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 »
Mobilize.net aims to bring .NET applications to the Azure (or other) cloud and to the mobile devices of the customer’s choice. The company knows from Windows and .NET — between them, its CEO and VP of business development spent 40 years at Microsoft. Read more »
Next week, legacy tech powers Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and Microsoft will vie for the spotlight as they set forth their cloud computing game plans at closely scheduled events. All three have prodigious resources and all three lag far behind cloud giant Amazon Web Services. Read more »
Cloud storage player gets $13.6 million from newbie OpenView Venture Partners and existing investors with the conspicuous exception of Amazon, which ponied up $9M last time out. Sonian will use the money to bring CAD and medical images into its managed/searchable cloud service. Read more »
Changes in the power market are rippling through the Internet industry, altering both the location of data centers and their sources of power. There are many factors in picking a data center location beyond the geographic location, such as how to procure energy and green-energy models. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
As great as shared cloud infrastructure can be, online game workloads often demand dedicated physical servers in addition to heavily virtualized, shared cloud servers. That’s where SoftLayer says it differentiates itself from other big cloud players including market leader Amazon Web Services. Read more »
Google is hard at work on a cloud computing offering that will compete directly with the popular Amazon EC2 cloud, I have been told, although Microsoft probably will beat it to the punch. The timing for Google is TBD, while Microsoft should announce on June 7. Read more »
Amazon cloud services may be cheap, but even those small charges can add up. Following a raft of third-party companies that offer AWS monitoring services, Amazon has stepped up to offer its own proactive billing alerts for Cloudwatch customers that enable it. Read more »
SAP All-in-One business applications will now run in Amazon’s cloud — another step that could make Amazon Web Services more enticing to risk-averse businesses that stress over entrusting their life-blood applications to a public cloud. Read more »
The PaaS market is on fire right now, with new providers coming out of the woodwork and existing cloud providers moving up the stack, all aiming to win the hearts and minds of developers. ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Save the date: Amazon will host its first-ever partner and customer conference at the Las Vegas Venetian in late November. With this move, Amazon looks more like an old-school IT vendor than ever. It recently announced an official partner program, another sign of IT maturity. Read more »
Rackspace is the Dr. Jekyll of hosting. For the last few years, it has been a legacy managed hosting provider by day that dabbled in cloud computing at night. As Dr. Jekyll ultimately did, though, Rackspace is becoming Mr. Hyde for good. Read more »
With more and more business leaders now turning to this topic, the questions — and confusion — are multiplying. With so much to consider, we’ve broken down the cloud discussion to help companies decide which strategy is right for their business. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Market research firm IDC released the first legitimate market forecast for Hadoop on Monday, claiming the ecosystem around the de facto big data platform will sell almost $813 million worth of software by 2016. But Hadoop’s actual economic impact is likely much, much larger. Read more »
When your business is to insure farmers against the effects of bad weather, you’d better have some seriously accurate data on your side. Mother Nature, after all, can be somewhat unpredictable. The Climate Corporation thinks the answer is lots of data and lots computing power. Read more »
Newvem, the Israeli startup that’s making a name for itself analyzing Amazon Web Services usage for potential customers, netted $4 million in Series A funding led by Greylock Partners. Index Ventures and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors are also participating. Read more »
VMware has acquired Cetas, a startup that provides analytics atop the Hadoop platform. Terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed, but Cetas is an 18-month-old company with tens of paying customers that didn’t need to rush into an acquisition. So, why did VMware buy it? Read more »
The marketplace concept does a good job of bringing the simplicity of the Apple App Store model to server applications. It has the potential to revolutionize IT consumption. And if no one else steps up, Amazon is going to own this part of the cloud, too. Read more »
If you think about it, Netflix’s metamorphosis into a company that runs its infrastructure completely atop cloud-based resources is truly remarkable. For many companies, such as site-optimization and CDN provider Yottaa, the bigger they get, the harder it is to justify the cloud’s cost and performance. Read more »
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels to IT customers: “If we’re not delivering the right services you should walk away.” While one would disagree with that, many question exactly how easy it will be for customers to walk away if they use high-end Amazon services. Read more »
This quarter saw Amazon Web Services finally relaxing its public-cloud-only stance and launching services to support hybrid-cloud deployments. Meanwhile, Hadoop players moved to make their platforms more accessible to mainstream BI analysts and database administrators. A new quarterly report analyzes these trends and provides a near-term outlook. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
iFixit, the popular DIY repair site, will parlay its Amazon Web Services, Rightscale foundation — and its own secret sauce — to take on the problem of product support and documentation for businesses. It’s new Dozuki business division targets large retailers and manufacturers. Read more »
Newvem, the startup that aims to help companies make the most out of their Amazon Web Services instances, has some new data that might shock the Amazon faithful. A high percentage of AWS users are paying for way more compute power than they need. Read more »
This quarter the EV market struggled to find its footing. Meanwhile, the smart-grid sector solidified and low-power technology proved itself important in the data center. Read more to learn what these news pieces and others mean for the larger space over the next few months. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Google take notice: Amazon Web Services is now pushing a “fully managed search service” for web or mobile app developers. CloudSearch promises to ease the provisioning headaches of web developers who need to build search into their commerce or other sites. Read more »
You might have heard of SoftLayer, but if you’re like me, you probably didn’t know the cloud provider is hosting operations for some of the web’s hottest apps. Among them are Tumblr, OMGPOP, SendGrid and even Heroku. You learn something new every day. Read more »
Amazon Web Services Storage Gateway is the company’s first foray into the on-premises cloud-storage space. But a number of vendors are attacking the on-premises cloud-storage gateway market too. Do these offerings signal the death of the cloud gateway as an appliance or simply validation of the market? Read more at GigaOM Pro »
