Kenneth Oestreich

I recently gave a talk at the Cloud Computing Expo in New York about where to begin if you're building a cloud infrastructure or "Infrastructure-as-a-Service." The response was great, so I'll try to summarize the high points here for others who are interested. What Is IaaS Anyhow? Whenever we see a "stack diagram" of cloud architectures, most conversation centers on higher-level layers like defining what "Platform-as-a-Service" or "Software-as-a-Service" is. But underneath all of these diagrams is always a foundation layer called "Infrastructure-as-a-Service" (IaaS) or sometimes Hardware-as-a-Service (HaaS). IaaS doesn't get much attention, but it's really the critical factor to being able to provide reliability and basic services to all of the other layers (see Figure 1). Why? Without a dependable, scalable, and expandable hardware (CPU, storage, networking) founda... (more)

Cloud Computing: Creating a Generic (Internal) Cloud Architecture

Kenneth Oestriech's Blog I've been taken aback lately by the tacit assumption that cloud-like (IaaS and PaaS) services have to be provided by folks like Amazon, Terremark and others. It's as if these providers do some black magic that enterprises can't touch or replicate. However, history has taught the IT industry that what starts in the external domain eventually makes its way into the enterprise, and vice-versa. I've been taken aback lately by the tacit assumption that cloud-like (IaaS and PaaS) services have to be provided by folks like Amazon, Terremark and others. It's as i... (more)