Richard Davies wrote: The UK has a good crop of technology pioneers in cloud computing - for example ElasticHosts, FlexiScale, Flexiant, OnApp - and also some strong government initiatives such as G-Cloud.
We will have to see whether this kind of technical leadership converts into swift mass-market adoption or not.
For cloud computing to take off, there need to be tools available that enable a developer to build and deploy an application without having to download anything to their desktop. This requires an on-demand development tool that sits on top of the cloud and provides a development Platform as a Service (PaaS).
There are two paths that a vendor can take to create a development platform for cloud computing: cloud-first or tool-first.
Cloud-first approach to PaaS: first build a cloud platform, then build a development tool that runs on top of it. This is the approach pioneered by Force.com and followed by Coghead and Bungee Labs.
Tool-first approach to PaaS: first build a development platform that is host-able tool (e.g., studio runs in a browser), then "push" that platform into the cloud. This is the approach taken by WaveMaker.
For Force.com, it made a great deal of sense to take the cloud-first approach. SalesForce.com already had a robust cloud platform and expertise in building proprietary development tools to create their CRM application. There was also no requirement to make Force.com work on any other cloud, because SalesForce is aiming to be the only cloud you will ever need for all your enterprise apps.
For most software vendors, however, the cloud-first development process has distinct disadvantages. First of all, it puts you in the data center operations business, which requires a very different DNA than software development. Next, it makes development itself difficult, because the cloud adds a level of indirection and complexity to all development tasks. Finally, you will be forced to do cloud port eventually to get to a SaaS cloud people want to deploy on, like Amazon EC2 or Google App Engine (assuming they ever exit the Python ghetto).
A tool-first approach to PaaS development is much more straightforward. You start by creating a host-able development studio (pretty much rules out Eclipse plugins) and do your build and test on standard hardware. After you have build a solid product, you add multi-tenancy to the studio and customize deployment for your cloud of choice (or use a partner like Elastra to do the deployment and administration for you).
A final oddity of the cloud-first vendors is that they have all delivered proprietary development platforms. This provides a "roach motel" level of lock-in - your logic and data can checkin, but just try moving them to another RIA or AJAX platform! Again, SalesForce can throw its 500-pound gorilla weight around and make the Apex language successful. It is hard to imagine, however, that 5 years from now people who have learned the Coghead language will be in more demand than, say, Java developers.
About Christopher Keene Christopher Keene is Chairman and CEO of WaveMaker (formerly ActiveGrid). Chris was the founder, in 1991, of Persistence Software, a San Mateo, CA-based company that created a new approach for managing data in high-transaction banking and communications systems. Persistence Software investors included Cisco, Intel, Reuters and Sun Microsystems. The company went public in 1999 on the NASDAQ exchange and was sold in 2004 to Progress software.After leaving Persistence Software in 2005, Chris spent a year in France as chairman of Reportive Software, a Paris-based maker of business-intelligence tools, and as an adjunct professor and entrepreneur-in-residence at INSEAD, a leading graduate business school.
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#3
Claeton Giordano commented on 3 Nov 2008
Proprietary development toolsets have a long history. PowerBuilder and VisualBasic didn't offer the flexibility and power of C, but they enabled rapid, if inelegant, development of business apps. In the Cloud, the same could end up being true of Coghead. There are a lot of reasons why that would be a suboptimal outcome, nonetheless a possible one.
#2
NS commented on 25 Aug 2008
What about other PaaS vendors like LongJump and Quickbase? Anyone have experience in using them?
Don't forget tools that help create "cloud-like" Utility Computing infrastructures out of what you own today (any HW, any VM). Cassatt can primarily do this, although there are other less automated tools on the market too, and even VMware has its eyes on trying to help make clouds.
These tools can automate how HW is repurposed, how and when VMs are created, where networks should be routed etc. etc. with the express purpose of maintaining application service levels, regardless of demand. This is essentially PaaS that is the underpinning behind "clouds".
Claeton Giordano wrote: Proprietary development toolsets have a long history. PowerBuilder and VisualBasic didn't offer the flexibility and power of C, but they enabled rapid, if inelegant, development of business apps. In the Cloud, the same could end up being true of Coghead. There are a lot of reasons why that would be a suboptimal outcome, nonetheless a possible one.
Ken Oestreich wrote: Don't forget tools that help create "cloud-like" Utility Computing infrastructures out of what you own today (any HW, any VM). Cassatt can primarily do this, although there are other less automated tools on the market too, and even VMware has its eyes on trying to help make clouds.
These tools can automate how HW is repurposed, how and when VMs are created, where networks should be routed etc. etc. with the express purpose of maintaining application service levels, regardless of demand. This is essentially PaaS that is the underpinning behind "clouds".
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Can you bring services from the cloud to your customers faster and have them adopt it with ease of use or bring the power of bundled services to the fingertips of your clients without creating new rigid ‘apps stove pipes'? Do you want to prevent your business running away to publ...
OCZ Technology Group, a provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, on Tuesday announced the Z-Drive R4 CloudServ PCI Express (PCIe) flash storage solution, designed to accelerate cloud computing applications and reduce operating expe...
Many organizations have embraced, or are considering, the benefits of cloud computing – speed, flexibility, increased expertise, shared workload, reduced costs, etc. The benefits are many – but so are the risks. What are the threats to cloud security? Which parties assume respons...
In August 2011, SHI Enterprise Solutions (ESS) division launched the SHI Cloud, offering reliable and cost-effective industrial-grade cloud computing platforms. That same division achieved an 82 percent increase in revenue over 2010.
SoftLayer Technologies on Tuesday announced the immediate worldwide availability of SoftLayer Object Storage, a redundant and highly scalable cloud storage service that allows users to easily store, search and retrieve data across the Internet, with optional CDN connectivity, or ...
