During the Microsoft Management Summit last month, I had an interesting chat with Rakesh Malhotra who is the VP product of Apprenda. It made me to think more about two important technologies: virtualization and PaaS. As we know, virtualization is almost a must for IaaS. Will it be the same case for PaaS?
Pure PaaS or PaaS over IaaS
Last week VMware formally announced that it would form a virtual team with EMC to take cloud service and middleware market. There was a rumor about it the week early which turned out to be mostly true. If you are in IT industry nowadays, you simply cannot under-estimate the power of rumors. I think most of the VMware and EMC employees might hear the rumor before hearing it from their management teams. 
Last week I took a two day boot camp on OpenStack, which is increasingly popular these days. The project was initially created at Rackspace in answering Amazon Web Services, and open sourced to the community.
Not only service providers and software vendors showed interests in the project, but also hardware vendors tried to pre-install OpenStack as one of key differentiators (inside most, if not all, of hardware boxes are Intel therefore not much difference).
Many of us have already heard of the term “software stack.” It shows the software layers in boxes stacking up on each other, all the way from operating system, to middleware, and to applications. When these layers are offered as services, we have IaaS (Infrastructure As A Service), PaaS (Platform As A Service), and SaaS (Software As A Service) respectively for so called cloud service stack. These two stacks are essentially similar if not the same.
Once upon a time, there was a famous vision – “The network is the computer.” If you have been with ITindustry long enough, you would know what the company was behind the vision. Inspired the vision for computer, I am inventing yet another one for cloud – “The data is the cloud.”
I just did an interview with Ricky Ribeiro, who is online content manager of BizTech Magazine. It was published last week as part of the Q&A series of Must Read IT blogs. In response to Ricky’s great questions, I shared thoughts on a broad range of topics, including blogging, cloud computing, and technical innovation in general.
The following is part of the article. For full coverage, please check out here, where you can also find links to interviews with other top IT bloggers.
After finishing up my reflection of 2011 predictions , it’s time to make my predictions for 2012 as today is the last day of 2011.
1. Virtualization war will be heated between VMware and Microsoft. The trigger will be the Hyper-V 3.0 which is expected to ship in the middle of 2012 with the Windows 8 server. According to many people, the 3.0 release will bring it on par or better than latest VMware hypervisor.
Last December I made top 5 predictions on cloud computing for 2011. When the year ends soon, it’s time to review them. I won’t rate their accuracy myself because I am indeed biased. You are welcome to do so in the comments though.
“1. The focus of cloud computing will gradually shift from IaaS to PaaS which becomes key differentiator in competition. Developer enablement becomes more important than ever in ecosystem evangelism, full software lifecycle integration, IDE support, API and framework, and etc.”
Yesterday I went to Microsoft Azure DevCamp in its Silicon Valley office. Like other developer events organized by Microsoft, it featured awesome presentations with nice overviews and demos by top evangelists like James Conard, Wade Wegner, Nick Harris, etc.
As you’ve probably known, Microsoft has been betting heavily on cloud computing. Anyone who is interested in cloud computing simply cannot ignore its Windows Azure, which is a comprehensive platform for developing cloud applications. Note that, the focus is applications, not virtual machines as offered by Amazon and other IaaS providers.
After leaving VMware and taking a short break at home last week, I am excited to be part of VCE solution engineering team as an architect at its Santa Clara office. For those who are not familiar VCE, it’s a joint venture of EMC, Cisco, VMware and Intel. My formal title is consultant software engineer which, according to my recruiter, is the top engineer rank in the company.
Today is my last day at VMware.
Looking back, it’s been almost four and half years since I joined VMware in June 2007. At that time, VMware was still part of EMC, and two months later it went IPO (to be exact, spin off). Together with many of my colleagues I watched the historical moment for the company on a very early summer morning. I still remember there were quite a few sleeping tents inside the new offices.
In my previous articles, I mainly cover server virtualization and cloud computing. Client computing, although less enterprise focused, is also a very important part of whole story. In this article, I am going to share some thoughts on this topic, mostly about the future development of how users will use computers and what it takes to get there. I know it’s a big topic, but let’s give a try.
Cloud bursting means workload moves from one cloud to another on the fly. With differentiation of public cloud and private cloud, you can have 4 different permutations: private to public, private to private, public to public, and public to private.
What people talk about the most is the case of private to public cloud. Think about the case in which
Recently I stumbled at a book Things That Make Us Smart by one of my favorite authors Donald Norman. In the book, he shared many insights on the complex human machine interactions, “arguing for the development of machines that fit our minds, rather than minds that must conform to the machine.” By the way, I highly recommend his another book The Design of Everyday Things.
Because I just blogged about IT automation, I still have that topic on my mind. So when I read the book, I did quite a lot of reflective thinking around IT automation. In general, I feel
This is by Boris Strongin, VP Engineering and Co-founder, Hytrust Inc at our first community meetup on May 18. He reviews new security, auditing, and compliance challenges coming with cloud multi-tenancy, and approaches to address them.
Check out these slides for his insights:
This is the tech talk by Giridhar Padmanabh(@girip26), who is now a Sr. Manager at Cisco. He joined Cisco not long ago with the newScale acquisition. This tech talk draws on his 7 years of experience at newScale building industry leading software for delivering private cloud as a service.
Check out the slides below:
Weeks ago I had a great conversation with Vanessa Alvarez (@VanessaAlvarez1) who is an analyst with Forrest Research. Among other topics, we discussed datacenter automation because we’re both interested in it. After Vanessa tweeted about her automation dream, several follow-up tweets came up.
In general, I think automation is a vague word in IT world, and it mostly means different things to different people. This is especially true when we talk about automation together with integration. This article tries to define automation from my understanding and perspective. Please feel free to share your thoughts in comments.
From high level, automation is the opposite to
After preparing the event for almost two months, we are finally ready. If you join us onsite, here is direction to our venue. We have free food/drinks, and many books/gifts waiting for you, thanks to our sponsors and 12 volunteers.
If you join us online, we have a great news for you. Instead of WebEx, we will have a live broadcasting. Here is the URL: http://bit.ly/osvimeetup, courtesy of @lkilpatrick. You can enter as a Guest on 7PM (Pacific Time) for tech talks.
Here are the 8 tech talks we pulled together. A bit long but
I always believe cloud computing is a computing, not the computing of the future. Its elastic and centralized nature allows greater level of sharing that was otherwise impossible within single organizations. It works great for anyone who has dramatic workloads and other cases. But it doesn’t work in all the cases.
Recently a new use case comes to my attention. It actually requires opposite way to cloud computing. You may have known recent developments in bioinformatics. With human genes are sequenced and analyzed, we can
Many APIs have emerged since the inception of computer software. Its root can be traced back to the layered software architecture in which high layer calls to low layer. The low layer is not necessarily called APIs, but the other way is mostly true.
Initial APIs were inside a single or multiple vertical call stacks that share same memory space. As a result, you have good performance and ease of use. After that, inter-process communication (IPC) emerged and allowed API services to run in a different process for better
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