Posts tagged application developers
CSC Announces CloudLab Virtual Development and Test Service Advanced SaaS Offering Powered by CSC Cloud-Enabled Data Centers
Jun 14th
FALLS CHURCH, Va., Jun 14, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) — CSC /quotes/comstock/13*!csc/quotes/nls/csc (CSC 49.73, +0.49, +0.10%) today announced availability of CloudLab, a new cloud-based development and test service delivered in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. CloudLab provides rapid, on-demand access to a precisely configured, highly scalable and secure environment that speeds development, maximizes productivity, avoids capital expense, and lowers development cost. While primary users include IT operations and application developers, CloudLab can be used by sales for developing product demonstrations or training organizations for designing cost effective online training tools and curricula.
The new service, available via CSC Gateway, an e-commerce portal for hosting and cloud services, is a virtual equivalent of a physical environment with inherent usage controls and user access management. These features support a secure and efficient application development lifecycle. CloudLab eliminates the wait for physical machines or the budgeting processes associated with procuring new equipment. This service saves time normally spent setting up and tearing down test environments allowing for reduced cycle times and managed costs.
“CloudLab enables technology providers to say “yes” more often to business partners and internal customers who need an agile response to competitive and economic pressures,” said Siki Giunta, vice president, cloud computing and software services, CSC. “When using CloudLab, development, QA and IT operations access a pool of virtualized infrastructure to scale resources up and down as needed. Users can rapidly provision lab resources and deploy standard environments at the click of a button, avoiding bottlenecks found in many organizations. With CloudLab organizations can plan and execute safe application changes in days rather than months.”
As a leader in Cybersecurity and Healthcare IT, these offerings put CSC in a very unique market position to run cloud services for Healthcare, Financial Services and other highly-regulated industries where security concerns are paramount. The “Business First Approach” and proven credentials in SaaS enablement are unique differentiators for CSC in the Managed/Cloud Services Market.
Features of CloudLab:
– Self service — Easily provision and manage users, configurations, templates and assets through an easy-to-use self-service portal
– Runtime applications remain unchanged — Easily import and export existing production images with no modifications
– Snapshot and suspend — Rapidly create exact copies of complex configurations
– Controlled access — Restrict access and passage rights on any project, person or environment
– Reporting and visibility — Easily capture users, usage and actions with detailed audit trails
To view a video perspective from Siki Giunta, vice president of CSC’s cloud computing and software services, around the importance of this announcement, please visit www.csc.com/cloudroadmap.
For more information about CSC’s cloud services, please visit www.csc.com/cloud.
For insights, resources and community interaction on cloud topics, visit www.trustedcloudservices.com.
About CSC
CSC is a global leader in providing technology enabled solutions and services through three primary lines of business. These include Business Solutions and Services, the Managed Services Sector and the North American Public Sector. CSC’s advanced capabilities include system design and integration, information technology and business process outsourcing, applications software development, Web and application hosting, mission support and management consulting. The company has been recognized as a leader in the industry, including being named by FORTUNE Magazine as one of the World’s Most Admired Companies for Information Technology Services (2010). Headquartered in Falls Church, Va., CSC has approximately 94,000 employees and reported revenue of $16.1 billion for the 12 months ended April 2, 2010. For more information, visit the company’s Web site at www.csc.com.
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The PaaS Application Service Ecosystem
Jun 7th
Depending on the user or entity, there are likely to be any number of reasons for them to choose a particular PaaS platform. They will make their choices based on things like programming language support, quality of service offerings, and pricing to name but a few. While all of those have certain appeal, they are mostly narrow as to whom in the organization they attract.
In most cases, developers would show the most interest in the kinds of programming languages supported, ops folks (and perhaps some developers) would perk up at the mention of QoS offerings, and executive level IT staff would by and large be drawn to pricing comparisons. Of course, this generalization does not apply in all cases, but it likely does in a majority.
However, when you start to look at different cloud-based application platforms, there is one particular facet of these solutions that will appeal to each of the groups mentioned above. This facet is the application service ecosystem offered by a platform.
The application service ecosystem is a combination of all of the different services and functionality that your applications running on a particular cloud-based platform can access. The platform provides and governs this set of services, thereby ensuring they are highly available, responsive, scoped correctly (dedicated vs. shared services), etc. The beauty of these services on the cloud-based platform is that deployed applications can simply count on them being there and access them through a defined interface. These services can range from the standard, such as data grids and databases to the more interesting, such as payment processing and user authorization services.
Now, if you think about these services in the context of the three groups above, the universal appeal is clear:
- Developers: Application developers will certainly have interest in the kinds of services available to their applications. Platforms with a larger set of useful, quality services will obviously stand out here. Developers can focus on the core logic of their applications, and they can rely on platform-provided services for supporting functionality. To the developer, a good cloud-based platform will seem like a legacy application container on steroids.
- Operations: More services provided by the platform mean fewer services provided by the enterprise. For the ops team, this means fewer things to deploy, manage, and monitor over time. It means they focus more of their energy and effort on the thing that matters: the enterprise’s application.
- Executives: The increased efficiency that comes from a cloud-based platform with a rich set of application services is likely to be a strong draw. Just by looking at it from a development/ops angle, you can see that a strong cloud application platform allows various teams to concentrate more on the assets that matter to an organization and less on supporting players. This can be a foundation for transforming IT from an organization largely focused on just keeping the ship running, to a highly agile, flexible, and forward-looking group.
While many probably do not view application services as a distinguishing trait among PaaS providers today, that is just a point in time statement that is a reflection of a rather immature market. Sooner, rather than later, platform-provided services will draw a keen interest from all within the IT organization.
Providers need to invest in a strong ecosystem of application services from the beginning. Easy to write, much harder to do. It is hard because it dictates that providers build a services framework that allows for third-party service contributions. As the cloud-based application platform market continues to grow and evolve, there is simply no way one provider can deliver and maintain enough application services to be relevant. It looks like we are about to witness some interesting solutions, even more interesting partnerships, and of course, intense competition!
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2010: The Year of the Cloud Platform
Mar 9th
For the 3rd installment of our webinar recap series, we dive into what the future holds for cloud computing. In particular, will look at the role of platform-as-a-service in the broader cloud ecosystem. In particular, will 2010 be “the year of PaaS?” Read on for more about why platform-level services will be hot in 2010, and who we felt would be the big winners this year as the focus shifts from the infrastructure to the platform
2010: The Year of Platform as a Service
Michael: 2010 is going to be the year of the platform layer. If we look back at the predictions in 2008 going into 2009, people were getting excited about cloud. People were talking very much about virtualization. People were talking very much about renting resources and tying them all together.
That was great, and we saw that come together in 2009, a lot of excitement out of Amazon and VMware with their various solutions for public and private clouds. A lot of users are coming. When we talk to our customers and various users around the country, I hear a lot of application developers come and say, “But wait how do I tie all of this together? What tools are there for me to take advantage of this new paradigm?” That’s really the core of this prediction.
The platform tools are there. We have our platform tools that assist developers to put together these large applications so they can focus on their value add. There are frameworks such as Hadoop where with just writing a couple of functions of code, you get this massive platform for churning through terabytes or petabytes of data across your infrastructure.
These are the tools. This is the next tier up on the cloud technology stack. This is what people are going to be looking for. I think it’s interesting that if you look back in 2009, you see this come. I see two big points that really drive this.
First of all, there was the VMware acquisition of SpringSource. VMware is still all about the private clouds for tying together your resources and being able to control them dynamically, but you could tell they saw that, to them, the VM is still just a black box that they manage.
They really don’t have the insight into what the application is doing, and they needed those tools to go one tier up. So, here they look at SpringSource. They have more control on runtimes. They have the Hyperic monitoring system to see what’s going on inside the VM, and they can control it at a tighter level.
We talked about standards for 2009. Here at the end of 2009, I’ve seen the first talk about not standards at the infrastructure layer, but standards at the platform layer, about how to try to keep these tools together. So it’s time. People need to move up that stack.
The masses of developers don’t want to be distributed computing experts. They want a tool set to assist them on top of this tremendous infrastructure we’ve built, and I really see it all coming together with another round of great tools for application developers to build upon.
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3Tera Announces Cloud Computing Certification
Jan 13th
ALISO VIEJO, CA — (Marketwire) — 01/12/10 — 3Tera®, the leading developer of cloud computing platform software and utility computing services, today announced new educational and certification programs to provide customers with expertise in building world-class cloud computing services and solutions. Initially, two certification programs are available, Certified Cloud Operator and Certified Cloud Architect, designed to address the needs of cloud computing professionals.
“Rapid development and deployment of applications are key reasons thousands of users are adopting cloud computing through our service providers and we’ve designed our certification programs with that in mind,” said Bert Armijo, SVP Marketing and Product Management, 3Tera, Inc. “Our certification programs offer instruction and hands-on labs covering the essential elements needed for rapid success in the cloud — basic concepts, advanced technologies, best practices, automation, and business continuity.”
Currently, two cloud computing certification programs are available:
The Certified Cloud Operator program is targeted toward service providers, enterprises operations professionals and systems integrators, responsible for the deployment and operation of cloud services. The program covers the process of installing, configuring and maintaining the computing fabric used for building cloud computing services. Emphasis is placed on hardware requirements, service configuration, hardware failure troubleshooting, provisioning of customers, and configuration of virtual private datacenters.
The Certified Cloud Architect program is offered for system architects, IT operations professionals, application developers and systems engineers responsible for the design, integration, provisioning, deployment and management of distributed applications. Participants learn the architectural concepts of the AppLogic cloud computing platform, step-by-step procedures for deploying, operating and managing applications in the cloud, best practices for security, testing and scaling applications, and how to architect for business continuity.
