EC2 and private clouds August 26, 2009
Posted by James Webster in : web, virtualization , add a commentAmazon have just announced the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud:
Amazon VPC lets you create your own logically isolated set of Amazon EC2 instances and connect it to your existing network using an IPsec VPN connection.
I am sure that cohesiveFT’s salespeople would say otherwise, but this looks awfully like their VPN-Cubed solution which itself runs on EC2. A small ecosystem of start-ups has sprouted up around Amazon’s web services; RightScale, cohesiveFT, Eucalyptus, Enomaly, Scalr; many of them providing enhancements to EC2’s initially sparse feature set with regard to management and scaling. However Amazon have demonstrated that they are increasingly interested in providing this value-add themselves and charging for it rather than just providing the base platform; look at the introduction of CloudWatch, Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing and now the Virtual Private Cloud.
The life of an EC2-based startup is clearly becoming riskier but do Amazon themselves risk alienation from the software development community through this policy of subsuming their ecosystem’s functionality?
Tis the season for consolidation August 25, 2009
Posted by James Webster in : finance, development , add a commentTibco buys Datasynapse, which is pretty big news for the City since most derivatives houses probably have one or the other. Will this sort of consolidation at the big end of the market scare some architects off and make them focus on open-source players such as GridGain? Are there any grid deployments running GridGain for production intraday & overnight risk at a bank?
Open-source is no stranger to the consolidation trend either;
Terracotta acquires Ehcache: from a capital markets perspective, Oracle’s Coherence (which itself arised from acquiring Tangosol) seems to be the 500lb gorilla in the ‘in memory data grid’ space. The combination of Terracotta and a deeply integrated Ehcache might be an appropriate alternative solution for the primary use case of Coherence in bank deployments; a market data/trade/position/risk cache & time series database.
VMware acquires SpringSource which itself acquired Hyperic: VMware is gearing itself up to be a major cloud player by offering a complete virtualised Java development stack, after all isn’t the recently announced CloudFoundry Java’s answer to Microsoft and .Net’s Windows Azure? Is a database acquisition or purchase of Splunk that far away?
Co-operation rather than consolidation; the open source trading platform Marketcetera has established close relationships with Sky Road and NYSE Technologies’ to provide a hosted solution for Marketcetera. Given Marketcetera uses Spring extensively some involvement with CloudFoundry is a possibility as well.
More AXE grinding August 24, 2009
Posted by James Webster in : finance , add a commentIt appears that there finally will be some movement in the halting efforts to introduce greater competition to Australian capital markets. The federal government has decided to move market & trading supervision responsibilities to ASIC in addition to its existing role as the cop enforcing the Corporations Act, and away from the ASX’s Market Supervision subsidiary. Clearly it would be untenable for ASX to have any function performing a regulatory role in an environment with multiple trading venues; the ASX would be regulating its competitors regardless of how “at arm’s length” the relationship with ASX Market Supervision is.
As an IT practitoner in financial markets that is moving from London back to Australia this is good news for me personally, but I do believe that greater competition (and therefore lower transaction costs) will attract significantly higher investment inflows. However the government will have to be prepared to fund ASIC adequately. I wonder if AXE/Chi-X etc can be convinced to start a new financial hub in Brisbane?!
Further coverage at Finextra and the Sydney Morning Herald.