Dustin Amrhein

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 ag... (more)

In many cases the industry talks about cloud computing being a new and optimized approach to delivering IT services. From the point of view of application developers, cloud computing offers dynamic platforms that equip them with the capability to deliver their application in an o... (more)

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 us... (more)

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, an... (more)

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 ser... (more)

Well, everyone knew it wouldn't be long before cloud computing got thrown under the proverbial bus after the latest Sidekick failure. Observers point at this specific failure, as they have with Gmail, Amazon, and other cloud provider outages in the past, as a broader problem. Som... (more)

The WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance can bring speed and agility to test organizations by drastically increasing the pace and ease with which users interact with WebSphere Application Server environments. I recently got a chance to catch up with IBM's Robbie Minshall. Robbie is a W... (more)

As enterprise interest in cloud computing offerings and concepts continues to increase, the number of solutions in both the public and private cloud spaces increases as well. There's been much debate over public versus private cloud, even to the point of debating whether there ca... (more)

A recent survey from F5 indicates that the cloud computing movement is making significant headway despite what some may see as mere fluff and hype. The survey, comprised of employees from large enterprises (2500+ employees), indicated that 82% of respondents are in some stage of pu... (more)

The Open Group recently announced the formation of the Cloud Work Group. According to the Open Group, this new group “exists to create a common understanding among buyers and suppliers of how enterprises of all sizes and scales of operation can include Cloud Computing technology ... (more)

Over the past few months it has been interesting to see the federal government's embracement of cloud computing. The catalyst for much of this seems to have been the appointment of Vivek Kundra to the Federal CIO position. Mr. Kundra was an advocate of cloud computing during his ... (more)

IBM expanded its software offerings on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) by delivering a WebSphere eXtreme Scale 7.0 Development AMI (Amazon Machine Image). The Development AMI can be used for development and test of commercially available applications without any IBM... (more)

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 comp... (more)

Recently, I attended SOAWorld 2009 in New York City, and I had the pleasure of listening to many distinguished speakers talk about extremely interesting topics.  One of my favorite talks was given by a fellow IBMer, Kareem Yusuf. During the course of Kareem's keynote, he discusse... (more)

A common feature of cloud computing solutions is that they enable self-service access to the services they provide. This enables users to directly procure services from the cloud, and it eliminates the need for more time-consuming, labor-intensive, human-driven procurement proces... (more)

This is a blog about the importance of cloud solutions that are organized as services. As more and more cloud computing offerings hit the market, I think it is becoming increasingly important that users understand what to look for in such solutions. It is one thing to provide so... (more)

When looking at creating a cloud of application environments, private clouds are attractive to many users because of the control, insight, and security they offer. However, besides these things, there is another key benefit afforded by private cloud application environments: cust... (more)

Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 The new IBM WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance is a one-stop shop for creating, deploying, and managing WebSphere virtual systems in a private cloud. It has quite a lot of very cool features that make this a possibility, and I could go on and on a... (more)

There’s no shortage of opinions on how cloud computing and SOA are related. Just plug the phrase into your favorite search engine and you’ll have a day’s worth of reading. What you are likely to find are articles discussing how SOA led to cloud computing, how a good SOA is a prer... (more)

It seems like just about every cloud computing discussion with a development audience results in the same question being asked: “Why does this matter to me?” As cloud computing first appears to be primarily an operational-centric paradigm, it is easy to understand the reason this... (more)