Grazed from TechTarget. Author: David Linthicum.

When people are planning a private cloud project, they remember the IaaS piece, but they forget to meet the expectations of developers. David Linthicum's guest Diane Mueller, cloud ecosystem evangelist at Red Hat focusing on OpenShift, tells IT pros to "mind the gap" and remember to fill in any private cloud with a fully integrated platform solution, such as Platform as a Service (PaaS).

John Treadway, senior vice president at Cloud Technology partners, joins the Cloud Computing Weekly podcast to discuss the future of PaaS, and the guests debate what applications should not be deployed in private PaaS. The word of the day, according to Treadway, is convergence. Topics include:...

Grazed from Slashdot.org.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Google’s I/O conference in San Francisco didn’t just offer new products and services for consumers: the company used the event to unveil upgraded software for developers and those who deal with IT infrastructure.

For example, Google Compute Engine (which the company first announced last year) is now available to everyone in preview, with a bevvy of just-announced features. The Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering gives developers access to Google’s enormous computing power, the better to crunch data and build applications...

Grazed from PeakColo.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Enterprise-class cloud computing offers many benefits to its adopters, and its overall value rests in its ability to offer innovative solutions to myriad business issues. One of a company's primary concerns is its security, but there are many ways in which enterprise clouds provide overarching solutions to potential security vulnerabilities. Inherent in the design of enterprise IaaS clouds is a prominent focus on maintaining a protected infrastructure. This is an especially salient concern of many IT professionals and CIOs, who still debate the merits and hindrances of security in the cloud, wrote Computerworld's Steve Pate. In addressing cloud security, Pate considered the perspectives of businesses and cloud service providers.

Pate wrote that the security concerns of smaller organizations in particular  frequently stem from their lack of an in-house security team, and so they often have the most to gain by investing in the services of an IaaS cloud provider...

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Louis Columbus.

Evangelizing development on any cloud computing or enterprise platform is challenging, costly and takes a unique skill set that can educate, persuade, sell and serve developers at the same time.

The companies who excel at this exude technical prowess and as a result earn and keep trust. For Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform providers, getting developers, both at partner companies and at enterprise customers to build applications, is a critical catalyst for future growth...

Grazed from ProfitBricks. Author: PR Announcement.

ProfitBricks, the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) company that completely reengineered the delivery of cloud computing, today released a case study detailing how its cloud computing 2.0 solution can help SaaS companies achieve their business goals.

SchoolBrains, a global provider of sophisticated data management, analytical and assessment solutions for PreK-12 school districts, implemented ProfitBricks' IaaS solution across multiple school districts. In doing so, SchoolBrains demonstrated how cloud computing 2.0 infrastructure can help SaaS companies operate more effectively and efficiently while enhancing application performance...

Grazed from TechCentral. Author: Editorial Staff.

Platform as a service (PaaS) is sort of the like the red-headed stepchild between the two, providing an application development and hosting platform in the cloud. PaaS in many ways combines elements of infrastructure and software as a service. But recently, Gartner researcher John Rymer, who closely tracks the PaaS market, says the lines between IaaS, SaaS and PaaS are beginning to blur.

Some of the leading IaaS companies, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), are adding PaaS-like features to their offerings. AWS has made it easier to deploy and scale applications in its cloud through services like its recently released OpsWorks, as well as Elastic Beanstalk and CloudFront, for example. SaaS pioneer Salesforce.com, meanwhile, is making a big push to promote its integrated PaaS offerings, Force.com and Heroku...

Grazed from Virtualization Review. Author: Elias Khnaser.

Let's continue the cloud conversaton that I brought up in last week's blog, but this time on another topic that has garnered steam in the last few weeks among my customers: Desktop as a Service. Customers are now asking, why DaaS instead of VDI? I don't want to turn this blog into a comparison between them and this fight has been discussed to death in other forums. Still, I'd like to highlight a few things that DaaS needs before it is a viable alternative to VDI. The biggest hurdle is Microsoft licensing. At the moment, the company doesn't have a Service Provider License Agreement for its desktop operating system products and that means customers have to provide their own Microsoft licensing to their DaaS provider. I have a problem with that -- without one, it gets very complicated, even more so than VDI Besides, it then is no longer provided in an "as a service" model.

Here's another hurdle: DaaS providers are delivering Windows Remote Desktop Session Host desktops and accessorizing them with a Windows 7 theme, and that presents its own set of challenges with apps and other considerations. There is also the concern with data ownership and compliance. Most important, DaaS would be limited to SaaS applications or Windows applications that are self-sufficient, meaning they don't need access to the corporate data or back-end databases. These are just very quick nuggets of some show-stoppers that I see at the moment...

Grazed from MidSize Insider. Author: Contel Bradford.

Imagine a cloud network as a stack of layers, each of which is akin to a consumption and delivery model for various IT needs. Those needs may be accommodated by solutions that range from software applications to physical hardware that supports storage requirements. The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platforms are two such stacks that can deliver substantial benefits when implemented by midsize companies.

SaaS Solutions as Part of the Cloud Stack

SaaS providers offer enterprise-level applications such as CRM programs to help businesses streamline their organizational processes. They also offer applications that facilitate communication and collaboration, support social business endeavors, and provide valuable insights into marketing performance. The availability of such a wide range of applications lets businesses move many of their network operations to the cloud and reap the advantages of a more flexible environment...

Grazed from PeakColo.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Although public cloud vendors first pioneered the infrastructure-as-a-service hosting model, the private enterprise IaaS cloud represents its future. Companies increasingly want to leverage the scalability and flexibility inherent in cloud environments without having to worry about the security and latency issues inherent in public hosted settings. As a result, businesses are more frequently adopting dedicated hosting environments for their IT infrastructure, Giridhar Lakkavalli, head of vmUnify solutions at Mindtree, wrote in a recent CRN UK guest post. 

Part of the issue was that public hosting environments became victims of their own popularity. Lakkavalli wrote that as more businesses opted to place their IT infrastructure in the cloud, the amount of space and speed available on a given server dwindled. Unless the public cloud provider was able to provision more processing power and dedicated servers to one client – which is never a given in shared settings – companies were not able to have the ideal hosted solution in place. As a result, a cloud service provider able to offer dedicated server space and connections became a far more attractive option to many organizations...

Grazed from up2v.nl.  Author: Marcel Van Der Berg.

Microsoft published two very interesting documents which assist in designing and understanding  Infrastructure as a Service based on Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1.

• Infrastructure-as-a-Service Product Line Architecture Fabric Architecture Guide (Windows Server 2012).
  This 112 pages document provides specific guidance for developing fabric architectures (compute, network, storage, and virtualization layers) of an overall private cloud solution. All of the Windows Server 2012 features are discussed.
  Very much recommended reading if your task is to design a Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V infrastructure.
  Download here...