Bluelock

As 2010 came to a close, many people were asking me about how they could move third party applications into the cloud... I'm guessing everyone was exhausting their 2010 budgets and purchasing software for the coming year. At the beginning of 2011 I am now hearing more from in-house developers wanting to know how to move their own first-party applications into the cloud.

My first inclination was to post the "Top 5 Ways to Design a Scalable Cloud App," but after re-reading my previous "Top 5"... Read More »

This coming January will host a series of posts on automation in the public cloud, which will be tied together with this coming Indianapolis Java User's Group on January 26th. We will cover a number of topics including the vCloud API, Java-enabled APIs such as jclouds and the vCloud Java SDK and OVF standard. It's one thing to give code snippets, but my hope is that I can tell a story of how these cloud technologies can be leveraged for a common use case.

That's where you come in! Have you ever...Read More »

I appreciate everyone's feedback on our earlier post about consuming cloud services. The discipline of keeping things as simple as possible seems to resonate with a good deal of people - either that or people really like my image of an Allosaurus. It was a great photo.

In keeping with the spirit of allowing cloud computing to remain simple, there is another elementary issue that is becoming a bit of a monster: how much cloud computing actually costs. If everything is "on-demand" or...Read More »

The great thing about meeting up with colleagues from previous jobs is that they are more than willing to keep you humble. Just recently, a few co-conspirators of mine grabbed a pint and discussed the merits of our application design choices, architecture patterns and just how gloriously over-engineered things used to be. Reflecting on things, I now realize I believed things had to be elaborate because the rest of the world appeared to be working on something complicated.

This train of thought...Read More »

Mega-awesome BlueLock engineer Bill Barbour recently posted a great snippet from marketing guru Seth Godin on the BlueLock quote board:

This Seth-ism is true not only with user interface design and information overload, but also reflects how the constant bombardment of...Read More »

First off, I wanted to thank VMware for giving my blog post a home last week. I appreciate the feedback we recieved from the article - we're looking forward to working with VMware on a blog series coming up!

I focused a lot on the pragmatic last week; now my brain has bounced the other way and started to wonder about what managed cloud hosting will look like in the future. Today there is a huge amount of interest from enterprises in leveraging Infrastructure as a Service in order to have a more...Read More »

Near as I can tell, Azure was launched under the premise of a .NET Platform as a Service offering. Microsoft employed some clever tricks to provide a cloud-ready relational database and provisioning tools for Visual Studio, bringing the service nose-to-nose with Google App Engine and Salesforce.com.

Bear in mind that Platform as a Service is quite different from Infrastructure as a Service. PaaS offerings focus almost entirely on the developer, leaving scalability concerns entirely to the service...Read More »

vCloud Director has allowed developers to create isolated, self-contained virtual applications that are easily replicated and shared across clouds. As we increasingly bring a number of ISVs and SaaS developers onto the BlueLock public cloud I have seen an interesting trend evolving - vApps (and the OVF metadata that wraps around them) have become an increasingly convenient way to package and distribute applications.

The practice of creating ready-made virtual machines is not a new one - in fact V... Read More »

For some reason or another I keep hearing people talk about the CAP Theorem this week. So now it's stuck in my head like a top 40 jingle. Thanks Interwebs.

Ever hear the euphemism "you can have it quick, fast or cheap: pick two?" CAP is one of those cake-and-eat-it to Theorems... the postulate being that you can pick two: Consistency, Availability or Partition Tolerance. Clustered relational databases usually are a combo of Availability and Consistency, NoSQL databases are often a combo...Read More »

At VMworld Europe 2010 today CA announced their CA IT Process Automation Manager now integrates with VMware's vCloud Director. CA developers have been working within BlueLock's vCloud Datacenter, conjuring the latest and greatest with our vCloud API reference implementation. It has been great working with CA, and we are excited to see what software vendors are developing with our public cloud!

With CA IT Process Automation Manager workloads can be managed in a more flexible fashion. A great use...Read More »