How do cloud applications scale, what can go wrong if they do, and how would you test that? These are some of the questions that my guest post on cloud scalability at Blazemeter touches upon. Blazemeter, by the way, is a cloud based load testing service.

Amazon has close to half a million servers, according to research done by Huan Liu of Accenture. This is impressive, though not as big as Google which according to my estimates of almost two years ago has around two and a half million servers (see Google server count). Of course, both these numbers are guesses […]

Is Cloud Essentials the right course for you? Many people ask me this question, so I have compiled a brief list of questions to help you in answering it. Here is a list of the questions that you should be able to answer after the Cloud Essentials course. If you think you know the answer […]

Thanks to my friends at ITpreneurs.

Just a few interesting points from a report on a Washington cloud conference recently.  In the [US] federal government, which carries a roughly $80 billion annual IT budget, the question of cloud computing is no longer a question of “if,” but rather “how,” and “how soon.” That is an interesting observation, but we say that one coming, […]

Here is a recording of a panel on cloud performance, held  at the recent CMG’11 annual conference of the Computer Measurement Group (see http://www.cmg.org). The topic of the panel was: “Is Cloud Computing a source of solutions or a source of new problems for performance engineering or is it a solution to old problems”?  Our […]

OK, I admit it, it was a stupid move: leaving my gloves and bicycle keys on the counter next to somebody else’s wallet, even though I only needed to pick up an ink cartridge at the computer shop. But I got distracted by some cool stuff and when I returned to the counter my keys […]

The definition of cloud broker attracts some controversy. Too bad, because I am trying to teach about cloud computing. Recently I wrote “there are no cloudbrokers“. My argument is basically that all known instances of cloud brokers actually provide a cloud service themselves.   Michiel Steltman takes issue with this in “the definition of broker […]

Even in a cloud world, reducing server count is a lofty goal in itself. After all, you would be paying for all those servers anyway. And sticking all your servers in a private cloud makes them more flexible, but not necessarily more efficient or cheaper. So today I bring you an interview with a guy […]