Jason Bloomberg

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)

Architecting Beyond Cloud Computing’s Horseless Carriage

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)

The Secret to a RESTful Cloud

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)

The API Is Dead! Long Live the API!

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)

2011 Retrospective and Predictions for 2012

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)