I recently read about the SELFMAN project on ReadWriteWeb (Coming Soon: Internet Apps that Heal Themselves). This project, started in 2006, aims to standardize and package the infrastructure needed to manage large-scale distributed applications. So far, they’ve produced some sample / reference applications using components written in Java. I don’t know if the bits themselves [...]
Cloud Computing has gained a lot of momentum this year. We’re hearing about more new platforms all the time, and all the big players are working hard to carve out a chunk of this space. Cloud computing originally promised us unlimited scalability at a lower cost than we could achieve ourselves, but I’m starting to [...]
Back in February, amidst the news about Microsoft‘s new Azure platform, I asked why the concept of Private Clouds seemed to be either dismissed or ignored as a viable Enterprise strategy (see also “PDC Reactions” and “Could Azure be self-hosted?“). Yesterday, I learned that there’s hope, after all. I happened to be in the office [...]
One of the most impactful things I saw at CodeMash wasn’t on the schedule. I’d dropped in to check out Jeff Blankenburg‘s presentation on Azure & Windows Live Mesh, but it was clear that the demo gods weren’t about to smile on Jeff that day. The CodeMashers had sucked up the hotel’s WiFi bandwidth like [...]
In response to my Azure reaction, James Bender pointed out that Azure, in its current form, really wouldn’t make sense as a self-hosted platform. Rather than burying this point in a comment, I’m going to talk about it here, because this positioning (by Microsoft) is pivotal, and it’s crucial for Microsoft‘s future. First, I think [...]