Heroku says PostGIS support enables smarter mobile app development
photo: Thinkstock
Everyone’s trying to add geographic data to mobile apps. Heroku says its embrace of PostGIS 2.0 will help devs do that faster and easier. Read more »
Heroku comes to Europe, but data protection issues remain
The platform-as-a-service outfit has taken its first non-U.S. region out of private beta. However, although it runs out of Ireland, some personal data may still be routed through the U.S. Read more »
Salesforce.com and Rackspace gear up for mobile developers
Industry giants are adding more development and platform goodies for mobile app developers. This may have the more targeted MBaaS providers a little perplexed. Read more »
Anatomy of a security fix: Postgres launches massive update to address vulnerability
Any time a major security vulnerability is discovered in a popular software product, there’s hell to pay. Here’s how the Postgres community reacted to one such vulnerability. Read more »
What if your cloud dashboard isn’t telling the truth? Hint: It ain’t good
photo: Shutterstock 3Art
Many businesses already get the heebie jeebies when it comes to deploying workloads to the cloud. They have to trust their provider and the metrics it provides. That’s why the Heroku-Rap Genius kerfuffle is important. Read more »
Is your PaaS composable or contextual? (Hint: the answer matters)
In his latest post on next-generation systems design, James Urquhart discusses the different types of PaaS offerings and why it matters that some are composable and others are contextual. Read more »
Hey devs, need some hand holding? Heroku adds premium consulting services for you
So you’re building an important application on Heroku’s Platform-as-a-Service but need some help configuring it? Now you can now get that. For a fee. Read more »
Engine Yard vet starts Cloud Foundry consultancy
photo: Flickr/Nrbelex
Dr. Nic Williams has left Engine Yard to promote the use of the rival Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service. Read more »
What happens if your PaaS passes?
If you build your company’s software on an external platform as a service, what happens when that platform disappears? PHPFog users are finding out. Here’s a cautionary tale. Read more »
New Heroku Dataclips eases data sharing via Google Docs
Heroku says its new Postgres Dataclips service eases sharing of SQL queries with Google Docs integration and broader availability. Read more »
Christmas Eve AWS outage stings Netflix but not Amazon Prime
photo: Flickr/Will Merydith
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: Rackspace whoops, sizing Amazon cloud and more
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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 »
Heroku now lets you play with your data without making a mess
People love platforms as a service because they are easy so Heroku’s new Fork tool that allows you to copy your database with one click should be a nice feature for users who want to play with their data without making a costly mistake. Read more »
Amazon problems take down Reddit, other sites
photo: Flickr/Will Merydith
Once again Amazon has experienced significant problems at its big US East data center. The snafu has taken down Foursquare, Reddit, Heroku and other popular websites. Read more »
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Cloud and data third-quarter 2012
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 »
Wercker aims to “fix” the app dev universe
photo: Wercker
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 »
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Examining open hybrid cloud options for the enterprise
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 »
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Platform as a Service in 2012
The PaaS market is predicted to reach $20.1 billion in 2014. Huge brands occupy this space, including Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Salesforce.com, as well as newer startups. As the market grows, watch for more consolidation, tighter integration with IaaS services, and more features. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Salesforce pushes Heroku into big biz with full Java stack support
Heroku is morphing from what was a Ruby-focused PaaS for web developers to a fully Java-supportive PaaS for big business. At least that’s what Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff hopes as he integrates Heroku — purchased in 2010 — more tightly into the company’s overall platform. Read more »
Apprenda seeks to make private PaaS more practical
photo: Apprenda
Apprenda, hopes to make private PaaSes more attractive to companies by giving developers access to a public instance of its Paas to experiment with, then pull in house, according to company CEO Sinclair Schuller. Read more »
Github: database migration sparked outages
Github’s planned migration to a new 3-node MySQL cluster didn’t go as planned, resulting in outages Monday and Tuesday. In addition, Github’s status site, which runs on Heroku, had its own problems, acccording to a Github post-mortem published Friday. Read more »
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Emerging trends in the non-relational database market
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 »
Heroku loses a star as CEO and Salesforce EVP Sebastian resigns
Heroku CEO and Salesforce.com EVP of Platforms Byron Sebastian has left the company. Sebastian was key to Heroku’s fast growth as a platform-as-a-service provider, which included a $212 million acquisition by Salesforce.com in December 2010. Read more »
How MemCachier went from a favor for a friend to cloud ubiquity
photo: Shutterstock/optimarc
Hosted memcached provider MemCachier is expanding like crazy, moving from its homebase on Heroku into the AppFog, CloudBees, DotCloud and Amazon EC2 platforms. It’s impressive growth for a bootstrapped company that launched in April and was little more than an idea a year ago. Read more »
LoudSauce is a Kickstarter for grassroots advertising
Crowdfunding site uses Amazon S3, Heroku and other cloud services to keep its costs low. San Francisco-based LoudSauce aims to give voice to small groups and organizations that don’t have SuperPACs to call their own, according to co-founder Colin Mutchler. Read more »
Cloud databases 101: Who builds ‘em and what they do
Remember when there were just two or three cloud computing platforms to choose from, and just about as many cloud databases? Well, as clouds have proliferated, so have the database services built on top of them. Here are the available services and where they’re running. Read more »
Heroku builds Postgres app for Mac users
Heroku built an app that makes it easy for Mac users to download and get started using the PostreSQL database. Called Postgres.app, the product should be available in the App Store soon and includes a number of popular Postgres features and libraries. Read more »
RightScale buys into cloud cost forecasting
The need for a way to plan and deploy cloud computing most efficiently is growing. The latest proof: RightScale’s acquisition of ShopForCloud, a free service that assesses the costs for cloud deployments before they’re rolled out. It works across multiple clouds and currencies. Read more »
Latest outage raises more questions about Amazon cloud
Massive thunderstorms notwithstanding, the fact that Amazon’s U.S. East data center went down again Friday night while other cloud services hosted in the same area kept running raises anew questions about whether Amazon is suffering architectural glitches that go beyond acts of God. Read more »
Severe storms cause Amazon Web Services outage
For second time in less than a month, Amazon’s Northern Virginia data center has suffered an outage and is impacting many popular services such as Instagram, Pinterest & Netflix. Amazon previously suffered an outage in its Northern Virginia facilities on June 14, 2012. 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 »
Cloudability tool tracks Amazon reserved instances
Cloudability’s new Reserved Instances Explorer helps companies keep track of and best utilize their discounted Amazon reserved instances even across accounts. The tool can search Amazon EC2 instances by size, region, operating system and expiration date. Read more »
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PaaS market accelerators, 2012–2013
According to 451 Research, the enterprise PaaS market will grow to be worth more than $3 billion by 2015. For businesses, it’s important to know the developments that are critical to properly deploying a PaaS solution that save time and development costs. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Why building SaaS well means giving up your servers
photo: Pinar Ozger
Keas co-founder and former Google VP of product management Adam Bosworth knows a thing or two about building software-as-a-service applications, and he’s convinced that anyone not doing so atop a platform-as-a-service framework either will be doing so soon or will likely have an inferior product. Read more »
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Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
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 »
On Structure’s 5th birthday, some video highlights to watch
In late 2007, in a conversation with my colleagues I pointed out that over the next decade or so, the Internet’s infrastructure was going to be transformed in a very fundamental manner. It would start with the proliferation of Amazon Web Service-style core cloud computing and […] Read more »
Heroku stung by Amazon outage
The popular Heroku platform as a service had a pretty rough night last night. Taken down by Thursday night’s Amazon Web Services disruption, Heroku took a tumble. But, shouldn’t a tech-savvy company that follows Amazon’s best practices have avoided this mess? Read more »
Heroku boss: 1.5M apps, many not in Ruby
According to former Heroku CEO and current Salesforce.com VP of Platforms Byron Sebastian, Heroku is hosting more than 1.5 million applications — an increase of approximately 15x in less than 18 months. It’s success is part of an industry trend toward PaaS acceptance for new apps. Read more »
Meet the cloud behind your favorite apps (and it’s not AWS)
You might have heard of SoftLayer, but if you’re like me, you probably didn’t know the cloud provider is hosting operations for some of the web’s hottest apps. Among them are Tumblr, OMGPOP, SendGrid and even Heroku. You learn something new every day. Read more »
Microsoft tries to make good on Azure outage
Microsoft issues credit, apologies and an explanation to Windows Azure customers affected by the recent Leap Day outage that took down several services. Snafus like this one not only affect the specific vendor but can hurt overall confidence in the cloud computing model. Read more »
