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Windows coming to Amazon EC2 soon October 1, 2008

Posted by James Webster in : web, development, dotnet , 2 comments

Amazon have announced that Windows server (32 & 64 bit) will be available on their EC2 cloud later this year. Further details will be available at the PDC later this month.

This is a great announcement. .Net developers have not really been able to come to the cloud computing party since most (if not all?) publicly available clouds have run on Linux. Sure, there is Mono but not many professional ‘Mort’ .Net developers go anywhere that!

I am looking forward to seeing what the pricing structure for this will be given that Microsoft will be expecting some license revenue. Does the availability of Windows on the EC2 cloud reflect new licensing options from Microsoft for cloud computing infrastructure providers?

There is also the security angle to consider… Windows boxes have a reputation for being malware magnets, if EC2 makes it easy and cheap for anyone to become the administrator of their own Windows server out on the Internet are we going to see these EC2/Windows instances get hacked and turned into spambots/DDOS nets? Will there be other restrictions on what we will be able to install on these machines… Microsoft Office, Visual Studio; notwithstanding that usability of these over RDP might be less than stellar, will it be possible?

Many questions, guess we will have to wait until the PDC for answers! Oh, and how about multicast support on EC2 eh? Seems obvious given the number of grid vendors, GridGain & Gigaspaces to name two, who talk about running grids on EC2 but then require slightly trickier configuration of their products than would be necessary if multicast was supported.

TIBCO + Silverlight May 1, 2008

Posted by James Webster in : web, finance , add a comment

TIBCO has put its support behind Microsoft’s Silverlight Rich Internet Application (RIA) technology, according to Infoworld (via TechMeme). Given that Reuters owned TIBCO in the past, and I presume still uses TIBCO technology extensively, I wonder if this means we might see a Silverlight-flavoured version of Reuters 3000 Xtra in the future?

Can OpenID solve the mobile web application login problem? February 25, 2008

Posted by James Webster in : web, mobile , add a comment

LinkedIn have announced LinkedIn Mobile (via TechMeme) available at http://m.linkedin.com. The ‘m.’ prefix has definitely become the defacto way to access mobile-specific versions of web applications; so much for the .mobi TLD then which is after all a pain to enter onto a phone keypad without the benefit of T9.

Anyway, having a mobile version of LinkedIn and Facebook and which-social-network-is-hot-this-month is all good but now I have the challenge of having to enter my username and password for the mobile version as well. See, since I use Johannes la Poutré’s Password Composer bookmarklet to generate a unique password based on a hash of the website’s domain and a strong password that never leaves my browser (see Jon Udell’s excellent screencast from 2005 on Simple Single Sign-On to understand more) I don’t really know what my password for LinkedIn/Facebook/etc is, at least not off the top of my head.

It has struck me that OpenID could provide a solution here. If my carrier offered an OpenID provider tied to my phone number I could authenticate to OpenID-compatible websites using my phone in hopefully a reasonably transparent fashion, once I had maybe used the main web interface of LinkedIn (or Facebook, etc, etc) to approve my OpenID on my mobile carrier’s provider.

OpenID has seen a growth in support from big players in the industry, with Google, VeriSign, IBM, Microsoft and Yahoo! all joining recently as corporate board members of the OpenID Foundation. Some of them have OpenID-access enabled to their web applications or OpenID-providers available as beta releases. Major mobile carriers are conspicuously absent however. To me, it seems like they missing a major opportunity to innovate.

Oh, and here’s a link to my LinkedIn profile :-).