Computemeghadoot's Weblog

Cloud computing: Climbing the Peak of Inflated Expectations?

computemeghadoot — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:50:42 +0000

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?

computemeghadoot — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 17:26:25 +0000

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

computemeghadoot — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 19:42:07 +0000

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