Toddy Mladenov

If you have been thinking how to choose your public cloud vendor you are not the only one. There are hundreds of offerings that you can choose from and comparing those can be a cumbersome exercise. Hence most of the people just run to the vendor (or technology) they are either most familiar with or gives them the best price. This is all good until they discover that… well, that vendor is not what they have been looking for. Lately I've been few times asked: "Which public cloud provider would you recommend to deploy our application?" Doesn't matter how much I want it to be, the answer is unfortunately not that simple. Here are few questions to ask yourself while doing the research. Do you plan to migrate existing applications or to develop brand new applications? Very few if any legacy applications are designed with cloud patterns in mind. Things like sticky sessions... (more)

Business Strategy for Enterprise Cloud Startups

With cloud computing becoming the center of almost every new enterprise IT project, more and more startups decide to compete in the area. This raises the question: "Are they ready to fulfill the enterprise needs?" Forget the need to have one big customer. This can open few doors but if your startup's business strategy is wrong those will be shut down soon. It is true that one prominent customer can boost your sales but in my opinion there are two more important things that can help your startup get customers fast. First question you need to ask yourself is: "Do I target the right ... (more)

Evaluating Cloud Computing Uptime SLAs

Last week's Windows Azure Storage outage made me thinking how many of us evaluate the vendor's Service Level Agreement (SLA) before they decide to deploy workloads in the cloud. I bet many think about it only when it is too late. Let's take Windows Azure SLA and see how we as consumers of the cloud services are protected in case of downtime. Before all though I would like to point out that it is in the nature of any service (public or private) to experience outage once in a while - think about power outages that we hear about or live through every winter. It is important to under... (more)

Cloud Computing Service Models

In this post I will look at the three different service models for cloud computing as defined by NIST. More specifically I will look at the management and operations overhead for each one of the models and compare it to the traditional on-premise model. Traditional Model Let's look at how things have been done in the past. Traditionally enterprises have been responsible for managing their own IT infrastructure as well as the software stack that runs their applications. For small companies that meant hiring polyglot employees with wide range of skills varying from low level netw... (more)

The Importance of Private Clouds

Few days ago I noticed a question on a LinkedIn group that made me thinking how important is the notion of private clouds. First, let's briefly look at what is the difference between public, private and community clouds as well as hybrid clouds. Once again those are very well defined in NIST Definition of Cloud Computing but stated with simple words they are: Private Cloud is cloud infrastructure that belong to single organization (enterprise, university, government organization etc.) that is hosted either on or off premise and is managed by the organization or third party contr... (more)