I often attend various conferences to explore new technology, keep abreast of the latest trends in the industry, recruit new partners, and try to discover new innovation that might be useful to StrikeIron, and more importantly of value to our customers.
This week I am at the JavaOne Conference in San Francisco where I am taking a closer look at Sun Microsystems' new cloud offerings announced this past spring and slated for availability later this summer, although it has been available to partners for a couple of months.
The first day was a CommunityOne event aimed at the broader open source community and focused on the cloud generically, but there was still a major focus on Sun's cloud offerings.
The key premise of Sun's cloud approach (and others of course) is that any developer will have the ability to create their own virtual data center and have it up and running in a few minutes. Now, this is simply server machines with electricity at this point and the applications still need to be built, but the machine abstraction and usage-based pricing is much better than negotiating machine types and annual contracts with your local Web hosting company experienced by those of us who have built traditional data centers. Ultimately, when applications are ready for production (or testing), complexity of deployment will be reduced significantly within the Sun cloud.
The first couple of cloud services Sun rolls out will be storage and compute, meaning remote storage (including MySQL virtual machines) and remote execution (no surprise here). All of this of course is built on top of Sun's OpenSolaris operating system and accessible by Sun's open cloud API's, which are RESTful APIs.
On top of this API, Sun has built a nifty virtual data center management application (based on technology obtained from their Q-layer acquisition), where the virtual data center can be built and deployed with a few clicks. This is done by dragging and dropping server and switch icons on to a palette and assigning the operating system to be run in a single click (Ubuntu, OpenSolaris, etc.) Within minutes, an entire Web-scale system architecture can be deployed.
One especially neat thing is the integration of Sun's cloud with their own applications such as OpenOffice. The free alternative to Microsoft Office will have new cloud-related menu items. For example, you will be able to "Save to the Cloud" and "Open from the Cloud" from the File menu, storing and retrieving documents to external resources on the Web rather than on your own desktop.
It will be interesting to see how Sun's offerings compete with Amazon's EC2 and S3 offerings, as well as forthcoming cloud releases from other major storage vendors (those same vendors who were scoffing at S3 a couple years back) in the race for developers' credit cards. Even though Amazon has significant momentum, Sun's offerings will be compelling with the integration that will occur with their OpenSolaris operating system, NetBeans Java development platform, MySQL database and Open Storage platforms, and applications such as OpenOffice. These collective weapons could really be a significant advantage over Amazon for serious enterprise cloud initiatives, as well as entrepreneurs.
Of course, this is all of great interest to StrikeIron. Not only do we leverage cloud resources ourselves with some of our computing activities, but applications that run in the cloud are naturally going to be in need of data services ranging from business demographic data, address, telephone, and email verifications, financial data (such as currency rates), sending of SMS messages, and many more of the APIs that we provide. It is much easier for an application in the cloud to call other APIs in the cloud. Our job is to make this as frictionless as possible with platforms like Sun is unveiling.
And of course, all of these cloud applications are going to need data, and our IronCloud data publishing platform is a great way to publish both public and private data out to the cloud for consumption by cloud (and other) applications, especially when these applications span multiple servers with a requirement to access data from a single point, and access to that data needs be controlled (and metered, maintained, analyzed for metrics...)
So there you have it, it should be a fun week out here in San Francisco, where the summer will certainly be cloudy (I will spare you the Mark Twain quote).
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