Amazon Elastic MapReduce/Hadoop

Not sure why but Amazon seems to be killing the whole innovation cycles & keep coming out with services integrated into AWS which otherwise a startup could have handled, nevertheless maybe we need to double our speed & innovate better & faster, sure so here comes the Amazon Utility service which basically will help run robust computational processes on demand & cost effective, we at attribo had started looking at integrating & making multiprocess algorithms easily deployable & manageable via cloud vendors, obviously Hadoop/mapreduce is something everyone would be interested in, though great I like the idea that Amazon has taken all that complexity involved in setting up hadoop/mapreduce environment & now it would be easy for us to integrate Amazon Elastic MapReduce directly into our product & build a wrapper layer to abstract out domain specific data churning algorithms....sad to see CloudEra's Hadoop initiatives go royally wasted ....more later

CloudCamp Bangalore 2009

Fantastic! so after almost 6+months from rest of the world where cloud brainstorming is on a rapid pace we in India got a chance to gather & meetup via CloudCamp @ Bangalore. Wonderful job done by Dave Neilsen(CloudCamp), prem(Novell), vinayak(Akamai), NARCEL, ACM, IIM & the volunteers who arranged the event & proceedings. After almost 6 month on look out for experts who are interested in cloud I had a sigh of relief to see a good amount of curious participants who introduced, argued, learnt & discussed about cloud. Overall a satisfactory event though I guess everyone went back with their own interpretation of Cloud, so confusion prevails as to what is cloud & what exactly represents cloud ex: SaaS, PaaS, IaaS etc were as confusing as ever. Though I firmly believe Cloud is all about making "the computational intensive, configurable & on demand infrastructure" accessible & available at a dramatically placed pricing model to an end user, what 1 can build on top of it is left to one's own creativity.

So my intention was to meet people & see what they are doing & what they want to know about cloud & how to jump start towards a cloud based business/service/product model, got introduced to few startups who are aggressively using the cloud (AMZ specifically) but for sure my focus towards making the end user experience while adopting to any cloud vendors seems to have gained a wide acceptance. also there are already talk to consolidate & publish a common cloud based API which interpets rest of the available Cloud vendor API's seems realistic. This is what I had aimed for since start & now I see good acceptance to a "Multi Cloud Vendor Management Console" which is what we at http://www.attribo.com/ are working on & about to deliver.

Utility Computing is something what I am also looking at & trying to understand how the cloud based architecture can be put in place for the same, bounced off at cloudEra who are doing a great job via bundling & making the Hadoop/Mapreduce process easily deployable & manageable by end users, also got to learn more about Intel/Yahoo/Hp's initiatives via OpenCirrus & Tashi (apache open source), Pig (Yahoo) so eventually most are trying to deliver a solution to allow end user adaptability of cloud.

so sure things are getting heated up & I am more inclined toward bulding or solving problems using cloud & not fall into arguing about what cloud is, as Dave Neilsen(CloudCamp) put's rightly
" Lets' learn & use Cloud for what is offers"

AMZ Console ...does it affect startups who solved the AMZ service usability issues?

yikes! honestly its heart breaking to see AMZ console, we at www.attribo.com had focused to make the AMZ services more usable via our point & click solution though we have already integrated with AMZ & GoGrid & all its services i.e EC@, S3, SDB etc , we dont see any revenue streams for our product henceforth given that AMZ is FREE! & they would be supporting all the services via that console. So looking forward we are changing our strategy & consolidating our approach towards multi vendor cloud management. Personally I think it was a great time spent digging into various API's which sure would help us build & innovate to suffice other issues while managing these cloud instances,