Cloud - Web and Service Cloud

Microsoft launched the Azure cloud based platform at the PDC today.  Microsoft has launched many file storage services that were their cloud offerings to date in Mesh, Foldershare, Groove and more.  Azure is what appears to be a real cloud platform to compete with Amazon and Google rather than just storage hosting.

Build new applications in the cloud - or use interoperable services that run on Microsoft infrastructure to extend and enhance your existing applications. You choose what’s right for you.

It appears so far that it is pretty Microsoft centric for tool support.  Of course the software and servers will be Windows.  This week and last, Microsoft platforms have made their way into the cloud platforms at Amazon and now Microsoft.  Google also recently announced the support of Java.  Another set of aquisitions at Rackspace in the buying of Slicehost and JungleDisk also seem to show the space heating up and the companies all believing in the cloud platform emergence and evolution that seems to be happening.

Amazon EC2 is officially out of beta, it is about time some of these services actually launched.  It is hard to convince people to use the cloud layer without being out of beta (AppEngine when’s it gonna happen huh?).

Amazon also launches with windows support, SQL Server support and much more.  This is great news in times where budgets are tight and people want to start scalable businesses but want to only pay for what is used.  The cloud layer will be a very attractive option to many.

Learn more about the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) at Amazon. There are already lots of great simple toos like ElasticFox (Firefox EC2 Extension) to help manage your AMIs from a browser.  You can start and stop armies of configured servers from a little extension in your browser.

Developers are getting many tools to build great things.  We hope more products are out of beta soon like AppEngine.

AppEngine is getting an update to it’s next available language besides Python (my particular favorite) in Java.  Apparently the top candidates were C++, Java and C# support for AppEngine but Java has been added due to the overwhelming library and developer support.

Microsoft also has been playing with entering the cloud with Mesh and now with “Strata”.  This would be a cloud for .NET developers.

There are already cloud providers for .NET mainly in Mosso’s offerings of any language being cloud enabled. But one from Microsoft will probably draw all the .NET developers to it like most Microsoft offerings.

Also, Amazon EC2 recently announced support for MS SQL Server and Windows servers.  So really any platform can also be used in Amazon EC2 in Amazon Machine Images. This took longer to happen due to the licensing per processor and server that most Microsoft software has.

This won’t be changing things much for me in the near term but having more platforms available in the cloud and on cloud systems is the natural progression.  At some point a platform might have advantages in cheaper processing but for now Python with AppEngine is still the best bet.

Google AppEngine is alot of fun, not only is it a good excuse to use Python but it is a touch of the future and lots of possibilities for programmers and engineers from all sized businesses to use. When they opened the gates I was one of the lucky 10,000 to get in. So what did I do, I setup three apps before I even knew that was the limit.  Then I was stuck.  Well today you now have up to 10 apps that you can run on appspot or your own domain. Make sure to update your SDK.

Next question is, when are they going to launch this out of beta?  I want to start using it for business.

We’re happy to announce we’ve released some small updates to Google App Engine. Among the more significant changes:

• More apps: Want to create more than 3 applications with your App Engine account? Now you can now create up to 10!
• Time windows for Dashboard graphs: Zoom in on the data in your dashboard to get a more accurate picture of whats going on. You can zoom in to see graphs for the last 24, 12, and 6 hour periods.
• Logs export: You can now use appcfg.py to download your application’s logs in plaintext format. Use appcfg.py –help for more information on how to download your logs.
• Send email as logged in user: If you’re using the users API, you can now send email from the email address of the currently-logged-in user.

Be sure to update your SDK and check the release notes for a full list of changes. Have more changes you’d like to see with App Engine? Let us know in our Google Group!

Today Mosso, a cloud provider that runs off of Rackspace and supports lots of languages, launched CloudFS to compete with Amazon S3.

CloudFS is new, untested but a bit cheaper than Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). This is where mainly ‘buckets’ of data of any content type can be stored and retrieved by a unique key across all resources. This is useful for image, content and media hosting and charges by the GB usually less than .15 cents per GB.

About CloudFS