- Nate Odell

Seattle is home to an impressive list of cloud computing companies (Amazon, Microsoft, and Google’s seattle campus), as well as a growing list of emerging startups (Decho, Skytap, and a plethora of SaaS companies). This makes Seattle a leading light for cloud innovation and CloudCamp attracted many of the Seattle tech community involved with cloud computing.

You can check out video footage from the event here.

A couple of observations from the event:

(1) Questions from the audience indicated there is increased enterprise interest in cloud computing and the need to understand compliance, security, and cloud architecture best practices

(2) One session focused on sharing experience and examples from attendees on the compelling use cases for the cloud today. This list included:

- Scientific and research calculations requiring massive compute

- Applications and services with unpredictable demand (e.g. online games, facebook apps, scalable web apps etc.)

- Virtual labs (development and test, training, demo environments etc.)

- Content storage and delivery

The use cases that had the most compelling business case had a need for (1) Short bursts of computing capacity and/or (2) Ability to scale quickly and cost effectively based on demand.

However, we’ve recently come across some large enterprise customers that are looking at cloud computing to leap frog stalled virtualization projects. Although some high priority virtualization workloads have been tackled, they are struggling to get past organizational inertia and budget approval for new projects.

In these organizations, they have recasted virtualization initiatives as cloud initiatives and are striving for optimum cost savings by utilizing cloud resources instead of further building out internal physical or virtual platforms. Public clouds are being suggested for new projects that are dynamic in nature, such as IT lab environments or load testing projects.  Internal virtualized environments are maintained, but with an eye to migrate these to the cloud over time.

This flexible approach not only overcomes challenges to virtualize all internal systems, but also reduces capital expenditures in a climate of reduced budgets. As the year progresses, it will be interesting to see how many other organizations adopt this approach.

¹ Forrester Research, Inquiry Spotlight: Server Virtualization, Q3 2008
² Gartner, Inc., “25 Ways to Cut IT Costs”, Gartner Symposium, October 2008

• How crowdsourcing and cloud computing can be used together to improve the application delivery process
• Examples of how leading companies are using crowdsourcing and cloud-computing to achieve their goals
• Best practices for using these solutions to launch higher quality apps and control costs

Just click here to sign up for the Webcast.

The USCB framework is graphically appealing. By adding a cloud solutions vertical bar to the side, it would capture some of the emerging cloud-based solutions that don’t fit into the IaaS/PaaS/SaaS model. Over time, I expect to see this category grow and be further classified as new management, automation, interoperability and vertical solutions become available.

-Ian

We talk to a lot of developers and architects about cloud computing, and one of the things that we run across from time-to-time is an element of skepticism due simply to the incredible amount of hype out there in the marketplace. To help clarify what’s real and what’s hype we’re teaming up with our partners at Appistry on a webcast to describe what developers and architects can leverage *today* and what’s likely to come in the future.

Fortunately, once we get beyond all the buzzwords and hype, the substance behind cloud shines through and we’re able to have great conversations about the implications of cloud on software development.

There are many implications… By making infrastructure more readily available, cloud can streamline a process that is frustrating for many organizations. (It seems like there are never enough boxes around!) And certainly cloud changes what users expect of our applications (e.g. QoS characterstics), impacting the choices we make during application architecture and development.

These are some of the issues we’ll be addressing in our “Unlocking the Power of Cloud for Application Development” webinar.  We invite you to join us for for the hour-long session, to be held on Wednesday, December 17th at 11 AM Pacific Time (2 PM Eastern).

Some of the topics we’re planning to discuss include:

* Benefits of a cloud-based development environments to build, test and deploy your applications

* Best practices for building cloud-ready applications, and retrofitting legacy applications for the cloud

* Case studies featuring end-user successes with enterprise cloud computing

We’d love to hear your feedback. What else would you like us to address on this topic?

Please do join us for the event. You can register here. ]]> http://cloudcastblog.com/2008/12/unlocking-the-power-of-the-cloud-for-application-development/feed/ 0 http://cloudcastblog.com/2008/10/skytap-announces-integrated-platform-for-professional-developers/ http://cloudcastblog.com/2008/10/skytap-announces-integrated-platform-for-professional-developers/#comments Mon, 27 Oct 2008 20:57:50 +0000 admin http://cloudcastblog.com/?p=76 LOS ANGELES, CA – October 27, 2008 – Skytap, Inc., the leading provider of cloud-based virtual lab solutions, today announced it will demonstrate integration with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System at the 2008 Professional Developers Conference (PDC) held in Los Angeles from October 27-30. Effective immediately, Microsoft developers can log into Skytap’s Virtual Lab Platform to access Windows desktop and server virtual machines on demand, and easily set up and tear down virtual labs for software development and testing using Visual Studio. Skytap provides Microsoft developers the flexibility to run applications unchanged on any version of Windows without rewriting developer code, a typical limitation with most cloud infrastructure environments.

Sell full press release here.