Top Picks

I spend a significant portion of my day reading blogs and playing catch-up with the latest technology offerings, trends, and fads. It’s become somewhat of a challenge to discover the “useful” pieces of information as the number of blog posts that Google Reader and Google Alert deliver to my door step are growing at an unbearable rate. Last night I stumbled upon a link to this post that talks about CohesiveFT and how they easily provision virtual servers with a specific user defined stack to the cloud, whether it be Amazon’s EC2 or any other cloud that their customers would like.

Lets take a step back, and think how the cloud and easy server provisioning is effecting the computing world? To put it in a nut shell, Joe Smith from Gibraltar can almost instantly deploy more computing power than Hewlett Packard. This is definitely revolutionary and deserves a big round of applause, but what we must realize is that the moment that Joe deployed his army of virtual servers, he has adopted a problem. An enterprise problem. Due to the fact that cloud computing, and server and stack provisioning, have become so easy, the time consuming and error-prone operations have moved higher up the scale; they’ve moved to the application. Joe is now faced with the challenge of providing services to his online and in cloud applications; updates, patches, hot fixes, log gathering, database manipulations, and the like. Pushing configuration changes to a couple of servers is no problem, but when these changes are on hundreds of servers, multiple tiers, and across clouds or data centers (don’t forget to add dependencies into the equation), we can quickly see how the celebration of easy cloud server provisioning is very much short-lived.

Application Service Automation is the natural evolution of the migration to cloud computing, and as the servers have become commodities, followed by the operating systems and stacks, businesses will now need to enforce scalable and manageable application services as part of their daily operations.