Thursday, September 17, 2009

Making Cloud Computing Ridiculously Easy

With all the hullabaloo about cloud computing, it is easy to get caught up in the trend of the day and miss the big picture. The big picture is that cloud computing disrupts the data center world by slashing the capital and skills required to deploy a web application.

If that is the big prize, then most of what passes for news in cloud computing is more along the lines of "me speak cloud too."

Today, cloud development and deployment is still the exclusive domain of highly paid web experts and just as highly paid hosting providers and systems administrators. As much as cloud providers like Amazon and Rackspace have done to simplify web hosting and eliminate people from the equation, it still takes far too much expertise and effort to get applications built and deployed in the cloud.

The goal of cloud computing is to make web development and deployment something that any bum can do and charge in on their credit card with nary a care in the world.

With all due humility, I think RightScale and WaveMaker have taken a big step towards that goal this week, introducing an easy-to-use cloud development platform with one-click deployment to Amazon EC2 via RightScale.

It is now monkeys-on-keyboards easy to create a web application and deploy it in a secure, scalable cloud environment using WaveMaker/RightScale and Amazon.

So who cares about this stuff anyway? How 'bout IBM and Amazon!

On Thursday, October 1, IBM and Amazon are hosting a half-day webinar entitled Cloud computing for developers: Hosted by IBM and Amazon Web Services . At that webinar, WaveMaker and RightScale will provide an online demonstration of building a web application with WaveMaker and deploying it to a WebSphere AMI using RightScale. One small click for man, one giant cloud for mankind!

No comments: