1. File Clouds
2. Device Clouds
3. Application Clouds

File Clouds provide cloud based traditional file storage that give users access from anywhere and examples include Microsoft’s own SkyDrive as well as services such as DropBox.
Device Clouds allow content to be purchased and shared across multiple devices in a transparent way. These devices maybe TV’s, mobile devices and work without the users having to be concerned where the content is stored. The most obvious example of this is Apple’s iCloud.
Application Clouds Hosted in the cloud, these applications allow anywhere access as well as improved document sharing and collaboration. No client software installation and a pay per use model means that these applications are attractive to individuals. Examples include Google Apps, Office365 as well as services such as Spotify.

It will be really interesting given their comments to see how Microsoft incorporate the personal cloud into Windows 8. At the moment, when using Windows, choosing cloud services is a very definite decision the user makes. With Windows 8 cloud access could be made a totally transparent. When a file is saved, where is it actually stored – locally or in the cloud ? If a photo is taken by a Windows powered phone, will it automatically be available to that users Windows 8 desktop or mobile computer ? Windows 8 has the potential to become the operating system that, leveraging cloud computing, can make access to our data seamless. The security of the data can be improved and the opportunities for collaboration significantly removed. I look forward to to the release.

Chris Czarnecki

The answer is simple. They both moved to their desired locations opening small offices in each location. To facilitate this the company decided to use ‘Cloud’-based IT and accounting systems. This means they can be accessed from anywhere which is perfect given that the core business required a lot of worldwide travel. The founders only meet around twice a month, using services like Skype video calls to keep in touch.

Whilst Fresh Marketing have adopted Cloud Computing to help build their business, many entrepreneurs have been slow to take up the idea of cloud computing, citing concerns over reliability and security. These are valid concerns but they are concerns for every IT system whether cloud based or in house. By adopting Cloud Computing Fresh Marketing have given themselves many advantages that most organisations could benefit from including:

• IT costs proportional to usage
• IT capacity scales seamlessly in line with company growth
• Minimal IT administration – no installation, upgrades, license fees
• Access from anywhere
• Improved information sharing and collaboration tools

These are just some of the benefits that organisations can expect from Cloud Computing. If you are interested in how Cloud Computing could benefit your organisation or have concerns and would like to evaluate the risks, why not consider attending Learning Trees Hands-On Cloud Computing course. It provides both a technical and business evaluation of Cloud Computing as well as showcasing the leading products from major vendors.

Chris Czarnecki

Microsoft Office 365 offers access to familiar Office applications that are updated and licensed directly from the cloud. There are also online versions of Exchange, SharePoint and Lync Online productivity services. This course will cover the collaboration and productivity tools of Microsoft Office 365. It will target anyone managing or working in a cloud-based environment, people moving an existing Office infrastructure to the cloud and users interested in the collaboration features of Office 365.

The course will appeal to IT Professionals who are considering an Office 365 cloud-based solution in their organizations. This includes Systems Administrators, Network Administrators, Application Developers, IT Managers and Knowledge Workers. The course assumes a basic understanding of Microsoft Office, Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange and either Lync or Communications Server 2007.

There are many cool things about Office 365. Even beyond that, Office 365 represents a real break-through for organizations wishing to realize benefits of the cloud in a familiar Office environment. Come to this course if you would like to see an objective treatment of Office 365 and for critical thinking tools to help you evaluate Office 365 for use in your own organization.

Kevin Kell

In the UK, the Sunday Times newspaper has an award winning iPad application for reading the newspaper. The existing application is a ‘pull’ service, where readers click on the cover of an individual newspaper section and it will start downloading at that point. This can place a severe strain on the newspapers servers and in fact this Sunday, the servers could not cope with the demand for downloads of the newspaper. This left the newspaper printing an apology and the applications iTunes rating falling to an all-time low.

The Sunday Times Newsstand version of the application will help prevent such server overload as its a ‘push’ service, where the server side articles are pushed overnight to the iPad ready for reading in the morning. This allows the server side to better schedule the pushing of data so as not to overload the servers. What is clear is that if The Sunday Times had used Cloud Computing for its server side, even with a ‘pull’ service, they would not have suffered the service outage as it would have scaled to meet demand and in a very cost-effective way. The ‘push’ service should still make use of Cloud Computing so that it can scale to meet the peak in computational demand overnight required to deliver all the newspapers. Again, here the beauty of Cloud Computing is that the cost will be proportional to the number of subscribers and therefore the revenue the service is generating.

Cloud Computing has the potential to positively impact all areas of computing, from large scale business applications to home users reading newspapers and listening to music. If you would like to find out more about it, why not consider attending Learning Tree’s Cloud Computing course where you will get an in depth, hand-on introduction to all aspects, all delivered by an industry expert.

Chris Czarnecki

• Unlimited number of applications on account domain
• Support from Google engineers
• No minimum monthly fee per app – just pay per use

The SLA Google have is 99.95%, but what this means is that if the service is available for 99% – < 99.95% in a month then 10% of that monthly bill will be credited to users accounts. This is incremental and < 95% availability in a month results in a 50% credit on that months usage.

For pricing, App Engine still provides free quotas for applications. An application can now be converted to a paid application for which a minimum spend of $2.10 per week is made. The free quotas still apply. Any usage of resources required above this payment will be charged accordingly. A Premier account application just pays for resource usage. One of the comforting aspects of the Google App engine is the ability to set daily spend limits on the application. This is not available on many other Cloud Services such as Amazon AWS.

For Java and Python developers Google App engine provides an excellent Platform as a Service for hosting the applications. If you are interested in more details and how it may benefit your organisation, why not consider attending Learning Tree's Hands-On Cloud Computing course where, amongst many other cloud products we detail the Google App Engine and have a hands-on exercise using the toolkit.

Chris Czarnecki

Heroku was originally a Ruby on Rails Platform as a Service (PaaS) which was acquired by Salesforce.com around a year ago. Since then, the platform has continued to develop at a rapid pace and Java is now the fourth language officially supported on Heroku. One of the interesting and unique features of Heroku is its approach to deployment tools. The toolset programmers use is typically highly dependent on the programming language used. Ruby developers use say Capistrano for deployment, Python developers may use Fabric. Java Web applications are packaged as war files to be deployed to an application server. Heroku, with the launch of the Celadon Cedar stack, claim to have developed the polygot toolset bringing normalization and unification across languages Ruby, Node.js, Clojure and now Java.

There is a sublety and elegance in what Heroku have achieved and continue to develop, in that a uniform development and deployment process as well as application monitoring process means that selecting the best programming language for a particular task does not require a change in the complete toolset. The benefits of the platform extend to not only the recognised ones of reduced administration, scalability etc but also now the flexibility in programming language choice that a consistency in tools across a wide variety of programming languages provides.

Chris Czarnecki

Cloud computing enables hardware and software to be delivered as services, where the term service is used to reflect the fact that they are provided on demand and are paid on a usage basis – the more you use the more you pay. Draw an analogy with a restaurant. This provides a food and drinks service. If we would like to eat at a restaurant, we do not buy it, just use it as we require. The more we eat the more we pay. Cloud Computing provides computing facilities in the same way as restaurants provide food, when we need computing facilities, we use them from the cloud. The more we use the more we pay. When we stop using them we stop paying.

Although the above analogy is a great simplification, the core idea holds. Since computing is many many things, Cloud Computing has a lot of things to deliver as a service.This is where the SPI model helps organise things. Lets consider these in turn.

Software as a Service This is typically end user applications delivered on demand over a network on a pay per use basis. The software requires no client installation, just a browser and network connectivity. An example of SaaS is MicroSoft Office365. Until its launch, if a user required say Word, they would have to purchase it, install it, backup files etc. With Office365 Word can be acquired for a small monthly fee, with no client installation, the files are automatically backed up, software upgrades are automatically received and the software can be accessed from anywhere. Decide you do not require Word anymore – stop paying the monthly fee. It is that simple.

Platform as a Service Used by software development companies to run their software products. Software products need physical servers to run on, with database software, often Web servers too. These are all the platform that the application runs on. Building this yourself is a time consuming task and needs to be continually monitored and updated. PaaS provides all of the platform out of the box enabling software applications to be given to the platform which will execute them with no requirement for administration of the lower level components.

InfraStructure as a Service This covers a wide range of features, from individual servers, to private networks, disk drives, various long term storage devices as well as email servers, domain name servers as well as messaging systems. All of these can be provisioned on demand and often include software license fees for operating systems and associated software installed on the servers. Organisations can build a complete computing infrastructure using IaaS on demand.

So all the services provided by Cloud Computing fit into one of the three delivery models above. End users typically use SaaS, software development teams PaaS and IT departments whose responsibility is the infrastructure use IaaS. There is much more to Cloud Computing, including aspects such as the automatic scaling and security for example, but as a starting point, categorising the deliver models should help to understand that all aspects of computing are covered and it can be potentially useful for everybody involved in, or using IT.

Chris Czarnecki

Learning Tree instructor Steve Lockwood shares his insights on Cloud Computing and how it is revolutionizing IT infrastructures for organizations today. Steve’s 18 years of professional experience in Cloud technologies enables him to provide attendees with real-world solutions they can use right away. Steve guides participants through hands-on exercises so they can see Cloud Computing in action and apply those skills to current projects as soon as they return to work.

Steve also describes how Learning Tree AnyWare™ makes it possible for remote attendees to attend a live, online, instructor-led course that enables participants to feel as though they are actually in the classroom. Now online attendees can fully participate in real-time activities and interact with both their peers and the instructor for a rich, rewarding learning experience.

Learn more about why Learning Tree instructors are the best in the world.

The SDK download from Amazon includes a library for .NET, code samples and a Toolkit for Visual Studio. Once installed the toolkit provides a New Project template in Visual Studio that gives you a good place to start. You also get the AWS Explorer which makes it very easy to manage your Amazon resources right from within Visual Studio.

Figure 1 Visual Studio with AWS Toolkit installed

The library provides an intuitive object wrapper over the Amazon APIs. If you have used the Amazon command line tools or management console you should feel pretty comfortable with the .NET implementation. For example to use EC2 from within a C# application you create an instance of an EC2 client using the AWSClientFactory. You can then call methods on the AmazonEC2 object you create. These methods correspond to the command line commands and API calls you have already been using. The wizard even creates some sample code to get you going.

A simple method to launch an EC2 instance might look like this:

Figure 2 Simple Method to Launch an EC2 Instance

By providing support for multiple languages Amazon opens up AWS to developers from many backgrounds. Whether you program in Java, Ruby, PHP, Python or C# you will find an SDK that will get you started building solutions that leverage the many services offered by Amazon in the Cloud.

Kevin Kell

Amazon SNS is a Web service that allows applications to send notifications from the cloud. These are then delivered to subscribers or other applications for consumption. Working with SNS requires the setting up of a topic which can be viewed as the asynchronous communication channel between senders and receivers. Subscribers can register their interest in receiving messages from the topic. When registering, the protocol to be used is selected from HTTP(S), SMTP, SMTP (JSON), Amazon SQS and now the newly added SMS. Senders publish a message to the topic which then delivers it to all registered subscribers.

SNS provides application developers with a highly scalable, flexible and cost effective communication channel. I have used it in my companies retail application for a number of scenarios, including customer order status notifications and also emailing special offer deals. The addition of SMS support offers even more opportunities for us to use SNS.

There are some restrictions to the SMS support at the moment. Firstly, it is currently only available for topics configured in the US-east coast region and for US phone numbers. Each message payload is restricted to 140 ASCII characters or 70 Unicode characters. Any message exceeding these restrictions will be truncated. Support for other regions is to be provided over the next few months. The pricing is attractive – the first 100 SNS SMS notifications per month are free and then $0.06 per 100,000 SNS notifications thereafter.

The new SMS support provided by SNS is another example of the way Amazon AWS continues to grow by adding more services that integrate with those already there to provide cost effective infrastructure solutions. For anybody wishing to gain an in-depth understanding of Amazon Web Services and how to effectively use the services and integrate them into a coherent cloud computing solution for your organisation, Learning Tree have developed a 4 day hands-on course. If you are interested, more details can be found here.

Chris Czarnecki