The Secret to a RESTful Cloud

REST focuses on the knottiest challenge of architecting the Cloud

Thought Leaders in the Cloud: Talking with Jason Bloomberg of ZapThink

Most enterprises haven’t yet thought about application modernization or application consolidation leveraging the cloud.

Microsoft details Windows Azure on-demand pricing

“Microsoft’s pricing for Azure is competitive without being predatory, at least for now,” said Jason Bloomberg, a managing partner at ZapThink. “As competition in any market heats up, you’d expect prices to drop. Whether Microsoft, Google and/or Amazon will enter a price war with the intent of driving each other or smaller players out of the business remains to be seen.”

Microsoft’s key challenge will be building trust around Azure, Bloomberg said. “There are already serious questions about the reliability and confidentiality of cloud computing in general, but add that to the general mistrust of Microsoft we saw with .NET My Services, and later with the Connected Systems Framework [now Connected Services Framework], and they already have two strikes against them.”

Read more at: SD Times

Who’s Architecting the Cloud?

As the hype cycle for the cloud computing continues to gather steam, an increasing number of end users are starting to see the silver lining, while others are simply lost in the fog. It is clear that the debate over the definition, business model, and benefits of …

Cloud providers answer the tough questions

Some EC2 integrations are more complex, he acknowledged, particularly when there are abstraction layers. “It may take custom development work to use EC2 or other services in a way that a developer wishes.” He added that he does not believe that a metadata API exists for describing Amazon services.

Amazon’s Elastic Block Store service, which runs on top of its virtualization infrastructure to abstract the underlying storage resource, does not adversely affect application portability, said ZapThink managing partner Jason Bloomberg.

Read more at: SD Times

Does Cloud Computing Hold Water?

One of ZapThink’s favorite roles is that of iconoclast. When we see a growing hype bubble, we love being the ones to pop it. We relished dispelling the confusion over the SOA is dead meme, and now it’s time to let a little air out of the latest gas bag: …

Oracle to put Fusion middleware in Amazon Compute Cloud

The tools are now “tightly integrated” with the re-branded Oracle WebLogic server. In a recent interview Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink, said WebLogic was the crown jewel in the BEA acquisition and filled a gaping hole in Fusion.

“If you read between the lines, when Oracle now says ‘Oracle WebLogic Server Enterprise Edition is the application server of choice,’ what they mean is that the application server they had before the BEA acquisition, to put it mildly, wasn’t the application server of choice — for just about anybody,” Bloomberg said.

Read more at: SearchSOA

ZapThink SOA Implementation Roadmap 3.0

Download or purchase ZapThink’s popular “ZapThink SOA Implementation Roadmap” poster!

ZapThink Announces Major Update to Popular SOA Implementation Roadmap Poster

ZapThink, the industry’s foremost experts, advisers, and educators in the field of Service-Oriented Architecture, is responding to customer demand with today’s publication of the third version of its popular “ZapThink SOA Implementation Roadmap” poster. The company distributed over 100,000 copies of its first two versions of the poster, the first in 2003 and then updated in 2005. The latest version adds cutting-edge thought leadership in SOA, includes detail on architectural artifacts, and expands coverage of SOA Quality, Enterprise Mashups, and more.

Read more at: Emediawire

Live Mesh may emerge as Microsoft ‘cloud’ platform

As presented now, Live Mesh does not go as far as EC2 in providing a full cloud-based infrastructure for running services, said Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with Baltimore-based research firm Zapthink. For one thing, it doesn’t focus on data and server virtualization like most cloud-computing efforts, he said.

However, it does act like a cloud-based platform by abstracting “the management infrastructure for diverse Microsoft-based devices, applications and other technologies,” Bloomberg said.

Another limitation to Live Mesh is that it is aimed at providing a connected device environment for Windows, not heterogeneous environments that cloud-computing offerings support, Bloomberg said. “There is little if any value in Live Mesh for most enterprise users or others who must live and work in a heterogeneous environment,” he said.

Read more at: InfoWorld