Larry Ellison Loses his #*$# and bashes "Cloud Computing"

Larry Ellison on the origins of Oracle, Acquisition of Sun, Linux vs. Solaris and Cloud Computing ... Things were going real well until asked about Cloud Computing and then just immense amounts of hilarity ensued.

Though I gotta say, one has to agree with him at a certain level, but I think he's missing the point like IBM's of the world missed the point of the little PC's appearing under people's desks in the late 70's.

The whole thing is well worth watching but this bit is just too precious! It was so funny to watch him being calm and composed and then just lose it all of a sudden! It made my day!

NOTE: The embed doesn't seem to be working, but it is Chapter 11 (What a coincidence!) in the program sequence.

Amazon announces the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

One of the questions people ask when being offered a Peoplesoft in the Cloud service is: How will you make sure this is safe and will follow corporate security policies?

One of the main reasons most enterprises would not want to put their sensitive HR/Financials data out there in the great fuzzy thing-a-ma-jiggy called "The Cloud" is because of the perception (right or wrong) that somehow this wouldn't follow the architectural guidelines established by a given IT organization (and the business sponsors thereof.)

This is also because most Peoplesoft Customers would only go so far as to consider putting a "trial/vanilla" instance in the cloud fearing that putting copies of actual data may expose the organization to risk.

And these concerns are not limited just to ERP Peoplesoft customers, they extend to most other large corporate entities. Keeping this in mind, it was only a matter of time before Amazon, being the industry leaders that they are in this space, came out with the next offering in their cloud portfolio.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) lets you create your own logically isolated set of Amazon EC2 instances and connect it to your existing network using an IPsec VPN connection. This new offering lets you take advantage of the low cost and flexibility of AWS while leveraging the investment you have already made in your IT infrastructure.

More at the AWS Blog: Introducing Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

Implementing Peoplesoft in the Amazon AWS Cloud

A blog entry wondering about whether something like that is possible prompted me to post this.

I believe we are the very first outfit to actually have implemented a proof of concept vanilla install of a Peoplesoft HCM instance in the Amazon EC2 cloud.

The proof of concept was to be offered as a joint venture "productized" consulting service coinciding with the launch of PT8.50 and HCM9.1 this fall. The "Cloud Broker" piece is still missing which basically means we can't have clients sign up and once built, provision their instances "on Demand"... although that is where I envision going once we get more funding and some time to build that piece into the infrastructure.

The basic architecture has been:

1. Windows2003/SQLServer 2005 Standard "Small Instance (Default)": 1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform
   
2. Peoplesoft Vanilla Install for evaluation purposes.
   
3. EBS (Elastic Block Store) volumes to house the database, as the i/o throughput is much better than the standard instance.
   

There is some magic that goes into getting this up and running, but it is by no means impossible!

I foresee Peoplesoft installations running happily in Internal IT Clouds in not too distant a future.

Imagine a DMO environment, for every developer if needed!

Imagine a DMO environment for every major bug your team is following up on.

Imagine separate environments provisioned on an hour's notice for multiple testing streams!

The possibilities are endless!

Amazon EC2 vs. "On Premises Price Calculator"

The folks over at AzureJournal have put together a handy Google Doc Spreadsheet which gives a rough comparison of in-house vs EC2 costs for a given scenario. You can also do what-if analysis by changing some of the parameters on the fly.

"Infrastructure in the Cloud Era"

Excellent presentation by Ezra (of Engine Yard) and Adam Jacob (of Opscode). The latest EngineYard EC2 offering (aka "solo") is based on Opscode's "Chef" Cloud Infrastructure Manatement Platform. One of the best talks from OreillyMedia's "Velocity 09" Conference btw.

Enjoy!

Google Chrome OS ... The Cloud is King!

So the cat is out of the bag! and Google IS going to go the Operating Systems way after all!

The paradigm is changing and Google is on top of things! The fact is that Google is one of the very few companies to realize and recognize that "The Web is The Computer", or as the old saying at Sun Microsystems used to go, "Network is the Computer".

While Sun Microsystems paid only lip service to the mantra while doing everything they could to lock their customers in, Google has put their money where their mouth is.

Just as the Data Center side of the "client/server" coin moves to the "cloud", so does the client side. The users want the flexibility that comes with managing and keeping their data in the cloud, with an increasing likelihood that this data would also be processed by data centers which exist only in the cloud.

From the Google Blog announcement re: the Chrome OS:

We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don't want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.

Amen to that!

Welcome to PeepCloud Blog

Wherein we shall document our adventure of running Oracle™ PeopleSoft in the cloud. Enjoy the ride.