Embedded Microsoft In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 19th Cloud Expo, Yoseph Reuveni, Director of Software Engineering at Jet.com, will discuss Jet.com's journey into containerizing Microsoft-based technologies like C# and F# into Docker. He will talk about lessons learned and challenges faced, the Mono framework tryout and how they deployed everything into Azure cloud. Speaker Bio Yoseph Reuveni is a technology leader with unique experience developing and running high throughput (over 1M tps) distributed systems with extremely low latency  (under 10ms). He is working at Jet.com as a Director of Software Engineering leading key initiatives around service containerization, scaling and geo-redundancy. His extensive knowledge integrating Docker, Mesos, Kafka, and many more pieces of the Big Data stack resulted in numerous performance boosts and operational cutoffs. Y... (more)

Opinion: Who Made Amazon the Judge of What's Legal on the Web?

[This post originally appeared on Joseph Galarneau's blog and is republished here in Cloud Computing Journal (www.CloudComputingJournal.com) by kind permission of the author.] When you visit Newsweek.com, the words you read started their journey milliseconds earlier from an Amazon.com datacenter somewhere in northern Virginia. And if you visited Wikileaks.org earlier this week, the bytes comprising leaked U.S. embassy cables would have traveled a similar path from Amazon servers based in northern California or Ireland. While WikiLeaks and Newsweek are very different organizations, we both relied on the 21st century equivalent of the printing press – cloud computing – to distribute our information. Amazon shut off WikiLeaks servers Wednesday, citing the company’s violation of Amazon rules, coincidentally at the same time government officials called for similar action... (more)

Service Semiotics and the SOA Illusion

Quick! What does a Service look like? Is it an icon on the screen or some collection of XML? Or maybe the concept of Service is too abstract to have a visual representation at all? This question may sound superficial, but in fact, goes to the heart of how Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) interrelates with related concepts like Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA), Business Process Management (BPM) Enterprise 2.0, as well as the fundamental question of how SOA provides value to the business. In fact, visual representations of Services, as well as the composition and consumption of those Services, are becoming the key to many SOA success stories. Without a visual component you can show business users, SOA becomes abstruse; furthermore, as organizations leverage Web 2.0 principles to build mashups, the visualization aspect of the Web 2.0 value proposition becomes a driv... (more)

The Top 250 Players in the Cloud Computing Ecosystem

In the run-up to the next Cloud Expo, 7th Cloud Expo (November 1–4, 2010) being held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley, it's time to give my earlier list a complete overhaul. Here, accordingly, is an expanded list of the most active players in the Cloud Ecosystem. I have increased it from the 'mere' 150 I identified back in January of this year, to 250, testimony – as if any were needed! – to the fierce and continuing growth of the "Elastic IT" paradigm throughout the world of enterprise computing. Editorial note: The words in quotation marks used to describe the various services and solutions in this round-up are in every case taken from the Web sites of the companies themselves. Omissions to this Top 250 list should be sent to me via Twitter (twitter.com/jg21) and I will endeavor to include them in any future revision of this newly expanded rou... (more)

Twilio and LiveOps to Deliver WebRTC Deployments

Click here to follow ▸@WebRTCSummit At the third annual TwilioCon conference in San Francisco, Twilio and LiveOps announced a strategic alliance in the call center space and their first joint customer, a 500 agent-seat call center provider specializing in order taking for leading U.S. restaurants. The customer chose LiveOps for its integrated multi-channel plus social desktop, LiveOps Engage, and integration with WebRTC powered by Twilio. This 500 seat call center is one of the single largest deployments of WebRTC in its young history. "WebRTC is no longer part of the 'imagine-if-you-will' contact center of the future, it's now part of today's strategic cloud contact center offerings," said Marty Beard, president and CEO of LiveOps. "Today's news about our first joint customer is just the beginning. The ease of WebRTC combined with the power of LiveOps Engage is ena... (more)

What Is Service Orientation?

Businesses tend to focus their architecture on efficiency instead of agility. This clear distinction between optimising for the known versus optimising for the unknown inherently counteracts on businesses in their effort to seize any of the new opportunities that arises around them. This article emphasises the importance of architecting enterprise wide systems with quality capabilities and a service orientation that more properly reflects business agility and enables new opportunities to create much more focused, efficient, and adaptable organisational structures. Describing the problem domain Desirable as it might be, delivering agility is not straightforward as the following obstacles must be overcome: [7, 9] Organisational culture and project orientation. In the same way that project orientation inhibited the reuse of components, it may also stifle agility. The ne... (more)

Immutable Service Containers on Amazon EC2

Cloud Computing on Ulitzer Back in June, we released the very first security hardened virtual machine images for the Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment. These original images were based upon the OpenSolaris 2008.11 release and were configured in accordance with the guidelines published by Sun the Center for Internet Security. Since its initial release, we have provided an update to offer this image in the European Region. In August, we took another step forward with the release of a security-enhanced image based upon the OpenSolaris 2009.06 release. This image went beyond just the simple hardening of its predecessor to add functionality such as encrypted swap, non-executable stacks and auditing that was enabled by default. With such a strong foundation, it should have been no surprise that it was likely to be used as a foundation for layere... (more)

Yahoo Open Sources Traffic Server Code

Open Source and Cloud Computing Yahoo has open sourced a version of its Traffic Server, a high-performance application server for building cloud services that it got when it acquired Inktomi. It donated the code to the Apache Software Foundation through the Apache Incubator. It says Traffic Server enables the session management, authentication, configuration management, load balancing and routing of an entire cloud computing stack. It’s supposed to offer fast, reliable and scalable access to cached online content and speed responses to requests for stored web objects, such as files, news articles or images, reducing bandwidth usage and costs. Yahoo says its low-latency, extensible framework makes it ideal for delivering web traffic at high rates, and its “plug-in” architecture makes it customizable to fit different system needs. The company previously open sourced ... (more)

[Flashback to 2008] Is Google the Elephant in the Cloud?

While cloud computing reporting has recently been focused on Microsoft's Azure announcement and Amazon's upgrade to EC2, there's an elephant in the cloud: Google. According to a well-researched article in Cloud Computing Journal, Google filed as long ago as February 2006 a provisional patent application with 91 different numbered claims that arguably makes it clear that Google has a multi-year lead in cloud computing. The article, written by Stephen T. Arnold, concludes that: "Google can, with the deployment of software, deliver global services that other companies cannot match in terms of speed of deployment, operation, and enhancement....[T]his patent document is an indication that Google can put its foot on the gas pedal at any time and operate in a dimension that other companies cannot." Stephen E. Arnold, who blogs at arnoldit.com, monitors search, content p... (more)

Cloud Expo New York Call for Papers Now Open

Early Bird Savings Cloud Expo Cloud computing is a game changer. The cloud is disrupting traditional software and hardware business models by disrupting how IT service gets delivered. Entrepreneurial opportunities abound as this classic disruptive technology begins to proliferate, so it is no surprise that SYS-CON's industry-leading International Cloud Expo is going from strength to strength. The 5th International Cloud Expo, to be held April 19-21, 2010, at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York, NY, announces that its Call for Papers is fast approaching. Topics on which submission are welcome include all aspects of providing or using massively scalable IT-related capabilities as a service using Internet technologies (see suggested examples below). Help plant your flag in the fast-expanding business opportunity that is The Cloud: submit your speaking propos... (more)

[Update] Amazon Boots WikiLeaks Off Its Cloud

UPDATE: Amazon itself has issued via its Amazon Web Services official blog the following rebuttal: "There have been reports that a government inquiry prompted us not to serve WikiLeaks any longer. That is inaccurate. There have also been reports that it was prompted by massive DDOS attacks. That too is inaccurate. There were indeed large-scale DDOS attacks, but they were successfully defended against. Amazon Web Services (AWS) rents computer infrastructure on a self-service basis. AWS does not pre-screen its customers, but it does have terms of service that must be followed. WikiLeaks was not following them. There were several parts they were violating. For example, our terms of service state that “you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content… that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not... (more)