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 Read more... (934 words, estimated 3:44 mins reading time)
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 Read more... (1066 words, estimated 4:16 mins reading time)
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 Read more... (313 words, estimated 1:15 mins reading time)
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 Read more... (321 words, estimated 1:17 mins reading time)
After I touted the idea to have a meetup last week, I got quite positive feedbacks from the community. More importantly, I secured sponsorship from my employer VMware so that we can have the event at VMware headquarter. Due to a little time conflict, we will have it on May 18, instead of May 25 as I planned before. It’s still a Wednesday and food/drinks will be served with no charge.
This event was designed for professionals like developers, system administrators. Even if you are not but interested in virtualization and cloud computing in general, you are still very welcome to join us.
The first 100 registers for onsite will have chance to win Read more... (249 words, estimated 1:0 mins reading time)
If you have a mobile phone and travel to other areas or countries, you can still use it to make and receive a call. Your phone number does not change. This is called roaming in the wireless telecommunications.
In the cloud environment, your virtual machine can “travel” around as well, maybe from one datacenter to another, from your enterprise to one of your service providers or the other way around, or from one service provider to another.
It’s relatively easy for a virtual machine Read more... (583 words, estimated 2:20 mins reading time)
In a previous post, I said that cloud service business model is very much like that of office renting business. Just as big companies want to own their major offices, they want to own their major datacenters as well. That explains why private cloud will not only be there forever but also represent a major chuck of overall market in the future.
Cloud Commoditization
Let’s get back to the cloud service business, or so called public cloud. When the cloud technology getting mature, the cloud related services will increasingly become commoditized. This is especially true Read more... (770 words, estimated 3:05 mins reading time)
I believe most of us learned at school the theory of big bang which tries to explain the formation of the universe. “According to the Big Bang model, the universe, originally in an extremely hot and dense state that expanded rapidly, has since cooled by expanding to the present diluted state, and continues to expand today.” (source: Wikipedia).
Now how does the theory relate to the cloud computing? More than you can think of. You can use the same theory to create (not just explain) a new cloud. Just like the universe, a cloud is created from almost nothing to a fully running infrastructure over time. Think about most enterprises which do not yet have a cloud today, they will need a big bang to create an enterprise cloud.
Basic Elements of a Cloud
It’s important to understand what you want before taking any action. To operate a cloud, Read more... (740 words, estimated 2:58 mins reading time)
Intent
Standardize new virtual machine provisioning with templates
Category:
Creational pattern
Problem
It’s been a pain to create new virtual machines with the right software installed and configured properly. You can always use tools like KickStart to automatically install the operating system and then install other software as needed. But configuring such an environment is not trivial, and it takes a long time from start to finish.
With the rise of virtualization, more virtual machines are provisioned (and decommissioned) than ever before. Installing each new virtual machine from scratch is not the ideal solution.
Solution Read more... (729 words, estimated 2:55 mins reading time)
One challenge almost every ISV faces today is how to quickly get “cloudy” with least investment. From business side, SaaS is a new model for most ISVs, meaning it’s still hard to project revenue. Even worse, the SaaS service may cut into the license revenue of existing product. Technically, it may require a full re-design and re-implementation of product for maximum multi-tenancy. Putting together, it’s a big challenge for decision makers.
But it doesn’t have to be difficult with a right strategy. This post explains how to support SaaS without re-designing existing applications, which means a big saving for the ISVs. Read more... (328 words, estimated 1:19 mins reading time)
English
Recent Comments