The Pros and Cons of Private and Public PaaS

I just returned from attending the Cloud Expo in New York City this week. The conference was dominated by private and hybrid cloud topics. There were several private Platform as a Service (PaaS) vendors attending whom I spent a great deal of time talking to as I walked the floor. It seems these days that many enterprises default to private and hybrid clouds and therefore insist on private PaaS as well. It is critical that consumers of PaaS services understand the pros and cons of both public and private PaaS before making a commitment to a PaaS deployment model.

DevOps and Security

I recently read the book Project Phoenix by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford. If you are in development, IT, and Security it should be #1 on your reading list. In this book the authors discuss all the horrors we hear about in IT with a clear direction on how to fix them. There is politics, shadow IT, over zealous security professionals, over worked critical employees, lots of finger pointing. But there is a clear solution, at least as far as the story goes. We also know that DevOps works, most of the time.

Database as a Service: Agility vs. Control

Over the last few years there has been an increase in the number of database as a service (DBaaS) offerings that have entered the market place. IaaS providers like Amazon have released solutions such as RDS that automates database administration tasks in the area of scaling, replication, failover, backups, and more. There are a number of companies offering automation around NoSQL databases like Hadoop, MongoDB, Redis, Memcache, and numerous other database technologies.

Cloud Scale Apps, Cloud Scale Testing

While at Interop I participated in a Tech Field Day event where Spirent was talking about their new Axon product as well as the possibility of usage of Blitz.io. It was an interesting discussion but gave me some food for thought. As we move to cloud scale apps based on platforms such as Pivotal (EMC World was just down the street), OpenShift, and others, we need a way to test those applications at scale. Spirent and Ixia provide these tools, but would they be used in this new model.

Can you Pivot to Pivotal?

At EMCworld 2013, one of the big stories was Pivotal and it’s importance to the EMC2 family and the future of computing. Pivotal is geared to provide the next generation of computing. According to EMC2 have gone past the Client-Server style to a scale-out, scale-up, big data, fast data Internet of Things form of computing. The real question however, is how can we move traditional business critical applications to this new model, or should we? Is there migration path one can take?