Sometimes it is important to reflect back on activities and achievements of the past year in order to focus on the road ahead. 2009 was a year full of “firsts” and exciting announcements for GoGrid and I thought that I would quickly summarize and highlight a some blog posts of interest.

I have personally enjoyed documenting our achievements, analyzing trends, reviewing opportunities, showcasing new clients and partners as well as musing about Cloud Computing in general. Much of the writing on the GoGrid blog during 2009 was my own, however, the people who have helped provide me inspiration are countless, ranging from those within GoGrid to others creating the cloud community at large.

The journey through 2009 has definitely been an exciting one. Looking back on 2009 should make all users, creators and consumers of the cloud very proud. We have done a tremendous amount in 2009! So without further ado, below are a few selected posts of interest from the GoGrid blog for each month during 2009.

January 2009

• “Cloudcenters Are Datacenters In The Sky” – in this post, Randy Bias outlines his vision of what the “cloudcenter” meme truly is and how it is unique
• “Building A House In The Cloud – Cloudcenters Vs. Infrastructure Web Services” – in this post, I tried to simplify some of the differences between our new term of “cloudcenter” and “infrastructure web services” using a comparison to building a house.
• “GoGrid Releases API Specification To The Cloud Computing Community Under Creative Commons License” – GoGrid released our Application Programming Interface (API) under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 License which allows users to share, distribute, display and make derivative works based on our API
• “New Windows Server 2003 & 2008 Images Added To GoGrid” – we continued to build out our Windows Server 2003 and 2008 image offering as the first to market with Windows Server 2008 in the Cloud
• All January posts are here

February 2009 (more…)

Just in time for the Microsoft PDC 2009, GoGrid is excited to showcase an integrated solution for Windows Azure™ developers, using the GoGrid Cloud for seamlessly building and deploying applications for Windows Azure. Our solution interoperates with the existing GoGrid infrastructure and includes preconfigured development environments which allows developers to build applications and publish them to Windows Azure.

GoGrid’s VP of Engineering, Paul Lappas, narrates the video below demonstrating the interoperability between GoGrid Cloud Infrastructure and the Windows Azure Platform:

GoGrid provides infrastructure services in the cloud allowing customers to rapidly deploy load-balanced and hybrid servers without purchasing costly hardware.

With the release of the Windows Azure™ platform, GoGrid wanted to extend its services and enable its customers to develop, test, deploy, and back up Windows Azure applications efficiently and cost-effectively.

The Windows Azure Application Lifecycle Management Service interoperates with the existing GoGrid infrastructure. With this pairing, Windows Developers enjoy a variety of advantages. For example:

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Yesterday GoGrid and EdgeCast Networks jointly announced the availability of the GoGrid CDN (Content Delivery Network). With the GoGrid CDN (currently in beta), GoGrid customers can scale their web presence as well as accelerate the delivery of web content using the GoGrid CDN global infrastructure.

What is unique about the GoGrid CDN (powered by EdgeCast Networks) is that it is a pay-as-you-go service with no contracts or usage requirements. Also, the CDN boasts 16 Points-of-Presence (PoPs) on 4 continents. There is no need to set up specific zones as your coverage is truly global. More details can be found on the GoGrid CDN page.

Webinar

GoGrid will be conducting a webinar about the new CDN to answer any questions you may have. Details are:

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GoGrid, and parent company ServePath, are excited to announce participation in Microsoft’s new WebsiteSpark Program, specifically targeted towards Web Professionals. Using WebsiteSpark, Web Pros can drive new business opportunities through connections with partners and customers around the world.

Before jumping into the details and Q&A, if you already know that you want to participate in this program with either GoGrid or ServePath as your Hosting partner, please visit our signup pages on the GoGrid site or ServePath site.

But what does all of this mean? Trust me, I have read through all of the 19 pages of Frequently Asked Questions and Program documentation and it is a bit overwhelming. So, this blog post is really an effort to try to cull out the critical points of importance for you. However, if there are any questions that you do have after reading this, I encourage you to talk to some WebsiteSpark folks or sales reps at GoGrid or ServePath. At a high-level, this is an incredibly helpful program targeted towards Web Professionals.

Probably the best way to approach this is through a series of questions and answers.

What is WebsiteSpark?

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VMWorld 2009 is set to kick off next week and GoGrid will be there in the New Innovators Pavilion. Conference information can be found here. We hope that you will come and visit us at our booth there. The Expo itself is open on the following days and times (and we will be at the booth during these times):

• Monday, August 31st – 5:30pm-8:30pm
• Tuesday, September 1st – 10:00am-6:00pm
• Wednesday, September 2nd – 10:00am-6:00pm
• Thursday, September 3rd – 10:00am-2:00pm

While VMWare in the IT organization may be a good fit for many, there are obviously other alternatives for hosting a full IT infrastructure in the Cloud. GoGrid is one of the pioneers from that perspective. We not only provide Windows and Linux servers within the GoGrid Cloud, we also provide many industry standard components like hardware-based load balancing, private and public networking, dynamic mountable Cloud Storage solutions, an industry hardened and robust SLA and the ability to connect a cloud front-end with a dedicated or colocated backend server infrastructure. We like to call GoGrid a “cloudcenter” which is essentially a datacenter in the cloud. You can read up on the cloudcenter idea here and here.

At the show, we will be giving out high-value promotional codes good for trying out GoGrid’s Cloud Infrastructure for free. Of course, we will also have lots of SWAG (Stuff We All Get) to give away!

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Drum roll please! We are excited to announce the availability of GoGrid version 2.0, released today to all users. This is an important release from a product standpoint as it positions GoGrid firmly as the easiest to use hosting provider within the Cloud Computing Infrastructure marketplace.

What is new with GoGrid in the 2.0 release?

• MyGSI – GoGrid Server Images
• Improved Server Deployment Times
• IP Addresses in Passwords Tab

The 10,000 Foot View

Before I get into the 100 foot view, it is probably important to talk about what MyGSIs mean to you from a higher level.

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Last night we release a new version of GoGrid that has a few notable changes, specifically:

• Server Image Selection Widget
• Smart selection of RAM allocations (and 8 GB RAM options in web GUI)
• Updates to GoGrid API
• Enhancements to underlying Architecture

Server Image Selection Widget

The biggest visual change in this release is to how Windows and Linux Database, Web and Applications server images are selected within the GoGrid web interface. This is essentially the framework that will be used for the upcoming MyGSI feature. Since we continue to add new images to the GoGrid image repository, and we will be enabling your own personal server images to be stored within GoGrid, we realized that the current selection process of Application & Database servers doesn’t scale very well.

Our software engineering team has come up with an elegant image selection widget that will allow you to quickly drill-down to the image type you wish. Instead of trying to articulate what the new selector looks like, here are some screenshots of what to expect.

After you click on the Add Web/Application Server Icon, you are presented with a list of all available images:

You can see that the list shows the Name, Operating System (OS), Architecture type (32/64-bit), Type of server (Web/DB), Price (e.g., MS SQL, for example, shows a charge – see below) and the Date the image was Updated.

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For those of you waiting to try out Cloud Computing or GoGrid, I wanted to be sure that you were all aware that the $50 Free GoGrid Trial Credit program will be ending on July 2nd, 2009! We recently sent out an email to all of those people who had expressed some interest in GoGrid Cloud Computing Hosting and Infrastructure. However, that was just limited to people that we knew about. I wanted to make sure that others who are not on our mailing lists are informed about this important change.

Below are the contents of the email:

If you have been considering trying GoGrid’s award winning cloud computing platform, you don’t want to miss out on your free trial. Sign up via the website before July 2, 2009 to redeem your credit.
http://www.gogrid.com/signUp/?promocode=GOGOTRIAL50
With GoGrid you get the most control out of your cloud  computing infrastructure. Included with every account at no additional cost are the following:

• Enterprise-Grade F5 Hardware Load Balancing
• 10 GB Cloud Storage
• 100% Uptime, 10,000% Guaranteed™ SLA
• 24/7 Premium Support

Dedicated / Cloud Hybrid Hosting

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The recent McKinsey report “Clearing the air on cloud computing” has caused quite a bit of stir within the cloud community, and I can see why. While it definitely brings a good deal of analysis to the table, I feel it is somewhat generalized, makes assumptions and does overlook some key points.

First and foremost, this article is NOT going to be an analytical discussion of the cost of running or setting up a datacenter vs. an Amazon EC2 Windows instance. I’m not a financial analyst. Honestly, calculating the Total Cost of Assets (TCA) or Total Cost of Operations (TCO) causes my eyes to roll back into my head leaving me gasping for air. Don’t get me wrong, it seems like some good effort was made analyzing data and formulating conclusions. The problem is, I feel that they were on a jetliner, shooting through the clouds with the shades 1/2 down.

Before I start with my own analysis and commentary, I would like to reference a few responses I have read that somewhat chastise McKinsey.

Three “Rebuttal” Articles to Read

The first comes from CIO IT Drilldown’s Virtualization site. In his article “McKinsey Cloud Computing Report Conclusions Don’t Add Up,” Bernard Golden does the major lifting for me in terms of analysis. I have highlighted some key points from the article that I viewed to be particularly important (my highlighted version of the article is here). I particularly enjoyed Golden’s rebuttal to the analysis of cost calculations, namely use of EC2 Windows instances, headcounts that don’t add up and other “less visible” capital expenses for facilities and other assets. Also as Golden points out, McKinsey proposes that better efficiencies and savings can be realized through virtualization within the organization. To me, the McKinsey recommendation seems a bit counter-intuitive: “Don’t go with a vendor whose expertise IS virtualization, hardware, infrastructure, et al. Instead, DO try to do it yourself, with tremendous CapEx & OpEx expense.” Hmmm, makes sense to me, NOT! Lastly, I particularly liked Golden’s 3 recommendations (quoted from article):

1. Review your portfolio of applications to understand what cloud computing means to you.
2. Create a viable financial model for assessing the true costs of internal hosting.
3. Evaluate the potential for an internal cloud even if the numbers don’t work with an external cloud provider.

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C|net and Webware have announced their list of user-submitted nominations for the 2009 Webware 100. Of the numerous nominations, GoGrid was then later selected by the Webware editors as one of the final 100 in the list. This is a “People’s Choice” type of award around the best Web 2.0 applications and services. More information about the Webware 100 can be found here.

To jump right to the voting for GoGrid, under the Infrastructure & Storage category, please click here or click the logo below.

There are 10 categories that users can vote on, as well as an 11th category where the Webware editors select an additional winner. The categories are:

• Audio and music: Music streaming and download, podcasting, audio book services, recommendation systems.
• Browsing: Tools to access online content, including browsers, start pages, RSS readers, widgets, and runtime engines
• Commerce: Retail, auctions, marketplaces, travel, event tickets, and real estate
• Communications: E-mail, chat, voice
• Infrastructure and storage: Web app platforms and tools; online storage and synchronization products
• Location-based services: Mapping, friend finders, business locators, geographic services (new category for 2009)
• Photo and video: Photo storage, sharing, and editing; video storage, playback, streaming, editing, and animation
• Productivity: Tools for work and organization
• Search and reference: Data and ways to find it; search tools and knowledge repositories like wikis
• Social and publishing: Social networking, shared online environments, content management, blogging, and micro-blogging
• Editors’ awards: To be announced, but these will include awards for up-and-coming products, design, innovative use of technology, and so on.

GoGrid was nominated under the “Infrastructure and storage” category and we couldn’t be happier. We have been providing Infrastructure “in the Cloud” since our launch at the beginning of 2008. Others have already “seen the light” as evidenced by our Linux World 2008 Product Excellence Award of “BEST OF SHOW.”

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