Despite my shaky prediction performance in 2011, I'm going to try again.
Last year, my best predictions were based on some sort of specialized
knowledge or insight, and the worst came from looking into the macro
environment and making guesses. So, this year's predictions emphasize the
former approach, yet hopefully avoid sounding like claims such as "the market
will fluctuate."
1. 2012 will be the Year of the Storefront in the cloud.
Admittedly, this is a somewhat self-serving prediction, since Standing Cloud
is (among other things) a storefront. But based on the variety of offerings,
rumors, customer behaviors, and other sources I have, it seems that the
confluence of forces that helped drive the popularity of App Stores in the
mobile world are now propelling the storefront concept ahead in the cloud
world.
Viewed through a relatively simple lens, a Storefront has ... (more)
In an application deployed directly on IaaS, you know and control everything
about the database; in a SaaS application you know little and control
nothing.
But how does it work in PaaS?
Since a PaaS is essentially a container that runs application code, and
virtually every application requires a persistent data store, most PaaS
offerings provide some kind of database services. Not surprisingly, Resource
PaaS offerings most closely resemble SaaS in that they hide more deployment
details, while Server PaaS offerings are more flexible but potentially more
complex. (For more on Res... (more)
Whether SaaS, IaaS or PaaS, one of the central concepts of all layers of
cloud computing is multi-tenancy. If there is no shared resource in a
deployment, it's difficult to justify calling that deployment "cloud."
Even NIST makes it more or less official within its formal definition of
cloud computing, which reads, in part:
Essential Characteristics: Resource pooling. The provider's computing
resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model,
with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and
reassigned according to consumer demand.
... (more)
A leading cloud analyst recently told me that there are exactly two ways to
operate software: Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and on-premises. He said,
"Either they run in the cloud and someone else takes full responsibility for
the underlying physical infrastructure and system management (SaaS); or they
run on your own equipment and you operate it yourself (on-prem)."
I said, "Not so fast."
To be sure, there are models where some of the administration is outsourced,
such as shared hosting or managed services. But these approaches still leave
the financial and management burden with... (more)
Virtual appliances are binary files representing the complete and fully
configured state of a server. They are a popular approach to the deployment
of application software in virtualized data centers as well as in public or
private clouds, because once the "golden master" is created, deployment of
that server state is fast, easy, and repeatable. However, there are
significant disadvantages to the use of virtual appliances. Model-driven
deployment is a new approach that largely eliminates these issues, better
matches today's fast-moving, agile environments, and takes full advantag... (more)
Dave Jilk has an extensive business and technical background in both the software industry and the Internet. He currently serves as CEO of 
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