Do Clouds = Scalability?

If this subject interests you, please head over to my other blog at The Cloud View. I was recently quoted at CIO.com about the relationship between cloud computing and scalability. My blog post goes into more detail about these related topics.

CloudTrends: Seeing Through the Cloud Computing Hype

With all the marketing hype about cloud computing, it’s hard to sort out which cloud computing platforms are actually gaining traction. An interesting new set of analytical tools is now up at The Cloud View’s CloudTrends that helps with this problem. As stated at the site:

• CloudSearches is an analysis of the volume of Google searches relating to the top five computing clouds (real-time, customizable).
• CloudJobs, By Platform is an analysis of the number of cloud computing related jobs available in the United States for the top platforms (updated once weekly).
• CloudJobs, By Language is an analysis of the number of cloud computing related jobs available in the United States for several popular programming languages (updated once weekly).

Have a look every so often to keep track of the trends in cloud computing as they develop over time.

Apps.gov = Huge Step Forward for Cloud Computing

Please see my latest post at The Cloud Option about federal government cloud computing: Apps.gov, FISMA compliance, Salesforce, and Google.

Enterprise Demand Driving Vendor Consideration of Internal Clouds

Please see my latest post at The Cloud Option about an emerging micro-trend in cloud computing platforms—the licensing of PaaS platforms for use in private data centers.

Introducing The Cloud Option Blog

I have moved my blogging activity over to The Cloud Option blog. Please follow me there, although I will continue to announce new posts in this blog as well.

Live Webinar Announcment: Multitenant Magic: Under the Covers of the Force.com Data Architecture

For those of you interested in Force.com and multi-tenancy issues, you won’t want to miss this. Craig Weissmann, Chief Software Architect of Force.com, is going to give a live webinar about the inner workings of Salesforce.com’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. This presentation is based on the recent paper that Salesforce.com hired me to write for them.

Transparent Data Encryption: Experience from the Trenches

The Oracle Technology Network just published my latest article, titled Transparent Data Encryption: Experience from the Trenches. If you plan to use Oracle or back up databases using public cloud-based services such as Amazon.com’s EC2 or S3, then you will probably have special interest in this article because you will no doubt want to use Oracle’s TDE feature to encrypt any of your existing sensitive data before exposing it to a public cloud.

The Force.com Multitenant Architecture

Here is the link that I promised for the white paper that I wrote for the folks at Salesforce.com. The abstract for the paper reads as follows:

“Force.com is the preeminent on-demand application development platform in use today, supporting some 47,000+ organizations. Individual enterprises and commercial software-as-a service (SaaS) vendors trust the platform to deliver robust, reliable, Internet-scale applications. To meet the extreme demands of its large user population, Force.com’s foundation is a metadata-driven software architecture that enables multitenant applications. This paper explains the patented technology that makes the Force.com platform fast, scalable, and secure for any type of application.”

I hope that everyone finds it very useful and informative.

Introducing EquiVol

The generic application that I’m proposing for my cloud/PaaS/DbaaS application platform study is called EquiVol. The EquiVol application keeps track of the monthly open and closing price for a given publicly traded equity on a United States stock exchange. Besides being helpful with my stock trading endeavors, I believe that the EquiVol application will be able to flesh out a number of the capabilities of various cloud-based options for building applications.

The steps that I have identified so far for building EquiVol are as follows.

1. Declare the data model for the application, including the tables and indexes.

2. Declare the business logic, including the data integrity constraints, as well as the procedural logic (functions and triggers).

3. Bulk load sets of data into the application’s tables.

4. Build a web-based interface for manual data entry and reporting, including data entry forms, text reports, and graphical charts.

5. Integrate the application’s database with web services that provide access to pre-built logic.

6. Expose some of the application’s logic as web services so that other applications can reuse components of interest.

7. Implement business intelligence functions to analyze data.

8. Schedule jobs that automatically process data, such as analyzing data or sending email alerts to application subscribers.

The other interesting thing that I’ll be attempting to do is try to port the EquiVol application from one platform to another. Should be interesting. If you have any suggestions, please forward them along. Meanwhile, I’m going to get going on my Force.com implementation of EquiVol.

Multi-Tenant Times

I know, I know. I don’t have a very good track record updating my blogs. But now it’s time for me to change all of that. My main problem is that I get involved in projects that are all-consuming, and neglect my desire to regularly share my thoughts on Software as a Service (SaaS), Database as a Service (DbaaS), and cloud computing.

My most recent job was to author a technical white paper for the folks at Salesforce.com that explains the internal plumbing of the multi-tenant architecture that supports Force.com. If you are interested in multi-tenancy and how Force.com is engineered, you don’t want to miss this document. This paper is being printed for distribution at the DreamForce08 Conference. I also drafted an accompanying presentation that VP/Cheif Architect Craig Weissman will deliver at the conference. When I have links to the paper and presentation, I’ll update this post.

So what’s next for me and this blog? The overall objective is to provide you with information that you will be able to use to compare and contrast various Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions, and hopefully make the right choices for you and your projects. Here are the details of my plan.

• Design a generic, easy-to-understand, yet full-featured application.
• Implement the application on various PaaS/DbaaS offerings.
• Demonstrate the capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses of each PaaS.

As I do this and the posts gain visibility, I’ll imagine that I’ll collaborate with the more eager vendors that wish to comment on my understanding of their products. I also look forward to constructive comments from readers that will help improve the information that I publish. Eventually, everyone will be able to use this blog as a reference library that will be invaluable for understanding application developement and administration for PaaS and DbaaS.