A heavy book!

What would you rather carry on your back — textbooks or lighter than air apps and data?

When I went to school (six miles each way in the snow and rain, LOL), every year the books got heavier. Now, students can look forward to easy trips home with courses online — brought to them by the cloud. I recently read a commentary that said textbooks met the needs of 19th and 2oth century students, but that they fall short of the needs of today’s interactive students. “They are old-school delivery that supports old-school pedagogy,” the author stated. ” (OK, I must admit, I had to go to Wikipedia to find out what “pedagogy” means.)

Instead, cloud computing is much more appropriate for both students and faculty and staff.  The more schools that adopt the cloud, the more they can replace books — which by the way, have a tendency to get rather stale and outdated fast and cost a lot to replace — with cloud-based content delivery.

We at Monitis have been working with more more schools to help them ensure reliability of content-as-a-service.  But they are going beyond course content. The cloud is settling into ivy-covered walls with such resources as word processors, spreadsheets, databases, data visualization and analysis applications, teacher and administrator tools, and voice/video communications.  Often, much of that is provided online by the likes of Google and Amazon and Rackspace, and that’s why we are seeing big demand from schools for cloud platform monitoring, too.

When I think of all the schools I’ve worked with that are trimming IT budgets and making way for future scalability, boosting services to students, ensuring updated and current course content and making administration more efficient, I am impressed by their faith in the cloud movement. Faith is one thing, but I think that they are also good business moves, and the drivers within institutions–whether they be educators, IT folks or students themselves — are far-sighted and good decision makers.

Everybody wants to improve education and our educational system, but sometimes it takes a little thinking out of the box to make forward strides.

Not Raking in the Dough

I read where UBS, the Swiss banking giant, found that Amazon Web Services (AWS) earns $500 million yearly from its cloud computing business.

While that number may sound impressive to some at first blush, it’s really only around 2% of Amazon.com’s annual revenues. And in the blog I read about this news, that would be less than AWS makes on “garden rakes.”

UBS got its numbers by breaking out a lump sum of Amazon’s quarterly earnings reports that it calls “other” revenue, separate from its retail revenues. “Other” includes Amazon EC2, Amazon S3 and other services like packing and shipping goods. On the bright side, UBS predicts that AWS cloud revenue might grow to $2.54 billion by 2014.

So what do these numbers mean to you? On the one hand, $500 million is a tiny fraction of worldwide IT spending — which comes to $365 billion a year right now — so it’s painfully obvious that public cloud computing is a lot smaller market than it’s been made out to be. However, on the other hand, we know that private clouds are preferred right now, as enterprises still have the heeby-geebies about security on public platforms.

So, my take on this is that just because AWS isn’t raking in (forgive the pun) billions of dollars yearly on the cloud right now, it doesn’t mean it won’t someday. After all, it’s built the infrastructure. And you know about that saying: “If you build it they will come.”

The Indian cloud market is now worth about $110 million annually, but a new survey says that could grow by almost 10 times as much to over $1 billion by 2013. Wow; that’s a lot of cloud cash!

The study, called Cloud Computing in India: Opportunities & Way Forward, by Zinnov Management Consulting, says that the Indian cloud computing market, SaaS has seen the most rapid growth until now, and is likely to reach $650 million in sales by 2015, while PaaS and IaaS markets together will reach $434 million each by then.

“This is indeed a perfect storm,” said Pari Natarajan, Chief Executive Officer, Zinnov Management Consulting, in an article I read in The Times of India. “The only difference is that, this storm is destructive only to companies who are not willing to change, while it is a huge opportunity for others.”

Collaborative Applications, CRM, ERP & Email workloads are the dominant apps in Indian cloud computing, according to the article.

I’ve always thought that the emerging economies of the world are the future goldmines of cloud computing, especially as opportunities for further growth in mature markets like the U.S. and Europe scale down a bit. And I believe that someday, homegrown companies in India will provide real competition to today’s mostly Western cloud services providers. Hear that Google?

I know that in my business, as Monitis grows globally and establishes new monitoring stations around the world, our international customer list expands accordingly. I guess my point here is that we in the IT industry often get caught up in our very Western-centric thinking about the cloud, that it’s mostly a trend in developed countries. But nothing could be further from the truth. The cloud, by its very nature, is borderless, and businesses and customers can be found everywhere — in Bombay, Beijing, Berlin and Boston.

Investors who went to Microsoft’s annual meeting came away with positive view of the company’s efforts to develop and grow the cloud, according to an article I recently read.

In the piece, some analysts said that investors had been pulling their money out of Microsoft over concerns that the company wasn’t doing enough to develop new sources of potential revenue. But in the same piece, the analysts noted that Microsoft has a history of adapting technologies invented by others and spreading them to the mass market — and that’s good news.

Microsoft’s COO Kevin Turner, at the company’s annual investor meeting in late July, predicted that it would “lead” with the cloud, and cited examples of winning cloud contracts against Google and IBM. That got investment analysts in a positive mood for Microsoft. For example, a Deutsche Bank analyst said that the bank believes the cloud is evolving from a threat to an opportunity for Microsoft.  And some said they believed investors’ hesitancy over Microsoft was probably due to their lack of knowledge about Azure — which encompasses cloud computing and data storage.

Glad to see Microsoft is getting more confidence from investors. I can only hope that more businesses get more confidence, too, that is, in the cloud. Having monitoring services that check servers and networks and cloud platforms certainly helps remove some of the insecurity.

VMWare's Big Event to Teach about the Cloud via Virtualization

I read recently that at VMworld 2010, the largest virtualization event in the industry, which spotlights VMWare and is set to take place in San Francisco in August and Copenhagen in October, VMWare will put its technology to good, practical use for all its VMworld labs, according to a press release.

At VMworld, attendees can deep-dive into technical sessions and get hands-on labs training, plus access to a wealth of technology and cloud partners who come to the show.  For example, attendees can share and gain practical knowledge around virtualization best practices, building a private cloud, leveraging the public cloud, managing desktops as a service, virtualizing enterprise applications and other strategies.

This year all VMworld labs will be powered by the VMware LabCloud portal, a self-service interface that was custom-built to enable attendees to access lab courses and content. The technology allows VMware to increase the number of labs it offers and provides attendees more ways to explore how virtualization can make their organization more efficient. VMworld plans to stage more than 22,000 lab seats through 480 simultaneous user workstations during the four-day event in San Francisco.

I’m hoping to attend the conference myself, since Monitis has an office in San Francisco, and I’m especially intrigued and pleased by the theme of VMworld 2010:  “Virtual Roads. Actual Clouds.” It will hopefully make it a lot clearer to organizations how to migrate to cloud computing through virtualization and how to explore new pathways for discovering, learning and breaking new ground in transforming IT.

And of course, I’ll be evangelizing about the importance of monitoring servers and networks – virtualized and non-virtualized. So, if you see me, stop me and I’ll bend your ear a bit.

I read that Congress will soon grill federal cloud-computing enthusiast and champion, Vivek Kundra.

Kundra, the nation’s first CIO of the U.S., appointed by Obama last year, will face the House Oversight Committee on his efforts to reform government IT, including plans to institute more cloud infrastructure.

Chiefly, oversight Committee Chairman Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) and Government Management, Organization, and Procurement Subcommittee Chairwoman Diane Watson (D-CA) want to get more information on the cloud, and Kundra’s plans. Perhaps they’re not as enthusiastic about the cloud as Kundra is, but nevertheless, there are some legitimate concerns.

For example, they’re concerned that there are no clear published policies or procedures in place for the federal government to follow when using cloud computing. So, the committee fears that there could be potential problems with security, interoperability, and data integration.

Well, join the club!

These are all concerns about the cloud that the private sector shares as well. Yet, despite their questions, companies are moving in an ever increasing tide to set up private clouds or join public ones to compute more efficiently. So, too, are they adopting cloud-based monitoring of their servers, networks, apps and other IT that they’re migrating to the cloud.

I’m sure Kundra will be able to answer Congress’ questions and put their minds at ease. And there are certainly plenty of examples already out there of governments successfully adopting cloud computing, for example, the city of Los Angeles’s switch to Gmail. Consider even the General Services Administration development of a cloud for federal departments to buy apps – Apps.gov.

In fact, I hope that, as a result of Kundra’s appearance, the committee will spurred to get involved in creating government oversight standards for the cloud – especially in the area of security.

Came across some interesting data from Google on the size, number of resources and other metrics of pages on the web. I thought they were worth noting here because some of the stats indicate that webmasters out there are only taking advantage of some of the power of the web, and in the process limiting themselves and the companies they represent — a lot of times their own.

This stuff comes from Googlebot — the company’s crawl and indexing pipeline. (Googlebot not only processes the main HTML of a page, but also all embedded resources such as images, scripts and stylesheets.)

• The average web page takes up 320 KB on the wire;
• Only two-thirds of the compressible material on a page is actually compressed.
• In 80% of pages, 10 or more resources are loaded from a single host.
• The most popular sites could eliminate more than 8 HTTP requests per page if they combined all scripts on the same host into one and all stylesheets on the same host into one.

Also, this:

• The mean number of hosts per page is 7 for all sites Googlebot looks at, while the median is 5 and the max is an incredible 374
• Mean KB per page is just over 320 for all sites, while the median is about 177.5 and the max is just over 517,026
• The mean KB per host is 45.69; the median is more than 13 and the max is 441,631.71

Do you want your website to run faster? The first step is to make sure you’re monitoring your site. Consider trying Mon.itor.us is a free, powerful website, server and traffic monitoring service. We have established track records of robust execution, alerts delivery and we help many website owners to reach high uptime and availability at no cost. Mon.itor.us is a part of the Monitis family, which provides professional, premium all-in-one monitoring service, integrating application performance with back-end infrastructure and cloud monitoring.

Mon.itor.us provides a fresh, novel approach to web and systems monitoring.

What's Your Favorite Cloud Flavor?

Just as there’s vanilla and chocolate and other ice cream flavors that different people gravitate towards, there are four favorite flavors today to cloud computing, according to an article I just read on IT World. A lot of this I’ve heard already, and certainly seen already among my Monitis monitoring services client base.

One is internal or private clouds — which allow a company to use virtualization and management software to tie together servers, storage, networks data and apps. The end goal is to allow companies to shift storage, computing power or other resources invisibly from one place to another to give all end users in an enterprise all the resources they need — but no more than that.   And private clouds should also give companies a lot of management automation and let business units charge back for services used.

Another favorite flavor is an external cloud — the kind that many small and mid-sized businesses gravitate to because it is cost effective, eliminates the need for IT proficiency, but unfortunately is also the kind that is worried about by a lot of folks for security reasons. Goodness knows there’s been plenty of evidence that they’re not perfect and are subject to service denials and database invasions (the whole Google China incident).  By the way, the article quotes recent Portio Research that says 68% of respondents are worried about security enough to hold them back from starting cloud projects.

Then there’s the Hybrid approach to cloud computing — a mix of internal clouds, external cloud services and traditional SaaS options. This is the flavor most companies relish, and it’s the near future of cloud computing, says the article. Smaller-scale workspace on demand services, for instance those offered by CloudShare, Soonr or Microsoft Azure, often work.

SaaS is the fourth flavor, and apparently the vanilla of the group, according to the article. “For those looking for an even smaller slice of additional functionality or capacity, plain-jane SaaS may be the way to go,” says the piece. “The quickest way to get into cloud computing is to sign up for free email at Yahoo or Google, or for productivity apps from Zoho, 37Signals or a host of other services aimed at businesses or individuals.”

Whatever flavor of the cloud your company leans toward, there are opportunities for every type of enterprise. And considering the options out there, I can’t think of any wiser strategy than to employ monitoring of cloud apps and cloud platforms as a complement to employing clouds.

It seems that the world of academia is coming up with a new way for cloud platforms — which offer individual computer users and companies access to powerful computers and software applications hosted by remote groups of servers — a kind of early warning system that can predict bottlenecks that slow operating speed and then address them before they become a major problem for businesses.

The research comes from the University of North Carolina.

“Previously, something bad would happen and you’d be left trying to figure out what took place. Often, you’d be unable to recreate the exact conditions that created the problem,” says Dr. Xiaohui (Helen) Gu, an assistant professor of computer science and co-author of a paper describing the new research, in an article I read recently. “However, if you can predict an anomaly, you are able to track the exact conditions that are leading up to a problem, diagnose what is wrong and put corrective actions into place much more quickly.”

The list of things that can go wrong and interfere with smooth operation of hosting services, cloud computing and data centers is long. Just a few: shrinking user capacity and host failures — resulting in violations of service agreements, financial penalties, even loss of clientIs.

In order to be on target predicting abnormalities, UNC researchers created a series of models that examine system activity in a variety of different contexts. In other words, the models are able to determine what constitutes normal behavior under a lot of different circumstances. Since the models do a good job of defining normal behavior, they are able to pretty accurately identify abnormal behavior, said the article.

Monitis's Web Load Testing: How it Works

Gee, this sounds an awful lot like what we at Monitis do for customers of cloud services providers, and it’s called Web Load Tester. With this service we help companies ensure their sites web pages continue to work as designed when more visitors than expected to show up and buy your products. Heavy user traffic is never a bad thing, unless your web system is under too much stress.  Web LoadTester helps you determine how your system responds to that traffic.  The service is available 24/7 to ensure your websites and applications are ready for any number of visitors whenever they arrive.

Glad to see UNC and Monitis are in sync working on ensuring smooth running of cloud services, even if our efforts are for different sets of audiences.

Seems to me there’s a lot of movement toward a broader, stronger cloud infrastructure these days in all parts of the world, but I’m particularly struck by the activity in Asia. For example, last year we responded to rising customer demand for monitoring services in China by opening a monitoring station there.

Yamamoto Dreams About the Cloud

Now comes word that Fujitsu, that Japanese electronics giant, is “pinning its future” on cloud computing services, says the Wall Street Journal – that is, to lead its long-term earnings and overseas expansion.  Masami Yamamoto, the president of Fujitsu, said that he expects cloud computing-related businesses to generate revenue of about Y1.3 trillion to Y1.5 trillion in the fiscal year ending March 2016.  Now, cloud computing services only generate revenue of only about Y100 billion for the firm.

Fujitsu recently restructured to reduce its exposure to volatile and capital-intensive businesses such as semiconductor production and hard disk drives.  And now, it is trying to pitch itself to corporations as an all-in-one provider of hardware, software and services a la IBM.

Yamamoto said that the company should have 5,000 cloud computing specialists on its staff by the end of March 2012, and that Fujitsu’s clients will see the benefits when they adopt the SaaS business model — expected by many industry experts to replace the sale of software in packages for installation on individual computers.

“Go East, young man” could be the new mantra of cloud IT pros, just as “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country!” uttered by an American newspaperman, was for the pioneers of America in the 1800s.

However things shape up, more and more firms — East and West (North and South, too) — will be coming to rely on monitoring services to keep their new cloud computing business gathering in the cash. So, it’s not just the end user who will need independent help keeping an eye on servers, networks, sites, bandwidth (you name it), but those very providers themselves.