Christopher Keene

We seem to be coming to the end of the definition of Platform as a Service (PaaS) blog posts and are now moving on to the more pressing question of what is PaaS good for? In a recent Paul Maritz talk at GigaOm Structure conference, he referred to PaaS as "a cloaking layer for clouds." This is an elegant definition for a rapidly expanding market of add-on cloud services. If Cloud 1.0 is a set of servers in the sky (think Amazon EC2), then Cloud 2.0 is a layer of services that hide the complexity of developing, deploying and managing applications in the cloud (think CloudFoundry). The API for Cloud 1.0 is the virtual machine/OS. The API for Cloud 2.0 is the application container itself - services like CloudFoundry, Elastic Beanstalk from Amazon and Heroku allow a developer to hand over an application to the application container without having to know anything about wha... (more)

The Web is the New App Store

I attended the GigaOm Mobilize conference (where VMware was well represented by CTO Steve Herrod) and came away with a few observations that are relevant for our overall mobile strategy: The web is the new app store. I had dinner with the heads of mobile for two large retail chains. Although each of them have multiple App Store apps, the vast majority of their mobile business is coming through the safari browser and not the app store. Consumer behavior is to go to the web to buy things, even on mobile. There are only two mobile markets, native iPhone and mobile web.The shift to H... (more)

Cloud Computing is the Hardware Equivalent of ATMs

Chris Keene's "Keene View" Blog Cloud computing is custom made for Silicon Valley - it is poorly defined, seemingly vast and has the potential to change human life as we know it (at least for those of us who live in Silicon Valley). Since so many people are jumping on the cloud bandwagon, I thought it would be useful to look not at what cloud computing is but at what cloud computing isn't. . Of course, we have our fair share of naysayers (like Larry and Richard), as well as theories about why those naysayers are down on cloud computing. Cloud computing is the hardware equivalent of a... (more)

Viewpoint: Time for Open Source Software Vendors to Think Beyond Free

Of the many sins that Silicon Valley practices, none are more dangerous or prevalent than the sin of smugness. Savio Rodrigues had a good posting recently making the point that Microsoft is learning from and adapting to the open-source movement, while the open-source movement is so enamored with "free" that they are not paying enough attention to the total cost of ownership from a customer's perspective. Let's be clear - the free part of open source is a great innovation and worthy of a few minutes of self-satisfaction. The aftermath of the Y2K bubble was the erection of enormous... (more)

Development Tools For Cloud Computing

Chris Keene's "Keene View" Blog For cloud computing to take off, there need to be tools available that enable a developer to build and deploy an application without having to download anything to their desktop. This requires an on-demand development tool that sits on top of the cloud and provides a development Platform as a Service (PaaS). There are two paths that a vendor can take to create a development platform for cloud computing: cloud-first or tool-first. Cloud-first approach to PaaS: first build a cloud platform, then build a development tool that runs on top of it. This is... (more)