Cloud news you can use this week: rough times for Rackspace; a look at Amazon Web Services revenue; EMC-VMware come clean (kind of) about spinoff; and Heroku spiffs up its add-on marketplace for developers. Read more »
Through AT&T’s ForHealth initiative, researchers at AT&T Labs are working on an asthma sensor that scans the air for volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that may worsen asthma symptoms and then alerts patients via smartphones and other devices. Read more »
Hewlett-Packard’s long-promised cloud builds on an OpenStack foundation as well as Akamai, and ActiveState technologies. Should it matter that this IT giant is relying on IT from other companies? Read more »
Startup CipherCloud will use fresh funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures and T-Systems to beef up sales and marketing and its global presence, says CEO and founder Pravin Kothari. Read more »
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 »
Many factors have driven the recent high demand for IT products and services. However, relentless global economic weakness and uncertainty have resulted in a deterioration of worldwide IT spending through the third quarter and will continue to be an anchor in the fourth quarter. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
You love MongoDB but you’re not wild with all the configuration and tweaking? SoftLayer now offers a new managed MongoDB service that it created with help from 10gen, the company behind MongoDB. Read more »
Openstack private cloud player Piston Cloud Computing names Jim Morrisroe, who formerly headed VMware’s Zimbra group, as its new CEO. Co-founder and former CEO Joshua McKenty stays on as CTO. Read more »
Given Dropbox’s huge popularity — it claims 100 million users — it’s not surprising that many workers use it at the office. But that trend is worrisome to IT departments concerned with security breaches. Read more »
At the AWS Re: Invent conference, engineers from Pinterest, Flipboard and Yelp detailed some of the strategies their companies employ in order to keep costs low as computing demand increases. The keys are keeping an eagle eye on usage and using the right types of resources. Read more »
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 »
According to Amazon Web Services Chief Data Scientist Matt Wood, big data and cloud computing are nearly a match made in heaven. Limitless, on-demand and inexpensive resources open up new worlds of possibility, and a central platform makes it easy for communities to share huge datasets. Read more »
AWS CTO Werner Vogels and I sat down at the AWS re:Invent conference yesterday to talk about whether large companies are actually using the cloud to innovate through new styles of applications. Vogels says they are, and has plenty of examples to prove his point. Read more »
Writing Hadoop queries doesn’t have to be hard and neither does sharing data according to Mortar Data, which just released an open source framework for Hadoop applications. The idea is that groups of people can more easily collaborate on building apps around giant data sets. Read more »
Startup Cloud9 IDE says its new enterprise development environment will let far-flung developers collaborate in real-time on their projects. Given the demand for quality developers, companies need to hire where they can and find ways to enable collaboration. Read more »
If you don’t think Google is serious about providing public cloud infrastructure to business users, check out the latest spate of services unveiled on the company’s enterprise blog. Google clearly wants to take on cloud king Amazon on its own turf. Read more »
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 »
Zorawar Biri Singh, who leads HP’s cloud effort, says the company’s vision aligns nicely with what enterprises want. HP will fill in check marks to its OpenStack-based game plan next month but the big question is whether HP’s brand still carries weight. Read more »
Mortar Data has raised $1.8 million for its cloud-based service that wraps Hadoop in a custom — and supposedly developer-friendly — blend of Pig and Python, meaning even novice Hadoop programmers can be writing jobs in about an hour. Read more »
Web-hosting giant GoDaddy is trying to grow into a products company to help its small business customers move into the modern computing era rather than just hosting their websites. A conversion to mobile websites is first, but cloud services are on the horizon. Read more »
Newvem has tested its analytics with customer data for 8 months and says its key finding is that customers need to hear how use of Amazon services will make them more profitable. Saving money is one thing, making money is better. Read more »
Jesse Andrews, an OpenStack veteran who’s done stints at NASA, ANSO Labs and Rackspace, will lead Nebula’s plug-and-play OpenStack development effort as it nears launch, the company said. Read more »
Hadoop is nothing without applications, and Continuuity aims to deliver those apps by making Hadoop something developers can work and innovate with. Its efforts haven’t gone unnoticed — the company just closed a $10 million Series A round from a who’s who of big data VCs. Read more »
Cloudability says its analytics can cut your overall cloud services cost. Available now for Amazon Web Services, support is coming for other major cloud service providers, A raft of companies have sprung up to help companies get a better grip on their cloud spend. Read more »
Obama for America CTO Harper Reed had helped build Threadless, a site for selling hip t-shirts, but he had never done anything like this. Here’s how he and his team built a tech platform that might forever change how presidential campaigns are built. Read more »
India’s major tech firms have become competitive enterprise outsourcers and systems integrators on a global scale. Firms such as Cognizant and Tata Consultancy Services are looking for technology to provide the next competitive advantages in the market. The cloud provides that opportunity on several levels. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 »
IT departments need not go away in a computing world increasingly concerned with cloud computing and complex service-oriented systems, but they will have to change. IT has to let go of trying to control everything and focus on coordinating and enhancing things that other people control. Read more »
In the wake of several glitches at the Amazon Web Services’ US-East data centers in recent months, RedisToGo opens shop in US-West, will others follow? Also in cloud news: Rackspace and Savvis seek critical mass for their new cloud service offerings. Read more »
The growth of public and private cloud services places new demands on the IT organization, particularly when it comes to the scale, agility and management of the data center. SDNs are a response to those demands, providing opportunities for IT managers to improve their network operations. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
If you weren’t clicking on news sites on election night, you were probably better off. Yottaa’s monitors showed that almost every major online news site fared very poorly when the results started to flow in with page load times hitting 50 seconds. Read more »
Joyent has named a new CEO and announced the altest generation of its infrastructure as a service software. The moves are in preparation for a big play in the coming months as the company looks to build the right computing platform for data and cloud applications. Read more »
The first version of the CloudStack open-source cloud platform carrying the Apache Foundation imprimatur is now available for download. The new “Incubating release” 4.0.0 integrates CloudBridge Amazon API support and support for Ceph and Caringo storage options. Read more »
LinkedIn’s popular career building and job search site has been offline for a short time Monday morning. There’s not a ton of information available yet, so stay tuned. Read more »
SpringboardIoT, a new accelerator program focused on startups working on hardware and the Internet of Things, has launched in the UK. The scheme’s founder joins forces with an experienced insider to explain why it’s a necessary and useful development. Read more »
By 2016, there will be fewer data centers but those that are built will be much bigger, according to IDC research. Cedexis launches tool to help AWS customers route computing loads around Amazon EC2 regions to mitigate service problems. Read more »
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 »
Dell’s Data Center Solutions group recently shipped its 1 millionth server just five years after coming into existence. It’s proof of how important webscale buyers have become to the server market, as well as how different their demand are than those of traditional IT buyers. Read more »
Streaming media powerhouse Netflix says its experience with Amazon Web Services outages led to best practices and technology that can insulate Netflix — and potentially other companies — from the impact of weather-related and other events. Read more »
