Cloud computing has become an umbrella term for utility computing, grid computing, and on-demand application delivery and as such, it covers a broad range of options for both IT consumers and providers. But what problems does it solve and how does it benefit startups and developers?

Join us for this live webinar!

This webinar will cover:

• Different approaches to cloud computing 
• Cloud computing's primary technology drivers 
• How cloud computing changes application delivery 
• How to evaluate a cloud computing provider for your startup 

Date: Wednesday, October 7, 2009 
Time: 10:00 am PDT / 1:00 pm EDT / 19:00 Central Europe (check my timezone)
Duration: 1 hour
Presenter: Lew Tucker, CTO, Sun Cloud Computing 

Unable to join the live event? Register anyway and we'll send you the link to the recorded session.

This Sun BluePrints™ article provides an overview of Sun's VeriScale architecture. The article includes details of VeriScale's defining principals, underlying components, interactions, and advantages. Applicable real-world scenarios are also described.

The article addresses the following topics:

• Requirements of a Scalable Datacenter" describes the requirements that are addressed by the VeriScale architecture.
• VeriScale Architecture Overview" describes the automation layer and functional components of the VeriScale architecture.
• Project OpenSolaris™ Dynamic Service Containers (OpenSolaris DSC)" describes the components of OpenSolaris DSC that are used by the VeriScale architecture.
• Service Delivery Network (SDN) Architecture and VeriScale Automation" describes how the SDN architecture is used to implement the VeriScale automation requirements.
• Network Optimization Through Distribution" describes how the VeriScale architecture can be used to distribute and optimize application deployment and load-balancing.
• Proof of Concept for the VeriScale Architecture" describes a proof-ofconcept (POC) that was implemented to verify the feasibility and utility of the VeriScale architecture.
• The VeriScale-Enabled Business Process" describes how the Veriscale architecture concepts can be applied to business processes in a software intensive enterprise.

Check out our coverage of AlwaysOn: Stanford Summit on justin.tv. http://www.justin.tv/sunstartupessentials

Juan Carlos Soto (VP of Cloud Computing) sitting on the Rainmakers in the Cloud panel.

Also, Visuvi demoing their visual search solution and telling how Sun Startup Essentials has helped the company grow both on the technology and marketing sides of business.

Vous avez immédiatement besoin d'une machine  pour déveloper, tester ou héberger votre application Web, et votre budget n'excède pas quelques dizaines d'Euros pas mois ?

Regardez chez Planet-Work !

Cet hébergeur met en ligne son offre d'hébergement iServer Solaris basée sur une architecture cloud : réservation de machines et paiement en ligne, choix entre différentes tailles de machines et possibilité de choisir le logiciel pré-installé (Apache, Glassfish, MySQL, etc.). La livraison est faite sous 2 heures.

La première configuration est à 19€/mois et à ce prix-là vous êtes hébergés sur Solaris et bénéficiez d'un  backup automatique ZFS.

Depuis plusieurs années, Planet-Work s'intéresse à la virtualisation afin de proposer de l'hébergement à des prix vraiment compétitifs sans pour autant sacrifier la qualité de services. Frédéric Vannière, directeur technique de Planet-Work, a été convaincu par les possibilités qu'offre Solaris dans ce domaine. La combinaison des containers Solaris et de la puissance de ZFS à permis de mettre en place une architecture de type cloud qui répond aux exigences techniques et économiques du cahier des charges de l'offre iServer :

• les containers Solaris apportent une technologie de virtualisation à la fois robuste et économe. Robuste car chaque container est une véritable machine virtuelle qui opère de manière parfaitement isolée, accessible uniquement via le réseau, pouvant être rebootée ou patchée de manière indépendante, qui se voit allouer des ressources dédiées que ce soit en mémoire vive, en CPU, en bande passante réseau, et qui possède son propre système de fichier. Économe car - contrairement à d'autres technologies de virtualisation, un container Solaris n'a pas besoin de faire tourner son propre kernel : il utilise le kernel du système d'exploitation qui l'héberge et qui lui sert d'hyperviseur. Ainsi, les ressources hardware allouées au container sont utilisées pour faire tourner vos applications, et non pas les kernels de différents systèmes d'exploitation. Chaque Watt est dépensé à bon escient,

• le système de fichier ZFS, grâce à son système de snapshots et clones, permet de provisionner les containers de manière quasi immédiate : des containers de référence ont été créés par Planet-Work avec chacun un volume ZFS dédié. La première étape consiste à installer le système d'exploitation du container dans ce volume. On obtient ainsi l'image disque du container. Puis, les logiciels tels que Apache, Glassfish ou MySQL sont installés dans cette image. A partir de là, les containers dédiés aux utilisateurs sont créés en clonant l'une des images disques de référence. Des mesures précises ont été réalisées pour comprendre ce qui consomme du temps lors du provisionnement d'un container. Le clonage ne prend pas plus de quelques secondes et c'est le démarrage - le boot - du container qui est le plus consomateur. Un container est provisionné et démarré en quelques minutes. Mais les avantages du clonage ZFS ne s'arrêtent pas là. Ce mécanisme permet aussi d'économiser de l'espace disque puisque dans leur grande majorité, les données ne sont pas dupliquées entre la nouvelle image disque et l'image de référence : tant que les données sont semblables elles sont partagées entre les deux images. C'est uniquement si  les données divergent qu'une copie des données modifiées est créée automatiquement par ZFS.  Cette copie est bien évidemment dédiée à l'image du nouveau container. Au bout du compte, ZFS permet d'avoir une consommation d'espace disque réduite à quelques centaines de méga-octets pour le système d'exploitation de chaque container. Là encore, l'espace disque est vraiment dédié à vos données et non au système d'exploitation de la machine virtuelle.

Voici un cloud qui a les pieds bien sur terre !

Ce qu'il vous propose ? Vous permettre de déployer votre propre 'data center' virtuel, et ceci en quelques clicks.

Le data center est basé en Europe et - comme mentionné sur leur site web - le cloud est construit avec des technologies et produits Sun : VirtualBox est l'hyperviseur recommandé et ils utilisent aussi Q-Layer.

En outre, c'est un partenaire de plus pour Sun et pour vous puisqu'il propose de l'hébergement sur la plate-forme OpenSolaris. Voilà qui devrait intéresser tous ceux qui rêvent d'utiliser ZFS pour accélérer leurs backups MySQL (l'intégration ZFS/MySQL sera traité en détail des les webcats à venir).

Et si vous voulez en savoir plus sur le cloud et sur les technologies de Sun dans ce domaine, rejoignez-nous au Paris Cloud Camp . Nous serrons présents pour répondre à vos questions.

It's easy to get lost in all the talk about cloud computing. Everybody seems to have a cloud, connects to the cloud, is cloud-enabled, or at the least, is cloud-ready.

There's a lot of jargon, but it's not all fluff and buzz. Behind that jargon are some very real business and technology benefits.

Our new guide to cloud computing will help you sort out what matters from what doesn't — and will arm you with a framework for determining whether and how cloud computing makes sense for your organization.

In 25 pages, this free guide:

   1. Defines cloud computing and its benefits
   2. Explains the different types of clouds (public, private, and hybrid)
   3. Describes the architectural service layers (e.g., Software as a Service)
   4. Details the underlying virtualization technologies
   5. Suggests next steps and actions to get started

You'll also learn about Sun's approach — which is to deliver all the components that enterprises, developers, and end users need to build cloud environments. Using open-source and open-standards, of course.

DOWNLOAD HERE NOW

Controlling costs while being ready to go big. Doubling application performance. Delivering tiered services. Connecting to the cloud, but being smart about it.

These are the things that startups tell us they want to do. So we’ve put together a seminar to show you how to do it.

Join us for an informative, free, 3-hour technical session with Angelo Rajadurai, one of our very talented and knowledgeable Web Scale Architects. He’ll discuss how Sun's new Open Storage products can help you cost-effectively scale your startup and think about storage in new ways. The sessions are a mix of slides, demos, and open discussion.

We’re coming to:

 - Los Angeles - El Segundo, CA - March 9
 - San Francisco - Sunnyvale - March 10
 - Austin, TX - March 12
 - Boston, MA - March 16
 - New York City - March 17

In most places the  seminar runs from 11 am to 2 pm. Light lunch will be served.
Get all the details and Register!

Watch this space soon, as this tour is coming to Europe ....

At Sun UK we recently supported and attended "Entrepreneur Country" a major European Start Up and VC event.

Acting as a rallying cry to the entrepreneurial, VC and Start-up communities, the event affirmed that now is the best time to start your own company and that entrepreneurs were key to the recovery of the economy from the recession.

Almost 300 of the UK’s leading entrepreneurs, including Caffè Nero founder Gerry Ford and Betfair co-founder and Chairman Edward Wray, shared stories of success at the event. Roman Stanek, a founder of NetBeans, and now founder and CEO of Good Data Corp and successful serial entrepreneur, said "tough times create tough companies", whilst Gerry Ford, urged us to "be restless and relentless" in the pursuit of success. The seminars were held at the Institute of Directors (IoD) in central London and coincided with the official launch of Entrepreneur Country online.

Other highlights of the day included keynotes from Sir Paul Judge (from the Enterprise Education Trust on ‘Risk and Enterprise’), Glen Manchester (Founder and CEO of Thunderhead), Ed Wray (Co-Founder and Chairman of Betfair), Niall Harbison (Founder and Chef at iFoods.tv), and David Courtier-Dutton and Paul Brown (from SliceThePie).

The event was organised and hosted by Ariadne Capital, an entrepreneurial investment and advisory firm. Ariadne was set up by current CEO Julie Meyer; probably best known as being a founder of First Tuesday, the largest global network of entrepreneurs (which many credit for igniting the Internet generation across Europe).

The agenda also included two panel sessions discussing Online Gaming (and virtual worlds) and Cloud Computing (and, to an extent, it's impact on the entrepreneurial, VC and Start-up communities and how they might best capitalise on it). The later of which I had been asked to take part in of behalf of Sun. Cannily I kept mental notes and have been able to write the session up as a separate blog post "Cloud Computing panel interview with Sun Microsystems at 'Entrepreneur Country'" (for further background material on Cloud Computing you may also want to check out my "Cloud Relationship Model" article). The questions we were asked included:

1. Surely we’ve heard all of this before in various forms and guises? What is different this time? Why will it work? ...response #1
2. For this stuff to become truly embedded it will need to move from the man in the street to the corporate. Corporate CIOs are a risk averse bunch especially when you move into some sectors (e.g. Financial Services). What will influence the CIOs' buying decision? ...response #2
3. It was all very easy when you went out and bought or developed software, installed it yourself, ran it yourself, etc. Does working in the cloud bring new issues with regards to data ownership, IP rights, other legal issues, etc.? ...response #3
4. What is your vision for the future and where this goes? ...response #4
5. An audience driven Q and A session including responses to "What do you think of Microsoft's Azure Cloud initiative?" and "What is Sun's Cloud Computing strategy?" ...response #5

I really enjoyed the day and had a productive time networking and meeting people, all of whom shared with me their vision, enthusiasm and wonderful business ideas. I met people from MovieStorm, TechnologyDen, NewVoiceMedia, Broadcom UK, SaaSPlex, Spinvox, Teamer, and a quite a few others too. Some of these companies had been funded by Enterprise Ireland and it was very good to see them there as well as representatives from the UK's Technology Strategy Board.

Accompanying the days themes of Invention, Innovation and Entrepreneurism were handouts, books and other resources, and I picked up a copy of Jeremy Coller's new book "The Lives, Loves and Deaths of Splendidly Unreasonable Inventors".

On the night we went to an associated networking dinner where I fell deep into conversation with a number of people including Paul Flanagan, Executive for Digital Entertainment at Ariadne, Declan Cunningham, Director at Ariadne, and Tom Salmon, founder of AfterShow and Traffic Digital.

The event was supported by the Sun UK Internet Business team, led by Paul Tarantino, with additional support from Simon Culmer, Director of Sales from the UK executive management team, as well as myself. Here's the official write up, a variety of photos taken and also a selection of video recordings.

Thanks to Rebecca Temple, Manager of Portfolio Marketing at Ariadne, here's a variety of some of the other coverage of the day, much of it focused on the business messages we heard:

• David Bailey - Entrepreneur Country - Hunting New Beasts
  http://blog.david.bailey.net/blog/_archives/2009/1/15/4057988.html
  
• Aristos Peters - Entrepreneur Country - Ariadne Capital Event
  http://weklik.wordpress.com/
  
• Real Business - Matthew Rock - Betfair boss: best time ever to start a business
  http://www.realbusiness.co.uk/news/startups/5521296/betfair-boss-best-time-ever-to-start-a-business.thtml
  
• Rosalie Marsh - Business leaders issue call to entrepreneurs
  http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2234098/start-ups-big-business
  
• Ariadne Capital Entrepreneurs can lead us out of recession' claim business leaders
  http://www.it-analysis.com/business/innovation/news_release.php?rel=9238
  
• Will Sturgeon - Why UK will become entrepreneur country in 2009
  http://sturgeonslaw.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-uk-will-become-entrepreneur-country.html
  
• Women Unlimited - Julie Hall - Entrepreneur Country - learning from the best
  http://www.women-unlimited.co.uk/entrepreneur-country-learning-from-the-best
  

Please note that this article was originally written and posted at my blog and I've included it as a guest article here too for those interested in the 'Entrepreneur Country' event. The original article is hosted here: http://blogs.sun.com/eclectic/entry/sun_ariadne_capital_entrepreneur_country

All the best,

Wayne Horkan

cloudcamp.com/london

It can also be found in the calendar in the sidebar feel free to subscribe!

Hiya All, welcome to my first guest post at Startup Essentials; today I'm going to be talking about the cloud relationship model I've developed and it's use as an artefact when discussing cloud computing.

I wanted a simply model which I could share with people and use as a discussion point, whilst still capturing the major areas of cloud computing which I considered most pertinent.  I developed a model about six months ago and have since found it useful when talking with people about cloud computing.

Here's the model and I'll go though it's major elements below.

Major Cloud Communities

In the cloud there are three major participants:

1. the Cloud Providers; building out Clouds, for instance Google, Amazon, etc. Effectivetively technology providers.
   
2. the Cloud Adopters / Developers; those developing services over the Cloud and some becoming the first generation of Cloud ISVs.  I have included Cloud "Service" developers and Cloud ISV developers together. This group are effectively service enablers.
   
3. Cloud "End" Users; those using Cloud provisioned services, often without knowing that they are cloud provisioned, the most obvious example of which are the multitude of Facebook users who have no idea there favorite FB app. is running on AWS. These are the service consumers.
   

I think it's important to talk about these communities because I keep hearing lots about the Cloud Providers, and even more about the issues and 'needs' of the Cloud adopters / developers, but very little in terms of Cloud "End" Users.  In a computing eco-system such as this where "services" are supported by and transverse technology providers, service enablers and service consumers an end to end understanding of how this affects these reliant communities is required. Obvious issues such as SLAs for end users and businesses which rely upon high availability and high uptime from there cloud providers come to mind; however other "ilities" and systemic qualities come to mind such as security, and that's before looking at any detailed breakdown of functional services.

The point here is that the cloud adopters / developers and interestingly the cloud "watchers" (i.e. the press, media, bloggers and experts) would be mindful to remember the needs and requirements of genuine end users; for myself it'd certainly be invigorating to hear more on this topic area.

Billing / Engagement Models

Simon Wardley, a much more eloquent public speaker than myself, does a wonderful pitch which includes a look at the different "as a Service types" which he boils down to being a load of "*aaS" (very amusing, and informative, try and catch Simon presenting if you can).

I wholeheartedly agree that there is a large amount of befuddlement when it comes to the differing "*aaS" types and sub-types, and new ones are springing up relatively frequently, however I also think it's important to not ignore the differences between them.

For me, and many others, I think first popularised by the "Partly Cloudy - Blue-Sky Thinking About Cloud Computing" white paper from the 451 Group, the differing "*aaS" variants are identified as billing and engagement models.  That white paper also postulates the five major Cloud Computing provider models, into which the majority of minor "*aaS" variants fall.  They are:

1. Managed Service Provision (MSP); not only are you hiring your service from the cloud, you've someone to run and maintain it too.
   
2. Software as a Service (SaaS); pretty much ubiquitous as a term and usually typified by Salesforce.com, who are the SaaS poster child.
   
3. Platform as a Service (PaaS); the application platform most commonly associated with Amazon Web Services.
   
4. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS);
   
5. Hosting 2.0

One of the best breakdowns and visual analysis of this space is the model in Peter Laird's "Understanding the Cloud Computing/SaaS/PaaS markets: a Map of the Players in the Industry" article which is well worth a read.

Major Architectural Layers

Also included in the diagram are the major architectural layers that are included in each of the above billing / engagement models offered by the Cloud providers. They are:

1. Operations; and this really is operations supporting functional business processes, rather than supporting the technology itself.
   
2. Service layer; made up of application code, bespoke code, high-level ISV offerings.
   
3. Platform layer; made up of standard platform software i.e. app. servers, DB servers, web servers, etc., and an example implementation would be a LAMP stack.
   
4. Infrastructure layer; made up of (i) infrastructure software (i.e.virtualisation and OS software), (ii) the hardware platform and server infrastructure, and (iii) the storage platform.
   
5. Network layer; made up of routers, firewalls, gateways, and other network technology.
   

This rather oversimplifies the architecture, as it's important to note that each of the cloud billing / engagement models use capabilities from each of the above architectural layers; for instance their can be a lot of service simply in managing a network, however these describe the major architectural components (which support the service being procured), not simply ancillary functions, effectively what are the cloud providers customers principally paying for. 

Delta of Effort / Delta of Opportunity

This is much more than the 'gap' between the cloud providers and the cloud users, wherein the cloud adopters / developers sit, the gap between the cloud providers and the end cloud users can be called the delta of effort, but also the delta of opportunity.

It is the delta of effort in terms of skills, abilities, experience and technology that the cloud adopter needs to deliver a functional service to their own “End Users”.  This will be potentially a major area of cost to the cloud adopters. But it's also the delta of opportunity;in terms of 'room' to innovate.

The more capability procured from the cloud provider (i.e. higher up the stack as a whole), the less you have to do (and procure) yourself.  However the less procured from the cloud provider the more opportunity you have engineer a differentiating technology stack yourself.  This itself has it's disadvantages because the cloud adopters / developers could potentially not realise the true and best value of their cloud providers infrastructure.

I suspect that there is an optimum level, around the Platform Layer, which abstracts enough complexity away (i.e. you don't have to procure servers, networks, implementation or technology operations staff), but also leaves enough room to innovate and produce software engineered value.  Arguably the only current successful cloud provider, based upon market share, perception, revenue and customer take up, is Amazon Web Services (AWS) who provide a PaaS offering.

Summary

Hope you enjoyed the article, in summary if developing cloud services or even building out a cloud infrastructure I would recommend that you focus on your users and if your a cloud provider, your users' users; remembering that only a certain percentage of those users will be customers (I won't getting into discussing Chris Anderson's 5% recommended conversion rate for the long tail, however I would recommend understanding what some of those calculations might be).

If you're looking to develop services over the cloud, think carefully about where you and your teams skills lie, and where would you most want them focusing there efforts; working on installing and tuning operating systems and application platforms or writing business value focused applications and services, before choosing at which level to engage with your cloud provider(s).  

I haven't mentioned enterprise adoption of cloud based services, and that's because I'd like to post that in the near future in a different article.

Hope you enjoyed the article and all the best,

Wayne Horkan