One of the oft discussed business challenges of cloud-based application
deployments – or any remote app deployment where a service has to
communicate over the public internet – is latency. It takes more time to
fetch data when a request has to leave the LAN, and latency is usually
variable and at the mercy of both the Interwebs and the cloud provider. This
isn’t so much of an issue when your entire app is deployed in the cloud and
users are going directly there for data; the user won’t notice any
difference between accessing your app after it’s moved to AWS than they did
when you had it deployed in your own data center. In fact some times it might
even be faster.
The latency monster rears its ugly head when apps are spread across data
centers, either in a split architecture or with bursting, where the user is
first directed to your local data center and then a deci... (more)
After pushing my latest post, Securing the Cloud: Shared Hardware and the
Data Plane, Hoff posted a series of excellent questions and responses to the
post via Twitter. I thought responding via another blog post, so that his
questions could be addressed alongside my last post, was the way to go.
I’ve trimmed some of his questions here for brevity but all of his
questions can be found on his Twitter stream. And here we go.
@thevirtualdc I hate to tell you this, but your last blog isn’t about
securing “the Cloud” at all. You are interchanging cloud & virt…
You are correct that I am... (more)
I’ve spent the past day reviewing all that’s floating around the
Interwebs on the Azure announcements from the WPC this week. There are
definitely a lot of nice nuggets to digest and stuff that’s going to take a
while to process. Most of the Azure talk at WPC has been, as expected, about
how partners can benefit from and build solutions on top of Azure. That’s a
compelling message and one I think Microsoft got 100% correct. Now if only
they’d franchise Azure we’d really be cookin’ ;). But what about
enterprise customers using Azure? Since enterprise virtualization is the
overwh... (more)
According to Forrester Research, 42% of all enterprise server resources will
be virtualized by 2009. [1] Referred to by many names - server
virtualization, OS virtualization, kernel virtualization - virtual machine
(VM) platforms, such as VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V, are typically the
first forms of virtualization introduced to the data center. These
technologies are becoming both less expensive and more accessible, making
them attractive candidates to be the first virtual "guinea pigs" in the data
center. Factors such as consolidation, cost savings, dynamic provisioning,
... (more)
My heart is truly warmed (which isn’t easy) by all the talk around cloud
security. This may mark the first time in my career that I’ve seen a
non-security bleeding-edge technology (c’mon, the cloud is bleeding like a
sieve) hit the market coupled with concerns and ideas about security. Even if
we look to the virtual foundation of the cloud, none of those technologies
(hypervisors, virtual CPUs, shared RAM, storage virtualization, etc) hit the
market with any care or concern about security. In this way the cloud is
creating a new model of accessible computing in more ways than one... (more)
David Lucas
Shaul Efraim
Terence Martin Breslin
Cory Marchand
David Hughes
James Carlini
John Iffert
Dan Stolts
Joe Zeto
