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 »
AMD, which has fallen behind its chief rival Intel in the x86 processor business, announced on Monday plans to make new 64-bit chips based on ARM’s chip technology that will target data center and cloud computing companies. AMD will continue to make x86 processors as well. Read more »
Data centers up and down the eastern seaboard went into emergency mode to keep up and running as Hurricane Sandy churned northwards. But the key to survivabilty is not last-minute prep but long-running practices. Read more »
At just a few months old, Google Compute Engine is seen as a threat to public cloud leader Amazon Web Services. At least that appears to be what Amazon thinks given its lawsuit against a former exec who is joining Google. Read more »
It was a busy week in cloud, bookended by Amazon and Google App Engine outages. In between those snafus, OpenNebula updated its cloud and stealthy startup Yottabyte launched technology that it says will let companies yoke commodity hardware into clouds of their own. Read more »
Google says it resolved whatever ailed its platform as a service. It was Black Friday for the web with Tumblr, Dropbox and Google App Engine all going down. It was unclear if these issues were related and/or due to a broader systemic problem. Read more »
When companies such as Google and Facebook design their own servers, switches and data centers, it’s more a business decision than it is a test of their hardware-hacking skills. Custom gear means lower power bills, better performance and the flexibility to adapt to unforeseen situations. Read more »
Which type of Amazon Web Services Reserved Instance should your company deploy and for what time period for any given job? These are the kinds of questions Cloudyn’s new calculator can help you sort out for yourself, the company said. Read more »
Why is it that Heroku, Foursquare, Pinterest, Reddit, Instagram et al are still so heavily dependent on Amazon’s aging and problematic US-East region? Very good question. Here are some potential answers. Read more »
Former Yahoo cloud VP Todd Papaioannou and Facebook engineer Jonathan Gray are trying to big data for programmers with a new platform service called Continuuity. It’s a development environment and runtime layer that sits atop a company’s Hadoop infrastructure and abstracts the complexity of writing apps. Read more »
Rackspace’s new OpenStack-powered Cloud Block Storage comes in spinning disk and faster SSD tiers and lets customers mix and match block size with compute instances as needed, says company CTO John Engates. Read more »
Facebook’s breaking up with hardware OEMs, Europeans distrust the cloud and it’s anyone’s guess whether there will be an Amazon of Europe. Those were among the key takeaways from the first-ever Structure Europe event in Amsterdam last week. Read more »
Google Apps for Business users need to be protected from their own downloaded apps, according to Waltham, MA-based CloudLock, which on Monday launched a firewall for just that purpose. Read more »
When cartoonist Scott Adams decides that cloudwashing has become too much to take, maybe it’s time to give this annoying practice the boot. Sooooo … what do you say Oracle, HP, IBM, Microsoft? Can we agree to put the mindless use of the C-word on ice? Read more »
Facebook is planning to rely more on flash drives in places where most companies have used spinning disk, and based on conversations with sources and hints from Facebook, I think one of those places will be in Facebook’s cold-storage photo facility it’s building in Oregon. Read more »
When it comes to realtime JavaScript frameworks, developers love Meteor. But they want better security features and user controls. With Meteor 0.5.0, it looks like they’re getting what they asked for. Read more »
Microsoft’s lackluster first quarter earnings news actually came as a relief after a raft of bad tech sector news from IBM, Intel and Google this week. The software giant missed expectations but not by all that much for the quarter ending September 30. Read more »
What sort of amazing cloud services could Amazon have up its sleeve? Werner Vogels ain’t saying anything in detail but here are five things to watch out for where the public cloud services giant is concerned. Read more »
Hadoop is getting closer to business intelligence thanks to a slew of new products ranging from a SQL database built atop Hadoop to an appliance packaging the two alongside a full complement of servers. On Wednesday, Birst, Teradata and Splice Machine got into the act. Read more »
Cisco and CA are working with Citrix to support its CloudPlatform implementation of CloudStack. The news, out of Citrix Synergy in Barcelona, comes as a raft of OpenStack news hits the wire. Read more »
Although older generations might still view cloud computing as an emerging trend, their children take it for granted, largely forgoing physical devices for cloud services. We might as well come get on board and maybe change the world in the process. Read more »
Software-defined networks and data centers are the future if enterprises want to manage their infrastructure with the agility of cloud computing providers, but they’re nowhere near ubiquity yet. However, according to two senior VMware executives, the pieces are in place and maturing every day. Read more »
The consumerization of IT has led to the growth of cloud, a big shift for the major hardware players and new opportunities for startups to build a business using IT without huge up-front costs. Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels explains what’s going on at Structure:Europe. Read more »
CIOs that try to thwart user demand for latest-and-greatest consumer technologies in the workplace could be an endangered species, according to speakers at Structure Europe. Better to accommodate and bring that new technology under IT’s big tent. Read more »
European hosting companies and service providers are hurting their cause by offering the same old services but with the word “cloud” attached, according to Flexiant founder Tony Lucas. Read more »
Federated clouds, the idea that customers can span different clouds with their computing and data, decided on cost, location or other variables, isn’t really available today, but there’s hope that it will emerge in the future and help service providers compete against Amazon. Read more »
New funding from GGV Capital and Onset Ventures will help Gridstore push its case that, with the right software, plain, old disk drives can scale out to do the heavy lifting for most web-scale applications. Read more »
Here you’ll find our live coverage of Structure Europe 2012, as we talk to some of the best minds and brightest stars behind the cloud revolution with a special focus on how Europe is helping change the game. Read more »
Europe’s Helix Nebula project is addressing the technical, legal, and procedural issues that today make it difficult to seamlessly move jobs from one cloud to another at scale. Lessons learned from it could provide a window through which we can see Europe’s cloud provision taking shape. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The usual suspects Amazon and VMware made significant announcements in cloud in the third quarter, while Hadoop remained the talk of the town in big data. Emerging trends in software-defined networking and flash storage stirred up lots of M&A and venture investment in the quarter. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
If there isn’t an OpenStack cloud you fancy, wait a second, there’s more — a lot more — in the pipeline. Cloudscaling, Metacloud and Dreamhost will all preview their take on the open-source cloud this week at the OpenStack Summit in San Diego. Read more »
Cloud Sherpas has seen revenue from both its Google Apps and Salesforce.com businesses double in the past year. That seams to indicate that third-party VARs and integrators can make a living off low-cost SaaS applications — and that Google gets that it needs an ecosystem. Read more »
The nation’s biggest broadband and cable provider is joining the OpenStack effort, just in time for it’s big coming out party in San Diego next week. Comcast is also working with Cisco on applications that can build on that open-source infrastructure. Read more »
Wercker says its continuous delivery SaaS will fill a huge gap in today’s software landscape where developers rely on cloud services like Github to store and version their code and PaaSes to deploy it. What’s lacking is a SaaS to keep updates flowing. Read more »
Not every business wants to store their files in the cloud. FileSpirit, a German company, is launching a new service by the same name that lets companies give their mobile workers remote access to company files and databases through a mobile file browser. Read more »
A major cloud trend over the past decade has been open source, but at present there is no one standard all providers obey. But anyone looking for a longer-term alternative to AWS now has two exciting new prospects: OpenStack and OpenShift. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
OpenNebula, the European-rooted open-source cloud platform is used by more businesses and in more countries than many might expect. At the ripe old age of 7, OpenNebula remains a quiet force compared to say, OpenStack. Read more »
Oracle is not often accused of helping customers cut costs, but in this case, modifications to its recovery manager product with the 10g release helped Amazon.com save $1 million a year by backing up directly to Amazon S3 storage. Read more »
If the OpenStack Summit is anywhere near as dramatic as the events leading up to it, it will be a really good show. As the open-source cloud effort transitions from a Rackspace-dominated move to a true community effort, here are 8 big questions. Read more »
Github is the code repository and versioning system of choice for millions of developers, especially in the open-source world. But Atlassian is banking that its newly updated Bitbucket and Stash, can entice corporate develoeprs. Read more »
