To Cloud or not to Cloud, Better Yet, What is a Cloud?

While doing a quick Google search to find what a Cloud is, I have found several different definitions which depend on which vendor site you pull up. One thing is for sure despite the frequent use of the term, it still means different things to different people and or companies. For my reference point I am going to use the National Institute of Standards and Technology definition referenced by Texiwill’s NIST Cloud Computing Definitions Final article.

Monitoring – The basics of the Cloud

“What do you wish to monitor?”, is often my response when someone states they need to monitor the virtual environment. Monitoring however becomes much more of an issue when you enter the cloud. Some of my friends have businesses that use the cloud, specifically private IaaS clouds, but what should the cloud provider monitor and what should the tenant monitor has been a struggle and a debate when dealing with them.

Application Vulnerability Scanning comes in from the Cloud

the Cloud is increasingly being used to provide external security testing services (such as AVS, Application Vulnerability Scanning). The argument of the proponents of such services is that security threats come from the cloud, and thus it makes most sense to embed the AVS in the cloud. However after very detailed examination of the options we have come to the conclusion that the Cloud it isn’t necessarily the right answer for many enterprises, and that the AVS service may best be delivered inside the datacenter.

Development Tools and Application Servers for the Cloud

Development tools like Eclipse and Visual Stuio are being built to ensur applications can be deployed in to the cloud on application servers. Key challenges include the manageability and scalability of application servers. Innovations include the use of non-java languages like Groovy and Jython and even PHP and Javascript on JVMs, and the final demise of SQL as object caches offer more natural scalability.

CA Buys Cloud Platform Vendor, 3Tera

The acquisition of 3Tera by Computer Associates signals an intent to move beyond traditional Systems Management, into something that may almost be viewed as Operating System: a layer of software called AppLogic that sits above the virtualization stack, and provides a consolidated abstraction against which composite applications may be built within the Cloud. Essentially the AppLogic layer deals with the nuts and bolts of configuring and connecting virtual machines, all you do is choose from a menu of virtual appliances you want, and use a visual interface to show how the appliances interconnect at a software level.