Develop better cloud services to deal with the market

Many people know that cloud computing is still in its development stage. We can see this by looking at the large number of small or new cloud offerings. In a mature industry, smaller companies will ultimately sacrifice as more rapidly growing companies boast larger booths.

In other words, many companies, big and small, offer cloud service development services and tools. The most basic product, from zero-development applications, to provide cloud-based hosting services. More comprehensive products include development tools and pre-built applications that developers can use as a building block to build their own unique web-based applications.

Let us come back to see who is providing what services from a cloud service development perspective. This is a funny company and service portfolio.

Amazon

This is right, Amazon, one of the largest retailers on the Internet, is also a major cloud development service provider. Consider the following: Amazon has spent a lot of time and money setting up a large number of servers to serve its popular Web site, it is the vast amount of hardware resources available to all developers.

The service we are talking about is called Elastic Compute Cloud, also known as EC2. This is a commercial web service that allows developers and companies to rent the server cloud owned by Amazon. The server cloud is one of the largest server farms in the world. EC2 makes scalable application deployment possible by letting customers request the specified number of virtual machines and loading whatever application they choose. As a result, customers can create, launch, and terminate server instances on demand, creating a truly "resilient" operation.

Amazon's Service offers three configurations of virtual servers for customers to choose from:

Small, it's equivalent to a system with 1.7GB of RAM, 160GB of storage and a 32-bit core processor

Large, it's equivalent to a system with 7.5GB of RAM, 850GB of storage and two 64-bit kernel processors

Very large, it is equivalent to a system with 15GB of memory, 1.7TB of storage and four 64-bit kernel processors

In other words, you only have to choose the configuration and computing power of the virtual server you want, and the rest is done by Amazon.

EC2 is just one part of the Amazon Web Services offering that gives developers direct access to Amazon software and machines. By leveraging the computing power that Amazon has built, developers can build reliable, robust, and low-cost web-based applications. Amazon provided the cloud (and access to it), and developers provided the rest. They only need to pay for the computing power they use.

AWS is perhaps the most popular cloud computing service available today. Amazon claims more than 330,000 customers, including developers, start-ups, and established companies.

Google application engine

Google is a web application leader, so it's no surprise that it offers cloud development services. Available in the form of Google Apps Engine, these services allow developers to build their own web applications using the same infrastructure on which Google's robust applications rely.

Google App Engine provides a fully integrated application environment. Leveraging Google's development tools and computing clouds, application engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain and easy to scale. All you have to do is develop your application (using Google's API and Python programming language) and upload it to the application engine cloud, from where it is ready to serve users.

As you speculate, Google provides a robust cloud development environment. It has the following characteristics:

Dynamic Web Services

Universal web technology full range of support

Persistent storage with query, classification, and transactional capabilities

Automatic expansion and load balancing

API for user authentication and e-mail using Google Accounts

In addition, Google also offers a full-featured native development environment that emulates Google's application engine on any desktop computer.

One of the best things about Google products is that unlike most other cloud hosting solutions, the Google App Engine is completely free to use - at least at the basic level anyway. A free application engine account can use up to 500MB of storage and enough CPU power and bandwidth to support 5 million page views per month. If you need more storage, computing power or capacity, Google intends to provide additional resources (fees) in the near future.

IBM

Given IBM's strength in enterprise-class computer hardware, it is not surprising that it is rolling out cloud computing solutions. Through Blue Cloud, IBM introduced a complete cloud-based on-demand service for small and medium-sized businesses.

Blue Cloud is a series of cloud computing products that enable organizations to diversify their computing needs into resource grids that are globally accessible. One such product is the Express Advantage suite, which includes data backup and recovery, email continuity and archiving, and data security features as part of a data-intensive process handled by a typical IT department.

To manage its cloud hardware, IBM provided an open-source load-scheduling software called Hadoop based on the MapReduce software Google uses in its own products. Other software includes PowerVM and Xen virtualization tools and IBM's Tivoli data center management software.

Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is perhaps best known for its sales management SaaS, yet it is also a leader in cloud computing development. The company's cloud computing architecture is called Force.com. The platform runs as a service on the Internet and is completely instantaneous. Salesforce offers its own Force.com APIs and development kits. Charges are based on each login.

In addition to Force.com, AppExchange is a web-based application's directory. Developers can use apps uploaded by others in the AppExchange to share their own apps in the directory or publish private apps that only authorized companies or customers can use. Many apps in the AppExchange library are free, and other apps can be purchased or licensed from the original developer.

Not surprisingly, most of the existing AppExchange apps are sales related - sales analytics, email marketing, financial analytics, and more. However, companies can use the Force.com platform to develop any type of application. In fact, many small businesses have jumped onto Force.com.

For example, the April 2008 issue of Microcomputer World magazine quotes Jonathan Snyder, CTO of Dreambuilder, a 10-person mortgage-backed investment company based in New York City. "We are a small company," Snyder said. "We do not have the resources to focus on buying a server and starting from scratch. For us, Force.com is a real booster."

Other cloud service development tools

Amazon, Google, IBM and Salesforce.com are not the only companies that provide tools to cloud service developers. There are a number of developers should be assessed, the end user may be the last to be familiar with the smaller companies are engaged in this area of ​​work. These companies include the following:

3tera (3tera.com) provides AppLogic Grid operating system and on-demand cloudware architecture.

10gen (10gen.com) provides a platform for developers to build scalable web-based applications.

Cohesive Flexible Technologies (cohesiveft.com) provides a virtual server platform called Elastic Server On-Demand.

Joyent (joyent.com) provides web application developers with a scalable on-demand infrastructure called Accelerator and an easy-to-use web application suite called Connector for small businesses.

Mosso (mosso.com) provides an enterprise-class, auto-expandable cloud hosting service.

Nirvanix (nirvanix.com) provides developers with a cloud storage platform and Nirvanix web service that provides file management and other public operations through standard APIs.

Skytap (skytap.com) offers an on-demand web automation solution called Virtual Lab that enables developers to build and configure lab environments with preconfigured virtual machines.

StrikeIron (strikeiron.com) provides IronCloud, a cloud-based platform for delivering web services and a variety of real-time data services that developers can integrate into their own applications.

In addition, Sun Microsystems has a research and development program called ProjectCaroline.net, which provides an open source hosting platform for developing and delivering web-based applications. The general public visits the Caroline Plan's grid for free.

Maturity of cloud services

In order to understand wherever web-based applications we call cloud services are in the computer software hosting process, we turned to our good friends at Microsoft and gave them four major maturity levels.

The first level of maturity is the traditional application service provider (ASP) software delivery model, dating back to the 1990s. At this level, each user has their own personalized version of the hosted application that runs their own application instance on the hosting server.

The second level of sophistication has arisen when providers provide a single application instance for each customer. At this level, all instances use the same implementation. As with Level 1 applications, the code is not customized for each user. In contrast, user personalization is achieved by providing detailed configuration options in the application.

The third level of maturity marks a major change in the way applications are hosted. At this level, the vendor runs a separate application instance for each user. With configurable metadata, the system provides a unique user experience, with authorization and security policies ensuring that each user's data is separate from other users.

At the fourth and last level of sophistication, vendors serve multiple users on a farm of homogeneous instances of load balancing. Because the number of servers (and instances) can be increased or decreased as needed, this type of system scales to a large number of users.

In addition, patches and upgrades can be easily rolled out to the entire user base as easily as a single user. This level is where cloud services make a difference.