Recently, BlueLock’s Brandon Jeffress and I visited Anderson University in Anderson, Indiana to take a look at how cloud computing is being used, or could be used, in the classroom environment. Jeffress, alum of Anderson, arranged for us to meet with Professor Charles Koontz, head of the Information Technology department there. After a tour of the facilities, we sat down with Professor Koontz to discuss the role of virtualization in modern college IT training.


You can’t open a news feed today without reading something about cloud computing, virtualization, or infrastructure as a service (IaaS), so Brandon and I were surprised to learn that these topics are all but absent from the modern college IT major’s curriculum. Professor Koontz explained that colleges follow the guidelines of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) which sets standards for the curriculum of IT majors in order to ensure that graduates possess the appropriate body of knowledge upon entering the working world. Cloud computing, it seems, has simply exploded onto the business scene so quickly that education has not been able to keep up. Curriculum changes take time, and so it is left up to the proactive student to engage with these expanding fields through their own research and internships. 

Brandon and I weren’t satisfied with that. Even for the most proactive students, internships and independent exploration cannot compare to the engagement one gets with a project under the direction of a professor. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to introduce students to virtualization through a short classroom tutorial, allowing them to interact with the topics they were reading about in the news through actual hands-on experience? 

      
Professor Koontz suggested that the IT major’s senior capstone class might be a great place to start. He invited Brandon to come and teach a day’s class on Cloud Computing, the advantages of cloud hosting, and his role at BlueLock this fall. Brandon agreed that even an introductory level class might really help to give the students some clarity around the whirlwind of topics referred to as “cloud,” including: Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). 

Additionally, Brandon suggested that the advantages of cloud computing could work in the students advantage when it comes to getting hands-on experience in managing environments. Before virtualization, it would have been impossible for an individual student to practice managing their own multiple-server environment. Even just three servers would have cost thousands of dollars in years past. But now, with virtualization, it takes just a few minutes to spin up three new VMs. If a college were to leverage virtualization in its classroom, students could manage their own multi-server environment in the cloud with ease. The student could control everything from creation of the VMs to their retirement, giving them great experience in one of the hottest fields in IT.

Professor Koontz believes such a program would be a great addition to a student’s education and would be willing to experiment with such a program at Anderson. He also recommended we investigate other local universities, including Indiana University, IUPUI, Ball State, Purdue University, and The University of Indianapolis. Together these schools could work to build a standard curriculum and pool their resources to implement this short tutorial series which might give Indiana’s recent graduates a leg up as they step out of the classroom and into a very “cloudy” business world.

As I entered my career in the early 1990’s, software companies were making huge strides with the development of the Microsoft windows operating system.  As we began to reach the second half of the 90’s, internet-based companies were beginning to explode everywhere.  It’s an era that for many remember it being call the dot.com and later the “dot.bomb era”.  It was appropriately named as start-up after start-up software companies launched new products to market with monies invested by investors who thought they had found the next goldmine. Finding investment in your new dot.com was as easy as showing a demo to some investors (so it seemed). 
 
Rumors of start-up companies who had limited success and were purchased by another company for record returns, later motivated this frenzy between investors and start-ups.  Just as we experienced in the last few years with the real-estate market, the market in the late 90’s adjusted and record number of technology companies folded.  Investors got weary and companies over-spending habits caught up to them.  Customers got burned by buying underdeveloped/vaporware applications that were over-promised and under-delivered.  The market plummeted. 

4 years ago when BlueLock started this mission of offering infrastructure as a service (IaaS), they went to market there were very few companies nationally who were leveraging virtualization and providing cloud hosting services that leveraged OpEx over CapEx.  For four years BlueLock has worked with VMware to help aid in the development of this model.  Four years later, with many successes and even a few failures over the past few years, BlueLock is a smooth running machine and is feeling the rewards of being an early evangelist of IaaS.  

As the idea of cloud computing continues to go mainstream, history may be on the verge of repeating itself.  As in the dot.com era, everything was about dot.com and moving to the web.  Today everything is about cloud computing and making sure you are a cloud provider.  You can’t skip a rock without hitting a technology/colo hosting company who now claims to have a “cloud offering”.  Buy some licenses of VMware, put in two SANS, place it all in a rack, and VOILA - a new cloud provider! 

It is true that technically many of these companies are cloud providers, as equal as it was true that many of those dot.bombs were technically software companies.  As software companies in the late 90’s learned, it takes more than having a basic product and a good sales guy to sustain business.  Now the new “cloud” companies are learning the same.  I have talked to a handful of these new “cloud hosting” companies who after investing close to a million dollars in cloud infrastructure now realize that they can’t sustain the capital constraints. 

I am not stating that every company besides BlueLock who claims to be a cloud provider is falsely representing themselves.  There are some very good companies out there, who are doing this the right way.  I am stating there just aren’t many who are doing it right and may not survive.  The crux of this post is - be careful where your company invests its monies.  While the providers you talk to might all sound the same, look beyond the words and look at the core of the business to get to the real truth.  Is this “cloud” just a rack in their collocation business?  You might be putting your trust in the next dot cloud computing bomb. 

There's some debate these days about whether or not you must be utilizing virtualization technology to be considered a true cloud computing solution.  Some argue that cloud computing is merely a paradigm and not a prescribed set of technologies; that while the advantages of virtualization are great you don't need virtualization to enjoy the advantages of cloud computing.  Just like I'm not convinced that one model fits all when it comes to cloud computing, I'm also not convinced that you have to be running a workload in a virtual machine for it to be considered to be "in the cloud".  At the core of it, cloud computing is just a sophisticated form of outsourcing all or a part of your IT infrastructure.  Instead of building your own datacenter or bying your own systems and software and managing it all yourself, you get along using someone else's datacenter.  Or someone else's systems and software.  Or someone else's people.

So while Cloud Computing <> Virtualization, VMs are the way that companies like BlueLock make infrastructure as a service and cloud computing a reality.  You can do managed hosting without virtualization, but the economies of scale and the ability to decouple compute capacity from the underlying hardware that virtualization provides are what makes infrastrure "convenient", "on-demand" and "elastic" - thereby making elevating it from mere managed hosting to "cloud hosting".  John Considine wrote a post on CloudSwitch's blog title, "Do VMs Still Matter in the Cloud".  It's worth reading to understand one perspective of what virtualization and cloud computing do probably deserve to be joined at the hip.

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.

Last week I attended Softletter's SaaS University in Washington, D.C.  It was a great event aimed at helping SaaS companies learn how to better market, sell and deliver their cloud computing solutions using the Software-as-a-Service model.  BlueLock was asked to deliver a session on the infrastructure choices that SaaS companies face when deciding how to host their application. 

The numbers from the 2010 Softletter SaaS Survey revealed that SaaS companies have many infrastructure choices to make, from highly virtualized (Cloud) server farms to highly managed service systems and many variants in between. My session analyzed the choices available to SaaS providers and and gave some realistic numbers, checklists, and scenarios that hopefully helped them make the best choice for their operations and peace of mind.  Infrastructure As A Service offerings can be a great benefits to SaaS companies in that they can help them move opex expenses to capex expenses, lower their overall costs, align their expenses with revenues, improve their speed-to-market and provide a competitive advantage.

Here's a link to the PPT and the presentation on SlideShare.

Over the weekend the OpenStack project proudly announced its existence and its intended goal: to create an infrastructure cloud platform that can reach the scale of a million machines. NASA has evidently dedicated a team of employees to support these efforts likely to replace their existing Eucalyptus cloud fabric controller used within their Nebula infrastructure cloud.

NASA had already been working on Nova, a next-generation cloud fabric controller, for the better part of this year. Nova had even been released as open source project for public adoption. Meanwhile Rackspace, simultaneously prepping their "Ozone" cloud infrastructure software for public release, approached NASA to see if the two could meld their codebases together. As a result OpenStack was born and now Nova seems to have gone defunct... even Nova's old home at http://novacc.org/ redirects to the Nebula cloud computing platform page.

The announcement of OpenStack has generated quite a bit of buzz. Several out in the grand Interwebs are wondering what this collective brain weight will bring. The goals are quite lofty: allow an open, inter-operable fabric for deployment and provisioning of infrastructure as a service. And while there are many cloud projects ready to pledge support, I wonder if consumer adoption is just as rampant. Will service providers spring up, ready to host an OpenStack cloud? Bear in mind while the hypervisor management may be open source and (presumably) free for use, the capital expense of a data center is most decidedly not.

My biggest wonder is how these two (or three) separate projects, up to now independently architected, will be able to merge and work together as a cohesive whole. Nebula and Ozone appear to be comprised of C, Python and C++ - each of which are definitely complimentary languages to each other - but the codebases may leverage very disparate frameworks. Will code have to be largely re-designed and re-written? Will the separate pieces just end up sandwiched together? Or are the software engineering efforts so vast that it doesn't even matter?

One thing is becoming very apparent - everyone and their mom is racing to push their cloud solution out into public light. Even Oracle just released their Cloud Resource Model API - although it seems that is barely making a din above the OpenStack conversation. Everyone established infrastructure and/or software company seems to be throwing their hat in the ring and handing out orchestration solutions. One big problem exists however: are they going to start handing out blade chassis, too?

Yeah, I don't think so, either.

I could be rolling in free hypervisors but it always comes down to one thing: who is managing the SAN? Or figuring out the resulting layer 2 network craziness? Or keeping the cores stoked? Or keeping the backup generator filled with diesel?

At the Purdue Innovation Summit last week Ruth Nickolich submitted a great question to the BlueLock team: What are the advantages of cloud computing?

This is a question that has been asked, and answered many times and in many ways. From the BlueLock perspective, the major advantages of cloud computing are as follows:

• The real advantage of Cloud Computing, especially when using an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering which provides managed services as part of the solution, is that you're saving on more than just communications, power, cooling and facilities.  You're moving hardware and (potentially) software costs to the service provider as well as the most expensive part, the staff-related costs.  - via Bob Roudebush
• While security is a major concern when it comes to cloud computing, looking at a move to the cloud not only draws attention to the security measures in the cloud, but also the security measures you are taking in house. How do they measure up? A lot of BlueLock clients get better security from the cloud than in-house. - via Alicia Gaba
• Cloud Computing allows you to shift capital-intensive infrastructure costs to operating expenses, which can save your organization thousands of dollars in the long run. Check out how DECA Financial cut 91% of their infrastructure costs in the first year alone
• Better matching of revenue to expenses
• Rapid provisioning and speed to market
• Competitive advantage - they are able to spend IT time on their application and core business drivers rather than the day-to-day worries of managing the infrastructure

Still looking for more? Check out BlueLock's "Advantages of Cloud Computing" Blog.

Gartner recently released six "rights" and one "responsibility" for cloud service users/clients to help enable better business relationships between vendor and client. This list, although short, is actually quite exhaustive in terms of outlining some major topics a client should cover BEFORE entering a cloud hosting agreement.

Gartner's list of Cloud Computing Rights & Responsibilities:

The right to retain ownership, use and control one’s own data - Service consumers should retain ownership of, and the rights to use, their own data.

The right to service-level agreements that address liabilities, remediation and business outcomes - All computing services - including cloud services - suffer slowdowns and failures. However, cloud services providers seldom commit to recovery times, specify the forms of remediation or spell out the procedures they will follow.

The right to notification and choice about changes that affect the service consumers’ business processes - Every service provider will need to take down its systems, interrupt its services or make other changes in order to increase capacity and otherwise ensure that its infrastructure will serve consumers adequately in the long term. Protecting the consumer’s business processes entails providing advanced notification of major upgrades or system changes, and granting the consumer some control over when it makes the switch.

The right to understand the technical limitations or requirements of the service up front - Most service providers do not fully explain their own systems, technical requirements and limitations so that after consumers have committed to a cloud service, they run the risk of not being able to adjust to major changes, at least not without a big investment.

The right to understand the legal requirements of jurisdictions in which the provider operates - If the cloud provider stores or transports the consumer’s data in or through a foreign country, the service consumer becomes subject to laws and regulations it may not know anything about.

The right to know what security processes the provider follows - With cloud computing, security breaches can happen at multiple levels of technology and use. Service consumers must understand the processes a provider uses, so that security at one level (such as the server) does not subvert security at another level (such as the network).

The responsibility to understand and adhere to software license requirements - Providers and consumers must come to an understanding about how the proper use of software licenses will be assured.

This list brings light to what BlueLock is already doing right to better our relationships with our own clients. Based on the Gartner list provided, we are certainly in the right place.

Server hardware manufacturers and software makers have always touted scalability as a feature.  For cloud hosting providers such as BlueLock, this feature moves to another level: elasticity.  Elasticity is loosely interepreted as implying the capability for services to ramp down as needed as well.  Since most administrator mindsets and tools are geared for provisioning and scaling up, organizations are sometimes concerned that there might be pitfalls they encounter when suddenly being given the ability to scale down at will or as necessary.

Within the BlueLock Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS) Cloud, compute clusters are carefully divided into building blocks called “cores” and these cores are assigned to customers – never assigning more “cores” to a computer cluster than are actually available.  This is the primary issue in the debate between dedicated versus shared cloud computing models – just throwing everyone in the compute pool without regard to expected performance isn’t a good idea.  It’s important to ensure that the capacity available to application(s) is both dedicated and somewhat dynamic.  At BlueLock, once one or more of these “cores” is assigned to a client they are combined together into a resource pool. 

This model of cores and dedicated resource pools, along with the abstraction of physical hardware from the resources assigned to a virtual machine, allows clients to provision (and pay for) only what they need.  As their needs change, additional cores can be added (or removed) to grow (or shrink) resource pools and add (or subtract) to their application’s overall computing capacity.  Since this happens at the virtualization layer, it’s entirely transparent to the underlying operating system and application.  It requires much less prior planning and architecting than building dynamically scalable applications and deploying them on a PaaS cloud.

Ping Li from Accel Partners wrote a very interesting article this week about how some of the companies that his firm have funded are leveraging cloud computing.  He made a couple of points that I find particularly interesting: 

The first is that VC companies are making it a “pre-condition” of funding that the funded company leverage the cloud vs. buying traditional infrastructure. 

Even more interesting and more powerful is his second point: that most of these companies didn’t need that encouragement – there is no way their company could exist if they didn’t launch in the cloud – it just wouldn’t be possible to build the scale, complexity or cost without using a cloud infrastructure provider. 

His article got me thinking about all the other companies in the “universe” and the book by Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch.  In the book, Nick tells the story of Henry Burden and “Burden’s Wheel”.  Burden realized in the late 1800’s that he could locate his manufacturing company next to a river, build a huge water wheel to generate electricity and then automate many of the manufacturing processes, thereby lowering his cost, increasing production and crushing the competition.  Mr. Burden, no doubt, needed a very specialized group of people to build and maintain this elaborate “power system”, however, by the early 1900s, commercial power was introduced that turned his internal power generating systems into an enormous cost that other manufacturers did not have to bear.  Sound familiar?

Many others have done a better job than I could in this post about the difference between power and data - that really isn’t the point.  The point is that there are companies today that have launched very successfully without any internal IT systems – which means no IT capital costs, no/minimal IT labor costs and maintenance costs that larger companies today bear with their own internal IT systems.  There are other differences, of course, namely, that large established companies have huge legacy systems that may not necessarily be appropriate for the cloud, however, they do have very large costs supporting other systems that are considered important but not critical that may be perfect candidates to be migrated to the cloud.  By moving these environments to the cloud they have the opportunity to reduce their overall cost and enable their existing IT departments to focus on building more valuable systems to drive more business value. 

In start-up companies, pure cloud hosting is the preferred route to market – in large companies it’s not going to be an all-or-nothing proposition – it’s going to be a “hybrid” approach. With a hybrid approach, enterprise companies create a secure connection between their private cloud and a public cloud (today a secure VPN or MPLS connection) and then move less critical workloads to the public cloud.

At BlueLock, we like to say that we’ve been in the cloud a “lifetime”, and we have the good fortune to be serving many companies in both of these camps:  start-ups (many that are SaaS companies specifically); and large enterprise clients that sought to leverage the cloud to lower their costs and focus their valuable IT resources on projects and systems that drive more business value. 

In July, I’m going to be presenting to software company CEOs at SaaS University in Washington, DC on the topic of “Infrastructure Choices”, where I’ll put a spotlight on the cost differences between building your own internal infrastructure vs. moving to the cloud.  I will also be discussing many considerations that companies face such as security and SLAs, two issues that should be top of mind when deciding which cloud is right for you.  

If you’re interested in attending the event as BlueLock’s guest – register for the event and use this code:  BLUELOCK100 to receive a $100 discount off the cost of registration.

If you have a comment or would like to contact me, you can reach me at bwolff@bluelock.com.  

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.

Looking to quickly get your application into the cloud? Want to build it on a cloud computing infrastructure powered by VMware?

vCloud Express allows you to quickly, easily, and inexpensively deploy your application to a VMware-based public cloud. In fact, right now it's free and you can get started on vCloud Express at the BlueLock website in a matter of minutes.

In this episode of Whiteboard Wednesday, Jake Robinson and I discuss the architecture of the vCloud Express platform and how you can spin up your own virtual servers -- in an instant! If you're a developer, researcher, software tester, or just a technology and cloud computing fanatic; this video is for you.

Be sure to comment below and ask any questions you might have, so we can try to answer them for you in next week's Whiteboard video. 

Cloud Computing means many things to many people.  It excites, motivates, and even scares some.  But what does it mean to you?

The advantages of cloud computing have been touted again and again - from flexibility, speed, versatility, convenience, and cost effective to green, secure and scalable.  But what makes cloud computing so interesting is that everyone has different thoughts and views around what it really does for them and means to them.

So first things first, what is cloud computing? At BlueLock we describe it in terms of 5 major things: on demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity and measured service.  It is provided in three different service models: software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). (BlueLock does IaaS.)

But what's the real value of the cloud? These are the major values our clients have seen:

• Transitioning IT infrastructure costs from Capex to Opex
• Opportunity to lower overall costs
• Better match expenses to revenue
• Rapid provisioning (speed to market)
• Competitive advantage

 But again, I must ask, what does cloud computing mean to you?  

With cloud computing becoming more and more pervasive, IT's role is morphing towards one of governance rather than control.  Internal departments are going out and accessing resources from the cloud rather than waiting on their internal IT departments to come around and get to their requests. IT must be more and more aware and ready to govern the use of outside IT resources such as software-as-a-service (SaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), which in some companies is a fire-able offense.

Internal IT must make decisions - they need to choose what to provide (SaaS & IaaS) and make those options easy and accessible to their business units.  Why? Because leaving those business units to their own devices can be a huge risk.  They may be putting the company or its client's data at security risk.  

There are many benefits of cloud computing, but the right people must make the right decisions around where your data is stored and what options are OK for business units to use.  Cloud computing security must always be top of mind, especially when sensitive data is involved.

By now you’ve probably heard about cloud computing, possibly even from your own IT department. Join Brian Wolff, Cloud Hosting Professional and Co-Founder of BlueLock to learn more about this nebulous concept called “The Cloud.” Brian will speak your language and share real-life examples of what other software companies are doing to leverage the cloud in his upcoming webinar. 

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.
 

Cloud computing (virtual cloud or "vCloud") is buzzing everywhere now, but what is it?  InfoWorld has a good article about "What cloud computing really means". I find it to be a rather helpful overview, here is a quick snippet from the post:

BlueLock Cloud Hosting lets you choose which cloud service works best for you (see this article from ReadWrite Cloud - BlueLock Lets You Customize Your Cloud Infrastructure).  Using the "Cloud" means choices, and using BlueLock gives you the benefits of choices. 

We are a hosting service provider in the cloud space. Some call it Infrastructure-as-a-Service, others call it cloud hosting.  Whatever you call it we manage, maintain and run the IT infrastructure from the operating system down so you don't have to.  What do you do with all that extra time? Focus on your core business!

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’.

 

The results are in, and for the second year in a row BlueLock has been named a TechPoint Mira award finalist in the IT Gazelle category. Five independent judges chose 60 finalists to compete for the state's top technology honors at the TechPoint Mira Awards, presented by BKD.There were a record number of nominations in 15 categories this year.  The awards recognize the achievements of Indiana's outstanding technology performers and contributors. The program does a very good job at focusing attention on the important role technology play's in Indiana's economy.  

At BlueLock, we've definitely seen a growing number of hi-tech companies in our own backyard not only showing how far ahead of the curve they are by moving to cloud computing, but also experiencing tremendous growth in the cloud.  

Congratulations to the BlueLock clients and partners who have also been nominated as a Mira Award Finalist:

• Ontario Systems
• Double-Take Software
• WebLink International
• Scale Computing
• Aprimo, Inc.
• Cantaloupe TV
• Compendium Blogware

For more information on the TechPoint Mira Awards and the nominees, read this article.