JP Morgenthal

Let's face it right now the cloud is pretty immature. The level of automation and management of these environments are analogous to the early assembly lines, but it won't be this way long. This is not the industrial revolution and it moves at a wicked fast pace. Before we know it the next generation of cloud computing will be upon us and it will be very different than the IaaS/PaaS/SaaS offerings we know today. For one, it will be intelligent. That is, the cloud will be content aware and it's network connections will act like mycelia hyphae and what one hyphae learns will become available to the entire cloud. Whereas the current cloud is focused on scalability and elasticity, the next instance of the cloud will focus on redundancy, resiliency and collaboration. The discussion regarding public, private or hybrid will become moot as the cloud simply becomes a system o... (more)

Cloud Needs Application Architects to Understand IaaS

Application development has been moving in the direction of platform abstraction. That is, the need for developers to have detailed knowledge of the infrastructure that the application was being deployed on was becoming less important with increasing sophistication of the application platform for which they were developing. Cloud computing is now reversing this course of action, at least in the short term. Actually, the platform abstraction is a bit of a misnomer since the implementation resulted in operations struggling to tweak the infrastructure to meet performance requiremen... (more)

Adventures in Cloudwashing: Are You the Cloud Or in the Cloud?

Anyone who is working intimately with cloud computing and having critical conversations regarding this medium will eventually be party to the “cloudwashing” conversation. Cloudwashing: the activity of associating all your products with cloud computing even though it doesn’t meet core attributes that define cloud computing as created either by de jure or de facto processes. Depending upon your role in information technology cloudwashing is either a major concern or a significant benefit. If you are a product vendor looking to gain attention for your product, then cloudwashing is v... (more)

What's the Best Definition of SOA?

It seems that I am not as flexible as I believed I could be on my thinking regarding SOA. I attempted to categorize various SOA engagements in my SOA World Magazine article entitled “A Classification Scheme for Defining SOA”. I believed that I could hide my dissatisfaction with the lack of clarity surrounding SOA by lumping SODA/application development into its own subcategory. I was wrong! When it comes down to it, there's still just too much ambiguity surrounding the term service. So, you might ask, “What is the big deal if we call everything running on a computer a service?” T... (more)

To Win the Cloud Computing War - Become the Platform

Steve Yegge, a Google engineer, recently posted a long rant on Google+ about how Amazon does everything wrong and Google does everything right. Probably the most traffic generated for Google+ since they launched, which is why he most likely still has a job. While it was painfully excruciating to get through, I wanted to make sure I read the entire entry because the focus wasn’t really on Google at all, but on a transformative idea of Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon. As Steve points out at some point Bezos got “it” and he realized the power and the value in his company wasn... (more)