Cloud computing report; Sun’s new API and DabbleDB

A recent McKinsey & Company report Clearing the air on cloud computing  reports that for companies to migrate their enterprise software platforms to the cloud:

The cost of cloud must come down significantly for outsourcing a complete data center to make economic sense

Although it is becoming cost effective for smaller ‘compute equivalent’ environment – where the total costs of assets for a typical data centre is US$45/month per CPU.

The report also suggests that:

CIOs should be working the cloud technology stack bottom up; cloud providers top down

Or in other words utilise virtualization and CDN’s available now, while waiting for the cloud service  providers to improved reliability and standardize offerings.  The recent Open Cloud initiative spearheaded by Sam Johnston from Australian Online Solutions might go someway to achieving this goal:

A common set of protocols and API’s for accessing cloud resources could be as revolutionary as HTTP was for TCP/IP.   And possibly the simplest and best implementation I have seen to date is Sun’s new cloud initiative, illustrated in this Hello Cloud example leveraging JSON over the RESTful API.  Hopefully the recent acquisition of Sun by Oracle won’t dent the enthusiasm of this project.

One of the great things about the cloud is the flexability developers/vendors have when choosing the software stack  for their implementation. DabbleDB was a recent example i came across that offers a rich database through a clever online spreadsheet-style interface.  It is built on the Squeak smalltalk engine utilising the SeaSide framework.  Avi Bryant talks to InfoQ on how his application works without the use of a RDBM instead storing virtual images of the smalltalk run-time.

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