Whats cooking inside the cloud kitchen

Whats cooking inside the cloud kitchen

With cloud computing and all the associated jargons IaaS, PaaS and Saas establishing themselves very well, I was curious to know what are the new products being developed for the market.

I ruled out all the network allocation, hybrid clouds, virtualization, monitoring, provisioning software because a lot of them are already available in the market and they will not complete the cloud picture unless we know if the core businesses are making products for the cloud.

Interesting observations:

1. The amusing one that caught my eye: Cloud Data Center Feng Shui.

Feng Shui, just like Vaastu, is an ancient science that recomends the best location of water bodies, fire appliances, wind directions etc for a building for the best health and harmony of its residents.

I was surprised to see Feng Shui for Data Centers. There are a few products that advises how each of the appliances, servers, network components, storage components should be placed according to 'what they are for'. For example,

- The Security, Availability components as RED

- Colloboration servers - Pink

- Staffing Pink, Budgets - Purple etc.

I believe colors mean a lot in Feng Shui and I don't know whether the colors are meant to be painted on appliances or if they signify something else (apologize for lack of knowledge).

Well, data centers are finally meant to deliver high efficiencies and a bit of Feng Shui may not harm that.

2. Bio-Informatics

I found couple of products/apps being available for highly data intensive stuff such as Genome research. One product offered configurable base images for scientists that can be deployed on Amazon or Terremark's cloud. The image offered multi-tenant genome and related biologial databases and also offered highly specialized search algoritms such as BLAST which is a collection of searching programs for biological sequence databases.

3. XML Mimic software for SOA based apps:

I liked the idea behind some of these. When your apps are deployed on the cloud and you need XML based responses, XML mimicking software can generate XML responses for you. This accelerates protyping as well as quick tetsing - which are so important in the time-to-value curve of cloud based deployments.

4. Host of innovative products for optimizing federated searches inside clouds, logging mechanisms across heterogeneous stacks, schema crawlers that will dump you all database schemas used inside the cloud. All for better developer productivity.

5. Also a new league of services that 'transform legacy application to the cloud'. The cream of all the products that I saw was this one. Desktop as a service. (www.desktone.com). The website does not offer us the explanation about how you can take your desktop based enterprise application, hand it off to this service provider who will convert this into a hosted or cloud based service. I'm curious to know if it is just plain web based wrapper on top of desktop or if the original desktop product will be reengineered and layered for the cloud. Great initiative though.

Using Muscle power to go Green!

Using Muscle power to go Green!

Microsoft is reportedly coming with a hand powered remote control that doesn't need batteries. " When the user turns the knob, the microcontroller powers up and samples the inputs from the supply circuit" - read the news here.

Although this might appear trivial and too small for the Green initiatives, every small effort helps. On a lighter vein, imagine if:
- Every woman from rural India who grinds wheat flour or idli batter on the stone grinder is given a 'plug in' that will automatically convert hand power to energy.
- Human pulled rickshaws are incentivised to convert wheel rotations into energy
- Couch potatoes given an option to convert heat generated in the seat to energy
- Venom spitting and ferocious politicians converting their decibel levels into energy
- Bollywood dancers given an attachment inside their socks that will convert movements into energy
- Every road hump and crater fitted with an attachment that will convert vehicular thrust into energy.

Read the book "Touch the Earth"

iPad - Pleasant surprise

iPad - just like each one of you I have been waiting for this device. The rumored Appale's Tablet is finally out and its a sweet revelation to most of us that its on expected lines.

I was 'waiting' for this because

- Although Kindle and Sony Reader are great ebook readers they produced a set of issues for me in India. One, they were priced > 300$ and well, just for reader feature and a little bit of 'other freebies' I did not want to pay so much. Two, the data formats such as PDF, Images, Graphs etc are all supported but not without the small prints. While I live in India, where Amazon still has no provider for its services, its quite a hassle to convert all data formats using Kindle because every non-native content is sent to Kindle's server for 'conversion' and then brought back.

India has 23% of its population on the mobile but Amazon has not tied up with any ISP provider as far as I know. Does any reader support Indian languages?

- An e-Reader was one more device I had to carry. There's the laptop, the power cord, the head phones for Skype, the mobile phone already in my travel bag and now one more device that I must bother about. A dream device would have had all features into one with intuitive UI and an optimum form factor that makes it easy to 'handle'.

When the rumors were around for the iPad most people guessed that it would be a tablet. However what surprised me is the features offered for the price. It's a Big iPhone plus e-Reader. (Disclaimer: I still don't know if I can read all types of documents on it). I expect iPad to extend its tentacles everywhere because of its extensibility, the SDK the same as that of iPhone and hence the power that third party developers have will only add to customer usage and pleasure of use.

I was an iPod basher about a few years ago because eberything about it was curtailing and propreitary. However iPod has become a 'good boy' now with its 'Home Sharing' of files with which family members can share the songs or podcasts. New iTunes also converts non-native formats such as realplayer formats by implicitly importing the formats. Podcasts have extended themselves to iTunes U where you can download university lessons on any topic thats available. If Only IPod or iPad can transfer songs without a separate adapter or a dedicated laptop! Thats the last mile that Apple has to go. Extensible, yet exclusive is the key.

Well done Apple. No beta, no trial versions and a big bang release of a new device! I'm waiting to check out the different versions.