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Cloud computing is affecting the evolution of content management systems and the manners in which data becomes a service. Business services are evolving as cloud computing forces people to think more about how information is organized and shared. At the consumer level, Apple iTunes will be replaced by cloud computing services, often referred to as online music storage lockers. People have become accustomed to using iTunes but as people get access to more data, they will find new ways to organize information. And the kids will realize how the information can be shared. Sponsor At the business level, cloud computing is having a profound effect in a number of markets. In the mapping world it's leading to new forms of content management systems that use data for specific niche purposes. Services like WeoGeo offer new forms of geo-spatial, content management systems and marketplaces that offer deep repositories of data, like a giant map case in the sky. It's in some ways like a content management system and marketplace for map makers, an age old craft now in a different dimension. Foe example, WeoGeo offers a map library and a marketplace , designed specifically for surveyors, engineers, architects, geoscientists, and cartographers. It offers both the library and the marketplace as data services, petabytes of data stored in the cloud. All of its services are available via RESTful web services. Is that a big deal? We kind of think so. Web oriented architectures require the data to be browser compatible. With RESTful, companies can create new kinds of mashups baked into a new generation of content management systems that correlate to specific communities. That's the evolution taking place. Applications that can share data through API's that provide the capability to organize new sets of data and shared in a variety of manners. The service is in contrast to what Google and Microsoft offer. Both of these companies use map data to enhance their services. They serve as ways to lock in data that they use for search and advertising. SimpleGeo is a similar service to WeoGeo but it uses geodata to makes applications more location aware. ESRI represents the old guard of the industry and is the market leader in mapping software. It's a proprietary platform. But the real future for the mapping world is in the cloud. It serves as a place that data can be served and built upon. It's also the place where markets will develop. It's like a data fabric that the map makers use to sell their works. It's a community made of developers. And that's how communities evolve. They trade between themselves, thus creating the demand. It's similar to how the publishing market evolved several hundred years ago. Book makers traded books. As more books were published, the market grew. We are in the same place with data as a service. Google and Microsoft will not and can not control the entire market. The foundation for geo market services will strengthen as its developer/small business community evolves. Its these small businesses that represent the future. Discuss

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WeoGeo: How the Cloud Makes New Markets Possible

It's worth noting that the cloud certainly has borders. It's the one reality that proves the cloud computing movement may seem at times abstract and vague but in the end it is the international politics of our world that creates some of the deepest issues for its place in the world markets. According to InformationWeek , The 451 Group presented a webcast that showed cloud computing adoption trails in Europe and Asia. About 57% op spending is in the United States with 31% in Europe and 12% in Asia. The numbers get even more polarized when you only look at the adoption for infrastructure as a service. A full 93% of spending is in the United States with 6% in Europe and 1% in the United States. Sponsor The low numbers almost makes it seem like some artificial effect is in play. And in some ways it really is. A lack of European data centers services by the large providers affects adoption. Rackspace, Terremark and Savvis are the primary companies looking to develop a presence in Europe. But they need to build data centers before they can have any real presence there. According to the 451 Group, 99 percent of European businesses are either small or mid-sized organizations. And they have plenty of choices from telecommunications providers. But here is an interesting twist. InformationWeek: One obstacle to both sides is the U.S. Patriot Act, which gives the U.S. government a right to demand data if it defines conditions as being an emergency or necessary to homeland security, and a measure that contradicts that power when the data is of European origin, the European Union's Data Protection Directive. In 2006, the European Court of Justice ruled that an agreement negotiated with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was too broadly construed and violated the EU's directive. The agreement was about sharing data on European airline passengers headed for the U.S. The data sought by the U.S. was too broadly construed and violated the EU's directive, the court said. "Both measures could prevent establishing a cloud without borders," said 451's William Fellows. Cloud advocates say services established via an Internet data center should be accessible by people around the world, and they are in the case of Google search or Facebook apps. But when it comes to sensitive data, national borders still prevail because of conflicting laws." The issue is apparent now with Google's issues with the Chinese government. It's not the technology that is making cloud computing an issue. It's international politics. Discuss

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International Politics Slow Cloud Computing In Europe and Asia

Tomorrow, GroundWork Open Source Inc. and Eucalyptus Systems will be announcing that they have partnered to deliver monitoring and management of applications running in a Eucalyptus private cloud environment. If your enterprise is running private cloud powered by Eucalyptus, you now can plug your cloud into the GroundWork's monitoring solution. This allows you to join your view of resources from Amazon and other servers in your enterprise with your private cloud solution. Sponsor What is Eucalyptus? We covered Eucalyptus recently in an interview with the company's founder and CTO. The company is a first-mover in helping organizations build private clouds that can achieve parity with Amazon's EC2. The company's enterprise addition will allow you to run an Amazon instance on your VMware infrastructure, effectively joining your virtual infrastructure and the Amazon cloud. "Detailed monitoring and management of private cloud applications can give Eucalyptus users important real-time information to increase productivity and reduce costs," said Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus Systems. "Through our partnership with GroundWork Open Source, Eucalyptus open source users and Enterprise Edition customers can now benefit from a proven, open source solution to monitor private clouds as part of their overall network environment." GroundWork's newest solution offers the ability to monitor topology of your private cloud and to plug the results into the monitoring you are doing with other servers and the Amazon public cloud infrastructure. In the briefing we attended with company executives, several things emerged that we're considering. First, it was pointed out that private clouds are "where the action is" for large enterprises. What we heard is that some companies, like pharmaceuticals that GroundWork currently has in its portfolio simply won't be able to move all of their data out to the public cloud yet. But, they do want to get the benefits of cloud computing internally. Second, we learned that one thing GroundWork's offers is a flexible hosting model, where your monitoring infrastructure can be hosted internally, or in the cloud on a managed EC2 instance. Recently, we checked out CloudKick , another cloud monitoring startup that also can monitor servers in the cloud and in the enterprise. The GroundWorks solution that is launching in beta both offers topology view of the private cloud and flexible hosting options that may be attractive to enterprises that plan on keeping most of their assets internal. From what we can see, CloudKick is positioned to companies that are starting on the cloud for scaling purposes, and GroundWork seems positioned towards companies where the center of gravity is inside the data center and now the private cloud. "More and more of our customers are investigating and investing in private cloud usage. Eucalyptus gives incredible power and cost savings to IT teams building out cloud services. Coupled with GroundWork's automatic instance and application monitoring, this partnership provides a robust cloud solution with clear ROI that enterprises can take advantage of quickly," said Peter Jackson, GroundWork Open Source President and CEO. What is GroundWorks private cloud solution? GroundWorks offers the premise that if you are running a private cloud, the monitoring solution needs to be aware of your architecture (topology, software stacks, and servers). Here is a visual representation of how the company envisions cloud aware monitoring: Here is a screenshot of the GroundWorks monitoring solution: Here is a bit more from the companies on the beta program: The GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Cloud for Eucalyptus beta program offers: "GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Cloud usage to cover on-premise, public or private cloud hosted applications and infrastructure Access to Eucalyptus EE, including VMware support to implement private clouds in existing environments The opportunity to provide direct feedback to the engineering and product teams, helping define the future of IT operations in the cloud Engineering and technical assistance for the duration of the beta program. Participants will gain these benefits with the combined GWOS and Eucalyptus Quickly and easily build and monitor private and hybrid clouds with your existing environment and other public clouds Run Amazon Machine Image (AMI) instances on VMware-based hypervisors within your Eucalyptus private cloud Seamlessly manage environments with multiple hypervisors (Xen, KVM, vSphere, ESX™ and ESXi™) under one management console and transition applications without any modifications Manage service performance and availability based on IT monitoring insight trend and usage reports across environments" More information available about the beta program at http://www.gwos.com/products/Enterprise_Cloud_beta.html It is becoming clear that private clouds are increasingly becoming an important part of the enterprise. Eucalyptus has a real opportunity as a first-mover in deploying them with its tools. From experience, we know that where enterprise-class computing exists, monitoring follows. GroundWork and Eucalyptus are working together to make a seamless offering that plugs into the private cloud deployment process in this beta release - and they are asking for feedback from administers interested in the program. Does deploying a private cloud change your view of administration tools and monitoring? Discuss

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Cloud Aware Monitoring: GroundWork and Eucalyptus Offer Private Cloud Beta Program

The news may be about the iPad this weekend but it's the cloud that will hover hot over Apple by the Fall and in many respects challenge its hegemony over how we store and share music and video. According to CNET , that's about the time of year that it looks like Apple will unveil its cloud-based music service. Sponsor In the meantime we are seeing a number of storage services emerge for the iPad that could be used for people to store their music and other media. Yesterday, we looked at the Box.net app. Dropbox has an iPad app as does SugarSync. And then there are the forces that are not tethered to the iPad at all. Last week, Canonical started a public beta for its cloud-based music service. Most cloud-based services allow you to store your own music in the cloud. With Canonical, you purchase your music through its music store that syncs with your device and your own personal cloud. That means you control your Apple appears to be looking at a similar strategy, allowing consumers to store music and movies in the cloud, albeit the media being that from the major labels and even more so, the studios. Will they go for it? Well, a long time ago, perhaps, but with the options available, the studios, have far more possibilities to pursue. But how can the Apple strategy work in a cloud built on open-source? Apple's Fair Play digital rights management software is intended to keep music, movies and other entertainment locked down so it can not be shared. It's in contrast to the open-nature of cloud computing that we see with services that allow for online storage lockers. People will find ways to store and organize data in the way they wish. That makes sense for a number of reasons: People have media on multiple devices. Keeping it in the cloud makes it easier to access. Syncing to the cloud makes sense. Cables? Dongles? That's old school. You can update a file in the cloud and see that same update on your smart phone. If a number of people have their own personal clouds than that means we can share, right? Yes it does! It's that last point that must give Apple a bit of a chill. For years, iTunes seemed like the only option. But Apple has locked down its hardware, software and the content. In league with the labels and studios, Apple has used DRM to get its leverage at the expense of us all. Will that strategy continue to work? Well, it's going to take a while but all these storage providers know that those home videos can bloat a hard drive pretty fast. Or maybe just maybe, Steve will put the screws back in the iPad, give us the schematics and let us all see what we really can do with that tablet. He'll then thank Cory Doctorow for waking him up and sure enough we'll all wonder if we had just fallen into a hot tub time machine. Discuss

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Will the Cloud Challenge Apple's Dynasty?

Zynga is a leading example of how to wield cloud infrastructure to achieve scale. The company uses RightScale to help match demand of its incredibly successful game franchise with appropriate resources. Zynga seems to be a master of understanding how to model customer demand and underlying resources. As even virtual goods have COGS (cost of goods sold) server resources are part of the bill when conjuring up virtual goods for tens of millions of users. Although we can't all be as smart (or cute) as Zynga, many of us are catching on that scaling into the cloud is a smart choice. This brief analysis of RightScale looks at its offerings and the momentum the company is gaining in the market. Sponsor What Does RightScale Offer ? RightScale is a platform that abstracts cloud offerings from Amazon and a host of other cloud providers to help orchestrate the management and provisioning of cloud assets. In the case of social games, this may be algorithms that help spin up services during a dramatic swing of usage. Or, in the reverse case, it maybe scaling infrastructure across the life cycle of a property as it is launched, goes viral, and eventually is replaced with the next thing. The company also offers resource portability, where it can deploy servers with Amazon, or other cloud providers that compete in providing cloud workload services and the ability to spin up new services through APIs. RightScale has tuned its tools to both learn and to react to changes required in the infrastructure for applications using the platform. New customer announcements include Hitachi Systems and Services in Japan and ProKarma in the United States. Both are strong systems integrators that have chosen RightScale as the platform to bring the cloud to their customers. RightScale has announced over one million servers launched using its platform. Maybe Zynga is the next Zynga The company certainly has the viral pattern down, and delivery nailed. And, one thing that we've learned in watching the excitement of social games is that demand can be like a roller-coaster. In addition to all of the natural benefits of cloud infrastructure in cost and timing, we think being ready for wild success is just good practice - it can much less expensive than failing to scale. More importantly, have a platform that scales can open up new doors to business that may have not existed without it. RightScale: For All Shapes and Sizes At RightScale, it doesn't matter if your application is an addictive game, or monthly billing application. The company knows that in the next years, it is likely that hosting in the cloud makes sense for internet infrastructure and it is well positioned to be a piece of a lot of solutions that want to scale with demand. If the momentum with heavy-hitting system integrators continues, RightScale will be coming to you through its partners. Of course, you can also try it for free and get started in managing the cloud. The company is targeting companies that have more than a handful of servers and has a compelling offering to get started and to grow from there. Does RightScale fit into your scaling plans? Photo Credit: jurvetson Discuss

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Are You the Next Zynga? The Rocket Science at RightScale Helps Deliver a Safe Liftoff