The Cloud & Efficient Systems

With infrastructure as a service, basic IT costs are moved from a capital expense to a variable cost, building clearer relationships between expenditures and revenue generating activities. As Jayashree Ullal points out, scalability, latency and performance are the cornerstones in any cloud ecosystem. Recognizing a heightened interest in moving functionality into the AWS cloud to get a better grasp on controlling. AWS comes with added functionalities to add monitoring, load balancing, and automatic scaling to their offerings making it more appealing to enterprise customers. Today, Amazon AWS is no longer in beta. The EC2 platform now supports windows/SQL platform as well. Amazon is boldly promoting this platform as the best environment for deploying .net and other high performance microsft technology centric applications. The implicit belief behind this is that having a low cost infrastructure is only the starting point of being as efficient as possible and that applications will make use of the infrastructure in an adaptive and scalable manner to achieve a high degree of efficiency. This would pitch amazon against the rumoured red dog initiative ( a stripped version of cloud OS) of Microsoft. The ultimate goal seems to be ability to offer services that would support all databases, operating systems and programming models. Microsoft, Google, SFDC are all approaching comparable solutions with varied interests from differing perspectives. This is really good progress for amazon and for cloud computing paradigm – the adoption by SMB segments and enterprises need to be keenly watched to assess how quickly this models gets to the centerstage.

Labels: Cloud Computing, Emerging Technologies, Emerging Trends