Cloud computing and Datawarehousing

Following my last blog entry , my brain continued elaborating on the thought of Cloud Computing Adoption in the Enterprise.

Having worked in the Enterprise Space for So long , I am hard pressed to come to terms with the notion that Enterprises will be willing to completely outsource their Information Management and IT infrastructure and more so in a constrained environment like that of Google AppEngine.

Amazon AWS with its ala carte is still a better option to Enterprises as compared to Google App Engine. As you can pick an choose what you want. I think the key is that any Cloud computing vendor needs to "FIT IN" into the Enterprise's Architecture . This basically imply's that more entry points you have to the cloud infrastructure the more use-cases you will have for Enterprise Adoption. So , it seems like Amazon has a better strategy for Enterprise Adoption. Another use-case for Enterprise Adoption is via an SaaS vendor case in point - Vertica . Vertica is a user of cloud infrastructure from Amazon. But the way the cloud is coming into the Enterprise Architecture is via an SaaS vendor.


Another use-case that came to my mind is the impact to the EDW world. With things like BigTable and simpleDB exposed , why would an Enterprise invest in highend Databases like TerrrData - why not use a proven scalable platform like BigTable to run your analytics. In any case you need to do your EDW work in house on separate machines from your core systems - So using an on-demand infrastructure for such needs makes sense.

Shame on you if you cannot start a .com now !

Life could not have been better for developers. I thought that what Amazon had done with AWS was the best developers could have had , But now we have one more entry into the space-- Google App Engine

It is interesting to see how the SaaS/HaaS space is shaping up. Googles App Engine seems like a layer above AWS. i.e a hosted development platform - the toolset for developing an application on App Engine will be focussed and consequently also limiting. App engine provides excellent integration to google's services(like single signon etc) but it is also limiting , i.e I cannot use Java (at least right now).

AWS on the other hand gives you more power (build your own machine the way you want it) but it has a higher learning curve and if you are running a shop on EC2 you will require a System Administrator to manage your website.

While at this nascent stage of Cloud Computing it seems obvious to compare AWS and Google's App Engine but I think that as the market evolves both the offerings will really address separate markets. Google will get its pie from transitioning the traditional Rapid Application development tool (RAD) customers and Amazon from the traditional IT Infrastructure shops. They certainly converge at some level but it will be years before that happens.

It is also interesting to see that traditional IT Majors like IBM , SUN and HP are missing in action from this revolution. One reason could be that at this point AWS and AppEngine seem like a mom-pop shop offerings(Small business and non mission critical) , how do these offerings translate to Enterprise customers and what are the SLA's that will mature these offerings to Enterprises is something I look forward to understanding in 2008.

Maybe Google and AWS needs someone like Capgemini or Accenture to do this.

If you have the time check out the video on google app engine

The Long Tail - Taken to the extreme

OK , I have read the long tail and I agree it is a great book. It is very interesting to see how Amazon is taking the concepts of Long tail to the extreme.

Refer : AWS fulfillment service : is a service where you can use the Amazon warehouse to store your products and they will then manage the shipment , order execution and payments for the item.

Earlier , when AWS-EC2, S3 got introduced I really thought that it was vertical integration. But now I am starting to believe that what Amazon is doing is just scaling up every core competency they have. This is not really vertical integration in the sense that it is not coming from strategic business decision of getting into a market, but really coming from the fact of making the overall cost model of operations better. Volume drives costs down and if Amazon can manage to get more shipments there cost per shipment will go down. I don’t thing that they are getting into the warehousing business big time (i.e taking shipments from containers from china etc) , But seems like a experiment that might / might not work.

The key thing in Long Tail economics really boils down to - what is the incremental cost of exposing an Enterprise's inner business functions to the world as a competency. Frankly if you need to re-architect your processes to support this you need to rethink on adopting Long Tail concepts into your business.