A review of cloud computing is contributed by Lew Tucker, VP and CTO of cloud computing at Sun Microsystems.

"Tucker said that Sun as a company had evolved its platform from a Unix, Solaris, and Java infrastructure without losing sight of the company's original vision, which is 'the network is the computer,'" writes Roger Smith at InformationWeek.com.

"'In cloud computing, the data center is the computer.' We see a future where there are a bunch of clouds, both public and private clouds, and companies will be able to build scalable apps that are self-provisioning. These apps will be able to scale up automatically where requesting resources will be done in a self-service fashion,'" said Tucker (Smith).

"Tucker cited the example of the Animoto FaceBook app that ramped from 25,000 users to 250,000 users in three days -- scaling from 50 instances of EC2 usage up to 3,500 instances -- as an example of the type of massively scalable app that's possible in the cloud," said Smith.

"'It's the next step up from the Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) Web Services model, which provides you with a LAMP (Linux OS, Apache Web server, MySql Database, PHP [or other] programming language) stack,' Tucker explained," (Smith).

"With Q-layer technology, we can provide a self-service virtual data center, where you can manage virtual components via a management layer. Enterprises will be able to define system architecture at Web scale; Q-layer codifies that," said Tucker (Smith).

"Tucker reckoned that cloud computing is in its early stages and that the lack of cloud standards isn't holding anyone back. 'There is a considerable amount of interoperability between all the cloud vendors (Force.com, AWS, etc.) due to their use of public APIs,' he concluded," (Smith).

About Lew Tucker

"Tucker started work on distributed computing in the mid-'80s as a research scientist and director of advanced development at Thinking Machines, working on machine vision and system architecture to create the massively parallel Connection Machine… During a previous tenure at Sun Microsystems, Lew was an early member of the JavaSoft executive team driving developer adoption of the Java platform, and later became VP of Internet services, with overall responsibility for Sun's Internet sites and services. He left Sun to become a VP at Salesforce.com, where he created AppExchange, a SaaS platform for business applications, and then went on to be CTO at Radar Networks, a semantic-Web-based Internet service for tracking interests, before returning to Sun to lead its cloud computing efforts," said Smith.

About Cloud Computing

Imagine scaling up instantly to massive capacities to meet changing needs. Then imagine doing it on the Web, without having to invest in new infrastructure, train new personnel, or license new software. That's cloud computing, and Sun is making it a reality.

Cloud computing is about managing petascale data. Sun's server and storage systems can radically improve the data-intensive computing emerging in the cloud.

More Information

Sun VP/CTO of Cloud Computing: Your Data Center is Your Computer, by Roger Smith

Sun Cloud Computing with Q-Layer Acquisition

Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing Will Attract Developers

Read More ... [...read more...]

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