Application Developers to Keep Their Eyes on the Cloud

In November, Amazon.com announced the launch of Amazon CloudFront, a self-service, pay-as-you-go Web service for content delivery. With the release of CloudFront, Amazon delivered a way for developers to distribute content through a worldwide network of edge locations that provide low latency and high data transfer speeds.

For its part, Google earlier in 2008 brought out Google App Engine, which enables developers to run their Web applications on Google's infrastructure. Applications run in a secure sandbox environment.

"You can serve your app using a free domain name on the appspot.com domain, or use Google Apps to serve it from your own domain," according to a Google Web page describing the company's cloud computing offering for developers. "You can share your application with the world, or limit access to members of your organization."

The Google App Engine features dynamic Web serving, persistent storage, automatic scaling and load balancing, APIs for authenticating users and sending e-mail using Google Accounts, and a "fully featured local development environment that simulates Google App Engine on your computer," Google said.

Meanwhile, at its Dreamforce annual conference in San Francisco in November, Salesforce.com, which refers to itself as "the enterprise cloud computing company," announced to thousands of its users and developers that its Salesforce CRM Winter '09 release had gone live. And for developers, Salesforce.com delivered the Force.com IDE (integrated development environment) for Winter '09.

CohesiveFT's Kerpan said: "Think back to the 'relatively' simple trick of virtual memory. Many IT people remember life before virtual memory. Those who are younger, take it as a research project. We went from sweating every byte of memory used and fussing with overlay files to virtually unlimited memory. This transformed the development of software systems. Developers who couldn't get used to 'wasting' memory hurt their projects by slowing them down. It was a rough shift for people who were 'memory management heroes' a mere year or two earlier."

Kerpan added, "Virtual memory meant nearly unlimited memory for your application—virtualization combined with public clouds like Amazon EC2, FlexiScale and ElasticHosts means a world of nearly unlimited computing devices.

Developers who understand that 'wasting' servers, assembling a huge number of servers, deploying a huge number of servers and discarding them at will are a good thing will have the advantage over their peers who still nurture, script and sculpt lumps of land-based metal [physical servers]."