The return of Computemeghadoot…

From the days when Cloud Computing started climbing up the peak of this Hype cycle published by Gartner in July 2008, interest in Cloud Computing has been growing steadily. As on July 2009, Cloud Computing was on the peak so to speak of the Hype Cycle, see report here.

Computemeghadoot caught the cloud bug, got started on a blog about clouds, technology, resources and current updates in the world of cloud. However it was missing in action until now, April 2010.  During incessant meanderings across the vast expanse of the blue sky filled with Clouds, of all types and shapes, there was lots of interesting work related to re-creating and packaging my system management and load balancing product for the cloud, researching various cloud computing models, Cloud Market Place, trends etc etc.  Now that the product is released, work on the cloud front has stabilized, and Computemeghadoot is back on the blog!

To make up for my absence, here is what I propose to do.  Watch out the next set of blog posts with a directory of sorts – consisting of resources related to Cloud Computing that I found really useful in the course of my work.  Another idea in the works is a free book related to Cloud Computing – for beginners – dedicated to students who wish to understand the nuances of Cloud Computing without having access to all the  ‘paid’ Cloud resources or spend useful time searching for the same on the web.  So far I found that only iCloud provides a ‘free online cloud computing resource – a PC’ to its users with limited storage.  Other services are all pay-per-use model.  Low price yet for a student in a developing country- its not always an option that is available to hone ones’ skills as a student.

Now that I have my feet on the ground and head held up high in the ‘clouds’, let’s get into some serious Cloud Computing. Happy Cloud Catching,  see ya soon.

Cloud computing: Climbing the Peak of Inflated Expectations?

As with any new technology trigger, Cloud Computing seems to be moving uphill on the Peak of Inflated Expectations and could potentially be adopted in mainstream computing in the next 2 to 5 years, provided it crosses the chasm – the Gartner ‘Trough of Disillusionment’.  Refer to the latest Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies – July 2008. Look at the Google insight graph to see the exponential rise in interest for the term ‘Cloud Computing’.

Everyone from Dell to HP to Yahoo is trying to catch the bandwagon. IBM, Microsoft and VMWare are vying for the Cloud Computing Market but by far the leader is Amazon with their EC2 and S3 Offering and also right behind them is Google with their AppEngine. Somewhere in between are raring to go and upbeat startups like Rightscale, Gigaspaces, 3Tera, Joyent (many more see here); Opensource folks such as Enomalism, Eucalyptus and so many others trying to catch the bandwagon with their ‘Cloud Computing’ offerings.

Well, the best part about clouds in general is whatever shape or size it is, its still a cloud as long as it has the following simple properties: well rounded edges (in computing jargon this translates into usable interfaces and integratable), mobility (application and server mobility, virtualization), seamless (you don’t know where your application resides and which physical resource it uses), may or may not cause rain/hails (breakdowns, failures, availability issues), overencompasses anything and everything that it can (every possible software that can go SaaS could get clouded), usually found on higher altitudes (target is higher layers of OS stack – applications, session and presentation layers, higher levels of abstraction using tools such as Ruby-on-Rails, Python or totally new languages which operate at much higher level than C/C++/Java).

Will Cloud Computing transfort IT? Well, only time and customers will tell.

Subverting Xen Hypervisor – Is Amazon EC2 really safe?

Well, folks at Google Cloud Group are discussing the Xen Hypervisor vulnerability and exploitpresented Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 at Black Hat conference in Vegas. Amazon EC2 infrastructure uses Xen at the backend for providing virtual instances. So is EC2 vulnerable?

As Cloudscale founder Randy Bias mentions, the dom0 is not accessible outside Amazon, this exploit may not really be a problem, unless of course there is some misconfiguration or somehow dom0 is accessible to someone outside Amazon.

What is Amazon being used for as of today – when we don’t have persistance in an instance – for one – those are compute and processing tasks, typically run on multiple instances and are capable of surviving or resuming after a few instance or node failures. There are others – the web 2.0 folks and they might have issues – if they have a few instances supporting their web 2.0 products and hosted infrastrucutre and this hack causes their instances to go down – they lose business. But then at this stage, chances of this vulnerability getting exploited are about the same as Amazon EC2 or S3 going down due it its own teething problems and I think users are aware of those and prepared for them as well.

Rackspace – First Cloud Computing Space IPO

Will 2008 see more Cloud space IPOs, mergers and acquisitions in the days to come?

This could be tip of the iceberg. Going by Merill Lynch estimates – within the next 5 years the cloud computing market is going to grow to $95 billion!!! Who will have the lead in cloud computing space? What are the characteristic features of the killer product in cloud computing space? Someone who has these capabilities: 1.) Capabilities of process transactions on the scale of Amazon and eBay, 2.) GUI – have the eye-popping user experience of Apple and 3.) Gorilla – the presence of Microsoft.

Details on Rackspace IPO here, This is how RAX is faring at the Wall Street

The FlightPath – ComputeMegha – yet to arrive

Getting Cloud Aware 101

What compute cloud really means?

Invisible Infostructure?

What is an itinerant computer?

Google cloud computing trends

Big Players

Cloud Ware Vendors A-Z

Cloud Blog and References
SAP Architect and Strategist Blog

wisdom of clouds

Joyent weblog

Frequently Asked Questions

Escaping Cloud lock-in

Primer, how cloud works and how companies and consumers would use clouds?

What is on the offer – applications, platform, infrastructure or all in the cloud computing paradigm?

What are some of the current issues with Cloud computing?

Hello world!

Welcome to ComputeMeghaDoot.

In Hindi, ‘megha’ means ‘clouds’ and ‘doot’ means ‘messenger’.

ComputeMeghadoot – blog brings to you any and all interesting developments happening around the globe in the context of ‘Cloud Computing’.