UP2011 Cloud Conference

Impact of cloud on global economy, trends and developments in cloud computing for 2011-2012 is the theme for year end event in Mountain View, California in December 2011. The format has been developed for International UP 2011 Cloud Conference to provide a platform for users and providers to approach cloud from theoretical and practical standpoint. Keynote sessions, panel discussions will contribute to more precise understanding of the definition, adoption and development of cloud. Also, conference aims at enriching the dialogue between various users and providers from different industry verticals.

A 'common language' among cloud enablers and consumers has already been sought at first UP and Cloud Slam conferences that have provided a highly valuable input into the still emerging field of cloud computing. In Toronto 2009, San Francisco 2010 and Mountain View 2011(Spring), enterprise cloud adopters and major cloud providers came together to discuss various aspects related to the cloud. Different perspectives on the issue have been examined and the conferences provided important insights to the sub-themes of cloud. Nevertheless open questions remained: these questions deal with the general understanding of what benefits cloud computing brings for business and global economy in general. Conference participants urged to solve the ambiguities in the understanding of cloud computing and find better way to leverage cloud for their business goals.

UP 2011 conference adopts an interdisciplinary and international perspective aiming to approach the theme from an analytical and global point of view that also includes the discussion of appropriate methodology to analyse and measure effects and success of cloud computing.

For more details, refer at http://up-con.com/

Intel’s Cloud 2015 vision

Intel’s Cloud 2015 vision – which aims to achieve cloud federation, automation and device-awareness – is almost entirely in Intel’s court. Considering its prevalence in devices from servers to netbooks, Intel can almost singlehandedly accomplish all of the goals at the hardware level, although it still will need plenty of support from the software community. However, as certain antitrust allegations against Intel (sub req’d) illustrate (in which server makers Dell, HP and IBM allegedly abandoned planned AMD offerings at Intel’s behest), the company does have the cachet to affect product strategies. I’m not inferring any illegal activity, but rather pointing out that if anyone has the might to convince IT vendors, cloud providers and device makers to collaborate on standards and interoperability, it’s Intel.

Intel likes client-aware for two reasons. First, Intel wants to keep selling “fat” clients, because “fat client” equals “lots of transistors and performance.” About three years ago, Intel started talking trash about thin client in the context of the start of the ARM wars.

In the intervening years, Intel has toned down the anti-thin-client rhetoric just a bit, but the company is still looking to sell fully-featured clients—or “rich clients” as the chipmaker prefers to call them—of the kind that rival ARM can’t yet match.

Apart from the fact that Intel wants to see clients maintain a robust appetite for the transistors and features it supplies, there is another reason why Intel likes the client-aware cloud vision: lock-in.

Intel would love it if the most convenient and secure way for you to connect to an Intel-powered cloud is with an Intel-powered client. If Intel can build clouds that are vPro-aware and that work best with vPro-enabled clients, then you’ll have a real incentive to make sure that Intel—not ARM—is inside your smartphone, tablet, or laptop.

So, that’s the broad outline of Intel’s vision for the cloud in three years. What’s your take?

Amazon Elasticache

This week, my first cloud paper Cloud Programming Concepts based on few months effort (http://www.codeproject.com/KB/azure/CloudProgrammingConcept.aspx), got publised in cloud zone of CodeProject at http://www.codeproject.com/Zones/Cloud/

Recently, AWS has launched Amazon ElastiCache, a new service that makes it easy to add distributed in-memory caching to any application. Amazon ElastiCache handles the complexity of creating, scaling and managing an in-memory cache to free up brainpower for more differentiating activities. There are many success stories about the effectiveness of caching in many different scenarios; next to helping applications achieving fast and predictable performance, it often protects databases from requests bursts and brownouts under overload conditions. Systems that make extensive use of caching almost all report a significant reduction in the cost of their database tier. Given the widespread use of caching in many of the applications in the AWS Cloud, a caching service had been high on the request list of our customers.

Amazon ElastiCache is compliant with Memcached, which makes it easy for developers who are already familiar with that system to start using the service immediately. Existing applications, tools and libraries that are using a Memcached environment can simply switch over to using Amazon ElastiCache without much effort.

For more details on Amazon ElastiCache visit the detail page http://aws.amazon.com/elasticache