I encourage you to check out this very provocative blog post by Forrester Research analyst John Rymer over on Forrester.com, in which he describes what he calls “Adaptive PaaS.” John proposes that the ‘usual suspect’ PaaS offerings have failed to meet the needs of mainstream enterprise users for a variety of factors, and that a new generation of PaaS solutions is coming to the fore which offer the efficiencies of PaaS, but without the negatives associated with this initial crop of PaaS offerings. (I will be hosting John for a webinar on this topic next week; Please join us!)

Of particular interest to John is the ability for this new breed of PaaS offerings to help users adapt existing applications, tools, processes and skill-sets to the cloud, thus the name “adaptive.” Quoting John’s blog:

1. Adaptive PaaS adapts conventional application code to the elastic scaling and multitenancy of cloud architectures. Developers don’t have to use special APIs or languages (like salesforce.com’s Apex) to create apps for the cloud. They code as they always have.
2. Adaptive PaaS adapts conventional servers and storage to provide “cloud” services by providing application, database, and/or file virtualization services. Some of the early adopters of adaptive PaaS use the software to implement internal clouds.

The ideas John presents in his post are very complimentary to those expressed in my earlier post, The Essential Characteristics of PaaS. In fact, my post could have been titled the Essential Characteristics of Adaptive PaaS — in that post and the article on which it was based, I strongly allude to a new style of PaaS offering (obvious example being Appistry’s CloudIQ Platform) that doesn’t carry the baggage of the “traditional” PaaS offerings.

I think John is on the right track with “adaptive PaaS” and I’m looking forward to further industry discussion around these important ideas.

Please post your thoughts in the comments and don’t forget to register for the webinar!

Thanks in part to an aggressive pro-cloud stance taken by the Obama administration, the federal government is positioning itself to be an aggressive adopter of cloud computing and cloud technologies, as evidenced by the recent GSA RFQ. As a result of the government’s push towards the clouds, there has been a strong desire on the part of agency IT leadership and practitioners to hear from real cloud users, providers, and technology suppliers. A number of civilian and defense CIOs and CTOs have taken “study tours” to visit firms like Google and Amazon in an effort to transfer back best practices and lessons learned back to their agencies.

In response to this need, and to help facilitate the sharing of cloud success stories with government, last week Appistry hosted a “Success in the Clouds” breakfast seminar in Washington, D.C.

I provided the “warm-up act” providing an overview of a variety of cloud computing topics and trends before inviting up Mike Rains from FedEx to speak. Mike shared FedEx’s real-world experiences as an Appistry customer and early adopter of private clouds for mission-critical applications, with much of his time spent addressing direct audience questions.

Here are my slides.

One of my take-aways from the event was a reminder of just how broad the cloud discussion is: At one of the breaks I was approached by an attendee asking whether I’ve seen customers using cloud computing as a way to reduce software licensing costs. I responded yes, as we’ve often seen a shift to cloud happen in parallel with a move to open source to accomplish just this. Her response startled me at first, “You mean to products like Open Office?”

To a server-side guy like myself, pushing desktop apps into the cloud is sometimes not quite as interesting as all the datacenter, application-tier and middleware magic that it takes to make that happen, but to end-user organizations the shift away from desktop applications and to web-delivered apps can provide tremendous economic value. It was a good reminder to be conscious of the many perspectives we bring to cloud.

Earlier this morning we announced the most important product initiative in our company’s history.  Built on more than seven years of customer experience and product development, Appistry CloudIQ Platform 4.0 is a major advance for enterprises making the move to the cloud.  You can read more in our press release, "Appistry Gives Cloud a Kick in the Apps!"  My fellow Appistry bloggers — Bob, Guerry and Michael — will also be posting about CloudIQ over the next couple of days.

With CloudIQ, we address the 80% of cloud computing that too often gets ignored.  It is this 80% — the application layer — that is the hardest to do.  To paraphrase something our CEO, Kevin Haar, said in this morning’s press release:  It’s one thing to deploy and manage a single application in the cloud; it’s a whole other ball game when you’re an enterprise with entire portfolios of applications you need to launch skyward. (I’ll be addressing the “80%” in a future post.)

That is the reason we’re so excited about our new product, Appistry CloudIQ Manager.  CloudIQ Manager gives enterprises a single point of application management as they migrate applications to public and private clouds.  More on the new features and benefits of CloudIQ Manager can be found here.

Additionally, if you are interested in learning more about the CloudIQ Platform, I encourage you to register for our webinar on Tuesday, March 31, 2009 at 11:00 a.m. PST.

We’re amped about this next step for the Appistry platform and the important role it will play in making cloud computing a reality for the enterprise.

How would you use a free Macbook Air? 

What if I told you that this weekend you could take 5 minutes, learn how to use Amazon’s brand new AWS console *plus* learn how to deploy applications on a leading cloud application platform *plus* have a darn good shot at winning a brand-spanking-new Macbook Air?

You’d say “Heck yeah, where do I sign up!” right?

Well, I’m glad you asked. You’d sign up right here!

What you’re doing is participating in Appistry’s Golden Ticket II contest, the details of which can be found on our Peer2Peer community site.

What’s particularly cool is that with Appistry’s EC2 support and Amazon’s cool new console, the steps to getting your Golden Ticket are even easier.

Now you have the option of skipping the download and installation steps, and using the pre-built Appistry EAF AMI on EC2. Just deploy your EAF instances via the console, connect via SSH, deploy the Golden Ticket application, and you’re done!

Right now your chances of winning the Air are still very good, so this is a great deal if you can spare a few minutes.

All you need is right here:

[1]  Golden Ticket II overview page

[2]  Step-by-step contest instructions

[3]  Appistry EAF on Amazon EC2 guide

[4]  Official contest rules

Good luck!

Ok, I’ll admit that this is a bit of a copycat post, but I’ve seen a bunch of these around and was inspired to pull together the Appistry version. So I pulled up analytics and here we are: the top ten Appistry blog posts of 2008.

1. The Blind Men and the Cloud, by Sam
   In this post I unveiled the first, if not only, poem about cloud computing. It continues to be a popular one.
2. Amazon S3 Still Limping & the Limits of Clouds, by Bob
   Bob gave Amazon his famous “Mad Kitty” for the big S3 outage back in February. Interesting commentary on when we can and cannot count on clouds.
3. Is Your Code Cloud-Ready and Multi-Core Friendly? (Part 1): Introduction, by Guerry
   In the first of what proved to be a very popular series, Guerry introduced the five attributes of cloud-ready code.
4. Is Your Code Cloud-Ready and Multi-Core Friendly? (Part  4): Idempotence, by Guerry
   Part four of Guerry’s series explores idempotence, which is a powerful software attribute, not a dysfunction.
5. Parallelism : Is Your Code Cloud-Ready and Multi-Core Friendly? (Part 5), by Guerry
   Parallel code isn’t just for academics. Guerry explores the relationship between cloud computing, multi-core processors and parallelism in this post.
6. Is Your Code Cloud-Ready and Multi-Core Friendly? (Part 3): Statelessness, by Guerry
   Discussions of state and statelessness tend to be fraught with confusion and semantic arguments. Guerry does a great job cutting through the noise in this post and lays out the relationship between statelessness and scalability in the clouds.
7. Is Your Code Cloud-Ready and Multi-Core Friendly? (Part  2): Atomicity, by Guerry
   Atomicity is not just for transactions. Here Guerry discusses the role of atomicity in your cloud applications.
8. Cloud Taxonomy: Applications, Platform, Infrastructure, by Sam
   In this recent post I discussed the emerging “Cloud Pyramid,” which organizes types of cloud environments into Application, Platform and Infrastructure.
9. Meltdown 2008, Part 1 – How I Learned to Love Chaos, by Bob
   Written in the early days of last year’s financial meltdown, this article shared Bob’s perspective as an “entpreneureus serialius.”
10. You Can’t Draw a Box Around a Cloud, by Guerry
    In one of my favorite posts Guerry lays out the case for private clouds.

Congratulations to Guerry for authoring six, yes six (!), of the top ten most popular posts on Appistry Blogs (as ranked by pageviews). I’m certainly looking forward to many more great posts from him and all the rest of the bloggers here.

Our partners over at Apptis were kind enough to post video footage from the recent CloudCamp Federal event. At the beginning of the event, each of the sponsors was given the opportunity to present a five-minute “Lightening Talk” on some aspect of cloud computing and where they fit in the big picture. My session is posted below. At the end of the video you’ll have the opportunity to review the other presentations from the event.

The slides are a bit difficult to make out, so I’ve included them below as well.

  With the U.S. presidential elections in the not-too-distant past, I thought it would be a timely opportunity to highlight a few of the results of a survey we conducted at the recent CloudCamp Silicon Valley. The survey is part of a series dubbed “Inside the Cloud” and is an effort to gauge the impact of cloud computing on the cloud community in general, and those attending CloudCamp particular, as well as uncover the issues and opportunities cloud presents.

We had 61 CloudCampers respond to the Silicon Valley survey, representing a mix of providers and consultants (and the ever elusive "other"). Through the survey, they provided feedback on cloud leadership, market conditions, innovation, challenges to cloud adoption, critical cloud attributes, and relevant cloud applications.

Some of the key findings include: 

• Amazon is perceived as leading the race for cloud king, besting Google by a 2-1 margin.
• Respondents expect an uptick in cloud interest as a result of the current state of the economy.
• Infrastructure is currently seen as the source of the most innovation in cloud computing right now.
• Cloud computing’s "Big Three" — security, reliability and scalability — continue to haunt developers’ dreams.
• There remains a considerable amount of uncertainty around what applications will win the cloud race.

The full survey report was released today complete with deeper analysis and statistics. You can read the press release here.

Have a question you’d like to submit for consideration in the next "Inside the Cloud" survey? Post a comment to let me know.

P.S. We’re tallying the results of a similar survey conducted at CloudCamp Federal in Washington, DC, which focused on the unique challenges and opportunities for cloud computing in the federal market (more to follow in a future post).