When Google launched its EC2 rival, Google Compute Engine, last June, it set some high expectations. Sebastian Standil’s team at Scalr put the cloud infrastructure service through its paces — and were pleasantly surprised at what they found. Read more »
The Belgian IT automation startup is now trying to address the scaling needs of its users. But before it leaves beta, it also wants to figure out the billing piece of the cloud broker business. Read more »
If you thought Amazon Web Services would stop churning out new features and cutting prices on older ones, you have another think coming. Read more »
The web has thoroughly infiltrated the political process, much like TV did in the 1960s. A series of posts on how the Obama team managed to analyze data, format its emails and now, build a fundraising API are showing how much web savvy and infrastructure matters. Read more »
The Spanish telecoms giant has made its big infrastructure-as-a-service play with Instant Servers, which it claims will beat entrenched rivals through better reliability and scalability. Read more »
Agility is increasingly recognized as one of the main advantages of cloud computing, but an important aspect of agility is choice: the choice to run computing jobs in house, in a private cloud, or on public cloud services from the likes of Amazon, Rackspace, and a growing number of other providers. To exercise choice, customers require information and the ability to compare the costs and benefits of competing solutions. This report explores opportunities for accurately measuring computing resources and their use, simplifying the comparison of competing cloud offerings and opening the door to charging models based more closely on actual consumption. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Observers of database technology should look closely at the non-relational database market to see where the most interesting growth lies in the world of applied information storage and retrieval. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Amazon’s new “High I/O Quadruple Extra Large” compute instances use SSD to store and retrieve lots of data fast — which should make them popular for interactive web and mobile applications where real-time response to user clicks and gestures is key. Read more »
In cloud and big data, the second quarter of 2012 featured several high-profile deals and product launches that could reshape the marketplace for everyone. Google and Microsoft launched Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings, software-defined networking took off, and all eyes stayed fixed on the continuing promise of data analytics. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Discussions about the cloud now involve more than just the IT department. New developments in hardware architectures, more-energy-efficient data centers, regulatory concerns and simplifying analytics are all discussions currently circling through the industry. Here’s what to consider when thinking about your business in the cloud. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Amazon web services are having trouble this evening and in the process are taking down some major sites. Among sites being impacted are Quora and HipChat. In addition, the Amazon outage has had an impact on Heroku, a division of Salesforce. Read more »
This quarter saw Amazon Web Services finally relaxing its public-cloud-only stance and launching services to support hybrid-cloud deployments. Meanwhile, Hadoop players moved to make their platforms more accessible to mainstream BI analysts and database administrators. A new quarterly report analyzes these trends and provides a near-term outlook. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Amazon Web Services Storage Gateway is the company’s first foray into the on-premises cloud-storage space. But a number of vendors are attacking the on-premises cloud-storage gateway market too. Do these offerings signal the death of the cloud gateway as an appliance or simply validation of the market? Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Amazon and Eucalyptus announced a partnership that gives corporate customers a chance to bridge their private clouds with Amazon’s cloud that includes services such as S3 and EC2. It is a sign that Jeff Bezos’ company is aggressively moving to keep competition at bay. Read more »
Amazon, the market leader, plays at the infrastructure level. But there was a lot of talk at Cloud Connect about Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings, where cloud folks think the real action will ultimately lie. The company will soon have to address these shifts as well as trends ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Is the PC “dead”? Of course not, but if you don’t see the trend moving away from local / desktop computing and towards mobile / cloud computing, you’re missing the sales figures for each market: Nearly 50 percent of recent device sales are mobile. Read more »
Rapid price spikes are effecting buyers on the Amazon Spot Market, where users are bidding extremely high prices for scarce compute capacity. These price spikes are new, and they call into question assumptions that many users have made about how the auctioning of computing resources works. Read more »
Amazon is scheduling what looks to be a significant number of reboots to customer EC2 instances in the coming weeks. Customers started getting letters informing them of the instance restarts on Tuesday, according to Cloudscaling. It is unclear what issue the patches address. 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 »
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 »
At its highly anticipated Kindle Fire launch, Amazon also took the wraps off its own browser. Amazon Silk, which relies on the Kindle Fire end point — for the cool UI — and Amazon’s powerful cloud — for the heavy lifting — promises a better user experience. Read more »
Xignite, which is offering financial data that’s hosted on Amazon’s cloud to its clients, has raised $10 million to become the big data repository for financial market information. The company, which was formed in 2004, is betting on the trends of mobile, cloud and big data. Read more »
Dome9, a stealth company that aims to create the equivalent of a firewall for public and private clouds, launched the company and its product Monday. The company, which was founded last year, is just one of several cloud security companies coming out of stealth mode. Read more »
Facebook’s Skype integration involved a lot of slimming down of Skype’s native client and making it work in a browser, creating the back-end integration between Facebook and Skype and scaling up Skype’s network to handle the expected flood of traffic. Read more »
Fyels just launched a new service for file sharing through Twitter, and it comes with almost no strings attached: The service offers unlimited, free and ad-free storage, and files can be as large as 9 GB each. Almost sounds to good to be true, doesn’t it? Read more »
The popular web sites down today because of the Amazon Web Services outage are getting most of the attention, but they were only a handful among the hundred-plus that were affected, including at least three popular platform-as-a-service providers — Heroku, Engine Yard and DotCloud. Read more »
As the ramp-up towards the January launch of Microsoft’s Azure platform reaches a crescendo, the software giant, of all companies, could be the most significant revenue driver for the cloud in 2010. Here are several reasons why. Read more »
The Pirate Bay made headlines earlier this week with yet another dramatic announcement, this time that the notorious BitTorrent site’s tracker has been officially shut down. But the move won’t impact downloading, site admins explained on a blog. Trackers are no longer needed to facilitate BitTorrent […] Read more »
Joyent today announced it has agreed to acquire Reasonably Smart, a fledgling cloud startup based on JavaScript and Git, for an undisclosed amount. While on the surface it might look like simple industry consolidation, Reasonably Smart’s technology will in fact help Joyent compete with emerging service-centric […] Read more »
GigaOM’s Structure 08 event offered a terrific opportunity to survey the changing landscape of computing infrastructure. But as with all technology shifts, innovation won’t just belong to the big established players like VMWare, Amazon, Google, Sun Microsystems, Salesforce.com and NetSuite. With that in mind, Found|READ asked […] Read more »
