Your data center, sometime in the mid 1990s: the server you ordered finally
arrives. Could be Windows, Linux, some flavor of Unix, doesn’t matter. You
unpack it. Boot it up. Patch the OS. Configure the OS. Install software off
of CDs. Patch the software. Configure the software. Move data to the box.
Test. Tweak. Test again. Finally, the box goes live.
Cut to 2012. You’re working in the Cloud now. You provision a virtual
machine (VM) instance in the Cloud. Or three. Or maybe a few dozen. Only
you’re not just provisioning VMs. You also provision some dynamic storage.
Maybe some Cloud-based queues. You also want some SaaS-based services.
And your software release cycles? Weekly. No, daily. How about hourly?
Now what?
Clearly, it’s impractical to set up your Cloud instances manually, the way
we used to set up servers in the good old days. So you go through the process
o... (more)
Today is a wonderful time for anyone interested in Cloud Computing to be
working with the US government. On the one hand, the government considers
Cloud to be strategically important, and they already have a track record as
an early adopter of Cloud Computing on a grand scale. On the other hand, the
government is also in the unique position of being able to drive standards
for the approach—and in fact, they are even responsible for establishing
the most widely adopted definition of Cloud Computing.
The federal agency who has taken this leadership position is the National
Institu... (more)
If you’ve been following ZapThink for the last few years, you know we’re
talking less about SOA and more about REST and Cloud. Not that there’s
anything wrong with SOA — we’re simply focusing on the current challenges
organizations face when building agile architectures. So, it should come as
no surprise that we finally write a ZapFlash on RESTful Clouds.
You might think the story we have to tell about RESTful Clouds has to do with
RESTful APIs to the Cloud. Sure, we want to be able to access Cloud resources
as well as Cloud management capabilities via RESTful interfaces. Makes so... (more)
A funny thing happened as I was noodling on this ZapFlash. I was all set to
put the nail in the Application Programming Interface (API) coffin,
continuing the discussion of just how awful Remote Procedure Call (RPC)
interfaces are, and how we should avoid them at all costs. But then I ran
across the “explosion of APIs” meme at ProgrammableWeb and elsewhere.
After all, your head must be planted deeply in the sand not to notice the
plethora of APIs at all our favorite Social Web sites like Twitter, Facebook,
and hundreds of others. How can the API be dead when APIs are more importa... (more)
The presents are unwrapped, family has headed home, and the leftovers are
almost gone. Once again, it’s time for ZapThink’s annual retrospective
and predictions for the coming year. While it’s true that many pundits and
prognosticators churn out their guesses for the year to come around this
time, ZapThink takes the practice one step further: we actually review the
previous year’s predictions and score ourselves on how well we did. Here
then are our results from last year and our predictions for the year to come.
2011 Predictions: 2 ½ out of 3
I’m proudest of how well we did on ou... (more)