Say what? Microsoft Azure’s a $1 billion business?
Microsoft says it’s sold a billion dollars worth of cloud services. But as is usually the case, the value of cloud sales depends on what your definition of cloud is. Read more »
Opscode gains momentum with IBM, Microsoft deals
IBM is integrating Chef into SmartCloud and Microsoft is adding support for Azure as well in a sign that enterprises are fully aboard the devops bandwagon. Read more »
This week in cloud: Cloud as job creator, crazy times for Microsoft Azure storage
photo: Shutterstock / Gena96
IT folks who worry that cloud computing adoption will kill jobs, may be surprised by the results of a new survey; Amazon unveils OpsWorks; Rackspace makes price changes. Read more »
Who’s the best cloud storage provider? Microsoft, says Nasuni; but it still likes Amazon
photo: Flickr / Carlos Gutiérrez G.
Evaluation of five cloud storage providers showed improvement across the board, but Microsoft leapfrogged the rest — including Amazon S3 — in some criteria, says Nasuni’s Connor Fee. Read more »
This week in cloud: Office 365 goes down and Microsoft stocks up Azure store
photo: Shutterstock / winui
Another week of high-profile outages may spook some prospective cloud users but Amazon Web Services strength shows the appeal of cloud. And Microsoft keeps adding Windows Azure options. Read more »
AWS launches transcoding service a week after Microsoft goes after media biz
Amazon has hopped into the video transcoding business with it’s new Elastic Transcoder service, joining Microsoft, Encoding.com and others as providers of such a service. Read more »
What we’ll see in 2013 in cloud computing
Next year, “the cloud” will finally be ready for enterprise workloads and big companies will finally start moving them there. Data centers will stop being enclosed by walls and those are just two of GigaOM’s 5 big cloud predictions. Read on for more. Read more »
Microsoft sells Azure storage like a smartphone: free device with contract
Microsoft to customers; Buy some storage and get a $138K StorSimple appliance for free! This is just the latest proof point showing that big cloud purveyors see storage as the gateway to broader cloud service sales. 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 »
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 »
Apprenda gets the hybrid cloud religion
photo: Apprenda
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 »
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 »
Microsoft snags StorSimple to pack more stuff onto Azure
Microsoft snarfs up StorSimple as an easy way to get customer data into its Windows Azure storage cloud. The deal, terms of which were not disclosed, signals increasing competition between Microsoft, Google, Amazon and the OpenStack crew for customer data. Read more »
Where’s Azure, and 4 other takeaways from Microsoft’s earnings
For all of Microsoft’s huge investment in the Windows Azure cloud computing platform, there was very little mention of the multi-billion-effort on Thursday’s Q4 and FY 2012 earnings call. Microsoft CFO touted major updates for Windows, Windows Phone, Office and Windows Server in the coming year. Read more »
NASA CIO: We still use OpenStack — and Amazon and Microsoft Azure …
In a recent interview, NASA CIO Linda Cureton said the space agency still uses OpenStack for some projects but that it must be pragmatic in all cloud technology choices going forward. Various NASA entities are using Amazon and Windows Azure as needed. Read more »
Google App Engine gets more global
The new Google App Engine release gets more global with better European data center coverage, plus better search APIs, SSL support for custom domains, and more integrated PageSpeed optimization. On the flip side, the Cloud SQL database still isn’t fully baked. Read more »
The Amazon API battle for the cloud rages on
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 »
Did NASA ditch OpenStack for Amazon?
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 »
CloudLock aims to bring PCI compliance to Google Drive
CloudLock, the Waltham, Mass.-based startup specializing in cloud security, says it’s bringing PCI compliance to Google Drive storage. The company’s new service scans files flowing into and out of Google Drive looking for personally identifiable information. Read more »
HP, Oracle, Microsoft prep for cloudapalooza
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 »
Microsoft puts Azure accelerator in Bangalore to woo startups
In its push to get traction for Windows Azure as a platform for cloud services, Microsoft is opening an Azure accelerator in Bangalore. The goal is to find and help startups across India and Southeast Asia — and get them aboard the Microsoft PaaS. Read more »
SAP cuddles up with Amazon, but what about Azure?
News that SAP and Amazon will All-in-One business applications to run in production on Amazon’s public cloud raises a question: what’s going on with SAP and Microsoft Windows Azure? News on this could come next week at the Sapphire 2012 show. Or not. Read more »
NAB: Cloud computing is ready for its closeup
Few industries are better suited to the cloud computing model than film and TV production. Show business is heavily project-oriented with myriad production shops and contractors collaborating on relatively short-term, compute-intensive projects. That’s why the cloud-computing giants are converging at NAB this week. Read more »
Cloud ‘lock-in’ survey shows not all clouds are alike
When it comes to moving massive files between storage clouds, performance depends — a lot — on what clouds you use, according to new research. For it’s bulk data migration report Nasuni repeatedly transferred 12 TB of data between Amazon S3, Rackspace and Microsoft Windows Azure. Read more »
Microsoft: Our apps are really coming to Azure! Eventually, maybe
Last April, Microsoft promised an Azure-based ERP product. Fast forward a year, it’s still not here, but the company said Dynamics NAV 2013 for Azure will go to beta in May and be broadly available by year’s end — as will Dynamics GP 2013. Read more »
So what happens to storage….
There’s a big change that is sweeping the business world — instead of buying their infrastructure by spending millions of dollars upfront, companies are now getting comfortable with the idea of paying for their needs as they go along. And that spells trouble for many. Read more »
Microsoft Azure falls down, goes boom
Azure, Microsoft’s platform-as-a-service cloud, went down Monday night and stayed down for at least 10 hours. The news comes as Microsoft is trying to pitch two-year-old Azure as a safe and reliable platform for consumer and business applications. Read more »
While Amazon courts enterprises, Microsoft eyes startups
photo: Flickr / D.Begley
Microsoft announced a partnership with TechStars today that will allow it access to more than 400 startups around the world so it can sell its Azure cloud platform. But as Microsoft tries to sell startups on its services, can it compete against Amazon? Read more »
Subscriber Content
Amazon’s DynamoDB: rattling the cloud market
DynamoDB, AWS’ latest effort to rock the technology establishment, has many implications for other players in the big data and cloud computing markets. A new GigaOM Pro research note examines just who is affected, and how. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
AWS offers free Windows on EC2 (kind of)
Amazon will let customers run micro-instances of Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 for free on its EC2 service starting now, according to a new post to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) blog. Such try-before-you-buy tactics have helped Amazon win converts to its cloud platform. Read more »
Jaspersoft parlays Red Hat OpenShift in BI push
The free version of Jaspersoft’s analytics software will be offered as part of Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service. As Red Hat, Microsoft, Heroku, and Cloud Foundry PaaSes compete, watch for them to add more services and capabilities just as they’ve raced to add language support. Read more »
Developers will flock to public cloud in 2012
The cloud is looking pretty good to software developers this year, according to new Zend Technologies’ research. More than half of the 3,335 developers surveyed said they expect to use a public cloud for their work in 2012, with AWS being the top draw. Read more »
Subscriber Content
Quality of the cloud: best practices for ISVs
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 »
Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure are top dogs in cloud storage
After a long look at the performance of cloud storage providers, only six of the 16 largest CSPs made the grade and the two top dogs were Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure, said Nasuni, a data continuity specialist that works with all the major CSPs. Read more »
4 Azure milestones Microsoft must hit — and soon
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 »
Engine Yard plugs Node.js into its cloud
In the latest indication that Node.js support is table stakes for all Platform-as-a-Service players, Engine Yard is adding support for the popular server-side framework as part of a trial program. Developers like to use Node.js because it supports JavaScript and is fast and scalable. Read more »
DotCloud adds Redis, MongoDB and MySQL
DotCloud, the platform as a service that won our Structure 2011 Launchpad competition, said Wednesday that it will support three new data stores as part of its multi-language platform. The company will add MySQL, Redis and MongoDB support. Read more »
Fujitsu makes Azure compliant by making it hybrid
Fujitsu’s new hybrid implementation of Microsoft Windows Azure could address corporate concerns about deploying global workloads on Microsoft’s public cloud. With Hybrid Cloud Services for Microsoft Windows Azure, Fujitsu can use its global presence to make sure that data stays within prescribed areas Read more »
Red Hat automates Java dev in OpenShift PaaS
Red Hat is bringing more cloud-based automation to Java developers in an update to its OpenShift Platform as a Service which integrates the JBoss tool suite and supports two open-source tools that will shift more of the programming workload to the cloud itself. Read more »
Peer 1 launches Zunicore, a new cloud service.
Peer 1, the hosting provider, joins the ranks of Rackspace, GoDaddy and other hosting companies that have decided to get into the cloud. On Monday, it launched its Zunicore service, which combines elements of an Infrastructure-as-a-Service with those of a platform. Read more »
