EC2-SQL: Competition in the Cloud

Not to be outdone by Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server will be available on Amazon's EC2 come late autumn. Read about it here... And you may want to read up on Microsoft's Windows Cloud operating system for developers at Slashdot. Is Microsoft adapting? Come on, now... It happens... Sometimes... Seldom.

And so goes another step for cloud computing...

Tags: amazon, mssql, MicroSoft

Relational vs. Cloud

The Scale Out Blog has an interesting article about the relational model and cloud databases.

Stormy Cloud

Amazon's S3 and EC2 services had three hours of downtime, followed by connectivity issues. The cloud looks a lot less reliable as Amazon fails to uphold their 99.9% uptime SLA. Hopefully Amazon will be open about the details; apparently they have been communicative on their forums. The impact of the outage is interesting; Tumblr and Twitter are two of the more popular sites affected.

Castles in the Clouds

Software-as-a-Service continues to gain momentum with more companies offering cloud computing solutions and even Development-as-a-Service.

Gartner seems to think SaaS will be adopted, apparently quite readily, if 15% of large companies will have SaaS initiatives by 2010. There is still COBOL and IDMS in this world. There are many factors that I feel are being glommed over. A couple of high level points:

Accountability--How anxious are companies to say, 'would you please hold onto all of our proprietary data for us?' For downtime they get to point a finger, but they still have to deal with the angry customers.

Security--Isn't this the ultimate all-your-eggs-in-one-basket situation? Again, companies are anxious to be beta testers?

Customization--Companies run differently... Look at how many canned applications you can find that do the same thing.

I can see smaller companies adopting cloud technologies more readily than large companies. They have budget and resource constraints. But I think it will take time before larger companies put stock into these offerings--hopefully not as long as grid computing.

I am just a DBA; I recognize that I am not business-oriented, as a misanthrope I do not possess the management mindset. Yet I see some very serious setbacks to SaaS adoption. Part of this is skepticism from seeing the industry and IT shops cycle through centralization and decentralization trends.

Let's hope that there is some substance to this hype.