Dustin Amrhein

A recent announcement from IBM signaled the availability of a new offering in the smarter planet initiative: IBM Smart Business Development & Test on the IBM Cloud. One of the newest offerings in the suite of cloud products from IBM, the IBM Cloud provides a public cloud where users can launch and run selected IBM software. As its name implies, the IBM Cloud is especially focused on development and test scenarios. The idea is to let developers and testers quickly spin up both development and application runtime tools, use them, and just as quickly tear them down. Since all of the software runs on the IBM Cloud infrastructure users don't need to acquire hardware or software, nor do they deal with lengthy install processes. All they do is select the necessary software comp... (more)

Don't Fumble the Hand-off

Imagine for a moment that you’re a software developer who has been charged with adding a new feature into your company’s billing system application that allows bills to be automatically sent to customers via email. You spend weeks, possibly months, working on the new function, and then at some point you move to the unit testing phase. You set up an environment, configure the product with... (more)

A Framework for REST in Java

Not long ago I worked on a team charged with building up a Java-based REST infrastructure. Our goals were to first support what was then an emerging specification for Java-based RESTful services called JAX-RS. Beyond that, we had thoughts of building an entire framework, both server and client, around RESTful services written in Java. Some of the people I worked with on that team are now... (more)

Confronting The Culture of Cloud Computing

Over the past two weeks I’ve been talking to IT architects and engineers from companies of all sizes and across many industries about cloud computing. It seems that many are moving past the talk and hype of cloud computing and looking into implementation details. Many of the companies I’ve talked with are either already leveraging cloud computing (both public and private), or they are cu... (more)

Forget Defining Cloud Computing

Defining cloud computing has proven to be nearly impossible. Ask ten different people and you'll get ten different answers. Countless discussion groups, blogs, articles, etc. have attempted to give their own take on cloud computing, and all to no avail. The industry just can't agree on a common definition. With that in mind, perhaps it's time to move past trying to define the cloud and l... (more)