There are very, very different ways of architecting cloud infrastructure so that it can scale. Prior to deciding on a cloud strategy you should ask one big question - why does your infrastructure need to scale?

About five or six years ago scalability migrated from an architectural property to a widely-discussed buzz word. I would occasionally be in a meeting where someone would ask if my application was "scalable." At times I was met with an incredulous stare when I asked to elaborate on what was meant by "scalable." It should just scale! Scales! Like... er... fish skin?

Scalability is a critical thing when designing your infrastructure and your applications, no doubt. What if I build an amazingly scalable Web application that can handle 10 million concurrent requests from users and could still double amount that in a blink of an eye... but my MySQL database quickly filled up with 1 billion user records? I may have amazing throughput and pass my JMeter load tests with flying colors, but if I don't prepare for the massive amounts of data my application might need to dig through in order to serve a query all the HTTP connections in the world will just serve to pour salt into the wound.

There are options for scaling your data layer and vastly reducing query time, as mentioned earlier in our discussions about non-relational databases in the Cloud. You can even expand to 10,000 node clusters like Google has done with Dremel. However, unless you are ready to build a league of data centers filling the Atlantic Ocean, you may want to consider what your upper limits of scaling really are. Don't automatically assume that a 10,000 node cluster of servers means more power, and definitely be careful of using technology that your application may have difficulty using properly. Non-relational databases won't fit well if your application already uses ORM tools for populating data, and sometimes you need to completely re-think how data is represented (as in Dremel) and move from simple rows of delimited data to nested columnar storage. It can make one's head explode. Mine already has twice this morning.

Cloud Computing infrastructure gives you a quintillion servers at your fingertips, but consider your diagonal scalability strategy first. Are we talking about syndicating or publishing content that is modified maybe 10-20 times a day but viewed thousands of times? Creating a series of read-only MySQL clones will work fabulously, even more so if your application caches data aggressively. Are you going to deal with a ton of transactions that need to be immediately written to your database? Architect your database layer using a sharding strategy that allows you to distribute the transactional load across multiple databases, even relational databases. Are you going to deal with massive amounts of data that will need immediate retrieval? Perhaps a non-relational database is a good idea, allowing you to distribute your data across multiple nodes and retrieve it by using a non-relational key. Need to perform full-text search? You may instead want to index your data in something like Lucene.

I can appreciate the need to standardize an organization's database tools, especially in an enterprise, but it is always good to be open to new solutions for unique problems. When it comes to scaling an application no single technology fits all situations... you need to predict why scaling might need to occur, then open up a path to remove potential bottlenecks before everything grinds to a halt.

I will admit that "Cloud Computing" terminology is becoming confused. People are mixing together the concepts of commodity hardware datacenters, the benefits of virtualization and massively parallel systems into a blender and calling it a "cloud." The truth is that these three concepts are very disparate practices that often do not entirely co-exist. Most service providers will pick one or two of the three for their managed cloud hosting.

For example: Amazon AWS is largely a traditional infrastructure provider that leverages a massive number of commodity hardware (well, not quite, but bear with me) to offer low-cost server hosting. This allows you to spin up elebenty kabillion instances on the cheap, but the price/performance ratio many times just isn't there. A great article was recently published showing how moving a conventional Drupal installation away from AWS provided much better performance, lowered response times and was much more cost effective, even when accounting for disaster recovery. This demonstrates not how physical hardware is more cost-effective, but instead shows how performance matters when calculating cost.

When architecting an application's infrastructure it pays to remember that performance does not increase by adding more servers into the mix. Diagonal scaling is the best way to handle increasing load on a cost-effective basis, as demonstrated by Flickr and Wikimedia. Increase your hardware until you become constrained by concurrency (such as context switching, thread contention or mutex waits) or I/O then consider scaling out horizontally. Unless you are talking about massively parallel algorithms you don't need to spin up an enormous number of machines; even if you do start talking about massively parallel computation, you cease talking about infrastructure as a service and virtualization and instead move towards deploying Hadoop clusters across many physical nodes.

I would agree that vertical scaling isn't a great strategy. I would also argue that horizontal scaling on its own isn't a great strategy either. Get your money's worth for each instance you start, then keep deploying as demand increases.

Do you remember Google Wave? The new collaboration platform from Google that was supposed to be what e-mail could have been if only cloud computing had existed thirty-seven years ago? The real-time Internet architecture that fully exploited commodity servers spanning the globe and administered by unicorns? The Google Wave that developers gave a standing ovation to and was "dripping with ambition" at the Google IO Conference in 2009?

Yeah, Google officially abandoned the project today.

I sometimes drool over cloud technology and cloud computing infrastructure; consume APIs like candy and dig into whitepapers like they were the latest Kevin Grisham novel. The most important thing our development team does, however, is actually consume everything we construct. Our team develops things that we really, really want to use. Having the power to spin up huge servers ad nauseam is huge fun and we keep coming up with ideas to add even more tricks to the mix. Firewalling! Snapshotting! Catalog management! Instant deployments! Graphing resource utilization trends! It's fun.

New social networking technologies are birthed on a weekly basis and crazy amazing cloud computing companies spring up all year. The ultimate test is looking past the press releases and actually using the service. The architecture is only as good as the need it fills.

How do IT administrators manage servers that have been migrated to the BlueLock Cloud?  Using either virtual private networking (VPN) or point-to-point network connectivity (MPLS, Metro Ethernet, etc) can make managing a cloud-hosed server virtually identical (no pun intended!) to managing a server that’s on-premise.  That's one of the benefits of working with a speciality vendor which provides Infrastructure As A Service offerings: custom networking requirements and dedicated wide-area connectivity needs can usually be accomodated rather easily.  Once connectivity is in place, administrators can use their existing tools (like Remote Desktop Protocol [RDP] for Windows) to connect to cloud-based server images. 

At the same time, what we’re also seeing in the market is a slew of new products and companies focused on this management aspect, providing a “single pane of glass” that allows things like provisioning/de-provisioning/management of systems to be seamless across not just a single cloud IaaS provider like BlueLock, but potentially between multiple cloud providers and between public/private clouds.  Jclouds is a good example: they provide an API that allows you to freedom to programmatically manage a large number of clouds including Amazon, VMWare (including BlueLock vCloud Express), Azure, and Rackspace.

If you're a developer, an IT admin, or a cloud computing enthusiast, you've probably heard of Amazon's EC2 and you've probably heard of VMware's vCloud. These two platforms power a large portion of both public and private clouds. But, what's the difference?

In this Whiteboard Wednesday video, Jake Robinson and I outline some of the similarities and differences between Xen-based EC2 and Vmware-based vCloud. If you have questions or comments, please feel free to include them below.

Also, check out the BlueLock vCloud Express Cloud Monkeys contest and submit your use case to win a FlipCam and the Grand Prize - an iPad!

I remember quite vividly IBM's competition for SQL compliance on their AS/400 platform. 20-some years ago, databases had to be relational, tying together a vast sea of disparate columns. Relations between tables enforced a kind of consistency and normalization. No more brute-forcing random data into your corporate accounting system... now you had to obey the rules!

...or so the thinking went at the time.

Slowly, deep in the seedy database underground, seditious computer scientists sat stewing. They waited for the day when engineers realized that sometimes the process of normalizing data mutated it past the point of recognition. They knew one day some devious developer would see that relationships were too computationally expensive and slow. And one day... ah yes, one day... people would give up their crazy ad-hoc "Standard Query Languages."

While these computer scientists and software engineers were shoved to the margins by enterprise computing a few small companies took note of how well these rogue database systems scaled to the millions of users and petabytes of data. Lilliputian firms such as "Google," "LinkedIn" and "Facebook" started to lead a No-SQL revolution, running contrary to the dominant relational databases and instead storing mind-boggling amounts of data in non-relational tables and retrieving them faster than RDBMS' one-hundredth of their size.

Non-relational databases have become incredibly effective, especially when backed by a scalable pool of resources of a cloud computing provider such as BlueLock. If one takes a look at Redis - a powerful key-value store that can scale to a massive size - such a sense of scale quickly becomes apparent. By removing constraints one can get rid of building a huge number of indexes and instead deal out content quickly and efficiently. Craigslist has already leveraged Redis to an exceptional amount, and VMware sees quite a future in it as a platform as well.

If we take a step beyond we can see an entire landscape emerging: key-value stores such as Redis, Voldemort or Cassandra, hierarchical stores such as Zookeeper and tuple stores provided by JavaSpaces and Apache River. The number of choices seems to grow every day, and without a farm of servers it becomes quite a daunting task to evaluate which one fits your project best.

My recommendation is to take a step back and see which solution best fits the problem you are working within. Re-evaluate your needs and objectively ask yourself:

• What business or logic problem am I really trying to solve?
• How large is this data going to scale within a year? Are we talking about megabytes or petabytes?
• How fast does the data need to be retrieved?
• Do I really need to perform a bunch of ad-hoc queries? Or am I just looking up values based on their primary key?
• Which solution is easiest to deal with? Which makes the most sense to me?
• Do I need relational data? Do I need hierarchical data? Do I even care?

Once you build a matrix comparing each solution you will find some implementations quickly sink to the bottom and others become very tempting choices. Once you have determined a top list of possibilities, it is best to fire up a data store and write a few quick proof-of-concept test applications. A convenient way to do this is to login to your BlueLock vCloud Express account, spin up several virtual machines and load up an array of Linux boxes to test each solution out. Measure how easily the product can be installed and test how easily it can be scaled to multiple servers. Do some performance testing against sample applications on your own fenced network and watch your local resource utilization.

Very soon after you use your vCloud Express account to test the top candidates you should be able to feel one or two "fit" in a much more natural way than other solutions. For example, Zookeeper may be the natural fit for someone wanting to house a slew of centralized configuration data. At this point you can take the next step and test this alongside your web applications and judge more accurately the level of effort to get things running.

If at the end of this arduous process you still can't decide between a couple of top candidates do what I always do: pick the project with the best mascot. You simply can't go wrong.

Don't forget - once you select a data store implementation you can have your own scalable, elastic cloud to grow into. BlueLock can not only help you horizontally scale your data tier, BlueLock can also help design server layouts that best fit the sometimes eclectic world of non-relational databases. Whether it be heaps of disk or mountains of RAM to remain resident within, the BlueLock Enterprise Cloud can help your cabal of data power the next big thing.

 

There's no shortage of comparisons between cloud computing and electricity.

And, for the most part, I like the comparison between cloud computing and electricity because I think it's easy for people to "get". It relates datacenter computing to something more common - like toasters. (Though, come to think of it, I've seen toasters these days as complicated as blade chassis and FC SAN storage!) What I think is important to point out, though, is that most comparisons between cloud computing and electricity (as a utility) stop here. To understand if/when/how cloud computing becomes a commodity, it's important to continue the comparison. Let's take a little stroll down memory lane...

It wasn't enough to discover electricity for it to become a commodity. Edison's contribution of the creation of a power generation system is what got things rolling, but it was Edison's arch rival Nikola Tesla and his idea of Alternating Current (AC) which made widespread distribution of electricity and eventually commoditization of electricity possible. From Wikipedia:

AC replaced DC in most instances of generation and power distribution, enormously extending the range and improving the efficiency of power distribution. Though widespread use of DC ultimately lost favor for distribution, it exists today primarily in long-distance high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission systems. Low voltage DC distribution continued to be used in high density downtown areas for many years but was eventually replaced by AC low-voltage network distribution in many of them. DC had the advantage that large battery banks could maintain continuous power through brief interruptions of the electric supply from generators and the transmission system. Utilities such as Commonwealth Edison in Chicago had rotary converters or motor-generator sets, which could change DC to AC and AC to various frequencies in the early to mid-20th century. Utilities supplied rectifiers to convert the low voltage AC to DC for such DC loads as elevators, fans and pumps. There were still 1,600 DC customers in downtown New York City as of 2005, and service was finally discontinued only on November 14, 2007.

So it wasn't until we figured out a way to get gobs of power across long distances efficiently that electricity really became a commodity. Sound familiar? Might one draw a parallel between that and the bandwidth predicament that most potential cloud customers find themselves facing today? Organizations today do backup and recover to the cloud in the event of a catastrophe and others even run their production workloads in datacenters far, far away.

If only it were easier to move large amounts of data across current WAN connections and that WAN connectivity didn't cost so dearly, many more would follow suit. So, until the TCPIP equivalent of Mr. Tesla comes along we shall continue to need to find a way around this potential roadblock for IT organizations. This bodes well for regionalized cloud computing infrastructures where it's relatively inexpensive to get high speed connectivity across town or to the next state. Uncannily analogous to the regional power plants that existed in Edison's time.

Another challenge is standardization and portability. Electricity works as a commodity because we eventually standardized on how it was distributed and how devices consumed it. I can take my toaster and plug it into any 110v outlet in the US and I will get...well...toast. Provided that I have bread available. When companies can easily move workloads and data to the Cloud and between cloud computing providers then I think we'll have a true commodity.

I'll admit it.  The more I see the term "aaS" used in reference to cloud computing models, the funnier it gets.  Besides being fodder for clever double entendre, it's also the core of some interesting discussion about where all of this is headed.  What do companies really need?  What are they comfortable with?  Where should cloud services organizations be making investments?

It occured to me recently that, in the technology world at least, the more things change, the more they stay the same.  Take, for instance, the current debate and comparisons between Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Application-as-a-Service (AaaS) is really a new spin on the standard computing stack: 

Applications --> AaaS
OS/Middleware --> PaaS
Hardware --> IaaS

Each of the three cloud computing models matches up fairly well with which each layer of the computing stack.  Applications can't run (at least today) without an OS and hardware resources without some software (an OS) to allow applications to access those resources isn't very useful. 

Cloud computing, similarly, will incorporate IaaS, PaaS and AaaS -focused solutions.  I'm not convinced that one particular model is the future of cloud services.  Krishnan Subramanian's post (hyperlinked in the previous sentence) is a good one and worth reading.  The problem with a world dominated by PaaS solutions is that not every development platform has a cloud platform to build for - leaving more popular development platforms like Ruby on Rails (Engine Yard, Heroku), .NET (Azure), etc. as the only game in town.  PaaS solutions today also require applications to be built with configuration management embedded in the code (using frameworks like Chef) which may be more effort than the developer is able to invest.

Managed IaaS or managed cloud hosting can fill an important gap between non-managed IaaS and PaaS solutions.  Managed IaaS solutions provide a reliable platform on which software developers can deploy their applications without modification on an application framework which they manage, but running on an operating system and hardware platform which they don't have to manage and which can scale as they need it to.
 

Some may argue cloud computing, specifically infrastructure-as-a-service, is moving towards a commodity (I think we're already seeing this) - but does that mean relationships don't matter? I say no. No matter how commoditized the Infrastructure-as-a-service or "cloud hosting" markets get, trust and relationships will continue to be a major factor in choosing and staying with a provider. 

Trust is king.  Clients want a brand they can trust and a provider who cares.  We've seen many prospects choose BlueLock because of the VMware brand, clients like Pathagility and Indigo BioSystems.  Indigo BioSystems, a technology provider for scientific research organizations, was at Amazon EC2, but just couldn't do what they needed - they needed VMware.  At BlueLock they got the security and management they needed on a VMware platform; two things they didn't find at Amazon.  Pathagility, a web-based platform for generating, managing and reporting on clinical data, needed security and compliance as well - on a platform built for mission-critical applications. They chose BlueLock because of the relationship (and VMware, of course).

The VMware brand is also the reason why vCloud Express has been such a hit.  People are out there looking for a self-service platform based on VMware, and now they have it.

Commodity or not, trust is and will continue to be king in the cloud.

Tom Henderson and Brendan Allen with Extreme Labs did an excellent and even-handed job of comparing three Enterprise Cloud Services.   BlueLock was honored to be considered.  The costs came out exactly as I would have expected and for the reason I’ve pointed out many times in previous blog posts, including this one (see tip #13 from a recent post) – we were the “expensive” option.  I’m not saying that being the expensive option is a bad thing, but if you look at the bigger picture, we just aren’t. The difference is people and expertise.  
 

Our philosophy (and pricing model) is different than Terremark and Rackspace’s cloud hosting offerings.  At BlueLock we’re focused on the relationship and helping companies manage the infrastructure so that they can hire more developers and/or sales people rather than systems engineers.  You’ll pay “more” at BlueLock because there’s more value (hint: people) in our offering than just raw compute and storage.  If you don’t want to read further, just scroll down to the illustration and you’ll see just what I’m talking about.
 

In addition to delivering raw unmanaged infrastructure, BlueLock is delivering systems engineering expertise to manage the environment from the operating system down – which is all part of the bundled price.   I’ve presented many times to an audience of software company executives on making the best infrastructure choices for their SaaS offering and the cost numbers I use during that presentation are almost identical to Tom’s and Brendan’s.   
 

My point here and during the presentation is that when you load your applications to the cloud – someone (a person or people) MUST manage those environments – whether they are internal or external.  When you bring them to BlueLock and load them into our Enterprise Cloud Platform, you do not need to employ infrastructure experts – that’s what we do for you.  Companies that choose our competitors or Amazon for that matter must have infrastructure experts to manage the environment – and that cost is not in their numbers, so they look much cheaper.   
 

The chart below adds a single full-time resource to the costs to represent one employee managing the environment.  That doesn’t cover you if your employee would like to sleep, get sick or take a vacation, but you’ll get the picture without going off the deep end with costs.  
 

Finally, I recently competed against and beat one of these two cloud hosting companies mentioned in the Network World article (link) and based upon my discussions with the client the other guys did have an implementation fee….I’m just sayin’.

 

Just one day before the release of the Apple iPad, another soon-to-be Apple game changer, I find it very appropriate to explore the link between the Apple iPad and Cloud Computing. 

Our CTO Pat O'Day (known around here as "Father Cloud"), has been intrigued with the iPad since the very first prototype was made public.  For him, it would be the most convenient way to demo the innovations our development team is working on - on the spot, in a matter of minutes.  Just touch the screen, connect to the BlueLock Cloud, tap tap and viola! Talk about taking the elevator pitch to the next level.  He currently does this on his iPhone, but let's be honest, the iPad definitely had its advantages over the beloved iPhone when it comes to the elevator pitch.

Enough iPad promoting - let's talk about the connection between the iPad and cloud computing. Decades of technology are behind the development of the iPad, including innovations such as ARPaNet (the first use of packet switching), GUI, laptops (duh), PDAs, smartphones, tablets, cloud computing and more.  But let's focus on this cloud thing.

Cloud computing became very visible in 2002 when Amazon Web Services was launched, and really took off in 2009 (BlueLock was founded in 2006). Ned Smith, with TechNewsDaily writes"

"Computing power and storage are consolidated on powerful servers that are accessed through dedicated lines or over the Internet.... Devices such as netbooks, smartphones and the iPad don’t have removable storage drives. For them, the cloud is the most convenient way to get information in or out of their devices."

The cloud is becoming a more and more integral part of new technologies and development because it's convenient and accessible (just like the iPad itself).  We are continuing to hear about more companies developing apps specifically for the cloud, internal IT is turning to the cloud and communication is already in the cloud!  Some might say the cloud "buzz" is over, but I would argue that it's only becoming more mainstream and standard, especially in emerging technologies.

Ned Smith's full article: Behind the iPad, decades of clever technology. 

To access the BlueLock cloud immediately, go to BlueLock vCloud Express.

More about BlueLock Cloud Hosting.

OK – time to take it home.  Hopefully you've already read my first and second post for SaaS CEOs, and now I’d like to finish up the final five tips for taking your applications to the cloud. 

I'd also like to ask you for feedback on what you think and whether you think I’m on the right track.  Please feel free to challenge and question me in the comments field below.


Tip #11:  Set financial penalties for downtime:  I agree, there should definitely be some financial incentive for the Cloud provider to perform for a couple reasons:  

Tip #12:  It takes time to see ROI on SaaS development:  Sage advice from Adam on this one – it’s going to take time and a concerted effort to make Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) pay off for you.  His comments make me think about focus.  Our experience is that many SaaS companies have little to no experience running a hosted infrastructure – so that skill must either be hired or acquired.  Hiring people is hard, so I might argue (because this is our business) that SaaS companies can get further, faster by focusing on writing the code and driving demand, while leaving the hosting to experts like BlueLock.  That’s exactly what SaaS company Right On Interactive did – they focused on writing better code and allowed us to help them get further, faster by managing their infrastructure.  Check out their cloud computing case study.

Tip #13:  Savings are not in the cloud, but in headcount:  Oh man, I wish I could make this tip #1!!  Adam hit the nail on the head.  I’ve presented an infrastructure choices presentation to Rick Chapman’s Softletter SaaS University conferences several times and I tell the Software CEOs in the room that one of BlueLock’s key value propositions is about people.  I even take them through a little back of the napkin math around the difference in cost of 5-10 servers doing it on your own, doing it at Amazon or hosting it with BlueLock.  BlueLock wins and I tell the crowd that you could substitute BlueLock for another managed cloud provider because it’s not about my ability to pay my people less, it’s about my ability to “fractionalize” our labor cost, where they must have a full time equivalent (FTE) or 2 (if that person wants to take a vacation) or 3 (if you want 24x7 coverage and let someone take a vacation or get sick).  So the software company that has dedicated staff to “manage” their cloud environment at Amazon is, in the end more expensive, than allowing me to manage their environment for them at BlueLock.  If you’d like to see the analysis – send me a note at bwolff at bluelock.com and I’d be happy to share the slide and take you through my logic. 

Tip #15:  Let the cloud lead you to new innovations:  This last tip takes the previous tip and Lincoln’s presentation to the next level.  Companies that choose to deliver their software via SaaS (in the cloud) open up many new opportunities for revenue and value creation. The first step toward opening up new horizons for your software company is to migrate to SaaS and let the users take you to a better place.  The cloud will only continue to get better, and SaaS companies taking advantage of the benefits of cloud computing will be leaps and bounds ahead of their competition in terms of cost efficiency and flexibility.

Thanks for reading this post – if you’d like to learn more about how BlueLock is helping enable other SaaS companies just like yours, drop me a note at bwolff at bluelock.com or visit our website to find out more about our cloud hosting services. 

I would also love to hear what you think about my take and if you think I’m on track or “off in left field”.

--Brian

Attend Nimsoft's upcoming webcast (2 attendees will win an Amazon Kindle!) and get proven guidance that can boost your business’ chances for success in the cloud. Learn from three successful cloud computing service provider leaders (including BlueLock) who have already established successful cloud-based businesses. Get practical guidance based on the experiences of our expert panelists.  Find out what worked and what didn’t, and discover some of the key challenges and opportunities that service providers face when moving into cloud computing.

While some service providers tend to look at cloud computing as a threat, the reality is that the cloud is opening up myriad opportunities for businesses. Each of the panelists has taken a fundamentally different approach to cloud offerings, based on their unique business objectives and opportunities. In this interactive webcast, you can ask questions and get specific guidance into the directions that make most sense for your business.

Our Service Provider Expert Panelists Are:

    * Dave Durkee, CEO, ENKI
    * John Qualls, President and CEO, BlueLock
    * Brian Ritchie, SVP and GM, Support and Managed Services Division, GlassHouse Technologies

Attend And Get Answers To These Questions:

    * Is cloud computing an opportunity or threat to your business?
    * Which kinds of service providers will be well-equipped to succeed in the cloud, which won’t, and why?
    * What are some of the best tips for service providers looking to embrace the cloud?
    * What traditional managed services can an MSP leverage in cloud environments?
    * What are some of the keys to making cloud services robust enough for clients’ high stakes business services?

By 2015, ABI Research predicts that more than 240 million business customers will be leveraging cloud computing services through mobile devices, reaching revenues of $5.2 billion.  According to ABI Research, an evolving IT supply chain, business adoption of cloud platforms for IT services, and greater business use of handsets and smartphones are creating new revenue streams for both IT and mobile suppliers serving businesses.

ABI Research practice director Dan Shey said, "The immediate opportunity lies in leveraging cloud platforms to develop mobile applications, particularly mobile applications that leverage enterprise data. Directly and indirectly, Microsoft and Google are major players both influencing and enabling these developments. Mobile operators have the most to gain through offers of cloud services to the enterprise leveraging their networks, application enablement, and data centers."

I can think of many applications we use at BlueLock that would be great to be able to access on a mobile device.  We've also begun to see a number of clients asking for mobile cloud options.  I can definitely see this trend taking hold in a big way.  What do you think?

If you have questions about BlueLock's enterprise cloud computing options, please contact us.

Link to the original article.

"The cloud" is still in its youth, maybe adolescence, so its easy to point fingers and scream when an outage occurs.  Just recently, Amazon Web Services had an outage in its Northern Virginia data center due to the failure of a power supply in an "availability zone" as well as a second failure of a component in the redundant system.  Outages happen, so it shouldn't have been as big of a shock as it was made out to be. 

However, when companies are beginning to outsource data center operations, they have high expectations, which is why zero failure is a good standard for providers to aim at in the clouds.  The fact is, all internal systems fail too, but there is no one to point the finger at.  When real people and real technology is involved, outages will occur.  I strongly feel that the cloud, outages or not, will have higher up-time and availability than most, if not all, internal systems.  High-profile clients, sensitive data and the fear of hundreds of clients yelling and screaming is enough motivation for any infrastructure as a service provider to architect a bullet-proof cloud. 

At BlueLock, we like happy clients, that's why we promise 99.99% up-time and push every day to make our cloud bigger, better and stronger.

Jason Langone did a recent review of the five official VMware vCloud Express providers. Langone is a tried and true user of Amazon EC2, and therefore was somewhat skeptical of vCloud Express (although he's a VMware expert and a fan of most all of their products).

When vCloud Express was announced at VMworld 2009 in September, it was was showcased as a portal that will allow for cloud-based virtual machines to be easily configured from a virtual hardware perspective.  What's the big deal? Well, there are millions of VMware users who can now extend their existing virtual infrastructures into a hosted and secured VMware cloud.  That's a big deal.

Langone tested all five vCloud Express cloud computing providers, including BlueLock.

His intent was to test ease of setting up an account, total time to have an instance running, basic input/output (I/O) metrics and overall user experience while using AWS Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) to measure against.

Find out how BlueLock vCloud Express Beta II fared here.

Read the original post about his review here.

Because we needed another "top" list, I'd love to go through David Linthicum's latest list, "Top 5 Cloud Computing Predictions for 2010."

Prediction #1: The rise of cloud computing standards

The whole theme of standards and interoperability was a big topic in 2009, but those discussions were very conceptual, and not really actionable.  Some organizations waited on the wayside before adopting a cloud computing solution because standards and interoperability would prevent them from experiencing vendor lock-in. On that note, some have said that BlueLock was a bad name choice because it has a connotation that we would "lock" our clients in.  I like to think that BlueLock would make someone think of security, but I guess not.  However, our cloud uses VMware virtualization technology, so you can take your VMware stuff and take it wherever you like (as long as it stays VMware) if you decide you aren't a big fan of us.  No vendor-lockin here.  Back to topic - I can already tell from listening in on some strategic meetings here that interoperability will take on a large role this year for us.  I can only guess that we aren't the only cloud computing provider with that on our mind.

Prediction #2: First Major Cloud Computing Outages

This one is only a matter of time.  Stuff happens in the cloud.  The cloud still involves real people and of course, real technology.  Although outages will happen, your provider should make sure that there is a sufficient backup plan in order that will help alleviate those pains.  And of course, the second a "big" provider has a "big" mishap, all aim will go to the cloud.  However, Linthicum reminds us, "Despite the outages, cloud computing providers will maintain an uptime record that far exceeds that of most on-premise systems, but you won't hear about that in the technology press."

Prediction #3: Microsoft will be relevant in the cloud

Most businesses run Microsoft, so to say that Microsoft will not become a larger cloud player would be silly.  Now that they've finally got going on the cloud front, we'll see just how much of an impact they'll make, but we're sure to see them make some sort of splash.  However, "Google will continue to dominate small to medium-sized businesses, using its free ad-driven model for delivery of Google Docs and Gmail, with a few larger enterprise deals thrown in."

Prediction #4: Rapid Consolidation of Existing Providers

As cloud computing continues to grow, many of the successful providers will want to expand even more, which will involve buying up the smaller guys.  Hence, there will be less small providers and more big - consolidation.

Prediction #5: Rise of Cloud Computing Startups

As if 2009 didn't see enough, there will be more in 2010 as the technology leaves the stage of early adoption and reaches the masses.  As consolidation occurs (see prediction #4), market value will increase and more VC-backed startups will sprout up.  Think you've seen a lot of "as a services" this year?  It won't be the end of it.

Read David's original post here.

Do you have a prediction for the cloud in 2010?

(Indianapolis, IN – December 1, 2009) - Indianapolis-based BlueLock, provider of cloud computing and managed IT services, announces its second round of Beta testing with BlueLock vCloud Express Beta II.  BlueLock was one of only five cloud computing hosting providers chosen by VMware to provide VMware vCloud Express services since its launch in September 2009.

BlueLock vCloud Express Beta II is a Compute-as-a-Service solution designed to support transient workloads by providing a high level of elasticity for faster turnaround time and future workload federation.  BlueLock vCloud Express will compete with services such as Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure.

“BlueLock vCloud Express Beta I was an instant success,” said Pat O’Day, CTO, BlueLock. “We filled up our Beta I slots in less than two months.  With the feedback we garnered from those early users we’ve been able to make some major changes and the offering will continue to get better as we prepare to launch the public offering early in 2010.”

BlueLock vCloud Express Beta II is a reliable, on-demand infrastructure solution that ensures compatibility with internal VMware environments and with VMware Virtualized™ services worldwide. The technology allows users to create virtual machines as needed and add compute capacity via an online interface. The beta services are currently free, but the public offering in the future will include a pay-as-you-go payment structure where users pay only for the compute and storage space they use.

BlueLock vCloud Express Beta II is available immediately. For additional information, visit http://vcloudexpress.bluelock.com.

I love my job. As a client specialist at BlueLock, I get to spend the majority of my time working with the innovative companies that are producing the products and services of the future and, at the same time, pushing the limits of cloud computing hosting.

In all of my conversations with BlueLock clients, one thing is clear:

There is massive demand for a cloud computing platform, specifically for testing and development, that is cost-effective and integrates well with production environments.

Many businesses have data and processing that doesn't require a fully-managed cloud hosting service at four nines (99.99%) uptime.

Some companies offer services that seem like they could be a good answer for this problem. IBM recently released Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud, which seems like it might be a competitor of Amazon's EC2 cloud computing platform.

The problem with some of these test/dev clouds is that they can't support VMware hosted environments. This means that, with test/dev clouds like EC2 and IBM's new offering, a company that is running their production environment on VMware can't necessarily integrate their test and production environments seamlessly -- an important consideration when doing a cloud computing comparison.

Enter vCloud Express...

One of the cool tools that the BlueLock engineers are tinkering with is a VMware-based, pay-as-you-go option that will be ideal for companies that need an environment that is dedicated to test and development. We announced vCloud Express back at the start of September, and since then, have received an overwhelming number of signups for the beta-version. In fact, we acually completely filled up all of the beta test slots!

I'm excited for the public launch of BlueLock's vCloud Express, because we'll be able to offer clients the perfect solution for their test/dev needs. Until then, I'll keep you posted as we continue to progress. 

The BlueLock Blog has been alive and breathing for about a year now, which is why I felt it necessary to look back and review those posts that have time and time again proven themselves as leaders, just like BlueLock has. 

Take a look and enjoy the all-time top ten viewed posts from the BlueLock Blog.

1. Virtualization is not for Amateurs
2. Cloud Computing - A Five-Layer Model
3. What's the Difference Between Cloud Computing and Virtualization?
4. Vocabulary of the Cloud
5. More on the Economics of Cloud Computing
6. Rackspace: Scoble Hiring
7. BlueLock vCloud Express has Officially Launched
8. Key Differences between Amazon EC2 and VMware vCloud Express
9. Virtualization Overtakes Traditional Data Centers and Creates Demand for Support
10. Private, Public or Hybrid - What is the Best Cloud Computing Alternative?