Jamal Mazhar

The growing use of Infrastructure as a Service to run custom applications, SaaS, and PaaS offerings is increasing the demand of management solutions to leverage the automation offered by IaaS.  One of the biggest advantages of IaaS is the ability to automate tasks which were not possible before.  E.g. a crashed server can be restored with an API call by launching a new instance.  Effective use of the IaaS APIs can dramatically reduce the time and resources it takes to deploy and provide production support for services and applications. Various solutions and standards are available for automating the application management tasks which are usually performed manually.  Before looking at various solutions and standards, let’s take a look at what is needed to fully automate the deployment and runtime management of applications and business services on IaaS. Low level o... (more)

How Secure Is Data in the Cloud?

University of Berkley has published an excellent paper on cloud computing, the argument regarding data security in the cloud is that encrypted data in the cloud can be more secure than unencrypted data in the internal datacenter. Almost nobody uses encryption in internal datacenters as they are percieved as secure.  Here is an excerpt from the study: “We believe that there are no fundamental obstacles to making a cloud-computing environment as secure as the vast majority of in-house IT environments, and that many of the obstacles can be overcome immediately with well understood ... (more)

SaaS vs. IaaS: Key trade-off has nothing to do with vendor lock

Lately there were some blogs implying that businesses should pick Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) over Software as a Service (SaaS) as SaaS has higher vendor lock compared to IaaS.  There has been a lot of buzz around the three flavors of cloud computing, SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.  It is important for business and IT leaders to understand the true trade-offs; when would it make sense to pick one over the other.  Though  it is true that SaaS has greater vendor lock, the reason a customer picks SaaS vs. IaaS has less to do with the vendor lock and has more to do with the type of a... (more)

Building a Private Cloud Within a Public Cloud

One of our customers wanted to establish a site to site connectivity between their datacenter and  public cloud (Amazon EC2) and then have a private network within Amazon EC2 with their own custom IP addresses for their servers in the cloud.  Basically the idea here is to augment the internal datacenter resources with the resources in the public cloud securely so that the servers in the cloud appear as if they are part of their own private corporate network.  The idea here is to isolate the servers used by the customer in the cloud from the rest of the servers in the cloud using ... (more)

Why All the Fuss Around Cloud API Standards?

Lately there have been several discussions around cloud API standards, and I am failing to understand why it is a big deal.  Lets first identify two type of standards: Syntax Standards Functional Standards For cloud lot of attention is given to syntax standards, e.g. using same method signatures.  E.g. some IaaS enablers are using exact same method signatures in their APIs as Amazon EC2.  After integrating with several cloud providers we found API differences (Syntax) may seem annoying but they really don’t matter much, as it is trivial effort to deal with them.  E.g. how hard i... (more)