It’s easy to characterize the cloud computing market as being Amazon Web Services’ to lose, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. McDonald’s dominates the fast food world, but life isn’t exactly bad for its dozens of competitors. Read more »
The British telco, which was recently ranked as the third-biggest infrastructure-as-a-service provider in the world, is expanding its corporate-focused platform into major new markets. Read more »
A startup called ParElastic thinks it can change the cloud database game by helping companies scale their MySQL environments without resorting to sharding or deploying an entirely new database. Read more »
The IaaS provider, which is a supplier to Europe’s performance-hungry Helix Nebula science cloud, has abandoned magnetic disks for solid-state storage, and all without raising its prices. Read more »
The private cloud world hasn’t been the same since OpenStack sucked the air out of the room. Here’s a look at the companies doing private cloud before OpenStack and how they’ve fared. Read more »
The infrastructure-as-a-service company offers flexible instances, high performance across all service levels, and enterprise-grade redundancy. Right now it’s also undercutting key European rivals, but its international expansion plans will need further funding. Read more »
The Spanish telco has beefed up its enterprise cloud portfolio by integrating its recently-announced Instant Servers IaaS play with FeedHenry’s Mobile Applications Platform. Read more »
The EU security agency ENISA has released a report on the cloud’s increasingly critical nature. Yes, it highlights the risks associated with the shift to the cloud, but also some notable security benefits. Read more »
We all know Europe’s a bit behind the curve on cloud, but that’s not the only reason the fast-growing IaaS platform is finding the going tougher there than elsewhere. Read more »
Cloud provider Joyent has a new Hadoop offering that the company claims can outperform most others on the market. However, the company says Hadoop is just its foray into big data and is promising bigger, better things to come. Read more »
Amazon Web Services has introduced its latest instance — an 88-core, 240 GB SSD, 244 GB RAM and 10 GbE behemoth designed for real-time analytics with software like SAP HANA, as well as demanding scientific workloads. Read more »
The last quarter of 2012 saw the rise of cloud-based databases, the cloud awakening of software giants such as HP, and many cloud outages that have left question marks. Enterprises found more IT dollars, and they will focus on the cloud for much of that spending. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Both Amazon Web Services and Netflix — its most-prominent customer — have released details on AWS outage that took down Netflix’s streaming service on Christmas Eve. AWS attributes the issue primarily to human error. Netflix just wants to avoid this situation again, whatever the cause. Read more »
Startups and enterprises alike face barriers when it comes to cloud adoption. This includes security, speed of access to cloud resources, and runaway network costs. However, multiple solutions for direct access are being provided to address this issue for companies big and small. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cloud computing’s increased performance cannot be sustained if the corresponding cost to the service provider (SP) for delivering this performance also increases. What service providers need is a way of delivering low latency, fast response, and increasing performance while minimizing the cost of the network. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The way the industry will use cloud-computing technology in 2013 will require following the existing adoption patterns and trends into the New Year. Those trends include the rise of standards, big data’s role in the cloud, industry-specific clouds, security, and more. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 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 »
Crowd labor is outsourced information work that can be provisioned automatically. It’s ideally, inexpensive, on demand, and elastic. Platforms providing such services are on the rise in 2012, promising customers lower labor costs in the short term and higher-quality output in the long term. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 »
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 »
Seville, Spain-based startup Besol is trying to take on companies like RightScale with a new cloud-management platform called Tapp. The company is currently honing its skills providing management interfaces for European telcos’ cloud offerings, and will start a push into North America in 2013. Read more »
GoDaddy has decided to close its Cloud Servers cloud computing product. The offering had been around for less than a year, although the company is attempting to integrate some of the technology into the next generation of its flagship hosting service. Read more »
Nasdaq OMX is offering a new service called FinQloud for financial services clients that want to store regulatory data or analyze trade data using on-demand resources. Built atop Amazon Web Services, the service seems to be the result of a close partnership between the two companies. Read more »
As the PaaS market transitions from nascent to mature, a new opportunity is emerging: cloud services curation. Peter Sonsini, general partner at NEA, predicts that cloud services curation will help PaaS players broaden their reach and amplify their strategic impact within the technology landscape. Read more »
OpenStack is hot, but determining which companies are best poised to capitalize on its promise is hard to do. Prabhakar Gopalan assesses what hardware vendors, software vendors and service will have to do if they want to be among the big OpenStack winners. Read more »
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 »
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 »
The role that IT plays is transforming. Thus, the skills, roles, and tools for CIOs have to transform too. Why? If the trend toward cloud-based services continues, then the role of the CIO will shift from being a builder/technologist to becoming an integrator/vendor-manager. Read more »
While computing in the cloud can cost less than running servers in your enterprise data center, the question of how much less isn’t an easy one to answer. The cloud will get cheaper in the future, but not before these challenges are addressed and overcome. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
We previously detailed the test architecture that NASA built to ensure the live stream of the Curiosity landing could handle traffic, and now Amazon Web Services is showing what the final architecture looked like. NASA scaled up its test build and monitored traffic in real time. Read more »
OpenStack has had a great week with eBay coming out as a user and Rackspace rebranding around the open source cloud project, but life isn’t all good in OpenStack world. There are still plenty of questions over its governance and development models that keep skepticism strong. Read more »
With millions of viewers expected to watch history Sunday night, NASA couldn’t afford to let the live stream of its Mars rover Curiosity landing go untested. Here’s how NASA put its Amazon Web Services-based infrastructure through its paces to ensure it keeps up with demand. Read more »
The Rackspace Cloud is now based fully on the open source OpenStack platform. I recently spoke with CEO Lanham Napier, who discussed how his company doesn’t necessarily see Amazon Web Services as a direct competitor, and how OpenStack is changing his company’s entire business. Read more »
Netflix has open sourced Chaos Monkey, a service designed to terminate cloud computing instances in a controlled manner so companies can ensure their applications keep running when a virtual server dies unexpectedly. In the past year, Chaos Monkey has terminated more than 65,000 of Netflix’s instances. Read more »
Benchmarking results from Zencoder show that Amazon Web Services beats out Google’s Compute Engine in a test of a specific CPU-intensive workload. Compute Engine’s performance was hindered by a lack of HPC instances, which Google could one day add. But it’s nice to see real-world comparisons. Read more »
