20 Real-Life Challenges of Cloud Computing

NCOIC Discusses e-Discovery and Cloud Computing

By G C Network | March 22, 2010

Last week during its weekly meeting, the NCOIC Cloud Computing Working Group (CCWG) examined some of the legal aspects surrounding electronically stored information. With government use of cloud computing expected…

Take the survey, get a book!

By G C Network | March 20, 2010

“Cloud Musings”, in cooperation with Aditya Yadav & Associates, is conducting a new cloud computing survey. This short, eight (8) question poll, is designed to gauge general corporate plans around…

Army Knowledge Leaders Study Cloud Computing

By G C Network | March 12, 2010

This week it was my pleasure to explore cloud computing with Army Knowledge Leaders (AKL) ! AKL is an intensive 2 year experience of training and work rotations designed to develop leadership,…

Northrop Grumman & Lockheed Martin Selected for CANES

By G C Network | March 9, 2010

   Last week the US Navy awarded initial CANES contracts to Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin. Navy officials place the contract values at $775M for Northrop and $937M for Lockheed.…

NCOIC Analyses Cloud Computing With SCOPE

By G C Network | February 24, 2010

Last week, the Network Centric Operations Consortium (NCOIC) Cloud Computing Working Group (CCWG) started it’s work on cloud interoperability in earnest. The first step in their process is the completion…

TASER Awarded: The NGA ASP/ISP Transition Contract

By G C Network | February 17, 2010

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has awarded the Total Application Services for Enterprise Requirements (TASER) contract to: Accenture National Security Services, LLC BAE Systems Information Technology, Inc. The Boeing Company-Autometric,…

EuroCloud Expands Quickly

By G C Network | February 16, 2010

Last October I introduced EuroCloud as a pan-European business network with the goal of promoting European use of cloud computing.  In the intervening three months, the organization has grown to…

Joining NJVC: A Professional Plateau

By G C Network | February 8, 2010

This week I begin a new and exciting phase of my professional career by joining the NJVC Enterprise Management Team! For those unfamiliar, NJVC is one of the largest information…

DoD Deputy CIO on Secure Information Sharing

By G C Network | February 3, 2010

Today on Federal Executive Forum, Dave Wennergren, Deputy CIO, Office of the Secretary of Defense, shared his views on secure information sharing. Mr. David M. Wennergren serves as the Deputy…

Training Conference: Cloud Computing for DoD & Government

By G C Network | February 1, 2010

Please join me at the Cloud Computing for DoD & Government training conference, February 22-24, 2010 at the Hilton Old Town in Alexandria, VA. This unique conference agenda blends interactive…

Nikita Ivanov of GridGain offers some excellent insight into the nuts and bolts of getting the cloud to work. Definitely worth a read. To summarize:

  • Most likely you do NOT need cloud computing
  • The best way to think about cloud computing is “Data Center with API”
  • You will spend weeks and months fine tuning your cloud based application
  • You are about to deal with 100s and 1000s of remote nodes
  • You cannot rely on the fact that environment will be homogeneous
  • Debugging problem on a cloud scale requires deep understanding of distributed computing
  • IP multicast will likely not work or work with significant networking limitations.
  • Traffic inside is very cheap or free – but traffic outside is expensive and can “get you” very quickly
  • If you have to use cloud all the time, the economics change and it may be cheaper to traditionally rent in a data center
  • Up time and per-computer reliability is low – comprehensive failover support on grid middleware is a must
  • Static IPs are not guaranteed
  • Almost always plan on having multiple clouds
  • External clouds may present data sharing problems
  • Carefully think through dev/qa/prod layout and how this is all organized
  • Clunky (re)deployment of your application onto the cloud can stop your development process
  • Connections are often one-directional so comprehensive communication capabilities supporting one-directional connectivity and disjoint clouds in grid middleware is a must
  • Cloud are implemented based on hardware virtualization – make sure your grid middleware can dynamically provision such images on demand
  • Stick with open source stack
  • Linear scalability can only be achieved in a control test environment. Real world applications will exhibit non-linear scalability.
  • [His] Personal recommendation: use Amazon EC2/S3 services
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G C Network