Amazon
Google App Marketplace Could Revolutionize Cloud Computing
Mar 10th
You must have noticed that Google has been slowly inching towards a culture of Online cloud computing, and most companies, individuals and businesses have adapted to the culture of cloud computing because of its obvious advantages. Cloud computing allows users to manage data, applications and information in a way that traditional software or hardware don’t allow and the most important advantage is that you could access your data, application and software from any computer in the world, provided you have the ID and password.
However, cloud computing itself is not without disadvantages, and the most unpleasant one is the lack of applications directly integrated into Google. Hence, users copy and paste data, use different applications time and again in order to get everything into the cloud. Google itself has admitted that it does not have the expertise to integrate the hundreds of business applications out there into the cloud.
Thus Google has now announced that Google Apps Marketplace is now open for business. Developers and software providers can now join the new Online store for integrated business applications. These cloud applications will allow Google Apps customers to discover newer applications without having to manage each one of them separately.
At the moment, there are already more than 50 companies who are selling their applications. Some of the apps already available are
Intuit Online Payroll: It allows users to run payroll, pay taxes and check paystubs within an integrated online office environment.
Manymoon: It helps in organizing and sharing information with co-workers and partners, including tasks, projects, documents, status updates and links.
Professional Services Connect (PS Connect): This provides contextually relevant information about people, projects, customers and transactions so that one could make better decisions.
JIRA Studio: This app helps to track and manage project issues and workflow, especially in design and development of tools.
What the Google Apps Marketplace Is
It works similar to the Apple App Store, but is only cheaper. Google is asking the developers and businesses a onetime fee of $100 and 20% of the revenue in exchange to the access to 25 million Google users. Apps would be authenticated using OpenID and would be secured through oAuth. The applications would be accessible through a universal Google Apps navigation system.
How It Could Help Businesses
Businesses and companies could stop using multiple applications and get rid of the burden of having to remember multiple passwords for each applications. Whether you are an employee or a proprietor, you could use your Google account to access all these applications, and edit/use based on the permissions you have.
How It Could Help Individuals
Google Apps are used by not just companies and businesses but also students, freelance workers, and independent professionals. There are several account management apps, data related apps and other applications that could help the end user to make use of Google cloud computing and the Google App Marketplace makes it easy for everyone.
How Cool Is It Anyway?
Like I mentioned earlier, cloud computing has already become popular and most of us have been using Google Docs, and other apps successfully. The marketplace would allow us to access more applications which are not developed by Google but have been authenticated nevertheless. This allows for a streamlined system of working and managing data, software, accounts and information.
Companies and individuals could make use of payroll, data entry, management, and an office suite for instance and integrate them to the Google account. It would also help in terms of social media, data management and communication. Google App Marketplace could thus be a great beginning and a step in the direction!
Read more: Google App Marketplace Could Revolutionize Cloud Computing | Walyou
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Google Apps Marketplace Launches as New Cloud Computing Store
Mar 10th
Google March 9 opened its Google Apps Marketplace, an online store selling enterprises business applications that integrate with and extend Google Apps.
The Google Apps Marketplace will let Google Apps users access business apps for project management, billing and accounting, travel management, and other services. This will provide third-party software
developers a larger cloud computing channel into which to sell their applications.
Click here for a tour of Google Apps Marketplace.
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The move, announced during a Campfire One event at the company’s Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, is Google’s most aggressive play to drive growth for Google Apps, a suite of SAAS (software as a service) collaboration applications. The play also threatens existing cloud application stores such as Salesforce.com’s AppExchange.
Google Apps, which Google offers in free and paid versions, includes Gmail; Google Docs word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications; and Google Sites publishing software.
Google Apps has picked up more than 2 million business customers who opt to let Google host their business data so they don’t have to maintain on-premises solutions such as Microsoft SharePoint or IBM Lotus Notes on their own servers.
However, collaboration applications are only a part of the SAAS software ecosystem. As the success of Salesforce.com shows, there is a burgeoning market for enterprise applications based on the cloud.
To wit, the Google Apps Marketplace allows Google Apps administrators to purchase integrated third-party cloud applications and deploy them to their domains.
Google Engineering David Glazer, who shepherded Google’s OpenSocial movement, said that while many businesses
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Amazon cloud : Amazon EC2 Setup Guide – Easy Educational Tutorial
Mar 3rd
This tutorial guides you how to setup an Amazon EC2 cloud computing account. You may note that in this tutorial we will only be creating an account and set that up for doing the cloud computing tasks. The steps after this stage (like launching an instance, accessing the cloud from your system using command line [...]‘
This tutorial guides you how to setup an Amazon EC2 cloud computing account. You may note that in this tutorial we will only be creating an account and set that up for doing the cloud computing tasks. The steps after this stage (like launching an instance, accessing the cloud from your system using command line etc will be covered in the next tutorial).
Introduction
In cloud computing you don’t need to have your own hardware (except for accessing the cloud) to do the computational tasks. It will be available in the cloud and you can pay as you use the service.
This makes it scalable and robust. Essentially, you will be pulling resources from so many computers in the ‘cloud’ for performing a particular computational task. Hence if you are running an application that requires so much of hardware resources then cloud computing is the right choice.
Amazon
Amazon is a leading service provider in this realm. They actually extended a part of their own network (which supports the amazon.com website) for providing services to third parties. All their services are PAYG (pay as you go) and you will be charged only when you are actually using the service.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers various services as described below:
- Amazon EC2 – Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
- Amazon S3 – Amazon Simple Storage Service
- Amazon CloudFront (it is essentially an S3 to distribute the data)
- Amazon CloudWatch (as the name suggests, it is a monitoring service)
- Amazon SimpleDB (for handling data sets)
In this tutorial we will stick ourself to the first two services provided by Amazon – EC2 (cloud) and S3 (data storage).
Sign Up
Inorder to start using the service you need to go to the following site and register
You can use the same account (Amazon account) that you use to buy books from Amazon.
Once you have done that you see message like this:
Now go to this page and signup for the EC2 service. You may note that you need to signin again during this stage.
If you are using Amazon services already it will not ask you for a credit card. But if you want to use a new card, you can do the same by entering the details in the box provided at the end of the page:
Once you have done that you will asked to verify your identity. You can do the same by providing your phone number and clicking on the button ‘call me now’
Now you can expect a call from Amazon (my ADP1 phone showed the number as ‘unknown’!) and you can enter the PIN displayed in the web page, using the type pad.
Once you have done that correctly, you will be shown this screen:
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Cloud Computing Investing Ideas
Mar 2nd
“Cloud Computing” is a new buzzword (or is it buzzwords?). Everybody is talking about it and most people don’t understand it. I will try to review the current state of cloud computing from an investment perspective and possible future developments in the area.
IT expenses are huge in most companies. At least that’s what any manager (with some exception) will tell you. To reduce those expenses, companies have adopted various business practices: cutting the number of personnel (usually with disastrous consequences later), appointing MBAs as IT department managers, buying software packages instead of in-house development (not a bad idea) and, of course, outsourcing (with the whole spectrum of results, from awful to great). In most cases, IT costs have ignored all heroic efforts of managers and have continued to grow. They continue to grow for two reasons: IT does more work every year and most of the efforts of managers are counterproductive- they actually increase costs instead of cutting them.
Looks like managers see cloud computing as a great new way to cut IT costs. They are both right and wrong. They are right because when implemented properly, cloud computing can cut costs and/or increase productivity. They are wrong because there is no such thing as a free lunch and correct implementation still costs a lot of time, effort, and money.
In the news, especially investment news, there are three different IT developments which are lumped together under name of “cloud computing”. Below is a quick review of them.
Internal Cloud
Also called server farm, this is a new way of organizing computing infrastructure. Companies set up big server farms with thousands of individual servers. Servers belong to the company, although management might be outsourced. The biggest plus of internal clouds is the fact that all data is kept on company’s own hardware. Usual features of such farms include: virtualization, automatic computer management and virtual networking. I am not going to explain all these terms, there are enough explanations on the Web. The first server farms, as far as I know, were used by Web oriented companies, such as Amazon.com (AMZN), Yahoo! (YHOO), Ebay (EBAY) and Google (GOOG).
But for investors, the most interesting companies are those which provide hardware and software solutions for internal clouds. The biggest of them are: Dell (DELL), HP (HPQ), IBM (IBM), Cisco (CSCO), EMC (EMC) in hardware; and in software, Microsoft (MSFT), VmWare (VMW), Oracle (ORCL) (which is also a hardware vendor after buying Sun Microsystems). There are also a lot of smaller players, but judging by the latest earning report from Brocade (BRCD), competition is stiff and prospects are not certain.
External Cloud
If the idea of storing data on somebody else’s hardware doesn’t scare you, the cloud itself can be outsourced. Currently, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, AT&T (T) and a lot of smaller companies provide this kind of service. I think that Amazon and Google have an advantage here, both because they are better at managing relationships and have better hardware/software combinations. Microsoft’s policy of using exclusively the Windows operating system is a drag on performance, while Amazon’s and Google’s reliance on Linux is a plus. AT&T is at a disadvantage here as well, because its problems with customer service are not restricted to the mobile phones area.
The companies provide virtual machines to their customers, with the operating system of the customer’s choice. But Linux is a better base for virtualization than Windows. Unfortunately for investors, external cloud doesn’t look like a significant piece of business for any of these companies or any other big companies which might get into it. Possible candidates are IBM, Ebay, Yahoo!, Dell, HP, Oracle. Of specialized companies, I only found Rackspace Hosting (RAX) and Enomaly, which is not public (yet?). I don’t know if specialized companies have any chance inside of the herd of elephants, but Rackspace is on my watch list.
Software As a Service
I don’t really know why is it often called “cloud computing,” it has nothing in common with the other two. These are suites of applications provided to businesses online, usually through web browser interface. True, companies providing applications might use internal or even external computer clouds, but the business model is completely different.
From my point of view, this is a very interesting development. There is only one problem for the companies here: data is kept on devices which belong to a different company. But in this case, companies don’t need expensive IT departments to run the application. It’s not a big help to big companies, which use hundreds of different applications, including a lot of custom built. But for a small company, which needs less than a dozen applications, this is a very interesting proposition. Current competitors in this area: Salesforce.com (CRM), Oracle ORCL), Rightnow Technologies (RNOW).
Salesforce.com is a leader, and any independent company is a possible acquisition target for Oracle and SAP (SAP). There is a possibility that Microsoft might get into this business, using acquisitions or internal developments, but so far I don’t see any indication.
Of the above mentioned, software as a service is the most interesting investing area. I’m looking at Salesforce.com often, but the stratospheric P/E scares me every time. I might be wrong and the P/E might be justified. For internal clouds, software companies look like the best bet with VMW being the leader. I don’t see any investing possibilities in the external clouds yet. I am long GOOG for different reasons and I think that AMZN is a great company, for other reasons as well.
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Amazon Web Services CTO out to Prove Enterprise Chops
Mar 2nd
There is still a misconception that Amazon Web Services exists to sell the company’s excess server capacity, but that is not the case, CTO Werner Vogels said during a keynote at Cebit.
“There is a myth out there that when Christmas comes, suddenly, all of the foundations under your building will be gone … that is obviously not the case,” said Vogels, referring to Amazon’s high-volume sales during the holidays.
During his speech, he showcased the customers that are using Amazon Web Services, with the aim of persuading skeptics that his company offers a viable option.
For example, also at Cebit Software AG announced ARISalign, which offers business process management as a service using Amazon Web services’ cloud computing. Time-to-market and tight control over costs were among the reasons Software AG picked Amazon, Vogels said.
Also, the growth of Amazon’s cloud can be seen in the number of objects stored on S3 (Simple Storage Service). The number grew from 54 billion at this time last year to more than 100 billion, according to Vogels.
Bigger scale lets Amazon Web Services offer lower prices than competitors, according to Vogels. The latest price cut was Feb. 1 for outbound data transfer.
Lower cost for both infrastructure and operations is the first attraction when companies start looking at moving systems into the cloud, but the ability to add or decrease computing capacity as needed soon takes over as the biggest advantage, Vogels said.
Some enterprises are more enthusiastic about cloud services than others — Web site and application hosting companies, as well as media distribution companies are jumping right in, he said. Other applications that make sense to move to the cloud are testing and development, backup, disaster recovery and large-scale data analysis, according to Vogels.
However, there are companies that take a more long-term approach to cloud services and start by making all new IT systems ready for the cloud, he said.
Vogels also took the opportunity to push Amazon’s VPC (virtual private cloud), which integrates a company’s existing IT infrastructure and the cloud, which makes it particularly attractive to enterprise customers, according to Vogels. Companies can build a walled garden in the cloud using VPC and connect it to the data center using an encrypted VPN (virtual private network), he said.
VPC was announced almost six months ago and is still only available in beta, according to Amazon Web Services’ site. Vogels didn’t provide any details on when VPC would exit the testing stage.
He assured the audience that Amazon Web Services is focused on security, which is another big issue when it comes to cloud computing.
“We would not be in business if we did not consider security our top priority,” said Vogels.
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Cloud computing: the biggest threats
Mar 2nd
The next generation of cloud-based storage and services allows us greater freedom to compute on the go. It enables us to be free from the storage constraints of compact devices and gives us the ability to access services and personal information on these devices regardless of our location. Cloud computing also poses serious threats to online privacy.
A new report published by The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and HP on March 1 details some of the more serious threats about what could occur when using cloud-based services, now and in the future.
Perhaps the most worrisome threat for individuals is the loss and interception of personal information such as credit card details, banking records, medical records, home and work address and any other information that could leave them susceptible to identity theft.
A lot of research has gone into creating cloud-based services, but perhaps not enough time and money has been spent protecting individuals’ privacy and safeguarding against the interception of information via third-party sites. More resources need to be harnessed to ensure these services will be safe for people to use when future generations of hackers try to prey on cloud-based databases.
There are few laws in place that govern cloud-based security practices. Cloud computing privacy policies are often very vague about what happens in the event of information loss or theft.
This level of uncertainty is largely replicated in the early adoption of cloud computing. Security is cited as the number one barrier to adoption. New users find it difficult to weigh up the pros and cons of cloud computing; there is a wealth of opportunities floating in the cloud but customers are very concerned about the associated risks.
By highlighting the top cloud computing security issues, CSA and HP hope to make cloud computing safer for consumers and businesses alike.
“Cloud services are clearly the next generation of information technology that enterprises must master. We have a shared responsibility to understand the security threats that accompany the cloud and apply the necessary best practices to mitigate them,” said Jim Reavis, founder of the Cloud Security Alliance.
The top security threats of cloud computing:
1. Abuse and Nefarious Use of Cloud Computing
2. Insecure Interfaces and APIs
3. Malicious Insiders
4. Shared Technology Issues
5. Data Loss or Leakage
6. Account or Service Hijacking
7. Unknown Risk Profile
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RELIACLOUD JOINS THE RANKS OF AMAZON AND RACKSPACE
Feb 24th
ReliaCloud and enStratus Team Up to Present CloudCamp Events and
Cloud Computing Webinar for IT Directors
EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. (February 24, 2010) – ReliaCloud, the new service that offers small-to-medium-sized enterprises cloud computing servers and storage space, has announced a new partnership with enStratus, a national cloud management platform that delivers governance for enterprise applications in the cloud. Together ReliaCloud and enStratus offer companies a seamless, manageable cloud computing service. The two organizations are also joining forces to sponsor 2010 CloudCamp events and an April 7, 2010, webinar to educate information technology professionals about the business advantages of using cloud computing.
“We are thrilled to offer the enStratus solution to ReliaCloud customers,” said Jason Baker, chief technology officer for ReliaCloud. “The highly regarded management platform and experience in cloud security and availability management at enStratus is invaluable to regulation-heavy businesses or enterprises that are concerned about reliability and business continuity.”
To go beyond basic cloud computing service, ReliaCloud customers now have access to a suite of software management tools from enStratus that are also used with Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and Microsoft Azure platforms to maximize:
- Security – enStratus has a patent-pending security architecture that ensures separation of security keys from encrypted data and provides advanced user management and activity logs for compliance;
- Reliability – Automated management tools, auto-recovery engine and unique clustering capabilities that minimize human error and enable support of service level agreements up to 99.9999 percent; and
- Cloud Independence – enStratus provides business continuity through cloud-independent backups as well as cross-cloud disaster recovery.
“enStratus is pleased to add ReliaCloud to its supported list of cloud providers,” says George Reese, chief technology officer of enStratus. “We’re confident that ReliaCloud is ready to serve IT directors who are seeking a reliable and secure partner that they can trust in the cloud.”
In addition to launching their affiliation, ReliaCloud and enStratus are hosting the Minneapolis CloudCamp on Tuesday, March 2, which is a local gathering of early cloud computing adopters who want to exchange ideas on the evolving topic. Other upcoming 2010 regional CloudCamps are taking place on Friday, March 5, in Chicago; Tuesday, March 16, in Philadelphia; Tuesday, March 23, in Washington, DC and Tuesday, May 25, in Denver. For more details about a specific CloudCamp go to www.cloudcamp.org.
To continue cloud computing education efforts, ReliaCloud and enStratus are also hosting a webinar on Wednesday, April 7, 2010, for IT directors and chief technology officers who want to learn what cloud computing can do for their respective businesses and hear examples of success stories. The webinar will feature Jason Baker from ReliaCloud and George Reese from enStratus. More details about the Webinar are posted on the ReliaCloud blog at www.reliacloud.com/blog.
