Today is Judgment Day, when Skynet becomes self-aware. It is, apparently, also a very, very bad day for Amazon Web Services.
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GoGrid is the world’s largest pure-play Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider specializing in Cloud Infrastructure solutions. What I liked about their approach was a first class and simple RESTfull API for managing all aspects of server administration. I even created a screen cast back in September 2010 to demonstrate how Nolio ASAP can manage temporary lab setups and teardowns with the click of a button. At that time, most of the heavy lifting was done externally from Nolio ASAP, until the Nolio Agents were remotely installed on the fresh servers. I finally had a couple of hours the other day and quickly put together another Application Component Library especially for GoGrid. Here you can find half a dozen out-of-the-box workflows for managing operations via their API. Of course this isn’t a complete tool set, but it’s a good kick start for anybody needing an application release automation framework integrated with GoGrid’s cloud technology.
Due to the fact that cloud based technology has transformed infrastructure provisioning for enterprise applications into a relatively simple and less expensive process, many operational teams are investigating the possibility of migrating some of their application portfolio to the cloud. However, they soon discover that the simplicity, cost savings, and effectiveness characterizing application provisioning and initial deployment in the cloud does not apply to ongoing deployment and application services. Instead, they discover that the management and execution of ongoing application release events turns out to be as complex and challenging as they are in physical non-cloud environments. I’ll discuss why the server image as the primary tool for deploying applications to the cloud does not provide a solution to the challenges posed by enterprise applications to ongoing deployments, and will point the direction to where such a solution may be found.
Jason Cowie, Embotic‘s VP of Product Management wrote a guest post on the ZDNet blog. This is perfect timing for my new white paper that discusses why virtual and cloud images do not contribute to application release, but rather make the situation much more difficult.
Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie has recently made some interesting predictions on the future of cloud computing.
Ozzie said that the future for companies’ data hosting will be in a combination of cloud computing and on-premise data centers. In his words, “at some point in time, every major enterprise, every company, every ISV is going to have some blend of software that runs on-premises and some that runs in the cloud, and everyone wants tools that they can use to in essence deploy some apps to part of their organization that might be in the cloud…”
