Amazon offers cloud certifications; more proof that AWS is all grown up
photo: Mega Pixel
Amazon is following the lead of its IT elders by rolling out technology certifications for developers, solution architects and admins. Read more »
By the numbers: How Google Compute Engine stacks up to Amazon EC2
When Google launched its EC2 rival, Google Compute Engine, last June, it set some high expectations. Sebastian Standil’s team at Scalr put the cloud infrastructure service through its paces — and were pleasantly surprised at what they found. Read more »
Scoop: Deutsche Telekom dives into multi-cloud management with NetOptimize
The German telco is preparing twin services called NetAnalyze and NetOptimize, which are geared towards companies that want to ensure CDN redundancy while optimizing performance-to-cost ratios. Read more »
Pinterest, Flipboard and Yelp tell how to save big bucks in the cloud
photo: Derrick Harris
At the AWS Re: Invent conference, engineers from Pinterest, Flipboard and Yelp detailed some of the strategies their companies employ in order to keep costs low as computing demand increases. The keys are keeping an eagle eye on usage and using the right types of resources. Read more »
Subscriber Content
Helix Nebula and the future of Europe’s cloud
Europe’s Helix Nebula project is addressing the technical, legal, and procedural issues that today make it difficult to seamlessly move jobs from one cloud to another at scale. Lessons learned from it could provide a window through which we can see Europe’s cloud provision taking shape. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Subscriber Content
Platform as a Service in 2012
The PaaS market is predicted to reach $20.1 billion in 2014. Huge brands occupy this space, including Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Salesforce.com, as well as newer startups. As the market grows, watch for more consolidation, tighter integration with IaaS services, and more features. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Amazon tests tricky spot market for cloud
photo: Flickr/Will Merydith
Amazon — which knows a thing or two about online marketplaces — is launching one for Amazon Web Services customers who may have over-provisioned their EC2 reserved instances. Now they can buy or sell those instances with other AWS customers Read more »
How MemCachier went from a favor for a friend to cloud ubiquity
photo: Shutterstock/optimarc
Hosted memcached provider MemCachier is expanding like crazy, moving from its homebase on Heroku into the AppFog, CloudBees, DotCloud and Amazon EC2 platforms. It’s impressive growth for a bootstrapped company that launched in April and was little more than an idea a year ago. Read more »
Subscriber Content
Understanding and managing the cost of the cloud
While computing in the cloud can cost less than running servers in your enterprise data center, the question of how much less isn’t an easy one to answer. The cloud will get cheaper in the future, but not before these challenges are addressed and overcome. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Subscriber Content
Takeaways from the second quarter in cloud and data
In cloud and big data, the second quarter of 2012 featured several high-profile deals and product launches that could reshape the marketplace for everyone. Google and Microsoft launched Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings, software-defined networking took off, and all eyes stayed fixed on the continuing promise of data analytics. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cloudability tool tracks Amazon reserved instances
Cloudability’s new Reserved Instances Explorer helps companies keep track of and best utilize their discounted Amazon reserved instances even across accounts. The tool can search Amazon EC2 instances by size, region, operating system and expiration date. Read more »
Google: AppEngine is here to stay
Software developers in search of a platform still wonder whether Google is really serious about Google AppEngine. Google’s Greg D’alesandre insists that Google — up to and including CEO Larry Page — is all-in with GAE Read more »
Amazon launches yet another EC2 instance
New medium Elastic Compute Cloud instance fills the gap between — you guessed it — smaller and larger “medium” EC2 instances. That brings the total number of EC2 instances to 13 (for now) as Amazon keeps churning out options for every possible compute load. Read more »
Subscriber Content
Dispatches from Cloud Connect 2012: AWS under attack
Amazon, the market leader, plays at the infrastructure level. But there was a lot of talk at Cloud Connect about Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings, where cloud folks think the real action will ultimately lie. The company will soon have to address these shifts as well as trends ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Some big thoughts on big data and cloud for 2012
This year may have been the beginning of the big data onslaught, but big data will only get bigger in 2012. Watch for companies to check out specialized databases for different data types and to segment their data centers for old and new workloads. Read more »
Subscriber Content
Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses
If your company has a cloud application with a predictable audience size or one that is costing you more than $25,000 a month to host, you may want to consider maintaining a private cloud. This paper provides an overview of the factors that decision makers who are developing a public-to-private cloud-migration strategy should consider, recognizing that public versus private cloud strategy is not an all-or-nothing proposition. It also details pitfalls that must be avoided along the way and provides a case study of Zynga, a company that has found a way to use both the private and public clouds to create a hybrid solution. Companies mentioned in this report include Akamai, Foursquare, Nimbula and ARM. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
What cloud boils down to for the enterprise
As I find myself honored with the opportunity to contribute regularly to GigaOM’s cloud coverage, I find myself thinking a lot about what I’ve learned in those five years. So, for my first post, I thought I’d walk through my most important observations to date. Read more »
Windows Server (and enterprises) get more Amazon love
photo: Pinar Ozger
Now that Amazon’s highest-end Compute Clusters support Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft-centric customers can use Amazon’s “compute intensive beasts” to run heavy-duty media processing, rendering or computational finance work loads. the move also brings Microsoft more parity with Linux on the Amazon platform. Read more »
Joyent Cloud takes on kingpin Amazon
Joyent pitches its revamped Joyent Cloud as a faster, cheaper platform that will give customers more insight into their cloud-based operations than the incumbent leader Amazon. Read more »
Facebook, Skype and the mechanics of the hook up
Facebook’s Skype integration involved a lot of slimming down of Skype’s native client and making it work in a browser, creating the back-end integration between Facebook and Skype and scaling up Skype’s network to handle the expected flood of traffic. Read more »
The final piece of Zynga’s Z Cloud revealed
Zynga has been releasing details about its innovative hybrid cloud deployment, called Z Cloud, over the past year, and it has finally revealed the final piece of the puzzle. Namely, that the private cloud component of its infrastructure was built using Cloud.com’s CloudStack software. Read more »
What Amazon and Its Customers Must Learn From Last Week’s Outage
Opinion on Amazon Web Services recent outage remains somewhat divided: One side blames Amazon for its technical failings; the other holds the cloud giant’s customers responsible for their bad judgment. But the answer to where the primary responsibility lies is a little less black and white. Read more »
Cloud Platforms Heroku, DotCloud & Engine Yard Hit Hard By Amazon Outage
The popular web sites down today because of the Amazon Web Services outage are getting most of the attention, but they were only a handful among the hundred-plus that were affected, including at least three popular platform-as-a-service providers — Heroku, Engine Yard and DotCloud. Read more »
AWS Claims ‘Significant Progress’ on Hours-long Outage
Amazon Web Services claims to be making significant progress in restoring functionality to a large number of EC2, Elastic Block Storage and Relational Database Service instances that went down due to a “networking event” in the early-morning hours and affected a number of popular web sites. Read more »
Encoding.com Raises $2M in New Funding
Straight on the heels of introducing a new feature that could cut cloud-based encoding time in half, Encoding.com has raised a Series B round of financing worth $2 million. The funding comes just a week after competitor Zencoder also raised a $2 million funding round. Read more »
Data Science Toolkit Brings Big Data Analysis to the People
Pete Warden got famous for scraping 220 million Facebook profiles and then analyzing this data to unearth U.S.-wide user connection trends. Now he wants you to be able to do the same with a new web service released at GigaOM’s Structure Big Data conference today. Read more »
Hot Cloud Startup Nimbula Launches Public Beta
Nimbula Director is now available as a public beta release. Nimbula has received lots of attention since emerging from stealth mode in late June, primarily because of its founders’ pedigrees as the creators and builders of Amazon EC2, but now Nimbula’s product has to prove itself. Read more »
Subscriber Content
Are the Stars Aligning for an Amazon PaaS Offering?
Right now, PaaS is hot and getting hotter, with the consensus being that it eventually will replace IaaS as the preferred cloud model for many developers. It would be wise for AWS to leverage its current IaaS lead and preempt any serious momentum by PaaS providers. ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Amazon EC2 Gets a Microsoft Boost
Thanks to a new Microsoft pilot program, Amazon Web Services’ enterprise customers can now bring their EA Windows Server licenses into the cloud. This is yet another step by AWS to continuously woo the corporate customers. Read more »
