Webcloud World

We thought of trying out a new idea. Instead of working from our Amazon offices, for a change, we will be work for few hours, every last tuesday of the month, from an offsite.
We like to call it AWS “Office Hours”.
Offsite will be at the StartPad co-working office space in Pioneer Square in Seattle. [...]

I am very happy to announce my white paper on Cloud Architectures is now ready. This is one incarnation of the Emerging Cloud Service Architectures that Jeff wrote about a few weeks ago.
If you are new to the cloud, the first section of the paper will help you understand the benefits of building applications in-the-cloud. [...]

I received an email message from a frustrated Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company executive yesterday asking if I could publish a commentary clarifying the difference between cloud computing and SaaS.
His plea was prompted by a trade publication article which basically referred to cloud computing and SaaS as one and the same.
Anyone who has been intimately involved in [...]

Andras wrote to tell me about Jollat, a new graphical cross-platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux) management client for Amazon EC2 and S3. Available for free download (with a purchase option), the client includes a number of interesting features.
On the S3 side, Jollat handles bucket creation in both the US and EU zones, upload and [...]

Engine Yard, provider of a Ruby and Rails deployment platform, announced a Serie B financing round of $15 million, implicating New Enterprise Associates, Inc., Benchmark Capital and Amazon.
Here is the official announcement
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Despite growing customer adoption of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), many companies and conservative industry observers still believe that SaaS solutions are simply a skinnied-down version of traditional, on-premise applications that offer little value add other than quicker deployment times and lower upfront costs.
IT/business decision-makers need look no further than at how today’s SaaS solutions are addressing age-old [...]

The GigaSpaces XAP (eXtreme Application Platform) is now available as an Amazon EC2 AMI (Amazon Machine Image).
At the core, XAP implements a scalable, in-memory database which can be
used as a data grid, a messaging grid, or as a parallel processing
framework.

XAP makes it easy to scale the entire middleware layer (data, messaging, and services) of an [...]

From time to time, potential users of AWS ask me about the best way to set up a highly scalable architecture using Amazon EC2, S3, SimpleDB, and SQS. I’d like to challenge readers of this blog to document their AWS-powered architectures in a blog post, preferably with a diagram, and to leave comments with a [...]

It is finally summer here in Seattle and I’m trying to get out of the office as early as possible today. Here are a few cool things that have recently landed in my inbox:

Don MacAskill wrote to tell me about his new product, SmugVault. This new service extends the existing image storage capabilities provided by [...]

Generally speaking, I’m opposed to introducing different terms to describe the same thing. In the SaaS space, Microsoft has taken the position of using “Software + Services” rather than “software as a service.” To some degree, there is a level of correctness captured in “Software + Services” that you don’t find in SaaS, particularly when [...]