There’s been quite a bit of chatter on the web about Microsoft's Azure Services Platform. Obviously I’m excited to see people talking about our new platform, especially when there is plenty of good, some bad, and some good if not somewhat rambling. There will be no shortage of guessing...

Most initial analysis of cloud computing touts its obvious benefits--grid, pay as you go, near-instant scalability--etc., which is fine. But the big story is how cloud will drive innovation and lead to a new type of CIO.

Cloud computing holds tremendous potential for both small and large organizations. Adopting your very own cloud solution may seem daunting, but the maturing of service oriented patterns, practices, methodologies, and tools has brought cloud well within reach. With proper guidance, yo...

Cisco is planning to start building servers. To be precise, servers equipped with virtualization software. A fascinating article in the New York Times expresses some surprise at this move, but it seems terribly obvious now that the news is out. After all, there is already a move afoot ...

In the next few years the a key opportunity for the emerging cloud industry will be on defining a federated cloud ecosystem by connecting multiple cloud computing providers using an agreeing upon standard or interface. There are a number of organizations looking into solving the proble...

Much like “Web 2.0″, cloud computing was a collection of related concepts that people recognized, but didn’t really have a good descriptor for, a definition in search of a term, you could say. When Google CEO Eric Schmidt used it in 2006 to describe their own stuff and then Amazon inc...

What features does a server absolutely positively have to have to be a candidate for a big cloud data center? What features would put it ahead of other servers in the eyes of the manager writing the checks for that cloud computing data center?

Comparisons between Scale-Out and Enterprise clouds, while sometimes tempting (especially in the Google vs. Microsoft case), are rather useless. They serve different purposes, often for completely different audiences, and enterprise IT organizations would do better to focus their effor...

Cloud computing provides a cost-effective architecture that has enabled new business models including Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The financial crisis might spell good news for cloud providers up and down the stack. According recent articles, IDC pred...

Recessions are about as appealing as a root canal; but they do force us to think differently. Now that the recession is official, it's an ideal time to explore how virtualization and cloud computing can help "recession-proof" IT by transforming yesterday’s costly and rigid computing mo...

Cloud computing promises to change much of how we as developers, designers, and architects currently design and build web applications. For one, concurrency is big issue that need to be addressed if the apps of the next decade are going to scale on this cloud infrastructure.

As providers evolve from traditional hosting they may be facing a window of opportunity in the current, rather dismal, economic outlook: Cloud Computing. In periods of economic uncertainty, especially when the capital for large-scale build-outs may be hard to raise in the debt markets ...

How do you make money as a datacenter-focused cloud computing company? Aside from the sale of compute capacity (a la Amazon or Rackspace), what are the other revenue opportunities available? Here are some thoughts...

With today's EMC announcement of their cloud optimized storage (COS) platform called Atmos, we are starting to see the first time an enterprise ready attempt at a global cloud storage system. For the most part, these types of global distributed file systems have been what Chuck Hollis ...

While cloud computing reporting has recently been focused on Microsoft's Azure announcement and Amazon's upgrade to EC2, there's an elephant in the cloud: Google. According to a well-researched article in SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Journal, Google filed as long ago as February 2006 a pr...

"It's a chance for Cisco to participate on a bigger scale, helping to bring peace to the world. Is that too big a dream?...(long pause)...Maybe." With that thought Cisco CEO John Chambers ends an interview published this week by BusinessWeek in which he reveals that Cisco's cloud compu...

Cloud computing has replaced virtualization as the new hot topic of 2008. Yet underneath the headlines a very basic shift is taking place in the network that promises even more conversations in the very near future. Let’s call this shift the rise of infrastructure 2.0 or the result of ...

For too long, the emphasis in Cloud Computing circles has been almost exclusively upon provision of rapidly scalable and ad hoc remote computing on top of cost-effective commodity hardware. The Cloud play from Salesforce, Amazon’s EC2 and the rest has been dominated by the implicit ass...

Considering that the price tag for state-of-the art data centers is now reaching $500M, cloud computing is an arena for big players. I don’t expect small players to stay competitive for long in this game. Cloud frameworks are very diverse, and switching from one cloud to another is goi...

I get pitched by a large number of Turkish internet startups, and none of them, not one, so far, have built their application using cloud computing. I wonder why that is. It seems to me that the cloud computing service providers like Google App Engine, AWS and 10gen, offer a solid, sca...

Cloud Computing represents both a fundamental and universal change from a desktop- to network-centric software model. The key to understanding cloud computing is that its infrastructure — network, storage and other services – is abstracted away from users to point that it “just doesn’t...

Although cloud computing provides financial benefits like reduction of CAPEX and the ability to pay-as-you-go, organizations will still need a reasonable amount of granularity in the reporting of cloud usage and the ability to map that usage into a financial chargeback model that makes...

Cloud computing refers to the ability to deploy your application on infrastructure that you do not necessarily own nor manage yourself and that can be easily scaled up to handle demand and provide resiliency to failure. The hardware infrastructure can be composed of clusters of many ch...

Whether one looks at how average consumers “compute,” or how industry segments “compete,” it now appears that cloud computing is poised to change the ways users interact with each other, use applications, communicate and compute. Some of the changes are obvious; others only now develop...

I have followed with interest a number of comments about the reliability of Cloud Computing, based on the actual, or perceived, problems with service from Google and Amazon. Of course there are some real incidents that have caused "out-rage" (my definition of the rage one experiences f...

Information Technology is fantastic, absolutely essential, and largely responsible for this country's increase in productivity over the past decade or so. It's also broken. IT is overly complex, difficult to implement correctly, and expensive to maintain over its short lifespan.

When you boil it down to brass tacks, cloud computing is just a new take on an old idea. Businesses are drawn to the facilities that cloud computing has to offer because the availability of our resources dictates our current needs...and our needs always expand beyond the capacity of ou...