SE News

Cloud computing allows companies to store and process data more efficiently than ever. But the code that’s used to control the machines in a computing “cloud” remains surprisingly clunky. Now some researchers are exploring novel programming languages for controlling the cloud, and they’re borrowing an approach developed in the ’80s.

Most programming languages were never designed handle so many computers or so much data spread out across them. Software frameworks such as Google’s MapReduce and an open competitor called Hadoop provide handy tools for doing this. But there’s room to make the process much more efficient.

Erica Naone

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/24220/

Amazon Relational Database Service is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity, while managing time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing you up to focus on your applications and business. Amazon RDS gives you access to the full capabilities of a familiar MySQL database. This means the code, applications, and tools you already use today with your existing MySQL databases work seamlessly with Amazon RDS. Amazon RDS automatically patches the database software and backs up your database, storing the backups for a user-defined retention period. You also benefit from the flexibility of being able to scale the compute resources or storage capacity associated with your relational database instance via a single API call. As with all Amazon Web Services, there are no up-front investments required, and you pay only for the resources you use.

http://aws.amazon.com/rds/

The flexibility and economic benefits of cloud computing have generated a tremendous amount of interest. As developers work with this technology, an obvious concern is vendor lock-in. Writing an application that makes the most of cloud computing is great. But what if that application locks you in to a single vendor? The Simple Cloud API is an effort by multiple cloud vendors to create a single API that works with cloud services from multiple providers. This article is a high-level overview of the API and its goals.

Doug Tidwell

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-simplecloud/

The International Cloud Symposium features expert speakers from around the world to present on the most important and relevant topics pertaining to the emerging field of Cloud Computing. The theme of “The Future of Cloud Computing” highlights many of the modern technology innovations that are being developed in support of Cloud-based services. As a co-located conference being held in conjunction with the 2nd International SOA Symposium, this event further addresses the ever-widening convergence between SOA and Cloud-based services.

World Trade Center Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Conference: October 22-23, 2009, Workshops: October 19-21, 2009.

http://www.cloudsymposium.com/
http://www.dnv.nl/nieuws_events/events/2009/2einternationalesoacloudsymposium.asp

Cloud computing is getting tons of press these days. Everyone has a different perspective and understanding of the technology, and there are myriad variations on the definition of the cloud- William Fellows and John Barr at the 451 Group define cloud computing as the intersection of grid, virtualization, SaaS, and utility computing models. James Staten of Forrester Research describes it as a pool of abstracted, highly scalable, and managed compute infrastructure capable of hosting end-customer applications and billed by consumption. Let’s take it a step further and examine the core principles, or pillars, that uniquely define cloud computing.

Dave Malcolm

http://soa.sys-con.com/node/904780

Welcome to Google App Engine for Java! With App Engine, you can build web applications using standard Java technologies and run them on Google’s scalable infrastructure. The Java environment provides a Java 6 JVM, a Java Servlets interface, and support for standard interfaces to the App Engine scalable datastore and services, such as JDO, JPA, JavaMail, and JCache. Standards support makes developing your application easy and familiar, and also makes porting your application to and from your own servlet environment straightforward.

The Google Plugin for Eclipse adds new project wizards and debug configurations to your Eclipse IDE for App Engine projects. App Engine for Java makes it especially easy to develop and deploy world-class web applications using Google Web Toolkit (GWT). The Eclipse plugin comes bundled with the App Engine and GWT SDKs.

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/overview.html

Scott Granneman’s new book Google Apps Deciphered — Compute in the Cloud to Streamline Your Desktop is a very useful technical overview about deploying Google Apps. It promotes a contagiously positive “we’re gonna be saved” view of Google’s ambitious initiative to provide our user communities with the perfect environment to counterbalance the Microsoft-centric archipelago of computing workstations. Good on Google, and good for Mr. Granneman for providing this practical overview, a comprehensive how-to for deploying Google Apps in any workplace.

Lorin Ricker

http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/25/1314207

There has been increasing hype about cloud computing during the last year. Big companies such as IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon have announced their strategies for cloud computing. Smaller companies, even start-ups, have offered their services. As always, when something is hyped a lot, it’s good to ask why we care about it, and what are the benefits to be gained by customers. This last installment of the Architectural Manifesto explores, at a high level, cloud computing and its possibilities for both vendors and customers.

Mikko Kontio

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ar-archman10

A number of people have asked me how Microsoft’s new Windows Azure platform compares with Amazon’s EC2 platform or what Google is doing with cloud services. It seems to me, that at least for now, these so-called “cloud platforms” aren’t really as competitive with one another as it seems. Below is what the typical user needs to know about these platforms, and what they may mean for the future of applications.

Michael J. Miller

http://blogs.pcmag.com/miller/2008/11/cloud_thinking_amazon_microsof.php

The Azure Services Platform is an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used individually or together. Azure’s flexible and interoperable platform can be used to build new applications to run from the cloud or enhance existing applications with cloud-based capabilities. Its open architecture gives developers the choice to build web applications, applications running on connected devices, PCs, servers, or hybrid solutions offering the best of online and on-premises.

http://www.microsoft.com/azure/default.mspx

HP, Intel Corporation and Yahoo! Inc., announced today the creation of a global, multi-data center, open source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education. The goal of the initiative is to promote open collaboration among industry, academia and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in data-intensive, Internet-scale computing.

The HP, Intel and Yahoo! Cloud Computing Test Bed will provide a globally distributed, Internet-scale testing environment designed to encourage research on the software, data center management and hardware issues associated with cloud computing at a larger scale than ever before. The initiative will also support research of cloud applications and services.

http://research.yahoo.com/node/2328

Cloud computing can be loosely defined as using scalable computing resources provided as a service from outside your environment on a pay-per-use basis. You use only what you need, and pay for only what you use. You can access any of the resources that live in the “cloud” at any time, and from anywhere across the Internet. You don’t have to care about how things are being maintained behind the scenes in the cloud.

In this series, learn about cloud computing using Amazon Web Services. Explore how the services provide a compelling alternative for architecting and building scalable, reliable applications. This first article explains the features of the building blocks of this virtual infrastructure. Learn how you can use Amazon Web Services to build Web-scale systems.

Prabhakar Chaganti

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/architecture/library/ar-cloudaws1/

Almost every day recently I find myself explaining Cloud Computing to different people at all levels and roles in various organizations. So, I decided to take a stab at it from my point of view. The challenge in explaining cloud computing is that there is more than one answer to the what is it question. The field is evolving rapidly and everyone wants a piece now. This article attempts to define and break down cloud computing to it’s most important components in the context of the business use case.

Kent Langley

http://www.productionscale.com/home/2008/4/24/cloud-computing-get-your-head-in-the-clouds.html