The empire strikes back: Amazon Web Services adds the Oracle database — actually the whole RDS lineup — to its free usage tier. Anyone who doesn’t see Oracle’s new Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Amazon Web Services as potential competitors should probably look again. Read more »
Amazon Web Services is adding a flexible IOPS storage option to its Relational Database Service. People setting up new MySQL, Oracle or SQL Server instances can take advantage of the new option now. Later, they can move legacy instances over. Read more »
Nasdaq OMX is offering a new service called FinQloud for financial services clients that want to store regulatory data or analyze trade data using on-demand resources. Built atop Amazon Web Services, the service seems to be the result of a close partnership between the two companies. Read more »
Are you a startup working on big data/high performance computing; gaming; consumer or business applications? Do you want $50,000? If so, Amazon has a challenge for you. Read more »
On Tuesday, Netflix put source code for its Eureka mid-tier load balancing technology onto Github so that other Amazon Web Services users can tweak it for their own use. This isn’t the first time Netflix has filled voids in the AWS stack. Read more »
The beauty of Amazon Web Services is they’re easy to set up and run. The problem with those services is they’re easy to set up and run. Now Amazon is offering companies a better way — with a little prep work — to track those costs. Read more »
Crowdfunding site uses Amazon S3, Heroku and other cloud services to keep its costs low. San Francisco-based LoudSauce aims to give voice to small groups and organizations that don’t have SuperPACs to call their own, according to co-founder Colin Mutchler. Read more »
Data centers consume around 1.5 percent of total electricity demand, a figure that’s expected to increase significantly. To cut power and costs tech titans like Google, Apple, and Facebook are cutting electricity use by greening their data centers. But do energy-efficiency gains justify huge capital outlays? Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 »
We previously detailed the test architecture that NASA built to ensure the live stream of the Curiosity landing could handle traffic, and now Amazon Web Services is showing what the final architecture looked like. NASA scaled up its test build and monitored traffic in real time. Read more »
With millions of viewers expected to watch history Sunday night, NASA couldn’t afford to let the live stream of its Mars rover Curiosity landing go untested. Here’s how NASA put its Amazon Web Services-based infrastructure through its paces to ensure it keeps up with demand. Read more »
The Rackspace Cloud is now based fully on the open source OpenStack platform. I recently spoke with CEO Lanham Napier, who discussed how his company doesn’t necessarily see Amazon Web Services as a direct competitor, and how OpenStack is changing his company’s entire business. Read more »
Netflix has open sourced Chaos Monkey, a service designed to terminate cloud computing instances in a controlled manner so companies can ensure their applications keep running when a virtual server dies unexpectedly. In the past year, Chaos Monkey has terminated more than 65,000 of Netflix’s instances. Read more »
A misconfigured network device caused Windows Azure to crash and burn in Europe yesterday. In a blog post, Microsoft said it is still digging into the root cause of the outage and will report back next week. Read more »
Benchmarking results from Zencoder show that Amazon Web Services beats out Google’s Compute Engine in a test of a specific CPU-intensive workload. Compute Engine’s performance was hindered by a lack of HPC instances, which Google could one day add. But it’s nice to see real-world comparisons. Read more »
Remember when there were just two or three cloud computing platforms to choose from, and just about as many cloud databases? Well, as clouds have proliferated, so have the database services built on top of them. Here are the available services and where they’re running. Read more »
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 »
Two big Amazon outages over the past month certainly got everyone’s attention. Here are three tactical measures cloud users should take to minimize damage from future cloud computing snafus. Broadly, the outages also ratchet up pressure for companies to move to multiple clouds. Read more »
Cloud-based storage and cross-device syncing of media content are two of the most competitive areas in consumer IT. Apple, Google and Amazon see cloud-based media services both as a way to increase attachment to their platforms and a means to extend and amplify their broader strategic goals. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Last week’s AWS outage outage might have outsmarted Netflix’s Chaos Monkeys, but the content-distribution giant isn’t about to turn its back on cloud computing. It was a relatively small blip in what has been better availability since the company made the move entirely to the cloud. Read more »
Like it or not, sweeping software bugs are just part and parcel with operating the largest computing systems the world has ever seen. Although Amazon is already fixing the problems that caused its latest outage, this won’t be the last we see. Read more »
This week’s announcement by Google of its new Compute Engine cloud offering is a big deal, but most commentators are missing the real reason Google will get some stalwart Amazon customers to give Compute Engine a try. Performance, not scale, could be Google’s real differentiator. Read more »
Google’s new infrastructure-as-a-service offering Compute Engine is a big, big deal in the world of cloud computing. Now that it’s a reality, here are five things I think Google Compute Engine means for the cloud industry. Read more »
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 »
Very few companies know how to scale and deploy cloud applications like Netflix, the ginormous movie streaming site. And now it’s making its Asgard management console available to the open source community. Read more »
Satya Nadella, who leads Microsoft’s Azure effort, said he would welcome the chance to sit down with Rackspace president Lew Moorman to hash out how to make it easier to move workloads between the companies’ respective clouds and ease cloud lock-in fears. Read more »
Amazon has been the king of cloud services for nearly six years but now the company has new deep pocketed competitors – Microsoft and Google. And while Microsoft announced its plans earlier this month, Google is likely to launch its new, improved platform at Google I/O. Read more »
Lew Moorman, president of Rackspace, said cloud providers that clone Amazon APIs miss the point of true cloud interoperability. Eucalyptus and other cloud providers clearly disagree. The debate will doubtless rage on this week at the GigaOM Structure conference. Read more »
Discussions about the cloud now involve more than just the IT department. New developments in hardware architectures, more-energy-efficient data centers, regulatory concerns and simplifying analytics are all discussions currently circling through the industry. Here’s what to consider when thinking about your business in the cloud. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Eucalyptus, the company that wants to link private clouds to the Amazon cloud, is updating its platform software bringing it more in line with the open source model. All Eucalyptus 3.1 code will be available on Github. Subscribers will get plug-ins and other perks. Read more »
The popular Heroku platform as a service had a pretty rough night last night. Taken down by Thursday night’s Amazon Web Services disruption, Heroku took a tumble. But, shouldn’t a tech-savvy company that follows Amazon’s best practices have avoided this mess? Read more »
A big AWS outage late Thursday, which took down some sites for hours, shows the risk of putting too many loads in one data center — and that is not a cloud specific problem. Experts advise better planning of workloads to run across Amazon regions. Read more »
Amazon is looking more like an enterprise tech vendor all the time. On Thursday, it announced spruced-up support offerings for customers deploying work on the AWS cloud. As it woos companies to put mission-critical loads into Amazon’s cloud, expect more support services to come. Read more »
An awful lot of people use Amazon’s cloud services for an awful lot of things. And many of them have pretty awful implementation practice. Here are the top 5 mistakes their making in AWS, according to Newvem, a startup that tracks such things. Read more »
Amazon Web Services already has a winner with its Elastic MapReduce Hadoop service, and now it’s turning up the heat by adding MapR’s Hadoop distribution as an option. Users can take advantage of MapR’s performance features while also having integration with AWS’s suite of cloud services. Read more »
In a recent blog post, NASA’s CIO Linda Cureton gives both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services a shout-out for helping NASA save money while serving its constituencies. But she made no mention of OpenStack, the cloud platform NASA helped bring to life. Read more »
Amazon S3 now hosts more than a trillion objects for its cloud computing customers, proving once again that AWS is the king of the cloud. That’s 142 objects for every person on Planet Earth or 3.3 objects for every star in the galaxy. Read more »
Two key members of the Facebook team that created the Hadoop query language Hive are launching their own big data startup called Qubole on Thursday. Qubole is a managed version of Hive that’s hosted on the Amazon Web Services cloud computing infrastructure. Read more »
Newvem, the feisty Israeli startup that made waves pointing out just how vulnerable (or badly configured) many customers’ Amazon EC2 cloud instances are, is taking steps to remedy that situation by partnering with Dome9, a security SaaS provider. Read more »
Microsoft hopes to prove Windows Azure a worthy adversary to Amazon Web Services with new solid-state block storage cloud, dramatically revamped REST API, and a console to meld management of on-premises and Azure-based applications on a single screen. Read more »
