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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I just read an article in ITworld titled “P2P bill could regulate browsers, cloud computing” by Grant Gross that got my brain churning a bit. Is Peer-to-Peer really considered “Cloud Computing?” And, if it is, how would it be classified? Cloud Application? No. Cloud Platform? Nope. Cloud Infrastructure? Uh…No.

After reading the P2P Bill, what concerns me is the extremely broad and loose definition of a “peer-to-peer sharing program”. H.R. 1319 (otherwise known as the “Informed P2P User Act”) does not seem to clearly define this term. (You can view the full text of the Bill here.) The definition of a “peer-to-peer file sharing program” is defined within the Bill as proposed as:

(2) the term ‘peer-to-peer file sharing program’ means computer software that allows the computer on which such software is installed–
(A) to designate files available for transmission to another computer;
(B) to transmit files directly to another computer; and
(C) to request the transmission of files from another computer.

In a response delivered to Representative Bono Mack, the sponsor of H.R. 1319, the CCIA (Computer & Communication Industry Association), the NetCoalition, TechAmerica and the Internet Commerce Coalition stated:

“As currently drafted, however, H.R. 1319 would broadly apply to many different applications and Web sites that appear to be beyond the intended scope of the bill.

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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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Over the past year, I have written about the various primal layers of Cloud Computing. Typically, my role is to “over simplify” in order to make the Cloud a bit more palpable by “the masses.” My colleague, Randy Bias, is the resident über-tech, so I usually leave the more complicated developer and sys-admin posts to him. As we all know, the Cloud is hot and becoming increasingly complicated as new products, services and vendors throw their hats into the ring. But is this over-complication confusing and saturating the market? I think not, in terms of the latter, but it is truly becoming more confusing.

First, we at GoGrid, broadly define Cloud Computing as such (latest definition):

On-demand self-service Internet infrastructure where you pay-as-you-go and use-only what you need, all managed by a browser, application or API.

Even that definition I feel is a bit skewed toward Infrastructure. Probably more aptly defined, it would be:

On-demand, self-service Applications, Platforms, Services or Infrastructure dynamically consumed on a pay-as-you-go basis using a browser, application or API.

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This morning we announced that Appistry EAF Community Edition has been released within the GoGrid cloudcenter infrastructure. The press release can be viewed here. Full contents of the release are below.

Appistry and GoGrid Announce Commercial Availability of Joint Cloud Computing Solution for Delivering Highly Scalable and Reliable Server Applications

Cloud Computing Infrastructure provider GoGrid and Cloud Application Platform provider Appistry announce the release of Appistry EAF Community Edition within the GoGrid cloudcenter.

San Francisco, CA February 26, 2009 — GoGrid, the Cloud Computing division of ServePath, LLC and Appistry today released new tools for developers, architects and administrators designed to ease the pain associated with developing, deploying and managing applications in the Cloud. Appistry’s Cloud application platform, named Appistry EAF, helps businesses and enterprises efficiently manage and scale their applications within the GoGrid infrastructure. With this joint solution, larger companies are able to take full advantage of the Cloud’s unique value proposition of elastic scalability, solid reliability, automated management and CapEx economies.

Appistry EAF Community Edition 3.9 is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 users. Additional EAF-enabled GoGrid images will be rolling out in the near future. Appistry EAF Community Edition allows developers, system architects and administrators to take advantage of Appistry’s Cloud application platform for free on up to five GoGrid Cloud Server instances. Appistry EAF functionality and benefits include:

• Transparent and instant linear scalability
• Application-level fault tolerance
• Broad support for Cloud-enabling software components
• Adaptive, software-based load balancing
• Fully-distributed, fault tolerant memory cache for objects and data
• Fine-grained, hierarchical security model
• Efficiencies in CapEx and administrator time
• Ease of use

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By now, many in the Cloud Computing space have heard about (or even read) the University of California Electrical Engineering & Computer Science’s (EECS) study on Cloud Computing titled: “Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing.” Published on February 10th, 2009, the EECS’s paper provides a seemingly academic study of the Cloud Computing movement, attempts to explain what Cloud Computing is all about, and identifies potential opportunities as well as challenges present within the market.

The 20+ page study is authored by Michael Armbrust, Armando Fox, Rean Griffith, Anthony D. Joseph, Randy H. Katz, Andrew Konwinski, Gunho Lee, David A. Patterson, Ariel Rabkin, Ion Stoica and Matei Zaharia who all work in RAD Lab. (Interestingly, several of the companies mentioned within the study are also Founding Sponsors and/or affiliate members: Sun, Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, etc.).

There has already been plenty of discussion and analysis of this study (by James Urquhart, Krishna Sankar and has even appeared on Slashdot.org). Needless to say, I felt compelled to get my two cents in, especially from the perspective of a Cloud Computing Infrastructure vendor.

From an academic standpoint, this document definitely has some legs. It is complete with carefully thought out scenarios, examples and even formulae, as well as graphs and tables. Some of the points that are brought up even got me scratching my head (e.g., using flash memory to help by “adding another relatively fast layer to the classic memory hierarchy”). Even the case analysis of a DDoS attack from a cost perspective of those initiating an attack to those warding off an attack on a Cloud was interesting to ponder. I commend these group of authors on undertaking such a grand task of not only writing by committee but also overlaying a very business school vs. mathematics and computer sciences approach to the writing and analysis.

Unfortunately, however, as I read through the document, I started scrawling madly in the margins with commentary that is somewhat contrary to what was written within the study.

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2008 was an action-packed year for us here at GoGrid and ServePath and we have many accomplishments to be proud of. I thought it would make sense to reflect back on what major things we did over the year as well as a few other notables that happened within the industry. The easiest way for me to do this is through a blog post Chronology (not every post is highlighted):

1st Quarter 2008

• 01.03.08 – GoGrid Blog was launched
• 01.29.08 – “Sneak Peak” at GoGrid
• 02.01.08 – Twitter and Joyent go different ways
• 02.05.08 – Understanding “Clouded” Computer Terms – a post that made a 1st attempt to explain Cloud, Utility, Grid and other Computing terms.
• 02.13.08 – Dilbert does a series on Virtualization (here, here and here)
• 02.15.08 – Amazon’s S3 has major outage (my comments)
• 02.21.08 – GoGrid launches a new public website in anticipation of the product launch
• 03.11.08 – GoGrid Public Beta LAUNCH! After over 2 years of development, GoGrid hits the streets with many Cloud Computing firsts:
  • 1st Cloud Infrastructure provider with a Web GUI
  • 1st to offer Windows Server 2003 in the Cloud
  • 1st to offer Microsoft SQL Server in the Cloud
  • 1st with free Inbound Transfer
  • 1st with free f5 Load Balancing
  • 1st with free 24×7 Support
  • 1st with Persistent Storage
  • 1st with free managed DNS
  • 1st with 100% Uptime SLA
  • 1st with public and private VLANs
• 03.17.08 – Drilling down on the details of new GoGrid accounts
• 03.18.08 – Even I wasn’t initially on board with the whole “Cloud Computing” term. My thoughts have changed obviously.
• 03.28.08 – The initial GoGrid FAQ’s start rolling out.

2nd Quarter 2008 (more…)

The start of a New Year is upon us so it is time to get a list together of things that you will do (or do your best to do) in the coming year. Everybody has their own personal Resolution lists, but what about your Business ones? How are you going to remain competitive? What steps are you going to take to cut your budget to remain lean and mean? Are you going to stick with your current methods or adopt some new strategies?

Here are some “Resolutions” that you can think about as you ready your business for 2009.

1. Invest some time in understanding the term “Cloud Computing” – there are several easy-to-understand definitions and movies that have come out that make Cloud Computing a bit more understandable. This one was done at the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo. Then came the GoGrid “Cloud Computing in Plain English”. Recently, there is a new “In Plain English” from the actual Common Craft folks (whom we got our inspiration from). And here is a more technical presentation that came out recently. Regardless, there are lots of sources out there for quick understandings. I have been maintaining a Bookmark RSS feed as well of many of the Cloud Computing blogs and sites. Subscribe to that feed for updated links. Also, read through the popular Cloud Computing Group on Google. Lastly, you can check Wikipedia for their ever evolving definition of Cloud Computing.
2. Do some research on different Cloud Providers – no Cloud Computing provider is the same, and the differentiation is continuing. Last year (2008), I introduced the idea of the Cloud Pyramid which has Cloud Applications (SalesForce) at the top, then Cloud Platforms (Google App Engine or Microsoft Azure) in the middle and finally Cloud Infrastructure (GoGrid and Amazon EC2) as the bottom foundation. Also hooked into it are Cloud Extenders (e.g., Amazon’s SQS) and Cloud Aggregators (RightScale). It’s pretty obvious that there are many choices to be made and that these are very specific to the type of business you are running. In fact, we will be further segmenting the IaaS (Cloud Infrastructure) section more over the next few weeks. Briefly, GoGrid is now being positioned as a “CloudCenter” (which is essentially, a DataCenter equivalent but in the Cloud). More on that later. In the meantime, compile a series of questions for yourself and for your prospective provider. We will get a list together of things you might want to ask (post to come).
3. Review your IT Budget – If you are like most companies out there, you are going through your 2009 budgeting (or have done so already and are probably on your 10th revision now). One way to make your CFO happy is to reduce your Capital Expenditures (CapEx). The easiest way to do that is to really take a hard look at Cloud Computing. If you can slash your CapEx spend by downsizing your physical server footprints, you can easily upsize that same footprint in the Cloud.
4. Empower your Programmers – Cloud Computing offers something new to Programmers: the ability to programmatically control their IT infrastructure. Using an API, Programmers can skin the functionality provided by Clouds as well as develop “intelligent” applications that scale dynamically, for example.
5. Empower your IT Staff – Be sure that you don’t ignore your IT Staff as you look at the Cloud as a physical IT infrastructure alternative. They have some best practices and standards that should be incorporated in what your IT strategies will be. Let them experiment with the Cloud so that they fully grasp what it can do for your organization. They may tell you that it is a great direction to go in, or, they may say that your current infrastructure simply cannot be ported to the Cloud. There may also be some hybrid solutions (like GoGrid’s Cloud Connect) that will give them the best of both worlds.

These are just a few Cloud Computing New Year’s 2009 Resolutions to get you thinking. What are your business resolutions for 2009?

Last week, I participated in a webinar with GoGrid’s partner, Appistry, that was titled: “Unlock the Power of Scalable, Agile Cloud Platforms.” To quote: “Cloud computing has grown from a little-known buzz word into one of the hottest topics in IT today. View this On-Demand Webinar to learn how to get started with this exciting new technology. More importantly, learn about the best practices for enabling your applications to scale and truly harness the power of cloud computing.”

Sam Charrington (Vice President of Product Management & Marketing at Appistry) and I (Michael Sheehan – Technology Evangelist of GoGrid) discussed not only what the Cloud currently looks like (especially as related to Cloud Infrastructure and Cloud Platforms) but also showed a demo of how the Appistry/GoGrid solution works through a live demo of the product.

Shown below is the Webinar in its entirety (complete with plenty of audio mishaps, dropped calls and scratchy voices).

Also, there were several questions related to GoGrid asked during the webinar that were quickly answered or not answered at all. I wanted to provide some responses to those questions within this post. (Note: not all questions that were asked have been answered.) So without further ado…

Q: What is GoGrid’s role in this partnership?
A: GoGrid provides the Cloud Infrastructure on which the Appistry Platform runs. Customers who wish to dynamically scale their application code and deploy across multiple cloud servers use Appistry to manage these dynamics and the application code is deployed and scaled across GoGrid servers within the GoGrid infrastructure.

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Today I read Mary Brandel’s article in Computerworld titled “Stormy Weather: 7 Gotchas in Cloud Computing” which discusses some of the possible issues related to turning to the Cloud for your application or site hosting needs. First, I agree (and actually like) the reference to “Cloud Computing” being like a pop song getting stuck in your head…it is a frequently (over)used buzzword swirling around the media and blogosphere. The article goes on to discuss about some hurdles or pitfalls surrounding this evolving technology. (I almost added “trend” to that previous sentence but then reminded myself, this is not a trend but rather a solid alternative to traditional IT technology.)

To briefly recap the 7 Gotchas that Brandel discusses:

1. Costs, Part I: Cloud Infrastructure Providers
2. Costs, Part II: Cloud Storage Providers
3. Sudden Code Changes
4. Service Disruptions
5. Vendor Expertise
6. Global Concerns
7. Non-Native Applications

So let’s quickly dive into each of these items from a Cloud Computing Vendor’s perspective, that of GoGrid.

Costs, Part I: Cloud Infrastructure Providers

At the end of this discussion of high CapEx via purchasing hardware infrastructures versus “pay by the drink” method of Cloud Computing, a hybrid approach was discussed. Putting all of your IT infrastructure physically in a datacenter that you manage, OR, hosting everything entirely “in the cloud” might not be the best option on their own exclusively. It does make sense from a cost perspective to put everything in the Cloud but there is a possibility (depending on the cloud provider) that the throughput of high I/O servers might not meet your needs. Thus, a hybrid infrastructure might be a more logical solution (put your high-performance DB servers in a dedicated, managed environment and your elastic or dynamic resources, such as web or app servers, in the Cloud). For example, take a look at GoGrid’s offering called “Cloud Connect” which give the ability to link dedicated environments with the Cloud.

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