Will Cloud Computing solution sing Sweet Caroline?
by
Charlie Bess
Last week I saw a demonstration of Project Caroline at Sun. Its main design features are to:
- Enable services to programmatically allocate, monitor, and control virtualized compute, storage, and networking resources.
- Expose resources through high level abstractions, including language level virtual machines, networks, and network accessible file systems and databases.
- Provide a horizontally scaled pool of distributed resources as a single system, providing developers with a unified platform for allocating and controlling these resources.
It is essentially hiding the complexities of boxes and OSes from the developer. It's also enabling resources to be dynamically applied to the task and load at hand. They are positioning themselves as a platform as a service provider (cloud computing), so that organizations who have programmatic intellectual property can provide SaaS capabilities. Although the project is relatively immature, it does appear to have significant promise by encapsulating existing code into a services shell.
Sun has a website (that is hosted via Caroline) where you can find document, tools... Since we've recently heard about Google's and Amazon's activities, the cloud computing area is definitely heating up. Sun's approach may be a bit more flexible though.
I've written before about how I think cloud computing will change how value is delivered by IT. These are definitely areas development organizations should be experimenting in, even if the services they offer are not all ready for enterprise class production.
