Amazon vs Microsoft

Yday, WallStreet Journal article says Amazon Starts Email Service for Companies.  Ref: WSJ

Amazon wants to bump Microsoft's Exchange out of its cozy position in the enterprise world. To do that, the company has announced WorkMail, a secure email and calendar platform aimed squarely at businesses.

Migration:
WorkMail can be used with existing email clients like Outlook.

Features:
According to Forbes, it will offer shared inboxes, shared calendars, and a global, company-wide address book, among other features, running its massive AWS cloud infrastructure.

Security:
WorkMail data is deeply encrypted with private keys, and the company is letting enterprise clients pick a geographic region where their emails will be stored. That could help employees access messages faster, but more importantly means that privacy-minded businesses can pick a region with favorable laws designed to keep prying eyes away from their data.

Cost:
WorkMail will cost $4 per inbox, a rate that's largely in line with what Microsoft and Google charge for their enterprise offerings.

Launch:
Q2 2015

Spring XD

Happpy New Year 2015 to all the followers.

Spring XD (eXtreme Data) is Pivotal’s Big Data play. It joins Spring Boot and Grails as part of the execution portion of the Spring IO platform. In simple term, itz a runtime environment for data proceessing.

As simple use case, you may define data streams reading from sources and writing to sinks, with processors in between to transform the data. The source could be Twitter, the sink could be HDFS, and the processor could convert the data to a certain format.  Behind the scenes it uses Spring Integration.

Spring XD contains two key components: Admin and Container servers. Using Domain Specific Language, you post the description of the required processing tasks to the Admin server over HTTP. The Admin server then maps the processing tasks into processing modules: a module is a unit of execution and is implemented as a Spring Application Context. The product has two modes of operation - single and multi-node.

Spring XD team have identified ingestion, real-time analytics, workflow orchestration, and export as being four major use cases common to creating Big Data solutions.  It is represented in the high level design as attached.

Spring XD reference is available at http://projects.spring.io/spring-xd/