Cloud Foundry Bridges the Clouds

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast, Dekel Tankel, a Cloud Foundry marketing manager at VMware, explains how one of the things that interested him most about Cloud Foundry was it’s ability to cross the chasm between clouds, allowing customers to easily move their applications between cloud service providers. To Dekel Cloud Foundry is all about giving more choices to developers without locking people into a particular service or technology.

Developers can start with the Cloud Foundry micro-cloud as they build their app prototypes, running locally on a laptop, and then deploy to a cloud service when their code has matured. No other cloud service offers this degree of flexibility ranging from the private to public clouds.

At times the enthusiasm for Cloud Foundry is daunting to Dekel (they had 10,000 developers register in the first 72 hours of launch) and the volume of Open Source contributions is hard to keep up with. It would be easier to control and contain the progress of Cloud Foundry if it had been closed and followed a proprietary architecture, but it’s all been worth it.

You can follow the Cloud Foundry blog here:
http://blog.cloudfoundry.com/

You can register for your own free Cloud Foundry account here (use the word “cloudtoday” for the promotion code for immediate approval):
http://www.cloudfoundry.com/

Of course, you can also register for a free account on the Uhuru PaaS, which is based on Cloud Foundry and offers extra enhancements like support for .NET applications.

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Taking .NET to the cloud is a process

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast show Michael Collier, an architect at Neudesic, shares his experiences in bringing .NET applications to the Azure Platform as a Service (PaaS). Michael explains how migrating existing .NET apps to a PaaS is a process. Managers have to be educated about the cloud so they feel comfortable using it. He has often had to rewrite parts of the .NET apps to make them compatible with the Azure PaaS. The migration process is different for each app, depending on how it was built. .NET apps that follow best practices can run on a PaaS with almost no changes at all (e.g. not storing state on the server, etc). Other apps can be much more difficult to migrate (e.g. using COM, relying on server state, etc).

In the end, the migration to the cloud is well worth it. Developers can focus on what they love doing: writing great apps!

You can find Michael’s blog here:
http://michaelcollier.wordpress.com/

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The Stateless App

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast Andy Piper, a Cloud Foundry developer advocate at VMware, talks about how to build great apps for the cloud. In his work with developers Andy has found that stateless apps are the easiest to transition to cloud platforms such as Cloud Foundry. Looking for particular files or settings on a server prevents your apps from being able to benefit from the automatic deployment scaling or redundancy features of new hosted Platforms of a Service. Luckily, many apps are ready to run on a PaaS already. At recent hackathons Andy has that many of the existing apps deployed on Cloud Foundry without any changes at all.

You can read more about Andy’s advice for building apps in the cloud on his blog:
http://andypiper.co.uk/

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When The PaaS Isn’t Enough

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast Andrey Cherkasin tells about his decision to abandon a Platform as a Service and move to a custom hosting solution. Andrey was an early adopter of the Cloud Foundry PaaS technology, and was thrilled with being able to setup his own private PaaS. Unfortunately, Andrey’s needs for support of numerous Ruby platforms made it impractical for his needs. He now relies on a custom cloud solution using Chef Scripts and a smart OS.

You can follow Andrey on his blog:
http://andoriyu.bestpersons.ru/

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The Long Path To The Cloud

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast Jason Nappi, a software developer with SmartPak, talks about the journey he has been on to move his .NET application to the cloud. Everything is now running in virtualized instances that can be easily replicated to handle additional load, but the monolithic database model used by his software doesn’t lend itself well to most cloud platforms. It would be nice to utilize the scalability possible on Azure, but that just won’t be possible without re-architecting the database. Jason is closely watching technologies like database auto-sharding to find ways to further improve the performance of his apps in the cloud.

You can read more about Jason’s ideas and trials on the cloud at his blog:
http://blog.nappisite.com/

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Gimme That PaaS Source Code!

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast show Krum Bakalsky, a software engineer, shares his passion of participating in Open Source projects. In particular, VMware’s decision to place Cloud Foundry into Open Source has inspired Krum to become a significant contributor to the community effort. The Cloud Foundry community has been the perfect place for Krum to learn about the guts of building enterprise class software and to gain real experience as a participant. The fragmented nature of the Open Source world can be frustrating at times, such as when Krum discovered other programmers had already been working on something he was doing, but the collaborative environment more than makes up for these deficiencies.

You can read about Krum’s Open Source exploits and ideas on his blog:

http://kpymkata.blogspot.com/

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Medical Imaging In the Cloud – Just a Matter of Time

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast Dr Victor Fang, a research scientist with Riverain Technology, talks about how the medical industry is well on its path to moving IT to the cloud. While medical diagnostic images (like x-rays and MRIs) are still stored locally today, most companies are looking at ways of putting them in the cloud. It has just taken a while for cloud services to reach the level of security and privacy needed to comply with government regulations. At conferences Dr Fang has attended recently he has noticed the explosion in businesses offering cloud hosting, which is just one indicator of where the medical industry is moving. Dr Fang also couldn’t help but notice that hospitals where he’s worked are typically behind in adopting stateless web applications, relying primarily on traditional Windows-based client/server solutions that are harder to move to the cloud.

The health care industry can move slowly at times, but it makes huge waves when it does move, and the cloud is just around the corner.

You can follow Dr Fang on his web site.
http://www.victorfang.com/

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