Don’t Be An AaaS, Stop Overusing PaaS
While attending Cloudy Mondays at the Microsoft NERD Center last week, I realized Platform as a Service (PaaS) is an overloaded term. I posed the question: where does IaaS stop and PaaS start? For example, was a database service PaaS? Was an object store PaaS? A distributed memory cache? The opinions were mixed, with most attendees concluding that services such as Amazon S3 and Dynamo were PaaS, but with much less audience consensus on services based on existing technologies, such as Amazon RDS. I typically leave the taxonomy to industry analysts, but feel there is confusion in the cloudosphere over PaaS. When we first started using the term in 2007, it was to refer to emerging horizontal development platforms such as Force.com,...
Pennies in the Cloud
By now you have seen the Amazon S3 price reduction. Effective Monday, Amazon has discounted the price per gigabyte for their cloud object store by up to 13%, with the discount inversely proportional to the storage consumed. The official explanation for the discount is that Amazon continues to innovate to drive down costs and “pass along the resultant savings to you.” If you’re a competitor, you’re likely to take away a different conclusion: Amazon’s disruptive pricing isn’t going to stop any time soon. The Amazon announcement reveals a little known fact in the 2012 battle for the public cloud: competitors that have maintained tight control over the cost effectiveness of their software, infrastructure...
Top 10 Cloud Computing Startups in Boston
Depending on who you talk to, cloud computing is either one of the most significant technology transformation since the advent of the world wide web, or one of the most over-hyped fads since virtual reality. For today’s post, I thought I’d do a round up of the top cloud computing startups in the Boston area. But first, a confession: classifying a company as in or out of the cloud computing market is subjective. It reminds me of classifying Internet companies back in the mid-1990s (does having a web site make you an Internet company?), and is further complicated by the fact companies are scrambling to re-brand themselves with the cloud. If you haven’t noticed, Salesforce.com is now known as “the enterprise cloud computing...
Joe Kinsella is a high-tech VPE and startup junkie in the Boston area.