After doing some research on Malaysian Cloud offerings particularly the IaaS offerings, I noticed something rather interesting from Skali. Now I always remembered Skali as an early web startup some time back in the 90s trying to ride the internet wave but failing all along the way, this however has some promise.

Skali takes cloud scalability to a whole different level with their cloud offerings, unlike other IaaS providers who offer a fixed number of machine types Skali offers a fully scalable machine that you can add processing power, Memory and Disk independently. In essence near unlimited amounts of options in terms of machine type compared to just 3 from Maxis Cloud.

The pricing still seems high, but it can go toe-to-toe with Maxis although it would depend on the specific requirements. From just the high level you can sense that these IaaS providers are going to compete for Malaysian customers but they’re competing with very niche offerings. Maxis ace up it’s sleeve would be the unlimited data transfer, which Skali charges at a mind-blowing Rm2/GB. Skali on the other hand offers an entire range of machine types (possibly in the hundreds), while Maxis offers just 3.

The choice between Maxis or Skali would be a simple one that would come down to how much data transfer or scalability you need in your application. That being said, let’s take a look at some other offerings from Skali Cloud.

Maxis recently launched their new IaaS offering in the form called the Maxis Cloud. According to Lowyat.net the Maxis Cloud is said to be the " the most advanced on-demand, real-time, fully managed cloud service in Malaysia, Maxis Cloud allows businesses to scale their cloud computing infrastructure according to their needs at any time through its self-service portal."

That’s basically calling yourself Jaguh Kampung. Pardon the sarcasm, but the Maxis Cloud does seem a tad bit expensive for a such a late entry into the game. You’d expect new IaaS providers that show up this late in the cloud game throw everything including the kitchen sink to get new subscribers. That however, has been lacking and a marketing strategy that seems more intent on selling IaaS to non-believers as oppose to selling the Maxis Cloud itself isn’t helping their case.

I’d loved to be rooting for Maxis, but most of it’s offerings just don’t add up, and there’s a whole bunch of questions about it’s bandwidth charges, support availability and API specifications that aren’t clear enough to me to make any sort of comparison or even recommendation. Plus the fact that its self service portal had a ’technical issue’ when I logged on didn’t really bode well for my experience.

That being said, while analyzing I noticed that there is one thing Maxis could offer that could tilt the tables in its favor, Maxis is a communications company after all (unlike Amazon or Rackspace) and I think there just might be a chance it could offer something niche that would make it stand out. But first, let’s take a look at some key concepts:

Adobe is looking to release a cloud version of their creative applications online called creativecloud. From what I gather from their website it looks to be like a office365 version for creatives. This is probably a step in the right direction, Adobe software usually run into the hundreds or thousands of dollars, and buying the licenses for that software usually incur a huge capital expenditure for startups looking use these applications.

Well technically Cisco is a big thing already, a company that by itself is defining the internet as we speak with mind-blowing efficiency. Sure, Huawei thinks they’re catching up, but the truth is Cisco is in a league of it’s own, literally.

Today, I bumped through 2 articles I thought were pretty interesting. Cloudbeat, a blog I just recently subscribed to, reported that Cisco thinks “that global traffic generated by cloud computing services will increase a staggering 12 times by 2015 compared to cloud traffic in 2010, while data center traffic will increase at a less-showy-but-still-impressive four times by 2015”. Now that’s a whole bunch load of traffic the internet is going to have to contend with, more interestingly though I was surprised that it was Cisco who did the study, not Amazon or Microsoft or Rackspace, not any traditional cloud computing company? Why would Cisco be so interested in checking out cloud traffic?

With the advent of cloud computing came the dawn of new terms for acronym savvy geeks to drool over, one of the most famous groups of these acronyms are the ‘aaS’ acronyms. These are the acronym that start with a letter or two and then end with an ‘aaS’.

Cloud computing isn’t fully defined right now, formal definitions usually naturally evolve once adoption rates reach a certain threshold. At the moment that threshold isn’t yet reached, so we don’t yet have a fully agreed upon definition. However, it’s a common understanding that the cloud comes in various flavors, 3 ‘major’ flavors to be exact. Iaas, Paas and Saas.

The ‘aaS’ stands for ‘as a Service’ , and it means that whatever it was that preceded it now can be treated as a service, and before we begin to move into that, it’s important to define what exactly a service is and why is everybody offering stuff as a service.

In the realm of selling stuff, the general categorization of ’things you can sell’ is basically products or services. No matter what you sell, regardless of where and when you’re selling it, everything you sell is either a product (an actual tangible ’thing’) or a service (less tangible but requiring effort). So basically every business revolves around the sale of either a product or a service or both.

The main concern companies have in migrating to the cloud is security. That in one sentence covers cloud computing greatest hurdle, as more and more companies are beginning to see the benefits (economically) of moving their infrastructure and data to the cloud, the major turn-off is control. In essence, the greatest advantage of cloud computing is also it’s biggest detractor. Companies (especially non-IT companies) are really interested in letting someone else run their IT infrastructure, but their uncomfortable letting someone else run the IT infrastructure due to the security concerns.

In my work, I often deal with PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), which is a benchmark of sorts on how secure your servers are. In the banking world, any application,system or vendor hoping to store, transmit or process credit card information needs to be PCI-DSS compliant. If you thought pronouncing the acronym was difficult, adhering to and complying to the standard is even more so. In fact, the direction now is to use certain ’tricks’ to avoid having to be PCI-DSS compliant, including implementing point-2-point encryption (thereby disregarding the need for PCI-DSS compliance on all intermediary systems) or using tokenazation (to replace the card number with a token that can redeemed from a secure vault). The main direction is clear, compliance to security standards is mandatory and non-negotiable, but it’s also expensive and time-consuming, and anything that can help reduce the effort and cost is really taking off (just ask shift4).

Who says the cloud can’t be fun? Amazons new cloud player combines my love for the cloud with my love for AC/DC all in one box, and I’m loving every bit of it.

Those who know me, know that I’m a huge fan of Amazon, but an even bigger fan of AC/DC (the greatest rock band of ALL time.). Today, I tried to setup my google music account and as many of you know google has just launched a new cloud music player to compete with Apple and Amazon. However, I couldn’t get it to install, it kept hanging during the “connecting to internet” phase. I suspect it’s something to do with my VPN, eventually though I gave up on Google Music but not on the cloud, and so I turned to the indisputable champion of cloud technology…Amazon.

A couple of days ago, I met some guys from Amazon web services strutting their stuff out in a brilliant presentation about cloud computing. Now I must admit I haven’t been the most ardent cloud computing follower (I wasn’t really sure what it meant) , but I was ‘converted’ by these guys….to the point where I wanted to dive in and learn about the cloud.

And in keeping with my belief that the best way to learn is to do, I decided to host a website on Amazon Web Services and see if it really could be setup in minutes (as promised by Amazon). Amazon also promised year long free trial of their EC2 platform, basically you get a very small virtual machine hosted on Amazon for free (for a whole year), which was too damn ridiculous to turn down. So if Amazon was spot on their promises you could setup a wordpress site on Amazon in minutes AND it would cost you nothing for the first year…now that IS interesting.