Developing for the cloud ?

08. Sep, 2009 0 Comments

VMWorld 2009

All this week at VMworld 2009 we have been discussing the cloud. Since VMworld is mostly about infrastructure we have been discussing the internal, external and private cloud concepts from an infrastructure point of view. Of course the real value I see coming from the cloud paradigm is for application and application service levels.

Eventually, the economies of scale behind cloud computing will allow cloud vendors to provide powerful services for the development of robust solutions. Standards will be created for API’s to facilitate many important IT service levels including:

High Availability/Fault Tolerance
True Dynamic Scalability through Automation
Quick Recovery
Disaster Recovery
Content Delivery
Storage on Demand
Certified Security

Some of these solutions will be developed into the service technology, some will be provided by service process. The great beneficiary will be IT organizations that now find it very hard to, for example, provide higher availability and decent disaster recovery. I have always preached that recovery and disaster recovery should be developed into applications not bolted on at the infrastructure layer. The shift in development to the cloud is a perfect time to make this a standard practice based on industry standard mechanisms.

The scale associated with cloud providers will also enable creation of top quality facilities with incredible amounts of available bandwidth which will fuel better SLA’s for recovery and performance. As long as the hurdles of security and multi-tenancy can be overcome which seems extremely likely with the amount of development going on within the vendor community.

I am not building cloud infrastructure but I hope that those that are like Google, Amazon and VMware’s many cloud partners are building these types of solutions into their products. The concept has me extremely excited about the future from someone who has had to worry about system recovery as an architect my whole career.

We’ll this is my last VMworld 2009 blog. I enjoyed writing them I hope that you enjoyed reading them and that they offered some food for thought.

- Rob Zylowski Director, Services and Director, IP GlassHouse Technologies

Private Cloud Are VMware’s vCloud initiatives enough to support the “Private...
What is “Cloud Computing”? What is “Cloud Computing”, What’s needed to get there and...
What are the steps to get to the Cloud? VMWorld 2009 In our video blog with Ron Oglesby yesterday,...
What factors will prohibit organisations from moving to the cloud? So the cloud hype train rolls on and we’re all...
Developing Recovery Service Objectives (1 of 2) Developing Recovery Service Objectives Recovery Service Objectives (RSO) are the...