The current public cloud computing providers have done an excellent job in bringing innovation and cloud computing technology to the masses. Cloud computing, however, is not yet a fully evolved technology and may take another decade to grow up and deliver on its full potential. Read more »
With all the bad news about recent outages of Amazon Web Services and Sony’s Playstation Network, cloud-based services and the cloud industry needs to more proactively educate users to protect the “cloud” brand. Read more »
Amazon Web Services released its official statement and apology regarding the four-day outage that began on April 21, vowing, as expected, to improve the design of its Elastic Block Storage service and generally improve availability across the AWS platform. Read more »
As a result of last week’s four-day cloud computing outage, both Amazon Web Services and its users have publicly come under fire for their practices. I think both groups will take these criticisms to heart, but I don’t think we should expect anything too drastic. Read more »
The four-day-long Amazon Web Services outage was no doubt a traumatic experience for many customers, but that didn’t have to be the case. There were plenty of users that were not affected, were minimally affected or that acted in a hurry to resolve the problem. Read more »
Amazon Web Services has put the outage behind them and now are getting back to normal, according to the latest status update from Amazon Web Services on its Service Health Dashboard. Performance data from Cedexis shows what it meant in terms of network latency. Read more »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Updated: Today, Amazon’s Web Services have hit some bumps in the road, taking down a variety of popular sites such as Foursquare, Quora and Paper.li. Since clouds do fail perhaps the best thing to do is provide information and maybe a dollop of humor. Read more »
Dave Girouard, president of Google Enterprise, in a conversation earlier this week, outlined Google’s cloud strategy and its long-term plans, and how it is different from other cloud providers including Amazon Web Services. He talks about Google’s two areas of focus – apps and big data. Read more »
Two markets stand out above all else when looking at the first quarter of 2011: infrastructure as a service (IaaS) — the epitome of cloud computing — and big data. Amazon Web Services continues to lead the IaaS space in terms of customers and innovation, while Rackspace, buoyed by momentum around OpenStack, will be its primary competitor for mainstream customers. In the big data space, there are so many players and terms floating about it’s difficult for outsiders to get a handle on who’s who and what’s what, though such activity validates the technologies. Other developments this quarter included HP’s impending presence in the cloud computing and big data spaces and the realization that Intel won’t be left to die if low-power servers based on x86 processors catch on like the buzz late last year suggests they will. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Microsoft, Cloudera, SeaMicro and Facebook. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Two of Amazon Web Services’ most-unique features have finally crossed paths with news this morning that Spot Instances are now available for Cluster Compute Instances. Spot Instances have always been ideal for ad hoc batch-processing jobs, which often run atop on-premise grids or clusters. Read more »
Amazon Web Services this morning announced dedicated EC2 instances for customers using AWS’s newly upgraded Virtual Private Cloud service. This is yet another example of AWS pushing the innovation envelope despite its customer lead, although Dedicated Instances are a bit pricier than some recent free tools. Read more »
Business and IT leaders now face significant opportunities and challenges with big data — that is data sets that are so large they are difficult to store, manage and analyze. This report explores the rapidly evolving big data business and technology ecosystem. It examines big data in the context of several different industries: financial services, health care, sports, travel and media. We explore the different big data technologies — from Hadoop and NoSQL derivatives to cloud-based collaboration tools — and their various benefits for enterprises. And we examine some of the existing challenges big data poses, and what enterprise IT leaders can do to overcome them. Companies mentioned in this report include Amazon Web Services, Google, Teradata, IBM and Cloudera. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Reddit suffered some major downtime yesterday, a situation it largely on a failure on the part of Amazon Web Services. But the real takeaway might have to do with the importance for cloud users to make sure all is well with their cloud deployments. Read more »
Their story arcs aren’t exactly the same, but the strategies employed by Apple and Amazon Web Services to reach their respective pinnacles seem very similar, with result being that users are willing to pay a premium and accept some lock-in as consequences of choosing either company. Read more »
Amazon Web Services has been on a tear lately in terms of rolling out new features that go a long way toward patching the weak spots in its cloud armor, and it did so again today with the announcement of an actual virtual private cloud capability. Read more »
We can cross off another item from the list of features that Amazon Web Services doesn’t offer, as this morning it announced an automated template feature called CloudFormation. It might not be the be-all, end-all of cloud templates, but it might not need to be. Read more »
Add Microsoft to the list of cloud providers offering free usage levels for their cloud offerings, as the company is now offering 750 free hours of Windows Azure usage. Like most things free, though, there is a catch. Read more »
As Amazon Web Services continues to roll out new features and services for its cloud platform, its competitors increasingly tout better performance as a key point of differentiation, which has me wondering if either approach — more features or better performance — will clearly win out. Read more »
What do Bon Jovi and the world’s fastest supercomputer have in common? Presently, they both rely on GPUs. Bon Jovi has partnered with Animoto on a fan-video contest for each its current tour, a possibility made possible by Animoto’s transition to Amazon Cluster GPU Instances. Read more »
Hopes were high leading into Saturday’s Comic-Con ticket-sale launch that TicketLeap’s cloud-based ticketing platform would be an availability superhero after two failed attempts in November, but those hopes were dashed nearly immediately. The problem was a MySQL bug, and the solution was scaling down cloud servers. Read more »
After two massive server crashes in November wrecked online ticket-sale launches and infuriated hopeful badgeholders, Comic-Con International has moved its ticketing engine to Amazon Web Serviced-based startup TicketLeap in anticipation of its third attempt — tomorrow morning — to sell badges for this summer’s event. Read more »
It’s a cloud grab bag, with everything from Amazon Web Services’ new Simple Email Service to debate over cloud APIs to VMware warning that profit margins will stay about the same through 2011. The unifying theme is the steady maturation of cloud technologies and pricing models. Read more »
Amazon Web Services needed to develop its own flavor of PaaS, the cleverly named Elastic Beanstalk, to keep up with cloud development trends, but that doesn’t mean the rest of its IaaS brethren need to follow suit – at least not in the immediate future. Read more »
It’s an interesting collection of links today, most of which are focused on money — specifically, Google’s sky-high Q4 infrastructure spending and AMD’s continually dismal performance. There’s also a great analysis of the PaaS market post-Elastic Beanstalk and a look at Heroku’s recent security hole. Read more »
Some might call this past quarter in the infrastructure space transformative. The rise of ARM-based processing suggests the days of x86 dominance might be coming to an end, while the Amazon Web Services-WikiLeaks controversy cast new light on the legal aspects of cloud computing. Big data got bigger, meanwhile, as the Hadoop ecosystem expanded, and amid all these cutting-edge technologies, two archaic topics — Novell and Java — proved they aren’t going anywhere soon. Companies mentioned in this report include Intel, AMD, Amazon Web Services, IBM, Yahoo, Appistry, VMware, Joyent and Microsoft. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
New cloud provider NephoScale announced its presence among IaaS providers earlier this week, touting itself as “an advanced cloud service for serious programmers.” However, I’m afraid its message might fall upon deaf ears, as there’s little evidence the world is clamoring for another IaaS cloud. Read more »
Here are a couple of “what-ifs” to chew on: What if a supercomputer beats two super humans at Jeopardy ? What if Steve Ballmer is the next executive to leave Microsoft? We’ll know the answer to at least one of those questions in February. Read more »
Amazon Web Services has made available two additional support options for customers of its cloud computing services. Customers can now choose from the Bronze level, which costs $49 a month, or the Platinum level, which costs at least $15,000 a month. Read more »
The Gartner Magic Quadrant has been called out for some serious wrongdoings, but by not including Amazon Web Services among the leaders in its Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting, Gartner just flat got it wrong. Read more »
Heading into the new year, there are a lot of questions, including whether Netflix is a friend of open source and whether Facebook will build more data centers. In some cases, such as Apple move into cloud services, the only question remaining is “when?”. Read more »
Skytap has closed a $10 million Series C round for its business-friendly IaaS cloud. The funding comes after some interesting IaaS developments late in 2010, and might signal that 2011 will be a big year for IaaS cloud providers targeting traditional businesses. Read more »
We’ve already covered the trends that began to shape up in the infrastructure market in 2010 and will really materialize in 2011. Several companies played — and will continue to play — a big role in making those trends happen. From Facebook to Cloudera to Microsoft, here ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
I reported earlier this week on Amazon’s new VM Import service, which some have described as a Hotel California for VMware images. Today, I received word from Amazon Web Services that it’s planning to address this issue, to a degree, as the offering evolves. Read more »
Given the myriad technological, political and cultural obstacles, what chance is there that cloud computing or Green IT will be there within the next 12 months, or that something will convince Apple to open up? I’d say “minimal,” but I’m keeping my fingers crossed. Read more »
I asked last week why VMware users would migrate to the cloud using Amazon’s VM Import feature instead of choosing a VMware vCloud partner such as BlueLock or Terremark. After seeing what some interested parties have to say, I’m starting to think interoperability isn’t the goal. Read more »
Today is full of intrigue, at least in terms of relationships among IT vendors. Probably the most intriguing relationships involve Cisco and NetApp, and the foursome that teamed up to purchaseNovell’s intellectual property. Elsewhere, AWS launched VM Import, and open source BI vendors are proliferating. Read more »
This year was rightfully advertised as the “Year of the Cloud.” The cloud computing landscape began to take shape in 2010, with providers honing their offerings, important issues surfacing to light and industry consolidation finally beginning to happen. In most areas, however, the action is likely ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
