Platform as a Service: Read the fine print I’m surprised at the number of startups that are now going directly to the cloud, bypassing traditional web hosting solutions and avoiding the need to own a server in-house. That’s great news, and at a minimum it shows that the big players — Google, Amazon and Microsoft — are marketing well to the startup crowd. But I am even more surprised at the number of startups that make critical cloud platform selections without reading the fine print. The little details with Platform as a Service (PaaS) are the ones that cause the most
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Part One – Introduction This article is written for IT professionals who are interested in optimizing their Windows Azure cloud applications by dynamically adjusting compute resources to accommodate for changes in demand – in realtime. The need for dynamic scaling is great: without it, your Azure applications will be performing poorly when demand is unexpectedly high and waste a lot of money when demand is low. Your application is charged for all allocated compute instances even if they are underutilized or not utilized at all. There are a number of articles and examples available that allow one to start on
Part 2: Apps for Africa: Mobile Cloud Computing to Accelerate Innovation Continued From Part 1 Every cloud has a silver lining, a lining that emits beams of hope onto the continent it traverses. Africa’s horizon has seen many clouds that have only passed on to deliver rains to the rest of the world. However, one cloud spreads across the African continent, breathing a new hope of life on a part of the world that has always been referred to as a dark continent. That cloud is called the mobile cloud. Mobile cloud computing is not a new trend in Africa,
Why your business really needs the cloud – Part 3 Continued From Part 2 If you are running a basic, content-driven website then utilizing the cloud won’t give you much advantage. After all, your website just needs CPU power and a way to upload content and manage the application. And publishing to one of the many Virtual Private Servers (VPSes) or Shared Hosting providers will more than suffice, and can be done at much lower cost. But there are instances where startups and SMBs should only consider the cloud: Cloud computing vendors are offering excellent techniques to auto-magically scale your
2011 Cloud Computing Predictions In 2010, we have seen a transformation of skeptics from their belief that cloud computing is suited mainly for small to mid-sized business, to a general acceptance that “the cloud” is everywhere. However, we have also seen a lot of inconsistency in how to differentiate cloud-based computing from on-premise computing. As a result, there has been confusion created in the market as software vendors like Microsoft promote their cloud offerings, and CIOs of large companies claim that their private cloud has been in place for years. As I take a macro look at the industry today,
Cloud computing spending will account for 25% of annual IT expenditure growth by 2012 and nearly a third of the growth the following year. “The battle for Cloud dominance is heating up, with the release of Office 365, it will be very interesting to see where the next big play comes from. Andrew Gradwell Director – Cloud Hypermarket” The Cloud has been around for a little while now. The development of the cloud has taken place over the last few years, led in the most part by Google’s innovations in Email, Document storage Cloud Apps and their SharePoint Alternative in
A lot of startups and SMBs need access to very basic server resources to host their website. They don’t require cloud based REST APIs, automatic scaling or the ability to run their application as part of a high-performance compute cluster. These are your traditional content providers that sell products in on-line shops, host blogs with inline adverts and generally ensure an online presence exists for their bricks’n’mortar business. So I find it surprising when I see such traditional content providers move their online presence to the cloud. This fact, more than anything, shows that the marketing of cloud solutions can
Africa’s mobile market is the fastest growing in the world, growing at twice the global rate. 1 A consistent market growth can be witnessed with the rapid innovation of new products and solutions for the African mobile user by mobile carriers and content developers. In this part of the series: Africa and the mobile handset, we shall delve into details of mobile subscription in Africa, mobile internet that is currently the major focus for most mobile carriers and the recent trends in mobile service(s) pricing. Africa has over 260 million mobile subscribers, with at least 27 in every 100 people
