Sam Somashekar

Sam Charrington recently posted a nice article called The Disintegration of PaaS. In it, he describes how early PaaS providers (PaaS 1.0) locked developers into their stacks and essentially prevented the movement of these apps onto other PaaS platforms. Sam also described the coming of "PaaS 2.0," a more open platform that allows different development stack modules for databases, application servers, etc., to be included within your application stack. PaaS 2.0 providers will also cultivate the community of tools that can be used within a deployment stack. The hope is that PaaS 2.0 will level the playing field and focus these providers on what matters most - service quality and customer service. That takes me to the part that no one is really talking about when it comes to PaaS - the management aspect. Up to this point, we have more often talked about the developmen... (more)

I Want Cloud Apps, Not Just Cloud Servers! – Part 2

In Part I, I talked about how it is important to think about cloud use from the application's point of view. We need to digitally centralize our best-practice institutional knowledge so that it can be used to easily replicate application environments from development to test, and then on towards production. Centralizing these steps helps you manage and automate what used to be manual labor. But how do you go from securing VMs within the cloud to actually deploying applications and their environments in the cloud with a single click? Transformation never happens overnight, and mu... (more)

I Want Cloud Apps, Not Just Cloud Servers! – Part I

It is amazing how I continue to hear people talk about how they are still not familiar with “cloud”, what it is and how it will help their specific business. Just the other day I spoke to a customer prospect who believed they had a private cloud – as it turns out they had a virtual server farm which still could not be accessed through a self-service portal. But I am not surprised – after years of “cloud-washing” incumbent IT management solutions that cost a lot of money, time, and resources to implement, vendors have dictated how YOU should use the cloud. But, you need to figure ... (more)