Kaushik

There has been a recent buzz in the Cloud Computing space with Rackspace announcing the launch of an open source cloud platform called OpenStack. We thought it would be a good idea to understand the platform and what it really means for Rackspace and the overall Cloud Computing space.

Cloud Computing has evolved into a large spectrum of services under a broader umbrella and typically all services which include shared resources, software and platforms provided as an 'On-Demand' service fall into this category. Cloud Computing however has various flavors of implementation and in this article we will talk about the three major flavors Software as a Service which are (SaaS), Platform as a Service(PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

Understanding the storage options on Google App Engine is an important requirement since the default option available on the App Engine today is the Data Store which is a proprietary Google Database which requires an understanding and usage of its custom APIs and implementation. In this post we will talk about the Google Data Store and some of the basic aspects of the storage, features available and the key benefits and challenges in working with the Data Store.

In one of our earlier posts we did a comparison between Google App Engine and EC2 based on some of the key parameters driving a Cloud Computing platform. In this post we will focus on a comparison between Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure.

While we have been evaluating in our blog posts the various features available on popular Cloud Computing platforms today, i thought it might be a good idea to understand when and how all this started and look back at where this began and trace some of the key events in the progress of cloud computing. Amazon like all other Internet companies in the period of the dot com bubble were left with large amounts of underutilized computing infrastructure.

Here is a list of the Top 5 Cloud Computing providers. The key parameters used for comparing these cloud platforms include when the platforms were introduced, support for various operating systems/languages, current adoption levels of the platforms and the overall potential of the platform. A good understanding of the key cloud computing platforms is critical to understand the current state of cloud computing and the overall direction of the industry.

This is a collection of key resources from some of my favorite links and posts. This should give you a great starting point for working with Google App Engine.

Google provides a number of free services which are available as easy to call APIs very useful to build a standard web application. Many of the services provide core functionality required in all web applications which could require a significant amount of effort if you attempt to build from scratch. Instead by using these services it should be possible to bootstrap an application with a very short turn around and focus on the core business logic that the application needs to provide.

This year has been the year of Cloud Computing. You need to be literally hiding under a rock if you have not yet heard about it. Its everywhere, it seems enterprises are moving to the Cloud, small startup companies are moving their services to the cloud and it seems like the whole world will pretty much be on the cloud soon. Really is it this big ? It might be a good time to evaluate how big the adoption really is. Who are the big players and what does the competition look like.

Once you have a application ready and tested in your local environment the next key step is to be able to deploy the application online on Google App Engine. This is pretty straightforward given the options directly provided in Google App Engine Launcher and the Eclipse Plugin for App Engine. Lets outline the key steps in getting your application running live for the world.