With its new Elastic Network Interfaces, created by separating IP addresses and some key attributes from EC2 storage instances, Amazon is making its Virtual Private Cloud more flexible for companies that want to bring legacy applications to Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure. Read more »
While the rest of the IT world is reeling from the hard drive shortage, users of cloud computing services should have a relatively painless experience — even if their providers don’t. Joyent’s Steve Tuck talks about his experience and how the HDD shortage might affect the industry. Read more »
Google announced that it’s ending its Academic Cloud Computing Initiative, a joint program with IBM and the National Science Foundation that gave researchers access to a massive Hadoop cluster on which to run their data-intensive projects. The company says access to such resources is now common. Read more »
Demand for cloud computing continues to increase exponentially as consumers, businesses and government agencies seek to defer the expense of acquiring, operating and maintaining infrastructure and applications to third-party service providers. Likewise, software publishers are finding the cloud computing model an efficient and effective mechanism for delivering their products as a service and as an operational expense to their customers. For independent software vendors, cloud computing is opening up new markets and making their applications more accessible and affordable to scores of new customers. For a multitude of reasons, many ISVs are choosing to forego data center development and are partnering with hosting providers that have the infrastructure, resources and expertise in managing and delivering cloud services. This report provides ISVs with guidance on partnering with hosting companies, establishing criteria for selecting a hosting service, metrics for measuring hosting performance as it relates to cloud services delivered and an understanding of the responsibilities they retain even when outsourcing a large part of their services functions to a third party. Companies mentioned in this report include Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.com. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
At last week’s MongoSV conference in Santa Clara, Calif., a number of users shared their experiences with the MongoDB NoSQL database. One common theme: NoSQL is necessary for a lot of use cases, but it’s not for companies afraid of hard work. Read more »
SOASTA has raised a $12 million Series D round as a throng of competitors jockeys for position behind it. SOASTA’s vision of using cloud resources for load testing is very relevant today as new applications web, mobile and even Facebook applications pop up by the minute. Read more »
According to a new survey by CSC, cloud computing is not the money saver it’s sometimes made out to be. But don’t fret — it’s still a very valuable delivery model for IT resources. The cloud brings with a wealth of benefits around mobility, efficiency and jobs. Read more »
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 »
Analyst powerhouses IDC and Gartner both rolled out their latest cloud computing and big data predictions and statistics Thursday morning, and while some are bold, others should have you saying “Duh.” Here’s what they have to say, and how that squares with what I’m seeing. Read more »
Silk, the browser for Amazon’s new Kindle Fire, utilizes Amazon’s cloud. But don’t think AWS is the Kindle Fire’s only cloud connection. In a post on Tuesday, Pulse’s Greg Bayer explained how his company’s news-reading app actually runs atop Google’s App Engine Platform-as-a-Service offering. Read more »
HPCC Systems, the division of LexisNexis that’s pushing a big-data processing-and-delivery platform to compete with Hadoop, has tuned its software to run on Amazon’s cloud computing platform. Interested developers can now experiment with the open source software without having to wrangle physical servers. Read more »
Windows Azure is an ambitious PaaS that doesn’t get a lot of love from web developers. Here are four things Microsoft must do to make it a more compelling option for the new-age, non-.NET developers who now flock to Amazon Web Services or another PaaS. Read more »
Spanning is a backup service for Google Apps that’s completely hosted and run from Amazon’s web services. The idea of backing up one cloud service via another was intriguing enough that I asked Mike Pav, the VP of engineering at Spanning, how he does it. Read more »
If a recent blog post by Gartner analyst Lydia Leong is telling, it looks as if cultural hurdles are impeding private cloud adoption as well as public cloud adoption — at least when it comes to doing it right. It takes sacrifice to operate like Google. Read more »
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 »
Amazon Web Services on Tuesday beefed up its Cluster Compute family with an extra-large CC2 iteration that packs in two eight-core Intel Xeon processors each connected to a 10-Gigabit network, 60.5 GB of RAM, and 3.37 TB of instance storage. Read more »
Amazon’s shiny Kindle Fire may be the sizzle, but Amazon Web Services — which pair vast compute power and customer behavior data to speed up browsing by anticipating a user’s next move — are the steak, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a Wired interview. Read more »
The latest kerfuffle about alleged vulnerabilities in Amazon Web Services’ Amazon Machine Images is little more than a tempest in a teapot, according to security experts. Their takeaway is basically that stupid users with bad computing practices get what they deserve. Read more »
A new startup called CrowdControl is launching today, and it aims to bring order to the world of crowdsourcing by using artificial intelligence to judge workers’ accuracy. Think Amazon Mechanical Turk, only with a quality control mechanism in place to help ensure jobs get done right. Read more »
According to a Harvard Business School professor, cloud startups can thank a copyright law decision for increased funding in the past few years. The case’s timing certainly aligns with an uptick in cloud funding, but it’s tough to see how the two are related. Read more »
Berlin is fast becoming the destination of choice for entrepreneurs, thanks to the emergence of hot startups such as SoundCloud, Amen, EyeEm, Phonedeck, Txtr and Wunderlist. And thanks to this burgeoning startup scene, Amazon Web Services is looking to establish its operations in Berlin. Read more »
Amazon Web Services is making available a new US West region located in Oregon, which it is positioning as a lower-cost alternative to the company’s existing Northern California region. AWS says services in the Oregon region costs about 10 percent less than in Northern California. Read more »
Cloud provider CloudSigma has become the first to add solid-state-drive storage to its public cloud computing service. It’s designed to better CloudSigma’s price-performance ratio overall, which will bring in more and bigger customers that want to do things in its cloud that they can’t do elsewhere. Read more »
Minneapolis-based cloud computing startup enStratus has raised $3.5 million in Series A funding to grow its business of managing all types of clouds across a common interface. EnStratus’ technology provides a secure platform for managing and monitoring numerous cloud offerings through a single interface. Read more »
E-commerce site Etsy has grown to 25 million unique visitors and 1.1 billion page views per month, and it’s generating the data volumes to match. Using tools such as Hadoop and Splunk, Etsy is turning terabytes of data per day into a better product. Read more »
James Hamilton, VP and distinguished engineer for Amazon Web Services, has some hot tips on building or running a cooler, and more energy-efficient data center. Hamilton, something of a data center rock star, spoke at a recent Open Compute Project event. Read more »
With the public beta of Cloudability’s cloud cost-tracking service, new APIs are available to help customers access their billing and usage information from popular cloud providers including Salesforce.com, Azure, Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. Oh, and if you refer a paying customer, there’s free beer! Read more »
Viber Media, provider of iPhone and Android apps that let users talk and text for free over 3G and Wi-Fi networks, is built upon a foundation of the MongoDB NoSQL database running atop the Amazon Web Services cloud. Read more »
Amazon’s data center whiz James Hamilton and Sun Microsystems’ co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim starred at the Open Compute Foundation debut in New York Thursday. Here are the top five threads coming out of the event that could help you run a leaner, greener data center. Read more »
“Other,” the revenue category in Amazon’s reports that encompasses Amazon Web Services, is growing like mad — 70 percent over last year, in fact. This matters because it likely means AWS is outpacing its projected growth and is rapidly approaching a $1 billion run rate. Read more »
AppFog, which started out as a PHP-based Platform-as-a-Service, just added Java to its roster of supported programming languages. AppFog already added support for Ruby and Node.js. Still to come: support for Python, .NET and “smaller languages like Erlang,” said AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson. Read more »
Equinix says its new online marketplace will help its data center customers partner with other companies using the same facilities. That could help companies expand more easily both in terms of geography and in the types of services they offer. Read more »
There’s a long-running debate in the cloud computing world about whether standard IaaS resources have become true commodities, but it doesn’t look like they’re there yet. Even as prices drop closer to zero across the cloud-provider landscape, there are still plenty of points of differentiation. Read more »
Amazon has become the cloud king, with its AWS offerings providing cloud-based storage and processing that takes a lot of the cost out of deploying new products and applications. Netflix, DropBox and Yelp are all AWS clients, but the most important user might be Amazon itself. Read more »
The ado around the privacy settings of the Amazon Silk web browser is probably deserved, but it didn’t have to be this way. Had Amazon understood the difference between running a web site and selling devices, it could have saved itself a lot of trouble. Read more »
Last quarter we highlighted the fast maturation of the Platform-as-a-Service and big data spaces. Those two trends only picked up speed during the third quarter of 2011. Joining them on the cusp of IT greatness, though, are the OpenStack project and flash storage. The former gathered serious validation from big-name companies, while the latter saw less funding than last quarter but a significant number of product launches. Of course, the third quarter wasn’t all lollipops and rose petals. We saw new computing technologies and delivery models such as tablets wreak havoc on both HP and Cisco, and there are concerns (aren’t there always?) about how the Internet will handle our increased use of streaming video and cloud computing. Unfortunately for HP and Cisco, the latter problem might be an easier fix than the strategic woes facing them. Additional companies mentioned in this report include CloudBees, Rackspace, Engine Yard and Joyent. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Microsoft poured money and resources into Microsoft Windows Azure, its grand attempt to transport the company’s software dominance into the cloud computing era. For die-hard .Net heads, Azure is probably the PaaS of choice. But for the army of new-age web developers, it’s an also-ran. Read more »
Cloud-based DNA-sequencing specialist DNAnexus has closed a $15 million second round led by Google Ventures and TPG Biotech. Elsewhere, we learned Wednesday that agribusiness giant Monsanto has deployed Cloudant’s NoSQL database as the underpinning of the company’s genomics system. Read more »
Amazon Web Services said Tuesday night that it’s now hosting 566 billion objects in S3. The volume has more than doubled since the fourth quarter of last year. If that doesn’t suggest that cloud use is picking up, I don’t know what does. Read more »
On Wednesday, Amazon introduced color screens and touch screens to its Android-powered Kindle lineup. With this, Amazon brings a combination of three critical elements to the tablet marketplace that no company — not even Apple — has matched: a full product line, a powerful business ecosystem and a unique combination of revenue streams. How will it compete in the tablet, video and online media spaces? This research note examines the prospects at hand. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
