Hybrid Cloud Applications

By Peter Loh

I attended a Cloud Computing session given by Lew Moorman, CTO of Rackspace at the Web 2.0 session in san Francisco last week. Here are a couple of interesting items I noted from his talk.

The cloud is for everyone, but not for everything. His point was that the cloud offers benefits for all companies, but not for all applications. Test, development, archive/storage applications are natural applications for the cloud. In-house ERP/CRM and database intensive appications are less cloud friendly - at least for today.
Hybrid applications will be prevalent in the enterprise. Since migrating entire applications to the cloud is complex and - as stated above - perhaps not desired due to that application's characteristics, hybrid applications which are partially in the data center and partially in the cloud may make more sense.

From Tap In's perspective, monitoring hybrid applications are a perfect fit for our service. Since Tap In can monitor cloud services and non-cloud systems, we can integrate both sources of information. For future functions, like autoscaling, that may require information from multiple sources, this appraoch makes sense. Perhaps more importantly, Tap In can gather information form existing on-premise monitoring systems like Nagios, Microsoft Systems Center, or just about any system that has an API. This eases the operational transition for operations to support hybrid cloud applications.