API-crazy Amazon adds a new tool to boost support for enterprise AWS customers
photo: Barb Darrow
Amazon says its new API will help businesses on support contracts automate how their support calls are set up and handled. Read more »
Amazon offers cloud certifications; more proof that AWS is all grown up
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Amazon is following the lead of its IT elders by rolling out technology certifications for developers, solution architects and admins. Read more »
Netflix fronts $100K for best cloud ideas
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Netflix wants to hear about your great cloud computing ideas and is willing to pay for the privilege. Read more »
Amazon gets (more) serious about the enterprise. No kidding
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The fact that Amazon Web Services is targeting enterprise accounts is nothing new. The company’s just getting more blatant about it. Read more »
Watch out HP, IBM, Teradata, Oracle: Amazon Redshift is here
photo: Barb Darrow
Can Amazon take on the giants of data warehousing and win? Now we’ll be able to find out as its Paraccel-based Redshift service comes online. Read more »
Is Amazon yesterday’s cloud?
photo: Barb Darrow
ProfitBricks, which goes head-to-head with Amazon for the IT budgets of startups with a new promotion, says the time is ripe to disrupt the disrupter. Read more »
Morphlabs’ OpenStack cloud to arm service providers against Amazon
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For big service providers that feel “disrupted” by Amazon’s prodigious cloud, Morphlabs is pitching mCloud Osmium as a way to get up to snuff. Read more »
Wanted: An Amazon “enterprise challenge”
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Amazon’s cloud services are a huge hit among startups with thin IT budgets. But Amazon wants be a for-real platform for important enterprise-class applications as well. Should it launch an enterprise challenge? Read more »
Amazon’s cloud is bigger, more profitable than we think, report says
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In a new research note, Macquarie Capital contends that Amazon Web Services is not only profitable, it would be a $19 billion business if it were counted as a standalone entity. That’s not peanuts. Amazon, of course, isn’t saying boo. Read more »
This year in cloud: Amazon-almost-all-the-time and the other 5 top stories of 2012
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Last year, AWS saw big success and big snafus; Superstorm Sandy prompted worry about data center location; legacy IT giants bought their way into SaaS; VMware regroups; the OpenStack crowd got their clouds off the ground; and Europe starts to buy into cloud. Read more »
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos gets more kudos, but challenges loom
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Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon 16 years ago, is the second-best CEO on the planet, according to Harvard Business Review’s latest rankings. Last month Fortune named him its Business Person of the Year. Read more »
Christmas Eve AWS outage stings Netflix but not Amazon Prime
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Big problems with Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Load Balancing service in its US-East data center nailed Netflix and Heroku on Christmas Eve and carried over into Christmas. Netflix competitor Amazon Prime Instant Video appeared to be unaffected. Read more »
This week in cloud: Red Hat snags ManageIQ; Amazon builds on devs’ devotion
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Red Hat’s $104M buyout of ManageIQ gives it a stronger cross-cloud management story; Developers love their Amazon EC2 instances and will likely use more of them next year, according to new Forrester research. Read more »
Amazon’s super-duper data pipeline is now ready for its close-up
photo: Barb Darrow
Amazon’s Data Pipeline, which promises easy, automated consolidation of data from many sources, is now available — or at least you can sign up for it. Amazon also unveiled a new instance type for data-intensive applications. Read more »
How startup Alegion aims to humanize crowdsourcing
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Crowdsourcing is a great idea in theory, but it hasn’t really lived up to its potential, says Alegion CEO Nathaniel Gates. He thinks with some fundamental tweaks, Alegion can change all that for the better. Read more »
Storage: the crack cocaine of cloud computing
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Storage price slashing continues as Microsoft meets cuts Google and Amazon traded last week. There’s method in this madness — lots of businesses have yet to test the cloud, and cheap storage is a way to attract those newbies. And once they’re hooked, watch out! Read more »
With HP now in the game, the enterprise cloud fray gets more interesting
Hewlett-Packard’s cloud efforts can get lost in the noise of the company’s bigger “macro” issues, but as the company adds its OpenStack compute cloud to the mix — joining the existing CDN and storage clouds — the battle for enterprise cloud users is on. Read more »
This week in cloud: All Amazon all the time but Google gets its licks in
It was a frenetic week for cloud with Google touching off a storage price war on Monday. Amazon responded Wednesday and Google hit back on Thursday. Amazon Web Services announced a data warehouse and data pipeline service at its inaugural AWS: Reinvent show. Read more »
Obama’s tech team talks loves, hates and neck hair
photo: Harper reed
Just weeks after the election, members of the tech team behind the Obama For America effort took their show on the road to Vegas. Here, at AWS: Reinvent, they gave off the cuff and very candid reviews of the technologies they loved — and hated. Read more »
Jeff Bezos on the beauty of low margins and building a reusable space craft
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos came to Las Vegas Thursday to chat about Amazon Web Services and other topics with CTO Werner Vogels at the first AWS: Reinvent conference. Read more »
Greenpeace targets Amazon in clean cloud stunt
A website that claims to be from Amazon about launching a clean-powered pilot project for its AWS services, alas, isn’t true. It’s a stunt by the environmentalist at Greenpeace to get Amazon to add more clean power to its cloud. Read more »
Ok, this is getting silly: Google cuts storage prices — again
Just when you thought the cloud storage wars couldn’t get any hotter, they do. Google on Thursday launched its second price cut in a week, a day after Amazon Web Services lopped S3 prices by 25 percent. Microsoft are you out there? Read more »
Amazon preps Data Pipeline service to automate big data workflows
photo: Barb Darrow
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels unveiled the company’s new Data Pipeline Service at AWS: Reinvent conference in Las Vegas. The service aims to make it easier for AWS customers to automate data workflows between various AWS and third party repositories. Read more »
For data warehousing startups, Amazon is both friend and rival
photo: Barb Darrow
Coopetition lives on as Amazon Web Services partners build atop Amazon infrastructure but then watch as Amazon brings out rival products. It’s the cost of doing business, they say. Read more »
Amazon’s new data warehousing service takes aim at “old guard” IT giants
Oracle, IBM, Teradata take note: Amazon has you in its crosshairs with new Redshift data warehousing services that are in preview now and slated to be broadly available next year. Read more »
Apprenda gets the hybrid cloud religion
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Apprenda, a true believer in private Platform as a Service, is embracing the hybrid cloud with its latest release. CEO Sinclair Schuller said many companies are ready to test out at least some workloads in a public cloud. Read more »
Netflix open sources tool for making cloud services play nice
photo: Netflix Hystrix logo
Netflix has forged a cottage industry building tools to fill gaps in Amazon’s cloud infrastructure or otherwise add value to it. Now the company is open sourcing its Hystrix libraries, which manage interactions between the myriad distributed services that power its applications. Read more »
Eucalyptus update makes its techie cloud easier to use
With this update to its open-source cloud, Eucalyptus focuses on better usability, a web-based user console, better reporting tools and key bug fixes to harden the cloud foundation for production use, says CEO Marten Mickos. Read more »
This week in cloud: HP saga roils on, Cisco buys Meraki, Amazon’s tax bite
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Hewlett-Packard’s Autonomy woes just keep on rolling; Cisco drops $1.2 billion on Meraki’s Wi-Fi smarts; and Amazon’s retail operations face sales tax bite on in more states — sparking questions on the impact on cloud services. Read more »
Amazon’s dead serious about the enterprise cloud
photo: Amazon
All the talk about big companies not wanting to put workloads on Amazon Web Services is hot air. The biggest companies already deploy workloads beyond test-and-dev on AWS. The question is: can AWS sustain that momentum as new options come online? Read more »
Amazon adds down-under presence with new Asia-Pacific region in Sydney
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Amazon is adding a new region based in Sydney to offer lower-latency services to customers in Australia and New Zealand. The addition brings total regions worldwide to nine at a time when cloud competitors with global reach are coming online. Read more »
Amazon speeds up EBS storage input-output — again
Another busy week for Amazon Web Services which added new compute instance types, cut prices on others, and upped the limit on provisioned IOPS for EBS volumes. Amazon is getting busier as more public cloud options come on line. Read more »
Amazon launches Vegas trade show for AWS developers, users
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 »
