• Amazon Web Services Blog: Amazon SimpleDB Consistency Enhancements
  "The first new feature allows you to do a consistent read. second new feature allows you to issue SimpleDB PutAttributes and DeleteAttributes operations on a conditional basis. You can combine consistent reads and conditional operations to implement a form of optimistic concurrency control, or OCC."

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• chive – MySQL database management tool
  "Chive is a next generation MySQL database management tool. The web-based user interface supports most of the common operations needed by software developers and database admins (databases, tables, indices, keys, triggers, views, routines, privileges management, import/export). Chive aims to be an alternative to phpMyAdmin." — You go!

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• Building Clouds One 1.4
  The slides from a 12 hour course on building clouds with Open Nebula!
• Don’t Pass on PaaS in 2010 – ebizQ
  Written by yours truly.
• Cassandra Database accepted as a Apache Top-Level Project
  Congrats to the Cassandra community. I'm excited about the work they're doing and the growing acceptance.

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This morning, an article I wrote titled “Don’t Pass on PaaS in 2010” was published by eBizQ. The article provides an overview of PaaS for IT practitioners with particular emphasis on addressing the “so what?” question. I encourage you to check it out.

In the article, I present what I propose here as the “Essential Characteristics of Platform-as-a-Service,” with an obvious hat-tip to Peter Mell and Tim Grance’s cloud computing definition for NIST.

The Essential Characteristics of PaaS

1. Runtime Framework: This is the “software stack” aspect of PaaS, and perhaps the aspect that comes first to mind for most people. The PaaS runtime framework executes end-user code according to policies set by the application owner and cloud provider. PaaS runtime frameworks come in many flavors, some based on traditional application runtimes, others based on 4GL and visual programming concepts, and some with pluggable support for multiple application runtimes.
2. Abstraction: Platform-oriented cloud platforms are distinguished by the higher level of abstraction they provide. With IaaS, the focus is on delivering to users “raw” access to physical or virtual infrastructure. In contrast, with PaaS, the focus is on the applications that the cloud must support. Whereas an IaaS cloud gives the user a bunch of virtual machines that must be configured and to which application components must be deployed, a PaaS cloud provides the user a way to deploy her applications into a seemingly limitless pool of computing resources, eliminating the complexity of deployment and infrastructure configuration.
3. Automation: A PaaS environment is a bit like a swan on a pond — graceful and elegant above the water, and paddling its little legs off below the water. The aforementioned abstraction provides the elegant user experience “above the water,” while high levels of automation provide the “paddling” beneath the surface. PaaS environments automate the process of deploying applications to infrastructure, configuring application components, provisioning and configuring supporting technology like load balancers and databases, and managing system change based on policies set by the user.
   While IaaS is known for its ability to shift capital costs to operational costs through outsourcing, only PaaS is able to slash costs across the development, deployment and management aspects of the application lifecycle.
4. Cloud Services: PaaS offerings provide developers and architects with services and APIs that help simplify the job of delivering elastically scalable, highly available cloud applications. These cloud services provide a wide variety of capabilities, and in many instances are key differentiators among competing PaaS offerings.
   Examples of cloud services include services and APIs for distributed caching, queuing and messaging, workload management, file and data storage, user identity, analytics, and more. By providing built-in cloud services, platform offerings eliminate the need to integrate many disparate components and decrease time-to-market for applications on the platform.

I hope to build on these characteristics in future posts. In the mean time, what do you think? Anything you would eliminate? Anything you would add?

• Burton Group Identity Blog: SPML Is On Life Support ….
  "The reality is that SPML is not currently viable for building useful, standards-based provisioning services because it is too complex and places too much of a performance burden on the connector."
• Designing applications for cloud deployment
  Nice piece on architecting your apps for the cloud.
• Hedging Your Options for the Cloud – GigaOM
  "Cloud services — whether infrastructure, platform or software — share similarities with other on-demand, pay-per-use offerings such as airlines or car rentals. But what’s past in those industries may be prologue for the cloud. Here are some key aspects of those services that could become integral to the cloud in the coming decade." –Great piece, as usual, by Joe Weinman.

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• ericflo’s twissandra at master – GitHub

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• up and running with cassandra :: snax

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• Amazon S3: Versioning Proposal
  "Versioning allows you to preserve, retrieve, and restore every version of every object stored in an Amazon S3 bucket. Once enabled for a bucket, Amazon S3 preserves existing objects anytime you perform a PUT, POST, COPY, or DELETE operation on them. By default, GET requests will retrieve the most recently written version. Older versions of an overwritten or deleted object can be retrieved by specifying a version in the request."

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I’m cross-posting this from the stlcloudusers.org site: First STLCCUG Meeting Tonight!.

Tonight will be the first meeting of the St. Louis Cloud Computing User Group. I’m looking forward to meeting everyone this evening.

The speakers for the evening will be Bob Lozano and Kyle Cordes.

Bob’s talk is going to focus on how we got here and why cloud computing is inevitable, and will provide some context for the wide range of things we’ve got to discuss as a user group.

Kyle is going to provide an overview of Amazon Web Services from a Developer + Business Perspective, based on his experiences using EC2, S3 and a variety of competitive offerings. He’s got a more detailed description on his blog.

We’ll officially get started at 6:30 with pizza, beer and networking. At around 6:45 I’ll take a few minutes for kicking things off and general discussion, and depending on the size of the group, introductions. The talks should be underway by around 7, and after the talks (8:30ish) we’ll open things back up for general discussion.

If you have a chance, please RSVP so we can have a sense for who’s coming and how much pizza to order, but this is an open meeting — by all means if you run into a friend on the way over, drag them along; there is no need to be preregistered.

Also, please sign up for the mailing list, and if you’ve got ideas for future talks, please float them there. We’d love to hear from you.

• Cerf urges standards for cloud computing
  "Vint Cerf, a co-designer of the Internet's TCP/IP protocols and considered a father of the Internet itself, emphasized the need for data portability standards for cloud computing during an appearance on Thursday evening."
• tonyg’s pika at master – GitHub
  "Pika is a pure-Python implementation of the AMQP 0-8 protocol (with an 0-9-1 implementation on a separate git branch, for now) that tries to stay fairly independent of the underlying network support library. It also tries to stay neutral as to programming style, supporting (where possible) both synchronous and asynchronous approaches."

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