Recent Cloud News

Hi,

This time I enclose a short update regarding the cloud:

1. IGT Cloud Investment Summit for Virtualization and Cloud/SaaS Based startups
This one should draw some interest in companies that strive for money these days. The IGT is organizing an investment conference for startups in the cloud/SaaS niche market. This one will take place in Tel Aviv at June 1st 2009.

2. Are games as a Service getting mainstream?
We get used to interactive casual gaming instead the good old solitaire. However, this time several startups (OnLive, Galkai) and larger firms (Sony, AMD) claim that even the most resource demanding games can be run using the cloud... Meaning that we should no more upgrade to the latest graphic cards and CPUs but consume the best games thorough the web. They are using new compressing methods and get advantage of the NGN networks (50Mbit to the home is almost here). Read more Here (hebrew) and in every blog regarding CES 2009

3. The standards battle has just began
As in every new emarging market, those who lag behind or feel threathned by the new trend, are merging into a standard group. This time players such as SUN, IBM, Cisco and HP merged forces to close the gap using the Cloud Computing Manifesto. This group is making its best to keep the cloud open and interoperable between cloud providers.
The leading cloud computing providers such as Amazon (leader), Microsoft (Open... Linux... usually not), Google (PaaS closed environment) and SalesForce (same) oppose this move.

Keep performing,
Moshe Kaplan. RockeTier. The Performance Experts.

Amazon Session Highlights

Hi,

As you may read we participated last week in the AWS session hosted by the IGT and SUN.

Simone Brunozzi, Amazon Web Services Evangelist, was great and he gave several interesting notes including:

1. Amazon will provide load balancing capability in the near future (you can avoid this issue right now using HAProxy, but it always great to get things out of the box).
2. Amazon support availability zones: Amazon has several DCs in the US. Each availability zone is in another DC, so can provide multi site architecture in day 1.
3. Amazon suffered for 12 hours downtime in the last 3 years. The longest was about 2 hours. This numbers are for intended and unintended downtime. It gives us about 99.95%, which a very remarkable number for such a scale and the given cost.

Simone presented the Animoto case study: "from 80 servers to 3500 in 3 days" as well.

Keep Performing,
Moshe Kaplan. RockeTier. The Performance Experts.

UPDATE 2: IGT Hosting Amazon AWS Hands-on workshop will start at 18:00

Hi,

Great News,
After all the Amazon meetups, the IGT is going to host Amazon AWS Hands-on workshop,
It's a great opportunity to meet Simone Brunozzi, Amazon Web Services Evangelist - Europe, and have real life hands on experience as well as asking questions.

Date: Mar 3, 2009 10:00 13:00

Location: SUN Offices, Manofim 9, 8th Floor, Hertzelia, Israel

Organizer: IGT

The preliminary agenda:
18:00- 18:30 Reception
18:30 - 19:00 Intro to Amazon AWS
19:00 - 20:30 Hands-on AWS Workshop
Including:
Account management
S3 – details and examples, using Firefox S3 organizer
EC2 – details and examples, Linux and Windows, using the AWS Console
Cloudfront – details and examples, using Firefox S3 organizer and/or other tools
20:30 - 21:00 AWS Q&A

Best,
Moshe Kaplan. RockeTier. The Performance Experts.

IGT Hosting Amazon AWS Hands-on workshop

Hi,

Great News,
After all the Amazon meetups, the IGT is going to host Amazon AWS Hands-on workshop,
It's a great opportunity to meet Simone Brunozzi, Amazon Web Services Evangelist - Europe, and have real life hands on experience as well as asking questions.

Date: Mar 3, 2009 10:00 13:00

Location: IGT Office, Maskit 4, 5th Floor, Hertzelia

Organizer: IGT

The preliminary agenda:
10:00 - 10:30 Intro to Amazon AWS
10:30 - 12:00 Hands-on AWS Workshop
12.00 - 13:00 AWS Q&A

Best,
Moshe Kaplan. RockeTier. The Performance Experts.

The world summit of cloud computing and the cloud computing directory

Hi again,

As you may know, I'm a board member at the IGT (the Israeli association of grid technologies). The IGT annual conference is taking place in few weeks. This year IGT2008 is focused on cloud computing, as you may conclude from its formal name "The world summit of cloud computing". You may find in this conference every major player in the field like Amazon EC2, eBay, Google, Microsoft, Sun, HP, Gigaspaces, Intel and many more. You will even find us, RockeTier, speaking regarding our field experience and our strategic aspects regarding cloud computing. We will have a booth as well, so we'll be glad if you'll go by and visit us.

While arranging the conference we noticed that there is no formal directory. which map the players in this emerging field. Therefore, the IGT created an interactive cloud computing players directory that you'll can find here. This directory includes an interactive map so you can easily dive and find the relevant players. We hope you'll find this tool useful, and we'll be glad if you'll update us if we missed any player in the field.

Waiting for your feedback,

Best
Moshe
RockeTier