Welcome CloudGeek.IN

Launching today, is my new blog "CloudGeek" @ cloudgeek.in

This aims to be a one stop for my thoughts, patterns, architectures and code for the next generation of Cloud Services.

This means, the current blog will be purely personal and will reflect my journey into the unknown. For all my geek readers interested in keeping up with the state-of-the-art in Cloud Computing, grab your seats at www.cloudgeek.in

IaaS giving way to "Data Science as a Service"

As organisations start embracing public infrastructure cloud for their critical data and application needs, Data Science SaaS will become more practical for use. The biggest challenge for Data Science SaaS is to have customers expose / store their data to / on their multi-tenant public platform. Increasingly, public cloud services are becoming a compelling ground for enterprises. This means with applications, data also becomes a good prospect to be moved to these platforms. 

This is due to low data access latency requirements for apps in cloud and increasing confidence in shared public cloud services. 

Once the data is out of the enterprise data center, inter cloud service integration becomes easier. For eg:- Imagine an AWS EC2 infrastructure running your enterprise application, with data lying on S3 / RDS. To extract Business Intelligence and inference out of this data, it is practical to use an existing public SaaS that can work on this data, rather than using in-house analytics infrastructure. Greenfield apps having their genesis on public cloud are already candidate to be used with Data Science services (aka Analytics as a Service). 

The future of Data Science SaaS looks promising. Startups like Datameer, ClearStory are doing pioneering work on this.

More on this at :- 

http://gigaom.com/2012/07/05/want-to-ditch-your-data-scientists-heres-are-7-startups-that-can-help/

Run in Public, Bring it back when its ready

The road to set up your own cloud infrastructure in your backyard is not a long shot, thanks to the array of techniques / patterns / solutions in the space. However, more organizations are looking at using Public Cloud services, especially IaaS and PaaS to experiment what it takes to scale their apps, and then bring the homework back to their own internal infrastructure a.k.a Z-Cloud of Zynga. This is proving to be a common place for organizations these days. And it makes a lot of sense.
Using public cloud services to test the waters in terms of what it takes to sustain and manage application scale is a good pattern. Once the pattern is understood, and the organization understands the nitty-gritties of managing the scale, an internal infrastructure can be setup, thereby owning the control back. This allows for efficient capacity planning and avoiding the common gotchas of deploying and managing the app at cloud scale.

The rise of Cost aware Architectures

Cost aware architectures have been on rise, thanks to the "as a service" phenomena. A lot have been said around these new evolving architecture patterns. The challenge is now to discover some of patterns that architects can use to build cost-aware architectures. In a gist, a Cost aware architecture is defined as an architecture that evolves based on how it sustains and grows revenues when using price varying infrastructure / application / platform services a.k.a cloud services. This means, as the business gets successful, and starts pooling in more revenue from the user, the cost-dynamics of adding capacity (infrastructure, application and platform) becomes less than linear.
As we see more and more application architectures incorporate "as a service" models, this is going to be the trend for future. I like what Werner Vogels talked about it in an article not long back.

Ref:- https://medium.com/21st-century-architectures/8c07ed78d4d4

PaaS is real ? is it... circa 2013

Reposting my earlier post from Jan 2012. How far we have reached with the below predictions ?

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I was encouraged to write this post by the influx of articles relating to predictions about Cloud computing in 2012. A common theme surrounding most of them is the rise of PaaS (Platform as a Service). While 2010 and 2011 was spent in understanding the real impact of IaaS and the value it brings, 2012 is destined to be the year when PaaS comes out of the closet with mass acceptance. Following are my ideas on what PaaS would be like in 2012 :-

1. Domain specific PaaS 

A domain specific PaaS would allow organizations of all types to build software infrastructure over existing domain platforms. Lets talk about Telecom domain. There are various IT implementations that need to be built, maintained and supported on a daily basis for a telecom provider. These include provisioning, charging, customer on boarding, analytics, customer service and support, value added services etc. All such application environments need to have a common infrastructure of reusable components ready to be deployed and orchestrated to create solutions.  A Telecom PaaS would provide telcos an unprecedented access to scale, grow and utilize the best practices of the industry without reinventing the wheel. This would create level playing opportunities for telecom providers of all sizes. Imagine how it would affect other verticals - Manufacturing, Egovernance, Logistics, Retail etc. 

2. PaaS enabler buzzword

IaaS platforms would attempt morphing into PaaS enablers. This would allow organizations to create PaaS platforms for the specific business needs at will. Currently the approach the organizations take in this regard : Use existing / Implement an IaaS layer, create application provisioning infrastructure, support deployment of apps on demand etc. However there are challenges that stand before a perfect implementation of PaaS environments using the traditional means. No longer organizations need a bespoke implementation of application provisioning and deployment automation. IaaS players would allow customers to start building these platforms. A lot of traction is already visible in this space. More on this in the next point.

3. Platform-enable anything

The rise of API enabling eco-system to drive the functionalities over a service has been the biggest driver of innovation. Social networks are the living breeding example of such a revolution. PaaS enablers and newer platform services would create opportunities for organizations to platform enable their services at a fast pace. This would allow a faster time to market and easier setup process. Currently this process requires a strategic cap-ex based approach for its implementation. Its not for the weak hearted. A sustainable process to create platforms for service eco-system is the need of the hour. Take example of an Ecommerce enterprise :- With PaaS enablers, the enterprise would be able to create platform for hosting applications built by third-party developers using its services. 

What do you think of this trend ? Share your comments and ideas. 

In the next post, I would like to touch upon Domain specific clouds in more detail. More on this later. 

My first Cloud Computing Talk at HIVE Forum

My first talk on Cloud Computing and Amazon Web Services - September 2008.

Coming soon, on the web near you :-

Conference is about Conversations

A beautiful Friday evening marked the end of the annual BT (Business Technology) Summit held on 11th and 12th November 2010 at NIMHANS Convention Center in Bangalore. BT Summit capitalized on the popularity of current hot picks in technology - Cloud and SOA. SOA being in news since some time, had a extra bit of makeover thanks to Cloud. This attracted not only developers, but decision makers, senior managers of IT companies, startups and the conference regulars.

The event divided over 2 days, the first about Cloud and related technologies, and second for the SOA.
The first day really saw the entire main auditorium full with attendees waiting to grab the next available IP address off the Wireless Internet Access point. Needless to say, once you loose the signal, you are put in a waiting queue for the next burst of Wireless access.
Among the day's highlight was the introductory talk by Dr. Soley of OMG on why standards and quality are important. A cliched topic, but explained in his humorous and straight-to-business style.
I had already gone through the numerous Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services introductory talks, so the next talks were not really an appeal. I especially had different expectations from Enterprise Cloud Computing talk, waiting to hear about use cases and implementation scenarios for Public cloud in enterprises of all sizes, but with no success. The talks were good, but repetitive if you have already been through the similar sessions.
The talk by Mr. Udayan of NIIT Technologies about designing apps in cloud was full of new learnings and excellent material. I regard that talk as one of the best in the list of talks I attended on both days. Full of real, practical advice, without been spoon-fed. Great work.
The next half of the day, saw me attending talks ranging from implementing private clouds for enterprise, to Windows Azure.
I liked Janakiram's no-nonsense-straight-to-point style of presentation, completely "paisa vasool" or "worth-the-penny".
My colleagues also poured in inputs from a talk about Multi-Tenancy on Cloud by Mr. Vikas and rated it as one that provided them with good practical knowledge. Along with the talks, the twitter hash "btsummit" was on fire, thanks to flurry of tweets flowing from all corners of the venue. It brought the summit in prominence on twitter hotspots in Bangalore.
I had my chance to participate in a Chalk talk as a result of a cancellation of a Q&A session, where along with me, two other attendees got a chance at microphone for 10 minutes. The topics included "Implementing Mix-breed Private cloud", "Amazon Web Services Case study" and "Using Cloud in enterprises". I had a good day with my luck, and bagged a elegant golf-set as an award for my chalk talk, rated top on public poll.
As the curtains came down to the first day, I had a mixed feeling as a take-away. The topics I had high expectations with, didn't really had punch, and under-rated ones surprised me.
The second day's highlight was the mix-bag of demos shown by Mr. Rohit of Kronos Inc. He talked about Semantic web and HTML 5, and amazed the audience with his bagfull of jazzy demos from all around the web.
I have a soft corner for panel discussions and see those as a perfect platform for brainstorming and value creation opportunities. The panel discussion on the second day about SOA in the age of Cloud and Integration did not disappoint me. It was the sheer aura of Dr. Soley as the moderator that kept me in the session. He got the best and the funny out of all, not just the panelists. It was a fantastic display of how a serious topic can be discussed in the light of intentional humour. Good Job.
The end of second day, made me to compare and contrast my expectations with real outcome of the conference. There were highs and lows, as with any other conference. But the whole point of coming together of a community, conversations over lunch and in middle of talks, networking, and finding new twitter friends is an amazing proposition alltogether. I made a set of friends thanks to twitter, and lucky to meet two of them in person - uma_kanth and _bharath (I better know you both from your twitter handles than your real names :)). All in all, a good experience and a learning opportunity.

A couple of points popped in my head as I browsed through the array of talks in my head:-

a) The presentations (not just powerpoints anymore) are still the old-school-style. Not all, but some notable ones still prefer to have the too-much-text syndrome. No pointers from me in this post to solve this, just read from Guy Kawasaki, Steve Jobs, Presentation Zen blog etc. - you will get the signal.

b) Beat around the bush and cliched-terms-to-save-point - I sometime found that talks, especially the process of talking involved abstraction and lacked a real sense of done-it-seen-it feel. We can make out when you see people talking like that, don't we ?

c) Ramp up the skills of presenting a talk - I found some talks to be little bland and less engaging, leading to a one-sided affair. I believe a talk or presentation is all about conversations and engagement. And this doesn't disarm the talent and skill of any speaker of a conference. The conference is a learning experience for the speaker too as its for the audience.
I sincerely hope to get feedback questionairres for each talk I attend, so to provide a consistent and focussed review, that not helps me, but also the speaker. Saltmarch, please do so from next time.

All in all, a great effort and wonderful opportunity to meet the fellow technologists from all walks of life.

SEI Cloud Computing Webinar Q&A

I had a chance to attend the SEI Webinar on Cloud Computing as a part of the SEI Webinar series. I had posted some questions during the seminar, and hence I thought of sharing them with you. The questions were answered by specialists in Cloud Computing at CMU SEI.

What is the scope for Enterprise Cloud ?

Enterprise Cloud is the term that is currently associated to the implementation of private clouds within the enterprise. The goal of enterprise clouds is the virtualization of resources leading to reduced maintenance and acquisition costs from a business perspective and hiding IT complexity from a technical perspective.

How an existing Customer can scale their already purchased infrastructure to Cloud?

There is a term called cloud bursting that is associated to only using cloud resources when local resources are not enough. This is one way. Another way is one-time usage, which is to move to the cloud one-time processing or archiving.

How do you see the Standardization of the Cloud Computing vendors coming up, and the timeline for it ?

The only standardization effort that I know of is from Eucalyptus Systems. Standardization is going to be hard.

How do Cloud Computing Implementors convince Customers regarding Security of their data in the Cloud?

The only way would be to look at their SLAs and analyze the security clauses. If you are comfortable with placing your data given those clauses, then it should be acceptable. It is a matter of trust, both from a partner and a technology perspective.

Thanks to Shane McGraw for getting back to me with the answers.

Using AWS : Experiences shared by Picnik.com