Understanding Cloud Computing – 4 – PaaS

Platform as a Service corresponds to the second layer in my analogy of cloud computing to your commonplace desktop at home.

PaaS – Platform as a Service is akin to an operating system that allows application developers, programmers and the like to install their language support systems, write and test code, package and distribute and finally deploy/install them to render the apps usable by end customers.

The difference lies purely in the ‘as a Service’ aspect. The platform in the case of cloud computing context is not tied down to a Operating System – rather it is something that is hosted on the cloud and available on demand to developers and programmers via any machine connected to the internet. The developed requests the environment and the same gets provisioned to him over the cloud.

PaaS also follows the 4 tenets of Cloud Computing.

Examples of PaaS platforms include Azure from Microsoft, SalesForce’s Force.com, Google’s AppEngine.

We will explore SaaS in our next part in this series.

Technorati Tags: Google. Microsoft,SalesForce,PaaS,Platform as a Service,Cloud computing

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Gang of Four on the Cloud

Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, has called his company belonging to a Gang of Four that is revolutionizing the Consumer activity on the Internet and Cloud today.

• Google with its Search
• Facebook with its Social Site
• Amazon with its E-Commerce site
• Apple with its Devices

This sure has led to a comparison with the former Gang of Four as per TechCrunch viz., Microsoft, Intel, Cisco and Dell formerly.

If I were to take a swipe to extend the Gang of Four to make it a Gang of Six, here’s my choices

• Microsoft with its Enterprise Offerings
• VMware with its Infrastructure Offerings

Do you have anything to extend this list?

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Google,Facebook,Amazon,Apple,Cloud Computing

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Getting a foothold in the Cloud

Quite an interesting point that Gary Orenstein of GigaOm makes in his post titled "VMware Is The New Microsoft, Just Without an OS". The crux of the discussion is that VMware has over the last 10 years has assembled together all the pieces necessary to cut right between the operating system and the ecosystem of apps. While the first half of the decade saw apps being developed on tools residing over the OS and being tied to the OS, the latter half has seen the rise of cloud. It is this cloud that VMware wants to exploit by doing two things primarily

1. Get the developer community to develop over the cloud by providing tools. Ex: CloudFoundry by VMware, SpringSource acquisition
2. Get the apps rolled out over the Platform and keep them OS agnostic. Ex: Zimbra, SlideRocket, etc

This brings to the fore 3 approaches cloud vendors are taking

1. Microsoft - Being the OS incumbent, it is slowly providing access to all desktop software via the Cloud through its Live.com platform
2. Google - Being the SaaS native player, Google has created a thin OS in the form Chrome OS and we will be seeing netbooks with Chrome OS start of July 2011.
3. VMWare - The infrastructure player whose focus will be the platform on the cloud and ruling the roost there.

Enterprises will be forced to choose between the offerings of a clutch of such players as vendors move faster than ever into making enterprise cloud computing a reality.

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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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Ray Ozzie's Vision of the Cloud

Ray Ozzie, the chief architect of Microsoft in a recent memo to his direct reportees and executive staff at Microsoft talked about the way cloud would eventually evolve
.
He says,

We’re moving toward a world of

1) cloud-based continuous services that connect us all and do our bidding, and

 Continuous services are applications that reside on the cloud, run continuously, take advantage of the cloud characteristics to achieve infinite scalability, abstract a lot tasks that can be relegated to the background wherever it helps us define a simpler world.

2) appliance-like connected devices enabling us to interact with those cloud-based services.

Anything that has a connection to enable us access the continuous cloud services. It could be things as pronounced as smart phone, TVs, etc to something as uncharacteristic of having connectivity as your wallet, your shirt, your shoe sole, etc that connect to services on the cloud to transmit real time date further lending to the services model. With IPV6 being rolled out and the Internet of Things concept  turning these into a reality, Ray Ozzie's connected devices does seem to be taking shape.

This is quite an interesting note from the viewpoint that it adds a certain perspective to the otherwise chaotic or rather nebulous environment we are seeing as cloud computing gains traction.