Alan Williamson

"We are in an ideal position to accelerate our business to continue our leadership in this rapidly advancing cloud market," says RightScale CEO Michael Crandell, in this Exclusive Q&A with the editor-in-chief of SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Journal, Alan Williamson. "We decided the timing was right to create a war chest that would take us to profitability," Crandell added. Earlier this month RightScale snagged $13M in a Series B round of venture funding. Here's the interview in full: Cloud Computing Journal: $13M is quite a chunk of change to raise in this climate. Was this about what you required? Was it more or less than you asked for? Michael Crandell: We raised exactly what we set out to raise. This year we've seen a lot of interest from investors, and so we decided the timing was right to create a war chest that would take us to profitability. At the same time, ... (more)

Has Amazon EC2 become over subscribed?

Amazon EC2 is increasingly under load, but when you start to see internal pings around 7seconds with regularly shell freezes this is more than a freak one off incidents. Amazon appear to be struggling with the load. ... (more)

There May Be Trouble Ahead...

As Nat King Cole famously sang, we have to "face the music and dance..." This month's editorial is coming to you with a reader beware warning! I've been engaged in some great debates over the last month on a variety of topics, but the one that has caught my interest is the old chestnut regarding the longevity of Java. Is it here to stay? If not, how long do we have? Quite rightly, it's being talked about and I've had the good fortune to brush shoulders with a number of big names in our industry who have given me their perspectives on the whole debate. I have my own feelings about ... (more)

Profiling Netbeans within Amazon EC2

Alan Williamson's Blog It was only a matter of time before we started seeing real how-to's pop up on how we can start profiling our Java applications running deep within the cloud. When my long term friend and colleague, Kirk Pepperdine, started talking about taking his world class Java performance tuning skills out of the server room and into the clouds I was excited. He's just getting started, with this handy start-up for getting your live clouded Java applications directly profiled using Netbeans. The big elephant in the clouds, is of course the fact that the hardware to whic... (more)

Microsoft's Azure Bullet Points

 Alan Williamson's Blog We knew it was coming, the leafs were rustling and the wind was blowing. Yesterday Microsoft finally released their vision for their offering into the cloud space. They have published a whitepaper on Azure so with that, here are the highlights from that whitepaper. High level view: "a platform for running Windows applications and storing their data in the cloud" Four main areas; Windows Azure base, .NET services, SQL services and Live services All Azure applications run within Microsoft's data centers accessible via the Internet Applications built on .NE... (more)