Friday, November 26, 2010

Cloudy week

I felt like in clouds this week. I joined three presentations and all of them were about cloud computing. All three were indicating and predicting the new cloud-computing trend, the advantage of the economy of scale. Large number of computers managed by relatively small staff, the elasticity, the capability to scale on demand. Great applications shared by many small companies and charged per use, no upfront payment, with fast and for the user invisible improvements. Gartner, other analysts and technologists predictions are clear: move to cloud or perish.

It started on Monday morning with Gartner and EMC joined presentation. In the Gartner presentation Jana Ridziova has pointed out the trends and risks of cloud computing. She also gave some interesting numbers. The main message: IT technology is becoming massively scalable, standardized and offered as a service. Many companies will get rid of their IT infrastructure and will use the SaaS.

The next presentation by Sanjay Mirchandani a CIO of EMS can be easily characterized: virtualize, virtualize, virtualize. No wonder EMC owns 80% of the X86 virtualization leader VMware. But frankly, the most important point was the savings EMC achieved by virtualizing 70% of the company. The realized benefits are $12M in power and space, $74M in the data center equipment, 170% in data storage and admin productivity, and 34% increase in power efficiency. These are great numbers and we have to learn out of them.

Steven Willmott, the CEO of 3scale networks has visited the CTU on Wednesday. His presentation has been inspired by the Wired article “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet”. He has been arguing that the web has changed from the static HTML pages to a set of API supporting wide range of functionality for different devices. He has been showing some of the cloud technologies used in his company. His talks were presented to students and overall they received comprehensive breakdown of the new wave of Internet technologies.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

The Google Developer Day 2010, Prague

The Google Developer Day was started as last year by Eric presenting the main topics: HTML 5, Cloud and Android. He started showing simple snippets of HTML 5 code to access disk files, to support drag and drop. Most impressive was a code keeping text on screen horizontal while tilting the notebook. This is a very handy feature for mobile devices. He has shown two impressive 2D and 3D graphics in HTML 5 running inside a browser. There are many browsers including mobile supporting HTML 5 except of the IE, but it still will take some time before we see more HTML 5 applications.
Eric has introduced the enterprise App Engine, which is in its preview version supporting the BigQeury and Prediction APIs. The famous Mapreduce will be also soon available. Great, Google will make these technologies available to programmers. We also have seen a great presentation of a rapid application development tool Roo. It has been developed by Spring owned by VMware. Roo allows development of web application and launch it on many different platforms including the App Engine.
One the fastest growing product is the Android operating system. There are 200k new Androids activated each day. The Android Market is offering more than 100k of applications today.
The whole Google developer gathering was very inspiring. Google Apps, the App Engine, Androig and Chrome are a very strong combination for creating complex and exciting cloud applications. They are putting Google to the leaders in the cloud computing.

Monday, November 15, 2010

Steven Willmott - Presentation

Steven Willmott is the CEO of 3scale networks - an API infrastructure provider based in Barcelona, Spain, London UK and Sunnyvale California.
3scale provides tools and services to companies opening APIs to partners and developers and helps them reach their audiences.
Abstract: Wired Magazine's incendiary article on the 'Death of the Web' may have used some questionable reasoning but underlined how quickly the structure of the Web and the Internet are changing. One of the biggest factors of change is in how companies delivering services and content are re-orientating their offerings around Web Services and APIs in order to server partners and users in new ways - making HTML websites just one of the many channels for creating Web/Internet experiences. While this trend still has much to play out, in this talk we'll cover trends, examples and changes that are already visible and guess at how they might play out in the future.

When: Wednesday Nov 24, 18:00
Where: Dejvice (T2:C3-337)

Cloud computing and it's impact on IT society

Sanjay Mirchandani, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, EMC Corporation will share his 6 years of experience building and running private cloud, the core technology for internal data center of worldwide IT leader EMC. He will speak about the main enablers of the cloud technology like VMware virtualization tools and data center hardware resources. He will present the best practices and the business drivers generally adopted by leading IT companies today.

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is a U.S. Fortune 500 and S&P 500 provider of information infrastructure systems, software and services. It is headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, USA. Its flagship product are the Symmetrix, VMware and RSA.

Date Monday 22. 11. 2010 at 13:00 Location building E, Karlovo náměstí 13, room: KN:E-301.