Keeping a data center online is a highly complex and often underestimated task, but one that provides the bedrock of any public cloud availability. Patrick Baillie of CloudSigma explains why he thinks public IaaS cloud service providers shouldn’t run their own data centers. Read more »
This year may have been the beginning of the big data onslaught, but big data will only get bigger in 2012. Watch for companies to check out specialized databases for different data types and to segment their data centers for old and new workloads. Read more »
Demand for cloud computing continues to increase exponentially as consumers, businesses and government agencies seek to defer the expense of acquiring, operating and maintaining infrastructure and applications to third-party service providers. Likewise, software publishers are finding the cloud computing model an efficient and effective mechanism for delivering their products as a service and as an operational expense to their customers. For independent software vendors, cloud computing is opening up new markets and making their applications more accessible and affordable to scores of new customers. For a multitude of reasons, many ISVs are choosing to forego data center development and are partnering with hosting providers that have the infrastructure, resources and expertise in managing and delivering cloud services. This report provides ISVs with guidance on partnering with hosting companies, establishing criteria for selecting a hosting service, metrics for measuring hosting performance as it relates to cloud services delivered and an understanding of the responsibilities they retain even when outsourcing a large part of their services functions to a third party. Companies mentioned in this report include Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.com. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 »
Windows Azure is an ambitious PaaS that doesn’t get a lot of love from web developers. Here are four things Microsoft must do to make it a more compelling option for the new-age, non-.NET developers who now flock to Amazon Web Services or another PaaS. Read more »
Microsoft poured money and resources into Microsoft Windows Azure, its grand attempt to transport the company’s software dominance into the cloud computing era. For die-hard .Net heads, Azure is probably the PaaS of choice. But for the army of new-age web developers, it’s an also-ran. Read more »
OpSource Inc.’s brand spanking new Silicon Valley data center should cut latency times and boost network performance for the cloud provider’s enterprise and service provider customers on the West Coast and provide co-location options for enterprises wanting redundancy. Read more »
On Wednesday HP released its first two public cloud computing services for private beta, based in part on the open-source OpenStack code. The services, some details of which were leaked in the spring, are HP Cloud Compute and HP Cloud Object Storage. Read more »
After purchasing Terremark in January for $1.4 billion, Verizon today announced an expanded suite of cloud infrastructure services for enterprises. Bob Toohey, President of Verizon Business, says the company knows it has to give some control and flexibility in order to attract customers to its cloud. Read more »
After years of debating what cloud computing really is, we’re finally starting to get a clearer picture. Today and tomorrow at Structure 2011, we’ll look at how the cloud landscape is shaping up. Click here to watch the live stream. Read more »
This week’s announcement of VMware’s Horizon App Manager is the latest addition to the company’s increasingly rich portfolio, but the company is not alone in wanting to strengthen its market position by expanding far beyond its original offering. Where, then, does that leave the competition? Read more »
StackMob, a cloud platform for mobile developers, has raised $7.5 million in a Series A round as it ramps up its offering for mobile developers. The new money, led by Trinity Ventures, will help the company expand and push toward a public launch later this year. Read more »
Two markets stand out above all else when looking at the first quarter of 2011: infrastructure as a service (IaaS) — the epitome of cloud computing — and big data. Amazon Web Services continues to lead the IaaS space in terms of customers and innovation, while Rackspace, buoyed by momentum around OpenStack, will be its primary competitor for mainstream customers. In the big data space, there are so many players and terms floating about it’s difficult for outsiders to get a handle on who’s who and what’s what, though such activity validates the technologies. Other developments this quarter included HP’s impending presence in the cloud computing and big data spaces and the realization that Intel won’t be left to die if low-power servers based on x86 processors catch on like the buzz late last year suggests they will. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Microsoft, Cloudera, SeaMicro and Facebook. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The second quarter of 2010 belonged to the little guys and the new guys. Almost across the board, from processors to virtualization to cloud services, relatively small vendors and startups had the market cornered on innovation and mindshare. And where there’s tinder in the forms of customer demand, products, funding and a greater societal movement toward environmentalism, something is bound to catch fire. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
When all is said and done, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce.com and others might be battling it out for PaaS (and SaaS) dollars against a whole slew of smaller providers operating within the infrastructural confines of AWS, Rackspace, Terremark and Savvis. PaaS and SaaS providers will need infrastructure ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
I wrote last week that the time might be right for Amazon Web Services to launch its own platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering, if only to preempt any competitive threat from other providers’ increasingly business-friendly PaaS offerings. That stance is firmer than ever now that Google has introduced ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Right now, PaaS is hot and getting hotter, with the consensus being that it eventually will replace IaaS as the preferred cloud model for many developers. It would be wise for AWS to leverage its current IaaS lead and preempt any serious momentum by PaaS providers. ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
While most of the technology world was watching Steve Jobs launch the iPad, some (unfortunate) others were listening to Oracle executives lay out the roadmap for the newly approved Oracle-Sun Microsystems behemoth. Most of what they learned was what they already knew — it wasn’t until ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Amazon Web Services’ new Spot Instances pricing model has created quite a buzz among commentators wondering what it means for the future of cloud computing. Some suggest it signals the advent of a commodity market for cloud resources, where CPU prices always are fluctuating based on ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is orders of magnitude bigger than its next largest Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) competitor. At first glance, this would seem to imply that Amazon’s massive scale should give AWS a significant cost advantage over fledgling IaaS cloud offerings. But the […] Read more »
