Dustin Amrhein

Yesterday, I read the latest post on James Urquhart's Wisdom of Clouds blog. As I often do, I found myself nodding my head as I read James' latest thoughts on cloud. In this particular post, James provided some thoughts on the types of applications for which we would see growing cloud-based deployments in 2011. I suggest you read the full post here, but I do want to identify the three application types James points out in his post: - Data intensive, analytical applications: James points out that cloud makes the economics of storing and processing large sets of data feasible. In that vein, one may reasonably expect that more companies will turn to the cloud for this style of applications. - Online commerce and communities: James says that online commerce applications and communities take advantage of low startup costs and risk enabled by the cloud. One can reasonably... (more)

How Are You Building Your Cloud?

"What are the use cases you want to pursue with your enterprise cloud project?" The question seems innocuous enough, but I can tell you from first-hand experience that it is anything but. If you asked five people from different teams within the same company to each give you three use cases, you would end up with 15 different scenarios. Such is the case in the current enterprise landscape where points of view on cloud vary about as much as you can imagine. Each organizational fiefdom has its own set of pain points, challenges, and initiatives to tackle, and each one of those teams... (more)

User Control and the Private Cloud

One of the comparison points between the public and private cloud domains is the difference in the level of control and customization over the cloud-based service. In a public cloud environment, users typically receive highly standardized (and in many cases commoditized) IT services from the provider. In the private cloud, it is usually the case that users have a higher degree of control and customization over the cloud-based service. I would wager a bet that to many this makes perfect sense and it is simply a manifestation of who has control over the means of delivery (third par... (more)

Cloud Computing - More than Elasticity

Quite honestly, I am a little fascinated at the preponderance of focus the industry sometimes puts on the cloud attribute of elasticity. Sure, it is important, and in fact, a necessary attribute to truly consider something a cloud. It also makes for cool reading in case studies where companies have successfully harnessed elasticity in the cloud to reap business value. However, in my experience with enterprise users, many would benefit from a couple of less sexy, but equally important attributes of cloud: standardization and automation. When I am out talking with middleware appli... (more)

Reporting for the Cloud

Normally when you read or hear someone talk about application environments running on cloud platforms a lot of focus is put on provisioning and elasticity. Mainly the claims are that you should be able to very quickly provision full application environments on the cloud platform and that those environments should grow, and shrink, based on the demands on the system. I certainly have no argument that those capabilities are important functionality for a cloud platform, but based on some recent conversations with several different users I'm beginning to think we aren't talking enough... (more)