Oct 28, 2009
Software is a fast-paced industry. New technologies soon become obsolete ones, and you need keep your mindset in Fire and Motion mode to move forward. Yet, when something really big emerges, say cloud computing, you end up in a crossroad and you need to make a choice about the future of your business.
This future depends on the 3rd party technology you decide to rely on. This is true for software companies buying software components, but it’s also true for brick and mortar companies moving to the next generation ERP.
Oct 10, 2009
Last week, I had the chance to meet in person with Steve Marx and Doug Hauger, two key people part of the Windows Azure team at Microsoft.
First of all, I have been really pleased, those folks are brilliant. My own little company is betting a lot on Windows Azure. When I tell people (partners, investors, customers) about the amount of work involved to migrate Lokad toward the cloud, the most frequent feedback is that I am expecting way too much from Microsoft, that Lokad is taking way too much risk too rely on unproved Microsoft products, that Microsoft failed many times before, …
Sep 24, 2009
Almost one year ago, I posted a a personal review about Azure, Amazon, Google Engine, VMWare and the others. One year later, the cloud computing market is definitively taking shape. Patterns are emerging along with early standardization attempts (ex: www.simplecloud.org).
My own personal guess is that the cloud computing market (not the technology) will somehow be reaching a v1.0 status at the very end of 2009, when the latest big player - that is to say Microsoft - will have finally launched it’s own cloud.
Sep 18, 2009
Disclaimer: this post is based on my (limited) understanding of the Azure Management API, I did start reading the docs only a few hours ago.
Microsoft has just released the first preview of their Management API for Windows Azure.
As far I understand the content of the newly released API, this API just let you automates what was done manually through the Windows Azure Console so far.
At this point, I have two concerns:
Sep 17, 2009
Until very recently, I was a bit puzzled by the Table Storage. I couldn’t manage to get a clear understanding how the Table Storage could be a killer option against the Blob Storage.
I get it now: Table Storage can cut your storage costs by 100x.
At outlined by other folks already, I/O costs typically represents more than 10x the storage costs if your objects are weighting less than 6kb (the computation has been done for the Amazon S3 pricing, but the Windows Azure pricing happens to be nearly identical).
Sep 14, 2009
Disclaimer: I am not exactly a Table Storage expert. In this post, I am just trying to sort out my own thoughts about this service offered with Windows Azure. Check my follow-up post.
Soon after the release announcement of the release of our new O/C mapper Lokad.Cloud (object to cloud) named Lokad.Cloud, folks on the Azure Forums raised the question of the Table Storage.
Although it might be surprising, Lokad.Cloud does not provide - yet - any support for Table Storage.
Sep 14, 2009
When we started to port our forecasting technology toward the cloud, we decided to create a new open source project called Lokad.Cloud that would isolate all the pieces of our cloud infrastructure that weren’t specific of Lokad.
The project has been initially subtitled Lokad.Cloud - .NET execution framework for Windows Azure, as the primary goal of this project was to provide some cloud equivalent of the plain old Windows Services. We did quickly end-up with QueueServices which happens to be quite handy to design horizontally scalable apps.
Aug 30, 2009
I have been hearing a lot about Twitter for a long time. I am still puzzled a bit by the concept, but apparently a significant percentage of the registrants at Lokad do have a Twitter account. So now, I can start wasting time on Twitter too while pretending it’s company work :-)
More seriously, it appears that a couple of competitors, prospects, customers are actually discussing of sales forecasts out there, so it might be worth keeping on eye on that.
Aug 2, 2009
The trick is: Galaad (the horse) was much more trained than I was (cours-equitation.com).
Jul 30, 2009
One of the major little-known weakness of cloud computing is development productivity. Indeed, developing over the cloud ain’t easy, and as complexity goes, the management of a complex, fully-distributed app may become a nightmare. At Lokad, as we started migrating a fairly complex technology, we did get the feeling that we were needing strong patterns and practices - tailored for the cloud - so that we don’t get lost half-way in the migration process.
