Blog
RSSLast week Charles Babcock published in InformationWeek a list of 9 more cloud computing pioneers as a follow-up to an early list he had compiled in 2012 of 10 cloud computing pioneers. This inspired Reuven Cohen, founder of Enomaly and current SVP, Community Clouds at VirtuStream to publish a list of a few early cloud computing mavericks on Forbes. These are great lists of some illustrious folks and their amazing accomplishments and contributions to the industry.
At NephoScale we also take the long view on the evolution of cloud computing, and as cloud builders with a distinguished track record ourselves, we have a unique perspective on the market forces, the inventors, innovators, engineers, and business leaders,...
When it comes to modern IT project management most organizations have adopted an iterative approach to product development. The reasons for this are well understood, including the fallacy of time estimation, the benefits of small changes, self-organizing teams, communication and collaboration, and the desire to fail fast and get customer feedback.
The traditional view of project management is that there are key variables such as time, cost, capacity and quality to be manipulated, but when using agile planning methods all of this goes out the window. It is true that a good agile team over time should in fact make all of these factors as constant as possible. In Scrum, the time window is fixed where a release every two weeks is the proscribed duration. Most teams don't change their cost structure very often - if the proper lean and agile practices are put in place along with leveraging cloud computing. Capacity over time becomes fixed as well, again assuming the proper practices are put in place, and the right balance is found between engineering and...
When NephoScale first embarked on developing the technology surrounding "Elastic Networking" in early 2010, the development team already had decades of experience building large scale hosting environments and clearly understood the limits of existing network architectures as they applied to cloud datacenter environments. They were static, inflexible, brittle, and difficult to scale. We envisioned a network that was controlled by software, was fully automated, and could function in ways traditional networks simply couldn’t. In hindsight, there were plenty of similarities between the Elastic Networking technology we were developing in-house with what is currently called SDN (software defined networking). With all of the recent industry and market attention being paid to emerging SDN companies, it is apparent our foresight surrounding what we felt was an obvious need in the area of data center networking was spot on.
- We wanted to create a network that is truly dynamic. One that could...
As programmers we use a large number of specialized languages for good reason, because we have a task to accomplish we tend to choose a language that we believe is just good enough to do the job. Programming languages become important because they contain interesting ideas, or they are very popular. How do languages that are just good enough become so popular?
Given it's shortcomings, JavaScript is an amazing success story. Its programming model is not popular, it was implemented in a hurry, it has too many poorly designed features, and it is tied to the DOM, a terrible API. Yet, there is something expressive and powerful in the language, and when AJAX came along JavaScript worked surprisingly well for managing the DOM. JavaScript has another critical advantage that has lead to its success, it is the only programming language available for programming in the web browser.
Bash is another specialized language that is very popular for programming tasks on Unix, Linux, BSD, OS X, and Windows (Cygwin). Bash is also tied...
Idempotence, literally meaning the quality of having the same power, was first introduced by 19th century mathematician Benjamin Peirce. In the context of an algebra, a function is idempotent if, whenever it is applied twice to any value, it gives the same result as if it were applied once. For example, the absolute value: abs(abs(x)) ≡ abs(x).
In computer science, the term idempotence has a slightly different meaning, and it is used to describe operations that will produce the same results if executed once or multiple times. As an example, let’s imagine that you submit a pipeline of requests to a server and after receiving the first response, you lose connection to the server. You may not be able to tell whether (a) the server processed all or some of the remaining requests but the response did not reach you, or (b) whether the server did not process any of the remaining requests. You can retry these requests, but doing so could result in undesirable side effects, e.g., creation of duplicate records, or deleting data that is not...
Why do Data Center Services, Platform Services, and Orchestration Services matter? With the recent acquisitions of Nicira and Dynamic Ops by VMWare and Xsigo Systems by Oracle it is clear that some of the biggest players are scrambling to reinvent their cloud strategy. Their goal seems to be adding flexibility and elasticity. At the same time Amazon continues to position on price with their latest effort to retain enterprise accounts by offering steep discounts for customers that commit to long-term-use rather than the on-demand instance options. At first glance, it may seem like the leading cloud services are either attempting to bolt on core functionality as an after-thought or offer commodities to the point where they have to compete on price.
At NephoScale, we believe that the platform for cloud services are definitely NOT the same between cloud vendors and price is not the most important factor in selecting a cloud service. In fact, the architecture, security and ease-of-use of the cloud service make all the difference in...
The cloud offers the promise of easy and fast software and infrastructure deployment, rapid availability of highly scalable compute power and all this with economic advantage over traditional approaches. While the overall impact of on-demand public cloud services is still playing out, the future success and ultimate impact will depend upon customers’ ability to leverage the cloud to help them build their businesses, generate incremental revenue and compete more effectively in the modern hyper-competitive landscape.
Historically cloud providers have focused on making the service reliable, scalable and secure. Despite all the benefits, cloud services are not without significant issues. The next step in the evolution of cloud services needs to address the challenges that face the various constituencies that use the cloud. This blog post examines the perspectives and challenges of the different stakeholders within an organization that are preparing to deploy cloud based solutions including business unit managers, IT managers, software developers, systems...