It’s been a busy few weeks for the team at Bluelock and a lot of exciting stuff has been happening, one of which was CRN naming Bluelock to its 2012 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors list. The comprehensive list highlights the most innovative cloud computing companies across the five major categories: cloud platforms, cloud infrastructure, cloud storage, cloud security and cloud software. This is the second time in as many years Bluelock has been named to the cloud infrastructure list. Be sure to check out the list in the March 26 issue of CRN Magazine as well. Here’s what they had to say about Bluelock:
 
“Bluelock embraces the public cloud for its enterprise cloud hosting offerings using its Bluelock Virtual Datacenters to help companies get up and running in its SAS-70 Type II datacenters. Bluelock also boasts the distinction of being among the first certified VMware vCloud Datacenter service providers.”
 
Also this week, Bluelock announced the availability of VMware vCloud® Director™ 1.5 within its VMware vCloud Datacenter Service which has been well received in the media. The announcement was covered on Data Storage Connection, Talkin' Cloud, ServerWatch, HostSearch, TopHosts.com and MyHostNews.com  to name a few.

Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is transforming the hosting industry. Traditional hosting companies and fresh service provider faces both play an active role in this emerging market. IaaS offerings taut agility for early adopters, while slower moving enterprises—still managing their own cloud—watch from the sidelines. Ever expanding datacenters, operational responsibilities and security requirements, amidst shrinking IT budgets, means traditional infrastructure often only makes sense for the largest of organizations.

1. Is the IaaS model right for you, or are you  better off with PaaS, SaaS or other cloud models?
   Disseminating IaaS from PaaS and SaaS is simplest to understand using the cloud stack model. IaaS includes all datacenter and network plumbing and service and storage hardware. A virtualization layer on top encases the IaaS offering. PaaS handles the next two layers of the stack; operating systems and infrastructure software. Finally, SaaS delivers hosted applications, ranging from personal email to full blown CRM systems. Leveraging the on-demand nature of these mdoels requires that an organization understand how they intend to develop and deploy applications. IT agility and autonomy beckons an IaaS structure.
2. Will implementing IaaS require additional IT resources?
   Adjusting from a static on-premise datacenter to a dynamic IaaS model can be a tremendous shift for enterprise IT organizations. IaaS solution providers also vary in their delivery of managed services. Providers like Bluelock offer managed services traditionally handled by internal IT to streamline operational tasks. This allows organizations to focus on their core business, not running their business. Examples of Bluelock managed services include operating system patching, load balancing, virtual machine backup and antivirus. The ease of IT operations inherent in IaaS solutions makes cloud particularly attractive to nimble startups with limited resources. Cloud investment and resources can scale with fluctuating businesses.
3. How easy is it to scale up (or down) your services?
   A key characteristic of cloud computing is scalability, or more precisely the ease with which scalability can be achieved. IaaS enables scalability through dynamic provisioning of resources on a self-service basis to meet business demands. While easy cloud offering takes a different approach to scaling parameters, all IaaS models are far more flexible than traditional one-app-per-service computing.
   A good illustration of IaaS scalability existed when Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc (LMHI) filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2008. Amist the sell off of business divisions, LMHI was left without the technology assets necessary to support the wind-down of the company. Lehmann formed an asset manager business, LAMCO. Tasked with building infrastructure able to assume peek capacity day one and slowly wind down over time, cloud computing was the logical choice. LAMCO selected Bluelock’s VMware-based Virtual Datacenters due in large part to its flexible scaling capabilities.
4. Does the IaaS provide adequate support?
   The ability to quickly and accurately diagnose and resolve issues with infrastructure not only ensures reduced downtime, but keeps one issue from threatening an entire network. Dedicated support teams ensure enterprise IT and infrastructure keep pace with your business. Keep in mind, select vendor’s customer service is not offered 24/7 or is only available at an additional cost.
   Transitioning to the cloud is no small task. A staff of cloud experts at your disposal for guidance and support may help organizations new to the cloud. Bluelock has a proven track record in providing scalability and client support.
5. What is your plan for outages?
   Outages are a problem for any computing model. On-premise datacenters are especially susceptible to outages. Designing for failure should be obvious, but each cloud providers approach to blackouts varies. For example, Bluelock offers 99.99% uptime in the cloud because our clients are enterprise-level companies with mission-critical production environment needs. You likely can’t afford the downtime that would be threatened with a provider who can only promise 99.9% or 99.95% uptime.

VMworld 2011, hosted by VMware, is in full-swing at Las Vegas (August 29 – September 1). The largest virtualization and cloud infrastructure event of the year was just the place for Bluelock’s unveiling of their all-new cloud-aware decision support tool Bluelock Portfolio™. The first of it’s kind, Portfolio will offer customers deeper visibility into the true cost of IT resources, enabling them to adjust their Virtual Datacenters to best align spending and utilization.

With great power comes great responsibility, and cloud infrastructure is no exception. The ability to see infrastructure consumption levels is increasingly important to understanding and managing the true costs of IT. Both over-allocation and under-allocation can spiral costs out of control. Now, Bluelock Portfolio enables customers to break down their cloud costs by region, site location, line of business, application or even by Virtual Datacenter. Monitoring usage and spending has never been easier in the cloud. Over-provisioned applications and potential overages can be adjusted through the self-service portal powered by VMware vCloud® Director.

Watch the Bluelock Portfolio in action to see how you can manage and monitor your Bluelock Virtual Datacenter accounts:


You can also read the entire Press Release.

“To meet our clients’ business requirements, we need to be able to scale up and scale down very quickly with no disruptions. The only way we can do that is with the architecture we’ve built using VMware and F5 BIG-IP LTM.” - Pat O’Day, Chief Technical Officer, Bluelock

As a provider of Virtual Datacenters hosted in the public cloud, Bluelock needs to be able to seamlessly deliver traffic across servers for heightened performance and efficiencies. BIG-IP LTM provides intelligent traffic management that efficiently distributes traffic across virtual machines to optimize server utilization. By offloading SSL processing from the virtual servers, BIG-IP LTM also frees up server capacity to handle other processes.

Check out a recent case study video where O'Day talks about the benefits of F5 load balancers for cloud computing.

“BIG-IP LTM helps us maximize the efficiency of our virtual environment so we can pass those efficiencies along to our clients, all while ensuring the high performance and availability that our clients require,” says O’Day.

Do you enjoy delivering client success in a fast-paced technological environment? If you're a motivated self-starter that shares our passion for delivering quality software and service, you might be the right persion. Bluelock, a leading infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider of cloud hosting solutions, believes that each employee who joins our staff is important to the success of our company and that everyone makes a difference. Bluelock's success is driven by hard work, dedication and commitment to and by our employees.

The Bluelock team is seeking an experienced Software Engineer able to deliver commercialized web-based software. Analysis, design, development, testing, owner acceptance, and deployment of software products highlight this role. In our ever-expanding IT horizon, individuals driven by their technical inclinations and personal initiative thrive at Bluelock. Software Engineers at Bluelock are customer and results oriented, focusing on enabling clients through outcomes rather than activities. Problem solving skills in our team-based environment are emphasized competancies for the Bluelock team.

Experience for the Software Engineer position at Bluelock demands at least four years software engineering experience. A strong comfort level with enterprise software development frameworks is favored. Engineers should have a fluent vocabulary in emerging web standards and browser-independent web applications.

Excellent benefits and opportunities for personal and professional growth and development await you at Bluelock! Learn more about becoming a Software Engineer well as other opportunities at Bluelock team on our careers page.

Do you have a knack for client success? We have the position to satiate your customer service needs. Bluelock, a leading infrastructure-as-a-service provider of cloud hosting solutions, is now hiring for the Engagement Manager role. Our team of customer-oriented cloud junkies is committed to delivering an unsurpassed customer experience.

This strategic role on the Bluelock team will leverage management, communication, and team-based skills. With client-centric priorities, the Engagement Manager provides first-line services to clients and partners. Daily duties include managing ticket requests, event communications, crisis protocol, business analysis, and client metrics.

Both an advocate and advisor for clients and the team, this collaborative position requires excellent problem solving an troubleshooting skills. Five years or more of client management experience is recommended. If you're a customer oriented individual that shares our commitment to delivering outstanding service to clients, we encourage you learn more about the Engagement Manager opportunity.

Excellent benefits and opportunities for personal and professional growth and development await you at Bluelock! Learn more about becoming an Engagement Manager well as other opportunities at Bluelock team on our careers page.

Are you a competitive self-starter with strong interpersonal and communication skills? Bluelock's Account Executive position is calling your name. As a certified VMware vCloud Datacenter Services provider, Bluelock delivers enterprise-class cloud computing and managed IT services. Leveraging VMware technology, Bluelock enables hybrid cloud strategies for the enterprise.

Account Executives collaborate with Bluelock's VP of Sales to prepare and execute quaterly sales plans. Through a consultative approach to selling our cloud services to a variety of influencers and IT decision-makers, Account Executives help shape and refine the sales process as the company enters our next growth phase.

Results-oriented individuals with five to ten years technical sales experience are encouraged to apply. Adaptability and problem solving intuition in the fast-paced cloud computing space offers a variety of opportunities for personal and professional growth. This client facing role will respond to and strive to meet customer needs. Bluelock's intimate work environment means all employees can contribute to a positive and fun work atmosphere.

Account Executives hands-on approach involves understanding prospect's specific business needs and matching our cloud hosting services to those needs. Bluelockers evangelize the advantages of virtualization and cloud computing. Think you got what it takes? We'd love to hear from you!

Excellent benefits and opportunities await you at Bluelock! Play an integral role in our growth team's success. Learn more about becoming an Account Executive well as other opportunities at Bluelock team on our careers page.

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A guest post by Nand Mulchandani, CEO, ScaleXtreme

ScaleXtreme is the first cloud-based systems management product, and we're excited to announce support for Bluelock Virtual Datacenters as an integrated, preferred platform. With ScaleXtreme, Bluelock clients can manage their servers directly through a web browser, giving them the ability to:

• Connect your Bluelock account to ScaleXtreme and use it to launch new vApp's directly through the system
• "Live Browse" the file system on your server and conduct a variety of operations on files, as well as look through application/package inventory on those systems
• Stats and monitoring of your machines for key variables such as CPU, Memory, Disk, Network and Processes
• Upload scripts (shell, command shell, Powershell, etc.) into the cloud - fully version controlled and ready to run across multiple systems
• Schedule and run scripting jobs across multiple machines and record historical data
• Use the integrated App Store to get one-click access to a rich library of scripts including popular packages (JBoss, etc.) and Bitnami stacks
• And more!

Instead of using "command shell" or other manual techniques, you can use ScaleXtreme to do many of the tasks that you would otherwise do manually. Bluelock clients can signup for free at http://www.scalextreme.com/register to start managing machines in a few minutes.
 
ScaleXtreme is also hosting a free webinar on July 12 @ 10am PDT where we will take clients through the product and show how to signup and start managing machines with Bluelock in a few minutes. Registration link is http://bit.ly/jR2WhX.

About ScaleXtreme:
Built from the ground up to be simple, scalable, and social, ScaleXtreme’s product aims to transform the way IT admins manage their Amazon EC2, VMware virtual machine and physical server deployments. ScaleXtreme was founded by a team with deep expertise in enterprise software and systems management, including Bladelogic and VMware, and is backed by Accel Partners.

Bluelock, among several other Indiana companies, was named among Lead411’s “Hottest Companies in Midwest” award list. Lead411, a research team, sifts through press releases and business articles each year to give insight on the fastest growing companies in the U.S. What began with more than 1,500 candidates has been narrowed down to the top 60.

Amazon Cloud Player, Google Music Beta, and Apple iCloud. The stage is set for a new battle over dominance in the entertainment world. Music and content management in the cloud is all the buzz. In the race to build the best cloud-based services and devices, however, all parties should take heed the cautionary tales about hacker attacks that compromised personal data (including credit and identity information) for millions of customers. As fiduciaries of customer information, companies offering cloud services have a moral and legal obligation to protect that data.

Join the Bluelock team and help us deliver the best in enterprise-class cloud computing and managed IT services. We’re looking for folks with a keen entrepreneurial spirit and are passionate about delivering client success. Individuals that pursue challenges and are committed to lifelong learning. Are you one of us? Bluelock’s dynamic environment caters to motivated leaders seeking a challenge. We cultivate a work space that enables personal and professional growth. Our talented and experienced staff is passionate about technology and helping others. Recognized locally and nationally for innovation and growth, our rapidly expanding business is always on the lookout for qualified, hardworking professionals.

Join the Bluelock team and accelerate your career. We offer competitive salaries, a pay-for-performance bonus structure and comprehensive benefits. With more than six positions currently available, a wide range of skillsets and credentials need apply. Check our Careers page to learn more about specific employment opportunities. As we continue to grow position availability is subject to change, so remember to check back often!

Top 3 Reasons To Work At Bluelock

Innovation
As one of only three North American VMware vCloud® Datacenter providers selected by VMware, Bluelock sets a new standard for cloud hosting. Bluelock’s co-founder and CTO Pat O’Day was first to define the term ‘Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and the leadership team continues to push innovation in the cloud space to new heights. TechPoint also recognized Bluelock’s progressive approach to the cloud, awarding the team the 2010 TechPoint Mira Award for Excellence and Innovation in a company under 3 years of commercialization. Check out other reasons we've been recognized.

Culture
Bluelock embraces the entrepreneurial spirit and fosters personal development. Whether your interests lie in a technical field or you’re more of the business development type, our intimate and collaborative work environment will provide you with the variety of experiences you are looking for. Dynamic tasks and cross-departmental projects are commonplace – say goodbye to mundane daily duties!


Location
Bluelock is located in Indianapolis, home to an emerging and vibrant tech sector. Amidst the economic climate, Indianapolis continues to produce many of the large names in the tech space (e.g. ExactTarget and Aprimo). Organizations like TechPoint identify and empower high-growth Indiana technology companies. Venture funds and capital exchange confidence is at an all time high in the Midwest. The case for Indiana as a thought leader in the tech space grows. 

What are you waiting for? Jumpstart your career in the cloud!

SearchCloudComputing.com’s Top 10 Cloud Computing Providers of 2011 list has been published. Given the movement and growth in the cloud space, this year’s list has been much anticipated. Rankings are based on customer satisfaction, technical innovation, and management track records.

Despite many of the same providers from 2010’s list reappearing, Bluelock was among the new entries in this year’s ranking. Bluelock, nestled between titans Microsoft and Google, took the #8 spot. As a provider and testbed for VMware’s vCloud Express, Bluelock was credited for pioneering a tool to diversify customer’s ESX bubbles with vCloud resources. Now a key VMware vCloud Datacenter provider, continued growth predictions were highlighted.

Hosts Jo Maitland and Carl Brooks of CloudCoverTV commented on the Top 10 Cloud Providers of 2011 in this week's video installment. Worth watching to the end, Bluelock is cited along interesting comments about Amazon Web Services and their transition to a 'white glove' service.

Read the full article from SearchCloudComputing.

BlueLock’s VMware vCloud Datacenter Service Sets Offering Apart from Others

(Indianapolis, Ind. – January 25, 2011) – BlueLock, an experienced provider of cloud hosting and managed IT services, today announces that the company has been named to HostReview’s 2010 Web Host Awards’ Best Cloud Computing Service list. HostReview’s annual Best Web Hosting Awards recognize innovators and market leaders, rewarding outstanding contributions within the web hosting industry.

The Best Web Hosting Awards are based on the overall product offering, value, customer service and users' reviews of the selected companies. Winners are at the forefront of technological innovation and deliver exemplary customer service. BlueLock was named to the Best Cloud Service list in part due to its VMware vCloud Datacenter Service, which provides the business agility and cost effectiveness of public clouds without compromising on portability, compatibility, security and control demanded by enterprise IT organizations. For the full HostReview Top 10 Web Host Awards list, please visit http://www.hostreview.com/awards/2010_annual_awards/cloud-service.

“We chose BlueLock as one of our 2010 Best Cloud Computing Services award winners because its cloud service continues to have a tremendous impact on the hosting industry,” said Darren Tabor, CEO, DevStart, network owner of HostReview. “A monthly winner of our Web Host Awards, BlueLock’s cloud computing service has proven to consistently provide outstanding performance and value, while enabling companies to more quickly get started on projects, grow and shrink their environments according to current needs and tap into the full benefits of hybrid cloud computing.”

“We are honored to be recognized by HostReview as one of the world’s best cloud computing service providers," said Christopher Clapp, CEO, BlueLock. “We believe our selection not only validates the dynamic combination of the industry-leading VMware platform and BlueLock’s secure and reliable cloud hosting and infrastructure expertise, but also our vast experience in enabling internal IT to quickly respond to heightened requests and demands while providing the ability to move computing workloads from internal virtualized infrastructure to an external cloud and back if needs change.”

As a VMware vCloud Datacenter Services provider, BlueLock’s public cloud is an enterprise-class service delivering consistent and auditable security and performance features including layer 2 isolation, role-based access control and LDAP integration in a SAS 70 type II certified data center. BlueLock’s use of the same VMware technology used by enterprise IT provides a common management and security model that enables application portability across internal data centers and all VMware vCloud Datacenter Services.

To learn more about BlueLock or its VMware vCloud Datacenter Service, please contact BlueLock at info@bluelock.com or visit www.bluelock.com.

About BlueLock
BlueLock, a certified VMware vCloud Datacenter Services provider, delivers enterprise-class cloud computing and managed IT services, offering the people, expertise and IT infrastructure in world-class, SAS-70 Type II certified data centers. By leveraging VMware technology, BlueLock is able to provide hosted virtual data centers to the enterprise that are fully compatible with their existing VMware investments, enabling their hybrid cloud strategy. This approach provides a common management and security model that enables complete workload portability between internal data centers and the BlueLock public cloud. Named Americas’ Service Provider Program Partner of the Year by VMware, BlueLock’s public, private and hybrid cloud computing solutions enable clients to utilize cloud resources based on their specific needs to optimize deployment, management, and investment. BlueLock, a Collina Ventures company, is privately-held. For more information, visit www.bluelock.com.

About HostReview
HostReview is a popular online destination for people who look for the best hosting deals. The site features a comprehensive article section, industry news, and one of the most complete directories of hosting service providers on the web. The site attracts a diverse and numerous audiences. For more information, visit www.hostreview.com.

VMware and VMware vCloud are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. The use of the word “partner” or “partnership” does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.

On-Demand business intelligence and management reporting organization to utilize BlueLock’s cloud computing services for Disaster Recovery

(Indianapolis, Indiana – January 19, 2011) – BlueLock, an experienced provider of cloud hosting and managed IT services, announces that iPartners, an on-demand business intelligence and management reporting company for the property and casualty insurance industry, has selected BlueLock as its cloud provider. With the announcement, iPartners will use BlueLock’s cloud-based disaster recovery services to back up their data and systems hosted in Atlanta, GA.

“After a lackluster experience with a different cloud provider, we knew we needed an organization with superior customer service and processes and procedures in place to ensure our data and systems are up and ready when we need them,” said David Zebrowitz, director of technology, iPartners. “We look forward to not only utilizing BlueLock’s highly available, scalable and secure platform for our disaster recovery needs, but also their vast cloud experience as we see them as a trusted and proven partner.”

“We are excited to work with iPartners and help them achieve their business goals cost-effectively and with the enterprise level of service they require,” said Brian Wolff, vice president of sales, BlueLock. “BlueLock’s cloud-based disaster recovery offers them the flexibility and scalability they will need as they continue to grow, with the performance, security and client services that is backed by our world-class BlueLock team.”

Delivering pre-configured, secure and resilient virtual IT environments which scale on-demand, BlueLock’s VMware-based cloud services offer enterprises world-class infrastructure-as-a-service solutions. BlueLock is a VMware vCloud Datacenter Services certified provider.

About iPartners
iPartners was founded in 2004 by a group of industry veterans with over 10 years of successful business intelligence and data warehousing consulting experience. iPartners, a software-as-a-service company, strives to change the way P&C companies collect the information they need to make decisions to make the entire process straightforward, reduce the investment of time and money and deliver a solution that adds value to the businesses they serve. Today the organization is leading the P&C industry with “on-demand” management information and analysis solutions, serving over 35 customers and processing over 15 million policies. The “on-demand” business model provides major advantages over traditional on-premise technology products. For more information, visit www.ipartners.net.

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" post it has become evident that I can't count. This time I'll leave addition to the experts and just give out a simple overview of ways to design a business application that can scale in the cloud.

Hosting your application within an Infrastructure as a Service provider grants you the operational agility to scale your infrastructure very quickly, but your application needs to scale with your infrastructure. One of the benefits of cloud computing is that you can rapidly grow your infrastructure from 1 to 100 servers within a moment's notice, but applications must have some way of sharing work across these newly provisioned servers in order scale in any meaningful way.

From my experience here are some common ways applications can be designed so that they can scale horizontally:

Design Element #1: Shard, Segment and Spread Out
Making sure that you have a clearly defined separation of concerns between components can be crucial. A common example is the RDBMS and the re-occuring question: "where should I place this database?" Traditional thinking might be that a database server should be an immense chunk of metal - a 64-CPU box with 16TB of RAM. A single, mammoth database server that hosts everything may be less effective than several small database servers, each hosting a single schema. Six 2 CPU, 2 GB PostgreSQL servers may give you better performance than a single 16 CPU, 16 GB server. You also have a greater ability to scale each instance vertically; by putting each schema on its own server, we can add additional CPUs, RAM or even migrate to higher-performance storage just for that schema.

This doesn't just apply to in-house software development, either. If every department in your organization wants to have access to a Drupal portal, but each department maintains documents separately, why not have a stand-alone Drupal server for each department? Each instance can be managed identically, tie back to a central authentication server and be scaled independently.

Design Element #2 - Know Your Enterprise Integration Patterns
This design consideration should be of paramount concern when first architecting your applications to grow at a cloud scale. The Enterprise Integration Patterns first envisioned by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf have become increasingly relevant as enterprises build applications that need to scale on demand and integrate a myriad of third-party systems.

Enterprise Integration Patterns are to service oriented architectures as the GoF Design Patterns were to software engineering. Pattern-driven development allows architects and developers design applications that are easier to describe, communicate and maintain by building upon common, re-occuring elements.

Patterns become very evident in cloud applications, especially when it comes to message routing. Service-oriented applications have to implement the "Message Translator" pattern frequently - and it makes sense to develop them using a set of shared best practices.

Even better, projects like Apache Camel have been established that give you an Enterprise Integration framework out of the box. No need to write "glue code" - instead you can re-use Camel's integration patterns and stick to writing business logic!

Design Element #3 - Quality of Service Counts
It happens... a flood of traffic comes out of nowhere and your system simply can't handle the load. Perhaps a service has gone completely down and now a ton of messages are backed up and waiting to be processed. There are moments where the system simply has more inbound traffic than it can handle, and you simply can't respond to every inbound request.

There is an alternative to just shutting everything down. By enforcing a quality of service with your message production and consumption you can have diminished availability without becoming completely unavailable. Preventing services from being overwhelmed includes reducing the number of messages being handled, which can be done by defining a time-to-live on your messages. Older messages, ones that may not even be relevant anymore, are allowed to expire and are simply discarded. One can also limit the number of messages being interpreted at the same time by dialing down concurrent message consumption, perhaps limiting a service to only process 10 messages at a time.

Design Element #4 - Go Stateless
Maintaining the state is always the bane of a scalable application. Maintaining state often means persistence, persistence means storing your data in some central location, and a central data store is difficult to scale. Instead of having a large number of stateful or transactional endpoints a scalable application should have a RESTful nature (without being limited to HTTP).

If you can't avoid state... and you seldom can entirely avoid state in some shape or form... manage state using the power of Enterprise Integration Patterns. Consider using the Claim Check pattern along with a tuple space such as GigaSpaces, JavaSpaces, Blitz or SemiSpace. The checkin/checkout style of tuple spaces paired with the Claim Check pattern allows for the very large amount of concurrency needed for transaction-oriented systems.


If your enterprise application is engineered for scale to massive volumes a managed cloud hosting strategy can let your software (and your organization's cost) scale as well. With scalable design patterns, a cloud-ready app can bring in an increasing number of customers with a minimum of re-engingeering.

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 tried a public cloud provider but had some hurdle that made it difficult to launch? Ever get tripped up with an unexpected "gotcha?" Wondering why cloud computing is even necessary when you have a perfectly good datacenter downstairs? We would love to hear your cloud technology rants, raves and questions.

If you are currently thinking about how your small/mid-size enterprise might leverage managed cloud hosting, I would love to hear what use cases or scenarios that could benefit from on-demand provisioning and deployment. I can speak specifically to that use case in our upcoming blog posts and show how an automated, agile solution within a managed cloud hosting partner can greatly reduce acid reflux.

Respond in the comments section or send us a tweet @BlueLock. We would love to answer your questions and highlight your use cases!

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 "pay-as-you-go," how can you actually budget for next month?

With cloud computing you basically have two types of billing: commodity billing and utility billing. Commodities are tangible things like RAM, number of virtual CPUs, disk storage, public IP addresses and the like. Utilities are rates or metrics that are tracked by how they are used such as bandwidth consumed, disk I/O operations or compute cycles. These billing models have solid analogs in the real world: I buy flash drives or grapes, but pay the gas or water bill based on how much I have consumed. Most infrastructure as a service providers mix and match commodity and utility pricing when adding up your bill; you may buy an allocated amount of RAM or persistant storage but you pay for Internet access based on how much inbound traffic you receive.

Initially it may sound like asking for completely utility-based pricing would be ideal - you only pay for what you use and your costs scale with your resource utilization. Unfortunately in real life scenarios utilization of RAM, compute and disk does not necessarily scale with how much your application is being actively used. An increase in active users doesn't have a 1:1 scale with an increase in resource utilization, a factor which hurts the predictability of your costs. In addition, unless you have great forecast and analsis reporting, it's hard to predict growth of either active users or resource consumption. If you need to draw up an operational expense budget for the next two quarters, forecasting cost with utility billing may require a crystal ball or mutant abilities. Or both.

If you're running a tight, fiscally-sound ship I believe the right cloud computing partner can offer you both predictable billing and flexible cost. Even if your managed cloud hosting allows you to spin up new servers on demand you can still accurately track and predict cost. Managed virtual servers can be thought of as a commodity without being seen as a capital expense by making most resources (namely RAM, vCPU, disk) billed on a straight allocation basis. When your invoice is based on the resources you've allocated to your virtual infrastructure there's no surprise at the end of the month.

Traditional, physical servers are seen as a commodity with a capital expense: they depreciate, they have a high initial investment and they eventually need replaced. Virtual servers within a cloud hosting service can be seen as a commodity with an operational expense. Virtual servers don't require the high initial investment, don't depreciate and don't need replacement. The cloud computing provider itself worries about replacement, maintenance and upgrades when the time arrives. An operational expense is far more agile than a capital expense, a fact that is multiplied when cloud technology begins to act like a server vending machine. Put a few coins in, get a 2 vCPU/4 GB RAM/1 TB server out.

While you may not know what next month's electric bill will bring, I'm guessing you've got a firm grip on next month's rent. Manage cloud computing costs in much the same way - make your infrastructure a operational commodity that doesn't make you dread the end of the month.

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 falls in line with my previous post about managing cloud computing infrastructure - simpler remains better. In software engineering, just as in cloud computing infrastructure management, there are common misconceptions about developing distributed systems - and they have bitten me before.

Myth #1: XML is great for inter-process communication
XML is a great implementation-agnostic way of constructing documents and sharing them with unknown consumers. Think SOAP and ReST - XML works fantastic for this kind of service exposure since we may never know who is actually consuming them.

However, if you need to rapidly send messages between components then XML can absolutely kill message throughput. The effort of marshalling/unmarshalling documents not only eats CPU cycles, it also makes byte sizes of your messages much larger than they need to be. Switching from XML to a more streamlined (but still interoperable) format such as JSON can sometimes cut your bytes transferred by 50% while being faster for apps to parse.

Myth #2: If you need to speed up your application, just add more machines
There is a big difference between speed and throughput. Speed is how fast an operation can be executed, while throughput deals with how many operations you can perform in a given time.

If you have a stored procedure that takes 30 seconds, adding two servers won't change a thing. You can add RAM to prevent disk access, attempt to add cores and multi-thread the process or increase the speed of your storage tier, but unless you break the stored procedure into several smaller procs you cannot spread the workload effectively across a farm.

A great use case of horizontal scalability is raw HTTP traffic. When it comes down to the number of simultaneous worker threads that need to be available a sea of HTTP servers behind a nice, robust load balancer that performs MAC re-writing can make a huge difference.

Myth #3: You have to have a NoSQL solution in order to scale
The blog High Scalability recently posted "What the heck are you actually using NoSQL for?" which had a very appropriate truism:
NoSQL databases do a great job of spreading storage or search tasks (or both) across a cloud infrastructure, but they aren't a silver bullet. You don't necessarily need to sacrifice ACID compliance to scale - the logical partitioning of databases can sometimes do the job quite nicely.

Myth #4: Commodity pricing means pay for what your users consume
Several cloud computing companies have made pricing really tricky to calculate. When an IaaS provider accounts for cost by IOPS or bytes per second it can be very difficult to discern what your bill will look like at the end of the month.

As much as we might want billing to be based on how many transactions are flowing through the system, most anecdotal research has shown billing ends up allocation based. For example, here is my hazy analytic of an on-demand application I deployed within a cloud hosting provider:

First off: no, this was not drawn by a preschool class. Second: note that cost did not scale with usage. After scaling upwards we were reluctant to scale downwards since we couldn't accurately forecast how many users would be flowing through. A more predictable, allocation-based billing model would have been welcome in a world of uncertainty.

I would love to hear your myths or the debunking of my own. Feel free to leave a comment on the blog or tweet us up @BlueLock!