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.
