Cloud and the Consumer – Part II

The first part of ‘Cloud and the Consumer’ series discussed how to move bookmarks to the Cloud and keep them synchronized across browsers. In this article, I will tell you how to keep your calendar, contacts and email in sync with your phone by moving them to the Cloud. Did you ever lose your phone and also lost the valuable contacts that you saved along with it? Do you want to use...

Microsoft, Please Don’t Kill Live Mesh!

I am a huge fan of Live Mesh. I started using Live Mesh (during my stint at Microsoft) even before it was announced to the public. Live Mesh was announced at Mix08 in April 2008 amid fanfare by Ray Ozzie. Ozzie passionately positioned Live Mesh as a “single device mesh”. The Sync culture was brought into Microsoft by Ray Ozzie. Ozzie first outlined his vision for mesh like...

Data on the Cloud – Amazon S3

Storage is one of the key resources offered as a Cloud Service. By moving data to the Cloud, there are quite a few benefits. Some of them include: 1. Illusion of unlimited storage – Unlike hosting, Cloud storage will virtually give you access to unlimited storage. You will never run out of space on the Cloud. 2. Better scalability – Most of the Cloud storage offerings have a...

Top 5 Things Microsoft Should Fix in Azure

It’s been just over a week since Microsoft has started to offer the commercial subscription of Windows Azure. As a Cloud enthusiast, I quickly signed up for the Introductory Special subscription and downloaded the required tools to deploy my first app to the Cloud. I had access to Windows Azure since PDC08 and I deployed quite a few apps to test the functionality and features of the platform....

Getting Started with Windows Azure

With Windows Azure’s commercial availability starting from Feb. 1st, I want to provide a quick introduction to Windows Azure Platform. This article will be followed by many more articles that will drill down into the concepts of the Windows Azure Platform. At a high level, Windows Azure Platform has 4 key services in it. The first one is Windows Azure which is the Cloud OS from Microsoft....

Why Technology Evangelism Matters?

A decade back only a handful of folks carried the title of an ‘Evangelist’ on their business cards. This role was predominantly found within software product and developer platform companies. It is Apple, Microsoft, Sun and Google that made this title sound very cool. Today it is common to find Evangelists in the corporate world. I have also seen a few companies giving the title of...

Cloud and the Developer

Every time I present at a developer forum or a technical conference, I get asked by the audience on how to get started on the Cloud. The mindset and the perception has been that the Cloud is the next .NET or Java. Unfortunately, some of the well known training institutes and freelance trainers in India started to position Cloud Computing as the Java of the new decade. This artificial hype is...

Who Will Win The Cloud Computing Battle in India?

Till now I have discussed various technical aspects of the Cloud. Going forward I will also cover certain business aspects related to the Cloud. In this article, I want to analyze the opportunity for the Cloud vendors in India. We will first take a look at the ecosystem, the opportunity map and then the potential for the Cloud service providers. It may be too early to decide who would actually...

Top 10 Myths of Cloud Computing

As we step into the new year of 2010, I want to discuss the top 10 myths of Cloud Computing. Quite a few experts tried to debunk the myths earlier. My attempt is based on what I have seen or heard in my community. The concepts that I am bringing up here cut across IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. If you disagree with any of the points, you are welcome to start a discussion. 10. Only the CIO is concerned...

Overview of Amazon Web Services

1. Introducing Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services is one of the early and also the most successful implementations of the Public Cloud. Many well known online properties leverage AWS. Amazon initially started offering a Cloud based Message Queuing service called Amazon Simple Queue Service(SQS). They eventually added services like Mechanical Turk, Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic...