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RightScale, which was built by ELC on top of Amazon’s EC2 cloud service is featured today in a ReadWriteWeb story that highlights some impressive cloud growth numbers, including an increase in cloud computing usage growth of 1000% in just one year.
From the post:
“We are amazed to see how much has changed in the past year, both in terms of the overall amount of cloud computing as well as the applications being deployed,” says Thorsten von Eicken, RightScale CTO. “For example, our customers’ average server runtime has increased 146 percent, and the number of servers running full time has increased 310 percent, which are indications of not only more production applications, but also increasing cloud stability. Our customers are also launching more powerful servers in support of more users, increasing amounts of data, and additional services offered.”
ReadWriteWeb wrote that RightScale’s numbers point “to an increasing adoption of cloud technologies in enterprise organizations.” It notes that “cloud adoption isn’t simply about horizontal scalability.” Instead cloud customers are purchasing larger “server instance so that scaling can happen vertically instead.” You can find out more about our RightScale project right here on ELC’s pages.
Here is an idea what to do if you are tired of managing DNS servers. BlueCat Networks’ Proteus Cloud Services is the first managed DNS service to offer IP address management (IPAM) hosted in the cloud.
The service is hosted by Afilias infrastructure and enables companies to outsource DNS management and security tasks into the cloud. 15 top level domains are supported.
The advantage of talking your DNS into the cloud? BlueCat promises more security and protection from painful distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks. Larger organizations may also be interested in handing complicated in house DNS management to someone else and pay a fee for the service. BlueCat says its technology is ready for IPv6 transitions.
The package offered by BlueCat isn’t exactly cheap for small companies, but if you depend on your web business and it is growing at a healthy pace, cloud solutions are getting very interesting even at a level down to DNS management.
Smart phones are redefining the definition of mass market. The iPhone is routinely shattering sales records, but feels Android phones breathing down its neck. There are massive volumes in play and it is critical to your business to choose the right platform for your application, whether that is Android, iPhone, Blackberry or Symbian.
Google recently said that 160,000 Android phones are now exchanging hands each day, which is well past the iPhone sales volume of about 90,000. iPhone sales are currently limited by Apple’s manufacturing capacity, but there is no denying that Android is becoming an extremely attractive app platform. Since we are in August already, we are now seeing the full impact of Android in Q2 market estimates. Canalys said that Android is now the most popular smart phone platform in the U.S. with a stunning growth rate of 851% in the U.S. and 861% globally when the entire market grew by just 41%. In the U.S., the Blackberry has now a market share of about 32%, Apple holds just under 22% and HTC, which sells Android phones is already above 14%. 34% of all smart phones sold in the U.S. in the second quarter were Android phones.
Nielsen today confirmed the growth of Android, and says that 13% of all smartphone subscribers in the U.S. use Android phones, while Apple is at 28% and the Blackberry at 35%. However, new smartphone subscribers seem to be flocking to Android which captured 27% of new users, ahead of the iPhone (23%). RIM’s Blackberry is at 33%, but shows a declining in customer acquisitions. Nielsen’s data shows that Android and the iPhone are extremely attractive app platform in terms of their user base. Almost 90% of iPhone users said that they will buy an iPhone again. 71% of Android users plan on staying with Android, while only 42% of Blackberry users are considering a new Blackberry. High user loyalty translates in app user loyalty and plays into your investment decision.
Mobile apps are not just about the iPhone anymore. Android has shown a truly stunning pace and it will be interesting to see the two compete for your attention. Check out our mobile page and projects we have completed recently.
When you are planning hardware resources for a web presence that needs to be available, you tend to assume the worst case scenario, the maximum connections that need to be supported – and then some to make sure you don’t go down when there is one or 1000 more connections. Cloud hosting changes the view and strategy of capacity planning. In fact, we are now talking about reverse capacity planning. Forrester Analyst James Staten highlights a stealth startup that is subscribing to an IaaS cloud and “most of the time pays next to nothing to do this”.
In fact, this company, which requested to remain anonymous, is planning for a minimum monthly bill and scales from there. There is no pre-allocation of resources, as the cloud scales with the demand. If there is no demand, there is a minimum bill. If there are thousands of users, the capacity is available on demand. Staten says that the model should be replicated and it may even be improved: “You can do the same but don’t stop once you’ve determined your base capacity. Can you make it even smaller? The answer is most likely yes. Because if there is a peak, then there is also a trough.“
In the case of the stealth startup, the code was tweaked to minimize the footprint, which enabled them to reduce the footprint even further. What “they really needed persistently was their services’ home page and that could be cached in a content delivery network. So when their service has no traffic at all, they have no instances running on their IaaS platform. Once the cache has been hit they then fire up the minimal footprint (which they tuned down to a single virtual machine) and then scale up from here.”
Staten says that if “you can find the trough then you can game the system to your advantage.” Maybe “gaming” goes a bit far. It is what cloud computing is meant to be.
Cloud computing will be a key force behind hardware sales over the next few years, IDC believes. In fact, the investments are significant enough to be considered a whole new era in IT infrastructures and not just replacements, which highlights the quickly increasing interest in cloud computing overall.
Analyst Katherine Broderick said that “many IT decision makers are seriously considering cloud computing as a way to dramatically simply their sprawling virtual and physical infrastructure. However, there is still some lingering apprehension over issues like integration, availability, security, and costs. These concerns, and how they are addressed by IT vendors, will continue to guide the adoption of cloud computing over the next several years.”
Is it just me or is cloud computing truly igniting vast parts of the IT industry and is turning more and more into the most critical part many segments of the industry will depend on over the next few years? IDC says that server hardware revenue for public cloud computing will grow from $582 million in 2009 to $718 million in 2014. Server revenue for the larger private cloud market will grow from $2.6 billion to $5.7 billion in the same time period.
According to IDC, public cloud computing has lower ASVs than an average x86-based server, public cloud seems less likely to be broadly adopted than private, public clouds will be less enterprise focused than private clouds and according to recent IDC survey results, almost half of respondents, 44%, are considering private clouds.