Cloud infrastructure providers like Amazon are putting out the technology
that the enterprise and SaaS providers need to move beyond testing the waters
and take advantage of the Cloud today. The latest, and most important from
the data storage perspective, is Amazon’s Elastic Block Store, or EBS.
Over the years we’ve witnessed a shift to hosted IT infrastructure where
all the issues surrounding the physical plant are consolidated and managed by
a specialist service. In the past six months we've witnessed the incredible
rate at which cloud computing has really taken off and is now allowing
businesses to shed the problems of ordering, racking and maintaining servers
and disk storage systems.
The public cloud is now knocking down the barriers to a broader business
audience that has seen the advantages of “pay as you go” IT and not
having to build or rent another data cen... (more)
Thorsten von Eicken's RightScale Blog
It looks like pretty soon all computing will be called cloud computing, just
because the cloud is "in." Fortunately most computer savvy folks actually
have a pretty good idea of what the term "cloud computing" means: outsourced,
pay-as-you-go, on-demand, somewhere in the Internet, etc. What is still
confusing to many is how the different offerings compare from Amazon Web
Services to Google App Engine and Force.com. I recently heard a
characterization of three different levels of clouds which really helps put
the various offerings into perspec... (more)
Thorsten von Eicken's RightScale Blog
The cloud is coming of age. Amazon took another huge leap forward when it
announced that EC2 is now out of beta, together with an SLA that is evidence
of Amazon’s commitment to provide top-notch service. Their uptime has been
stellar, and they are now standing behind their offering contractually in a
much stronger way, and signaling how customers can set their expectations.
Read about the announcement on the AWS blog and on their CTO’s blog.
The advent of Windows on EC2 is welcome news too. Even though Windows is not
typically the OS used for se... (more)
Thorsten von Eicken's RightScale Blog
Recently Rich Wolski (UCSB Eucalyptus project) and I were discussing grid
computing vs. cloud computing. An observation he made makes a lot of sense to
me. Since he doesn’t blog [...], let me repeat here what he said. Grid
computing has been used in environments where users make few but large
allocation requests. For example, a lab may have a 1000 node cluster and
users make allocations for all 1000, or 500, or 200, etc. So only a few of
these allocations can be serviced at a time and others need to be scheduled
for when resources are releas... (more)
Thorsten von Eicken is the CTO and a founder of RightScale and is responsible for the overall technology direction of the RightScale Cloud Management Platform. Previously, he was founder and chief architect at Expertcity (acquired by Citrix Online), where he directed the architecture of the company's online services, including the popular GoToMeeting service. von Eicken also managed the Expertcity/Citrix data center operations, where he acquired deep knowledge in deploying and running secure, scalable online services. He was a professor of Computer Science at Cornell University and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Doug Bonderud
Giles Proctor
Tom Flynn
Leonard Johnson
Patrick Pushor
Bob Evans
