Dmitry Sotnikov

I’ve been recently involved helping a new European start-up just launched a new Platform-as-a-Service capable of running and automatically scaling any Java application. Here’s a quick write-up on why I think Jelastic is really onto something, a service to try and a company to watch. Say, you’ve got a great Java application which you want to put on the internet and make it available to the world. Believe it or not, up until today, what sounds like a trivial task simply could not be done. You effectively had to choose between lack of scalability, necessity to manually set up and maintain the whole software stack, requirement to re-write your code to conform to a particular framework (and get locked into it thereafter), or a combination of the above. Traditional hosting simply leased you a server and had you set it up including the web server and Java stack – effective... (more)

Cloud Definitions: NIST, Gartner, Forrester

Analysts should love hype – it lets them jump into a hot area and be the thought leaders who everyone has to consult to make any sense out of what is going on in the area. “Cloud” is probably the most hyped word in the industry these days and everyone has a definition of what it is. And despite this being a running joke in the industry, everyone obviously needs definition conversion to happen so we can start speaking the same language here. U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) stepped in and did – from my perspective – something truly amazing: they provided ... (more)

Email Address as the Universal Identity

In the brave new world of enterprise applications going to the web do we need an identity directory spawning the internet, and if so, will email address system become the de-facto global identity system? Global directories are obviously not new. There were efforts like X.400 and like, but then we kind of got scaled back to company-wide identities instead. So most of us just use a username (or DOMAIN\username) to log into our computer at work, and do not care that this is not globally unique at all. Sounds like the internet will make us care again. Suppose you are designing a glob... (more)

Cloud Computing Ain’t Electricity – It’s a Supermarket

Thanks to Nicholas Carr everyone loves to talk about Cloud Computing as electricity and how we are transitioning from own power-stations to central grid. After a lot of discussions about "the cloud", it occurred to me recently that there is a far better model to make cloud idea easy to understand - and it is supermarket. Electricity is kind of a wrong model. Not because so many folks are now trying to get the pendulum swing back and get to solar panels and other micro-generators, but also because software and IT services are much less uniform than electrical current. There's no ... (more)

Microsoft’s First Step Toward Cloud Computing

Azure Session at Cloud Expo Pundits talking about how Windows 7 is all about Microsoft competing against Apple, recovering with Vista consumer adoption disaster, or getting people off of XP, are missing one other – extremely important – part of the Windows 7 story. Windows 7 and its server counterpart – Windows Server 2008 R2 – are actually the first real step in Microsoft’s Windows Cloud Story. Before Windows 7 Microsoft could offer some services (such as Exchange Online) from the cloud – but could not provide full enterprise directory, security and so on – now they can. Micros... (more)