Clouds everywhere

Too much empty cloud talk - we need to start classifying clouds, think what are they good for and start using them.

Amazon EC2, Rackspace, GoGrid, number of others are in fact IaaS - infrastructure as a service

Clouds like GoogleApps, Azure or Force - PaaS - platform as a service

IaaS vs. PaaS are totally different animals. Practically speaking, from a business perspective, I am very skeptical about generic PaaS (like GoogleApps or Azure).

Serious business users would use IaaS clouds due to it's scalability and procurement benefits, but who (in it's right mind) would have resources to start rewriting existing applications to run under Azure or GoogleApps?

I understand a young developer who would like to develop something for PaaS, but let's say this small development becomes a growing successful website - Can it be run under PaaS - what I hear in the industry today is "no way".

For example, DBAs complain a lot about SQL Azure Database, it's backup issues, scalability and visibility issues when it comes to problem root cause analysis.

From an economical perspective - also, no way, - right now, running fast growing web site on PaaS is too expensive and moving from it would be a pain.

As a note - I do see a great future for a specialized PaaS, such as Force - in this case, it is based on a solid and thriving existing community of business users with clearly defined needs and ability to pay for a right solution.

It would be great to see a PeopleSoft clouds or SAP clouds, but right now it is too far in the future.

I am an active cloud user and will share more about my practical cloud experiences. My company (Enteros) created white papers together with IBM about cloud scalability (which is also a big and misunderstood issue).

More later...

Technical areas I will write about

I was lucky to start working in database technology since very early - early versions of Oracle (v6), DB2 (2.1 on mainframe), SQL Server (v 6), MySQL (v3), Sybase and Teradata.

Arrival of scalable  NOSQL databases and a cloud puts a new life into database technology - what we can do with such databases as Hadoop, Simple DB, MongoDb, Cassandra opens new horizons!

I also start working with Internet technologies very early - sill remember using alpha version of Netscape over PPP and slirp. Was a beta user of Java (still holding SunSoft developer box with the first version of java) and prior to leaving to US (from Israel, mid 1995) was approached by Israeli SUN subsidiary to lead JDBC development (to create JDBC that was not existent at that time).

Using database and java technology while working with large insurance companies (Principal Financial Group, Allied Insurance, Nationwide Insurance), large Internet companies (eBay and Yahoo), supporting major Banks (like SVB) and Casinos (Like WYNN) creates great perspective and knowledge of what is working and not working under very high production load, what architectures are scalable and what is not scalable and should be broken into scalable pieces ASAP and how to handle critical production problems in real time.  All this I believe is worth sharing.

I also accumulated huge library of technical tidbits that can be very useful to DBAs, Application Server Admins and well as to System Admins.

Recently I work with data masking technology and find it to be very interesting area to cover as well.

I am sure I'll add more later - but this looks like a good start