Tag: cloud computing

Cloud Computing Session Announced For MENA ICT Forum 2010

MMM

MENA ICT ForumAdding to the list of interesting sessions taking place during the MENA ICT Forum 2010, which will be taking place in Amman next week (October 10th – 11th, 2010), a new session has been announced called “Reality and the Cloud”, which as the name suggests is about cloud computing as an emerging technology to be harnessed in the region.

The session will have two parts, and through them the ‘cloudiness’ of the MENA region will be examined, as regional broadband and access initiatives have made online technologies available to large and small business alike, cutting the burden of large IT expenses.

Challenges faced by companies who are not adopting this trend will be discussed, in addition to privacy and confidentiality concerns. The dominant theme of web hosting and servicing will also be tackled, and the hurdles faced by the region to capture vital market share in an ever-expanding industry of web-hosting.

Read More

Google App Engine: Your Web Apps On Google Infrastructure

MMM

Google just released a preview release of Google App Engine, a developer tool that enables you to run your web applications on Google’s infrastructure.

Google App Engine gives you access to the same building blocks that Google uses for its own applications, making it easier to build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data.

The development environment includes the following features:

  • Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies
  • Persistent storage (powered by BigTable and Google File System (GFS) with queries, sorting, and transactions)
  • Automatic scaling and load balancing
  • Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email
  • Fully featured local development environment

During the initial preview period, applications are limited to 500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day. In the future, these limited quotas will remain free, and developers will be able to purchase additional resources as needed.

This new offering from Google is direct competition to the suite of web services offered by Amazon, including S3 (storage), EC2 (virtual servers) and SimpleDB (database).

But unlike Amazon Web Services’ loosely coupled architecture, which consists of several essentially independent services that can optionally be tied together by developers, Google’s architecture is more unified and less flexible; which means that developers using it will be running their entire application stack on Google resources.

Very interesting start from Google in the cloud computing arena, hopefully the future will hold more options and development platforms, and a bit more flexibility. It should make it a little easier for developers to get started with a new web app, and actually scale when that app reaches the point where it’s receiving significant traffic.

# Google App Engine