Ernest de Leon

One of the things that drives datacenter architects and engineers absolutely mad is that networking is still a second-class citizen overall. While server processor speeds, number of cores, memory density and speed, hard drive size and other pieces of the infrastructure have increased dramatically over the years, networking has moved at a comparatively glacial pace. Before the modern push for Cloud Computing, this was a minor annoyance, only seen at certain junctions where large amounts of data needed to be sync'd across long distances. The Cloud, however, has brought this issue to the forefront of engineers' minds. If the Cloud is the heart of an infrastructure, the network is the blood vessels. Instead of substantive arteries and veins, however, we are working with capillaries. If we compare the progress of disk sizes over the last decade from megabytes to terabyt... (more)

What Makes a Cloud Server?

With the massive push toward cloud computing in the enterprise, there are some considerations that hardware vendors will have to come to terms with in the long run. Unlike the old infrastructure model with hardware bearing the brunt of fault tolerance, the new infrastructure model places all fault tolerance concerns within the software layer itself. I won’t say that this is a new concept as Google has been doing exactly this for a very long time (in IT time at least.) This accomplishes many things, but two particular benefits are that load balancing can now be more intelligent ov... (more)

The Five Layers within Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing on Ulitzer As a preface to the series of articles I will be writing on the Value Proposition and Business Cases for Cloud Computing, I wanted to discuss the layers below and within the cloud. It is important to understand what each of the layers is composed of, what the intended function of that layer is, and how these layers interact with each other. By simplifying the cloud computing concept into layers, it is easier to define the roles within the overall structure and explain where your business fits into the model. Let me start by introducing a graphic I whippe... (more)

RDBMS as a Service? In the Cloud? Yes!

There are many amazing things emerging out of Dreamforce 2010 (I really regret that I couldn't make it) and thus far, one of the biggest may be Salesforce's new RDBMS as a Service offering. I don't suppose Salesforce could have purchased a better domain name, Database.com, but the prospect of having an RDBMS in the cloud is very appealing to a broad range of developers. So what is all the hoopla about with Database.com? Well, Database.com is essentially an enterprise grade database that is offered as a service in a utility billing context. That means that you only pay for what y... (more)

Amazon Going PaaS? Introducing Elastic Beanstalk

Are you looking to enter the cloud but don't know where to start? Are you leery of 'cloud-washing' by so many vendors in the IT space? Let's work together to get your business into the cloud in a methodical manner. I am an expert in public cloud computing at all levels (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS) as well 'private' cloud (VMware). We will work together to identify costs, risks and strategies to ensure your projects succeed in the cloud. Below is the email Amazon sent out to AWS customers announcing their new PaaS offering - Elastic Beanstalk. Dear Amazon Web Services Customer, We're exc... (more)