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Datacenterknowledge.com: In an effort to boost its refocused cloud computing initiative, Sun Microsystems (JAVA) has acquired Q-layer, a Belgian provider that automates the deployment of both public and private clouds. Sun says Q-layer’s technology will help users instantly provision servers, storage, bandwidth and applications.

Do you have experience with Q-layers technology like its Virtual Private DataCenter and NephOS?

Scalability Perspectives is a series of posts that highlights the ideas that will shape the next decade of IT architecture. Each post is dedicated to a thought leader of the information age and his vision of the future. Be warned though – the journey into the minds and perspectives of these people requires an open mind.

Werner Vogels

Dr. Werner Vogels is Vice President & Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com where he is responsible for driving the company’s technology vision, which is to continuously enhance the innovation on behalf of Amazon’s customers at a global scale. Prior to joining Amazon, he worked as a researcher at Cornell University where he was a principal investigator in several research projects that target the scalability and robustness of mission-critical enterprise computing systems. He is regarded as one of the world's top experts on ultra-scalable systems and he uses his weblog to educate the community about issues such as eventual consistency. Information Week recently recognized Vogels for this educational and promotional role in Cloud Computing with the 2008 CIO/CTO of the Year award.

Service-Oriented Architecture, Utility Computing and Internet Level 3 Platform in practice

Amazon has built a loosely coupled service-oriented architecture on an inter-planetary scale. They are the pioneers of Utility Computing and Internet Platforms discussed earlier in Scalability Perspectives. Amazon's CTO, Werner Vogels is undoubtedly a thought leader for the coming age of cloud computing.

In this article they present the companies which offers means (mainly, the software and hardware) which powers most of the cloud computing hosting providers, namely virtualization solutions.

Read the entire article about Platform virtualization - top 25 providers (software, hardware, combined) at MyTestBox.com - web software reviews, news, tips & tricks.

Every day brings news of either more failures of the financial systems or out-right fraud, with the $50 billion Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme being the latest, breaking all records. This post provide a technical overview of a solution that was implemented for one of the largest banks in China. The solution illustrate how one can use Excel as a front end client and at the same time leverage cloud computing model and mapreduce as well as other patterns to scale-out risk calculations. I'm hoping that this type of approach will reduce the chances for seeing this type of fraud from happening in the future.

Data centers are reshaping themselves by taking ideas from public cloud providers, such as Amazon and Google. The idea is to make the data center more cost-effective by enabling on-demand utility-based computing rather than dedicated machines. At the same time, it is clear that to make IT operations more effective, it doesn't make sense to run all the applications that are currently hosted in a company's data center in the private cloud. This calls for an integration between private and public cloud. In this post i discuss some of the challenges involved in making that happen:
1. How do we design applications to be cloud-agnostic?
2. How do we enable seamless fail-over to a public cloud?
3. Future-proofing: There are many cases in which we can't make a clear decision as to where our application should be running at the time of writing or developing the application. We would like to be in a position to change the decision as to where our application will be running even after our application has been completely developed.

Scalability Perspectives is a series of posts that highlights the ideas that will shape the next decade of IT architecture. Each post is dedicated to a thought leader of the information age and his vision of the future. Be warned though – the journey into the minds and perspectives of these people requires an open mind.

Nicholas Carr

A former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, Nicholas Carr writes and speaks on technology, business, and culture. His provocative 2004 book Does IT Matter? set off a worldwide debate about the role of computers in business.

The Big Switch – Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google

Carr's core insight is that the development of the computer and the Internet remarkably parallels that of the last radically disruptive technology, electricity. He traces the rapid morphing of electrification from an in-house competitive advantage to a ubiquitous utility, and how the business advantage rapidly shifted from the innovators and early adopters to corporate titans who made their fortune from controlling a commodity essential to everyday life. He envisions similar future for the IT utility in his new book

• The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google

This post describes how you can create a federated management model using JMX standard API. Applications that are already using a standard JMX interface can plug-in the new federated implementation without changing the application code and without introducing additional performance overhead.

One particularly interesting EC2 third party provider is GigaSpaces with their XAP platform that provides in memory transactions backed up to a database. The in memory transactions appear to scale linearly across machines thus providing a distributed in-memory datastore that gets backed up to persistent storage.

Compares MapReduce to other parallel processing approaches and suggests new paradigm for clouds and grids

CloudCamp is an interesting unconference where early adapters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged you to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.

CloudCamp Silicon Valley 08 is scheduled for Tuesday, September 30, 2008 from 06:00 PM - 10:00 PM in Sun Microsystems' EBC Briefing Center
15 Network Circle
Menlo Park, CA 94025

CloudCamp follows an interactive, unscripted unconference format. You can propose your own session or you can attend a session proposed by someone else. Either way, you are encouraged to engage in the discussion and “Vote with your feet”, which means … “find another session if you don’t find the session helpful”. Pick and choose from the conversations; rant and rave, or sit back and watch.

At CloudCamp, we tend to discuss the following topics:

* Infrastructure as a service (Joyent, Amazon Ec2, Nirvanix, etc)
* Platform as a service (BungeeLabs, AppEngine, etc)
* Software as a service (salesforce.com)
* Application / Data / Storage (development in the cloud)

You want to have a scalable website. You want a website which can handle traffic spikes (think if you are getting on Digg, Slahsdot, Reddit, Techcrunch or other very popular websites frontpage).

Regular hosting companies (especially shared hosting) can offer only so much. The servers usually get crushed under the load in short time.

But there is hope. A new breed of hosting companies emerged recently. A new breed which can offer you the scalability you need at a fraction of the cost.

Welcome to the world of “cloud computing!” (or “grid computing” or “utility computing”, which are terms for the same thing).

Here's a website which compiled a list of cloud computing hosting companies (with short descriptions, prices and customer lists for each of them).

Read the entire article about Cloud computing, grid computing, utility computing list at MyTestBox.com - web software reviews, news, tips & tricks.

A report from the CloudCamp conference on cloud computing, held in London in July 2008.

Scalability forces us to think differently. What worked on a small scale doesn't always work on a large scale -- and costs are no different. If 90% of our application is free of contention, and only 10% is spent on a shared resources, we will need to grow our compute resources by a factor of 100 to scale by a factor of 10! Another important thing to note is that 10x, in this case, is the limit of our ability to scale, even if more resources are added.

1. The cost of non-linearly scalable applications grows exponentially with the demand for more scale.
2. Non-linearly scalable applications have an absolute limit of scalability. According to Amdhal's Law, with 10% contention, the maximum scaling limit is 10. With 40% contention, our maximum scaling limit is 2.5 - no matter how many hardware resources we will throw at the problem.

This post discuss in further details how to measure the true cost of non linearly scalable systems and suggest a model for reducing that cost significantly.

Update 2: Nice introductory New York Time's article Cloud Computing: So You Don’t Have to Stand Still. Good example of how Animoto used RightScale and Amazon to meet a Facebook driven demand of 25,000 test drives an hour.
Update: Peter Laird in Understanding the Cloud Computing/SaaS/PaaS markets: a Map of the Players in the Industry paints a very cool visual map of all the cloud service players. It's a larger industry than you might think.

Once upon a time I worked at an Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) switch startup. Over a delicious Christmas punch my grandma asked me what I did for a living that I could afford such extravagantly inexpensive gifts. Always so subtle. I explained I worked on an ATM switch. Mistake. She sniffed, said that's nice, and asked me why the Automated Teller Machine ate her bank card that morning. No matter how hard I tried I couldn't convince her I didn't work on bank ATMs. To all future job interrogations I waxed off, protesting I do boring software stuff that nobody cares about.

Not put off in the least, grandma asked me last night to explain this cloud computing thing she keeps hearing about at her church club. Afraid of being another victim of the distortion field surrounding cloud computing, I instead referred her to Kent Langley's excellent overview of the subject in Cloud Computing: Get Your Head in the Clouds. It does a good job demystifying the very confusing concept of cloud computing. It has nice diagrams, definitions, examples and is a great place to start.

She agreed that she had learned a lot, but one thing still troubled her: what's the difference between cloud computing and utility computing? They seem to be the same to her. Always so perceptive. She felt sure if she could drive this point home she would score big points with her church group. Oh the pressure.

A lot has been said already about Twitter's scalability issues. Many have given Twitter as an anti-pattern of how not to deal with scalability and have suggested different solutions for scaling it. As Twitter is famously a Ruby-on-Rails deployment, this case has also been used as a weapon in the language/platform wars between the RoR and Java camps, and to a lesser degree, also with the LAMP (PHP) camp