Platform as a Service

At yesterday's conference Google and VMware made what is perhaps one of the most ambitious cost reduction announcements in the history of information management.*

Google, with >1 million servers, has joined the dominant virtualization firm VMware (with >50,000 customers) to announce the availability of a "Platform-as-a-Service" cloud.

Here is the significance:

1. Google will provide the computing infrastructure (Platform) from 27 global data centers to anyone
on an as-use basis. Various Service Level Agreements (SLAs) will be available, including six sigma reliability.

2. Customers will avoid devoting  >50% of the development costs to the creation of application level
infrastructures. A complete data center and a continually evolving secure infrastructure will be delivered by Google and be completely transparent to any customer.

3. VMware will provide code development Tool Suites to customers. By means of these tools customers will be able to manage applications for the cloud, thus by-passing many of the existing problems associated with the writing and installing code with a minimum of testing.

4. Google and VMware will deliver software development tools that will integrate software performance
monitoring with production environment tracing technology. This will enable end to end performance visibility for all applications as well as load balancing across several data centers.

5. Large libraries of open source tested components will become readily accessible. This will offer a major
departure from the existing Microsoft .Net tools and methods.

6. Open standards will make it possible for customers to relocate processing from Google Platforms to
other Public or Private Clouds. National Security processing will be able to use the identical technology
to create a "Secure-Platform-as-a-Service".

SUMMARY

We can expect large reductions in the development and operating costs of new Java applications (>70%)
plus improvements in reliability and in error reduction.

These developments will alter how we will have to view the ways how to organize the creation and the application of software.


* http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmware-google.html