter in Northern Virginia. 

1. With major customers like NASDAQ, NetFlix, FourSquare, Pfizer, NewYorkTimes, this disruption brings to the forefront the debate on what should enterprises keep in house versus putting them on 3rd party provided infrastructure like AWS EC2. 
2. It also will result in enterprises revisiting their strategy on 3rd party infrastructure. Enterprises like NetFlix that hosted from multiple datacenter locations of AWS did not face disruptions while SMBs who opted for single data center hosting faced the brunt.
3. A definitive 3rd angle to be discussed would be on "Should we go with one provider or distribute our bets with multiple?

Occurrences of this nature do help both consumers and providers a chance to tighten their belts. A bane in the short term but a boon in the long term.

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Understanding Cloud Computing - 3 - IaaS

The Infrastructure layer of cloud computing is the base foundation of cloud computing. This is the layer that triggered off the thoughts of true cloud computing.Additional hardware purchased by divisions of companies that remained unused must have prompted other divisions to request for this hardware on a temporary basis. That action is what sparked off the thought of subscribing to hardware on demand and not buying and owning it.

Hosting companies that provided space on remote servers took the first step in this direction. They were prompted more from the need for the servers to be exposed to public at all times unlike enterprise servers that are within the firewall. This also freed up enterprises from having to invest and maintain open-to-public servers. They just put up their websites and related public consumable data onto these hosted servers. 

It was exactly 5 years ago that the next big step in IaaS was taken. It was by a company named Amazon (more famous for it online book store). AWS or Amazon Web Services (started in July 2002) announced the availability of its EC2 - Elastic Compute Cloud offering in August 2006. EC2 allowed users to rent out computing power and pay for it by the hours of usage. EC2 allowed for users to load their applications onto Amazon hosted infrastructure and EC2 related services allowed for scaling up or down the needed computing and storage power based on the consumption of these applications.

Today you have a whole set of companies trying to match what AWS brought to the market. GoGrid, Rackspace, Akamai, etc are among the few top ones. 

You could safely say that the current trends and gung-ho around cloud computing had its seeds sowed back in 2006. In our next post, lets dive into Platform as a Service facet of Cloud Computing.

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3 trends in the SaaS Space

As i trawl through pages of predictions, trends and forecasts by analysts, tech reporters and industry watchers, trends in the SaaS space stand out distinctly and are observable by me on the ground.

1. Cloud Computing driving the viability and adoption of SaaS
   • Low cost infrastructure availability is letting entrepreneurs, startups and even big enterprises experiment in the SaaS space without having to shell out thousands of dollars for infrastructure.
   • Plug and play services that dole out platforms (Force.com, VmForce, Azure), security wrappers (Navajo Systems), handle identity and federation management aspects (Okta, PingIdentity, Symplified Technologies, etc)
2. Convergence of the TV, Computer and the Mobile is creating opportunities for SaaS
   • The 3 screens we know of are converging. This means a greater leverage for software play. Write once and Run Everywhere will become the norm of the day. What better way to do this than the SaaS way. Central software that  detects hybrid screens, screen/gadget types and renders itself to optimally function in the form factor of the gadget will be the natural next thing. Roll out upgrades to your software at once across multiple gadgets. (Kony Solutions)
3. Cloud Service Ecosystems are the next big thing in the SaaS space
   • Service aggregators in the form of cloud service providers, telecom service providers are driving the next wave of SaaS adoption. Be it DreamSimplicity, JamCracker or Etelos or even TSPs like AT&T, NTT DoCoMo: all of them are creating services based marketplaces – an ecosystem that will help you pick, choose, try and buy service, provide feed back, rate services, switch service suppliers, etc. To experience how such a marketplace would look like, go to to Google Chrome WebStore.

3 places I can see SaaS in action

People often ask me about experiencing SaaS. Being a concept still taking off and the absolute resemblance to installed software, people most times are totally unaware that services they consume on the web are in fact SaaS. Hence this post to help recognize SaaS.
1. Google Docs: Go to http://docs.google.com and signup/login. You can immediately start working on a Word document, a power point presentation and are presented with an interface uncannily similar to Microsoft word. You can create word document, edit it,email it and even collaborate in real time. What’s more…You do not have to install any software.
2. Dream Simplicity Marketplace: Go to http://www.dreamsimplicity.com and sign up/login. You can subscribe to a whole set of online software from a variety of vendors/providers and create a complete dashboard of tools you find useful.
3. Google Chrome Web Store: Download Google Chrome browser and install. Search of Google Chrome Web Store on the internet.

You will be surprised to see the number of applications most of which are free that can be installed on top of the Chrome browser and you can bring them up when needed. The tools are categorized into a number of buckets like Productivity, Games, Kids, etc. Most tools are rich and pack a  lot of power in terms of features they offer. Just as good as any tool you might have installed on your PC.
Do you feel you have experienced SaaS now?

Gartner’s 3 predictions for the cloud…

Gartner has released its 2011 predications for cloud computing

1. More than half of an enterprise’s transactions will be done via cloud based infrastructure over the next 4 years - based on a survey of Chief information officers (CIOs).
2. In the Asia-Pacific, around 40 percent of enterprises with more than 1,000 employees will invest in cloud this year.
3. Software as a Service (SaaS) is also projected to grow from 9% of total enterprise applications software spending in 2009 to 14% in 2014. SaaS enterprise application revenues will also more than double during this timeframe, or 15.3% of compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2009 and 2014.

Cloud Buzz - Vol 1 - Edition 1

Cloud Buzz is a quick roundup of interesting happenings in the Cloud space

1.       Microsoft Azure extends beyond PaaS to IaaS through its VMRole offering. This puts its offering on par  with IaaS offerings from Amazon like AWS EC2 – James Staten blogs about it here

2.       SalesForce.com now offers Database as a Service. Database.com provides access to data for an application written in any language, on any platform and to any end-point device – Network Computing talks of it.

3.       Vivek Kundra, CIO of US Federal Government has unveiled 25 point plan to improve efficiency of the US government IT infrastructure. The plan hinges chiefly around the “Cloud First” policy unveiled earlier that insists that the public cloud to realize these efficiencies – Kevin Jackson blogs about it in his Cloud Musings Blog

4.    Estimates by Gartner show that the software as a service (SaaS) market is expected to grow to 18% by 2013 – Cloud Computing Zone

IT Needs Then and Cloud Needs Now....

When the digital computer age was ushered in way back in the 1960s, IBM ruled the roost with System/360, a large mainframe offering. Over a decade and half we saw the emergence of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) with PDP and VAX systems, Hewlett Packard with HP-2115, Data General with its Novas. Each company had its own proprietary hardware stack and languages they supported. While DEC supported UNIX which was in its infancy then, HP supported Fortran and Algol and IBM had its own proprietary mainframe language. 

Enterprise and consumer needs drove adoption of these different stack each of which were best suited for a particular segment. Over the next 2-3 decades, enterprises suddenly realized that the computer industry had left them with a spaghetti of systems none of which were inter operable or supported cross talk. And this after millions of dollars had been poured to procure these systems. The anguish was so pronounced that it drove some of the legacy providers to extinction while others had to learn to dance to survive. Louis Gerstner, the erstwhile CEO of IBM, in his book, "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?"  gives an account of IBM's historic turnaround between April 1993 and March 2002. Lou Gerstner led IBM from the brink of bankruptcy and mainframe obscurity back into the forefront of the technology business. He did so by reorienting the company's business to the demands of the time. One of the main cornerstones he lay was the establishment of IBM Global Services - a System Integration division whose main objective was to help enterprises stitch together the multitude of computer systems they had invested in and get them to co-work. Thus was born the huge SI industry that has seen the likes of IBM, Accenture, EDS, CapGemini and the Indian majors like TCS, Wipro, Infosys, HCL, Cognizant drive business.

The reason I cited a snippet from history is to demonstrate two things

1. To draw a comparison between the digital computing era and the cloud computing world as it is evolving
2. To give the reader an indication of how transformations in the industry happen over years and decades.

Cloud computing industry was a buzz word for most part of the first decade in the new millennium. The fag end of the decade saw the emergence of Amazon Web Services, Google Apps, Microsoft Azure, Go Grid, SalesForce's Force.com as some prime cloud players. We also see a lot of smaller players who serve niche needs like Service Mesh, Zuora, JamCracker, Ping Identity, etc who complement the bigger players. However, the biggest lacuna is the interoperability of clouds. Users choosing a cloud provider do not have a seamless path to migrate to another cloud.provider. What you see is a picture similar to the erstwhile era. A rising need felt by enterprise customers to ensure a fair degree of standards and interoperability between clouds. What that also means is the need for companies that would help enterprises achieve it. Whether this set of players would come from the the big league or from the small niche of players remains to be seen...What's your take on this matter?

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