1. Data Security
Because Amazon AWS has gone through nearly all possible security compliance procedure (SAS 70 type II, PCI compliance). So now, you can consider Amazon as a possible supplier for hosting your credit card data or any other confidential data.It offers security from day one ... Compared to what some companies should invest to get the same result on time within their datacenter, this announce could be a major game changer.
2. Data Management
Several offers exist on the market and are preparing for a major shift:- Xeround, "The cloud database" offers mySQL in the cloud ... Easy ... Easy ...
- Amazon SimpleDB, and Amazon Relational Database Service part of Amazon Web Services set of cloud computing products and offers. Amazon RDS gives you access to the full capabilities of a familiar MySQL database, while Simple DB is a NoSQL offer.
- Salesforce launched Database.com "Build for the cloud" yesterday.
- Microsoft has a great offer with SQL Azure (SQL server like Database as a service) and Azure Storage solution.
- Cloudant offers NoSQL data Mgt in the cloud.
- Google is offering several solution for data storage as API: Big Table , Blobstore, and Google Storage (see a good description how how to use them here).
- And a new one: clearDB.
3. Platform As A Service(PAAS)
Great news on the Platform as a service. Oracle recent decisions concerning Java are making companies and the open source community look for next generation platform, in the cloud.This was a great gift for:
- Google enhancements concerning Google AppEngine latest release, with 1.4.0 SDK. This SDK offers a Channel API, a bi-directional channel for communicating directly with user browsers by pushing notifications directly to the JavaScript running on the client, eliminating the need for polling). Android, Chrome OS, and Chrome Store will also be game changer in 2010.
- Heroku (bought by Salesforce), Engine Yard, Morph Labs, and PoolParty will target the Ruby language developer community offering them dedicated PAAS solutions. Read DigitalHobbit’s more in-depth review of some of these Ruby-specific PaaS offerings.
- Microsoft Azure Compute Service... with its impressive marketing power and its still amazing killer development IDE Visual Studio that integrates just fine with Azure. Microsoft also target PHP developers ...
- Force.com. Developers familiar with Java or C# could use it easily. The platform was well suited for businesses looking to develop business applications that could easily integrate with the SaaS tools. But since this year, a real platform did emerge to support more company online services. Now you can benefit from: appforce ("the fastest way to build enterprise apps"), siteforce ("the fastest way to build data-rich websites"), VMForce ("the fastest way to build enterprise Java apps" based on SpringSource), ISVforce ("the fastest way to bring commercial apps to market").
- WSO2 Stratos in alpha version offering only some specific services (identity service, portal service, gadget service).
- No big player yet for PhP PAAS, but interesting solutions from CloudControl, Baobapp, etc.
- JoyEnt’s Smart Platform is an open source, Javascript-based PaaS.
- Tibco Silver (Not sure it is more than pure marketing ... Waiting for it since years)
4. Internet Service Bus (ISB) and Cloud To Cloud (C2C)
Now that your data and applications are in the Cloud, how to exchange data between them? You need cloud to cloud solutions. Again, the offer is maturing and you will find tons of solutions in the future. Today the offer is mostly:- Queue based messaging systems:
- Integration Platform in the cloud
5. Mobile
To have great mobile app you need a great user experience and well defined services that you can call in JSON or REST (SOAP is not recommended for mobile com). That's why the new Mobile SDKs for Amazon Web Services could be a very good game changer ...Two exist already: AWS SDK for Android and AWS SDK for iOS.