Cloud Computing: Current State of Affairs

Cloud Computing has had phenomenal growth over the past year and continues to entrench itself in all facets of IT. Cloud Computing is definitely more than just a buzz word or a passing trend. Now the heavy weights like IBM, HP and SAP are ready lock horns with existing players like Amazon, Salesforce and Microsoft whose offerings have matured over a period of time. Besides these big players, a lot of start ups are coming up with innovative offerings in this space.

The talk is about the current state of affairs in the cloud computing. It covers the products, services and offerings that have been making a lot of noise in the cloud computing space.

This talk was presented at the 2nd Annual IndicThreads.com Conference On Upcoming Technology (Cloud Computing) held in June 2011 in Pune, India.

Speaker: Chirag Jog, is the CTO at Clogeny Technologies where the main focus is on Innovation in the Cloud Computing, Scalable Applications and Storage space.

He is the chief geek at Clogeny who talks “Cloud” and works on architecting exciting ideas in the cloud space. He has previously spoken at IndicThreads, CloudCamp and other cloud related events.

* Please excuse the poor video quality. It is intentionally so, to ensure that the video works fine on slow connections.

Following are the key points covered in the talk:

• New Players: A lot of enterprise market giants are now coming to the cloud party offering infrastructure and platform services. IBM has come out with its SmartCloud for private as well as public clouds. Oracle has released its Cloud-in-a-box solution. The talk will cover all the new offerings by these enterprise giants.

• Old Players, New offerings – Amazon being the leader in the Cloud Infrastructure space has rolled out a lot of new products and services, strengthening its hold in the market and expanding into the PaaS segment. Amazon Beanstalk, Amazon CloudFormation and EC2 Dedicated instances most notably have the power to be game changers. SalesForce the leader in the Cloud SaaS space released database.com, enterprise cloud database and its “PaaS” offering similar to GAE – VMforce.com This section will cover the new offerings by the players.

• Interesting Players in the cloud ecosystem: There have been a lot of new players who are leveraging the cloud to build some exciting products like Scalable API platforms, Cloud-based logging, Java in the Cloud. etc eg. Apigee, PiCloud, Loggly,Cumulogic, Cloudbees being some of them. This section will cover most of the exciting platforms and technologies these companies are working on.

• Current Trends and Future: This section will cover the current trends(where a lot of startups are investing in) and how the future will look like in the cloud space.

Finally, the talk plans to “arm” developers and architects with the latest and cutting edge platforms, products and technologies in the cloud that have been developed and made available over the last year, helping them to leverage the cloud and make better choices leading to higher ROI and lesser TCO.