Is enterprise cloud adoption going through a lull ? »

I recently broke my collarbone and couldn't type.   So spent a lot of time catching up with some smart folks like Christopher Hoff.  Interesting that many of us thought it seems like we are going through a lull in enterprise buying of cloud technologies.

I do see what they are saying -  it seems like many of the CIO's who were gung ho to do summer pilot projects are slowing down...why?

I do not think this is a lull - instead the splashing water (survivcal mentality) is starting to go away..    The economy is getting better (or this is anticipated - almost the same thing).  Now the pressure's on to act quickly on trying out new things either to increase revenue or save $$'s.

Executives are getting back into a regular budget cycle, and this is planning time for most companies as they get back to thinking how to show good results and pitch budget needs for next year.

We at Sonoa are convinced that promise of cloud is strong as ever and our customers pilots are going into production w/ awesome results. The wave will continue to build into next year as more success stories are discussed - get ready!

Screencast: Creating your first API proxy »

The first in a series of how to get started using Apigee to proxy API traffic (looks best in HD).

In the cloud, scale means concurrency »

In enterprise computing, scale has traditionally meant “lots of transactions per second."  On Wall Street for many years, “20,000 TPS” was the magic number as it was the rate of a typical market data feed.  Infrastructure like TIBCO’s UDP-based information bus and then IBM’s MQSeries became the base platforms for much of this scale of computing, and are still heavily used alongside modern JMS and MSMQ implementations.
 
Relatively little attention was paid to concurrent connections.  Enterprise environments tend to be well-regulated, and most applications will have under 1000 simultaneous users (whether human or machine driven).  As a result, application servers and related technologies evolved to support high transaction throughput at limited concurrency.
 
The web on the other hand brought in much higher concurrency requirements, and platforms like WebLogic became default components of web computing environments for sites serving 1,000s people at the same time.  This was a breakthrough and led to significant market success in a short time period.
 
With the rise of cloud computing, two things change.  First, mobile applications and the API economy are driving an order of magnitude increase in the number of simultaneous users.  Second, these users are often machines rather than people, and therefore aren’t limited to the demand patterns of humans users clicking links or refreshing their pages.
 
This produces a new set of demand patterns which increase both total throughput and peak concurrency.  As an example, travel sites like Kayak.com and Bing.com/travel issue hundreds of API requests to airline reservation system backends as a result of a single human-driven query.  Furthermore, these requests are being made not just by desktop or web applications but by mobile applications – especially iPhone applications.  As most people are aware, the next 10 billion devices that come online will be mobile devices (phones, MIDs, GPS, game units, media players).  Each of these is prized for its native application experiences.  Each of these devices will be making user-driven and automated calls to cloud services in order to deliver those experiences.
 
Where backend systems are not protected from this demand, they are being penalized in performance and load management.  This causes either outright outages, “web brownouts” where the core website that uses the same backend slows down, or erratic performance across both the web and cloud properties.  Again, mobile access exacerbates the issue due to the intermittent nature of mobile internet connectivity, which multiplies the number of connections that need to be set up and torn down as the device comes on and off the network.
 
So the explosion of concurrent usage is already beginning, as the traffic and backend impact is expanding.  To manage this and maintain stability of existing infrastructure, a new layer of infrastructure is emerging, much as HTTP load balancers have evolved to serve the needs of web computing.  What we’re seeing is the rise of cloud service controllers, a category of infrastructure that works well with existing systems and builds on top of the strengths of application servers, enterprise messaging systems, and application delivery controllers.