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Joyent to Amazon: It’s on
Joyent isn’t being coy about it: It wants to compete head on with Amazon and that means it will offer many more options including some, it says, are cheaper than analogous AWS services. Read more »
Dell backs away from OpenStack public cloud, steps up to Enstratius
So, remember that Openstack-based public cloud Dell promised for this year? It ain’t gonna happen. Instead Dell will sell public cloud options from Joyent, ScaleMatrix and ZeroLag. Read more »
AWS is the McDonald’s of the cloud. Who’s the Burger King?
photo: Wikipedia Commons
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 »
Opscode gains momentum with IBM, Microsoft deals
IBM is integrating Chef into SmartCloud and Microsoft is adding support for Azure as well in a sign that enterprises are fully aboard the devops bandwagon. Read more »
Joyent says Chef support will make cloud workloads mobile
photo: JULIADEBOER PHOTOGRAPHY
The cloud provider is banking that its new full integration of Opscde Chef, which is also supported by Amazon Web Services, will make it easier for AWS customers to move to Joyent Cloud. Read more »
The week in cloud: Bezos rationalizes AWS feature churn; OpenStackers cue up news
photo: Shutterstock / Gena96
Amazon’s chief vows to keep up the AWS feature race; OpenStack gets two more big backers as vendors cue up news for the OpenStack Summit. Read more »
Cloud and data first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook
Cloud computing is finally starting to add value to business, as those in charge of cloud within enterprises are moving from talking to doing. That much was very evident in the first quarter of 2013. Read more »
How OpenStack upended the private cloud market overnight
photo: Shutterstock / Alexey Repka
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 »
Startup Strongloop brings supported Node.js to Red Hat
Strongloop, founded by a group of Node.js heavy weights, aims to bring a supported version of the popular server-side language to Red Hat Enterprise Linux as well as Ubuntu, Mac OSX and Windows. Read more »
Is Amazon yesterday’s cloud?
photo: Barb Darrow
ProfitBricks, which goes head-to-head with Amazon for the IT budgets of startups with a new promotion, says the time is ripe to disrupt the disrupter. Read more »
Samsung Ventures backs Cloudant with undisclosed investment
Cloudant gets backing from Samsung’s investment arm to help push its database as a service into large enterprises. Read more »
Joyent offers up its take on Hadoop as a service
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 »
Bad news for Amazon could be good news for “other” cloud providers
photo: Flickr / Editor B
Any cloud vendor that does not try to take advantage of Amazon Web Services’ US-East woes is probably guilty of malpractice. But most tread carefully — it’s fine to talk up your uptime and service, but vendors in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Read more »
This year in cloud: Amazon-almost-all-the-time and the other 5 top stories of 2012
photo: Flickr / karindalziel
Last year, AWS saw big success and big snafus; Superstorm Sandy prompted worry about data center location; legacy IT giants bought their way into SaaS; VMware regroups; the OpenStack crowd got their clouds off the ground; and Europe starts to buy into cloud. Read more »
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos gets more kudos, but challenges loom
photo: Amazon
Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon 16 years ago, is the second-best CEO on the planet, according to Harvard Business Review’s latest rankings. Last month Fortune named him its Business Person of the Year. Read more »
Amazon’s dead serious about the enterprise cloud
photo: Amazon
All the talk about big companies not wanting to put workloads on Amazon Web Services is hot air. The biggest companies already deploy workloads beyond test-and-dev on AWS. The question is: can AWS sustain that momentum as new options come online? Read more »
Joyent has a new product and new CEO
photo: JULIADEBOER PHOTOGRAPHY
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 »
Telefónica squares up to Amazon with Instant Servers global IaaS offering
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 »
Joyent: Data centers are the new factories, making and moving bits
photo: JULIADEBOER PHOTOGRAPHY
Data centers are like a virtual version of the traditional shipping industry, says Joyent founder and chief technology officer Jason Hoffman — they are becoming commoditized, but at the same time they are also disrupting digital businesses just as shipping disrupted traditional manufacturing. Read more »
Doctor’s dream: Jason Hoffman’s quest to build the new web machine
Jason Hoffman is familiar to many in the computing industry as the CTO of Joyent and a leader of the movement to build distributed systems. But before that, he was a doctor who helped his mom beat cancer. Here’s how the past and present connect. Read more »
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Continuous delivery and the world of devops
Thanks to the rise of online business, companies must now get their products and services to market as fast as they can, and releasing software now means small releases that occur very frequently. Enter devops, which is disrupting traditional assumptions about the roles of development and operations. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
A user revolt and the second coming of TextDrive
Asking your users to buy lifetime subscriptions to a service is an unconventional way to build a business. But in 2004 that’s what TextDrive did. But after those lifetime subscriptions were cut short, TextDrive’s co-founder has stepped out of retirement to keep them alive. Read more »
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Understanding and managing the cost of the cloud
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 »
Amazon pitches better-than-ever cloud deals
Amazon is offering customers unprecedented deals to stick with its cloud services. Some big companies can get annual “true up” deals while many report incentives to use reserved, rather than on-demand, instances. And Amazon is making an effort to keep startups in the fold. 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 »
Datahero aims to turn us all into analytics stars
A startup called Datahero launched on Thursday with a new cloud service that makes visualizing data as simple as a few mouse clicks, and $1 million in seed funding. The company’s ultimate goal is to make big data something you or I could do. Read more »
Outages prompt multi-cloud evaluations
It’s increasingly clear that no cloud is perfect. After public Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Windows Azure outages — the latest just this week — more business customers are evaluating multiple-cloud deployments to build in redundancy and hedge their cloud computing bets. Read more »
Node.js head takes a breather, will momentum stall?
Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node.js, says he is taking a break. Dahl said he is stepping back from day-to-day Node.js gatekeeping duties, which will now be handled by Joyent’s Isaac Schlueter. Will this leadership change dampen momentum? Read more »
Cloud provider Joyent gets $85 million for global expansion
Joyent will use the cash to fund expansion of its cloud services and take on Amazon, the behemoth in that space. The company hosts its own public cloud services and sells infrastructure that customers use to field their own public or private cloud services. Read more »
Grading my cloud predictions for 2011: How’d I do?
I made a lot of predictions about cloud computing and the general IT infrastructure space heading into 2011, and I impressed myself with my skills of prognostication. Of course, it’s possible I’m just grading myself too generously, so I’ll let readers be the judges. Read more »
What the HDD shortage means for cloud computing
While the rest of the IT world is reeling from the hard drive shortage, users of cloud computing services should have a relatively painless experience — even if their providers don’t. Joyent’s Steve Tuck talks about his experience and how the HDD shortage might affect the industry. Read more »
Move to cloud makes DevOps even more important
As companies move to the cloud, DevOps — the practice where developers work with the operations side of the house — becomes more important. That collaboration could lead to more satisfying IT implementations and the best — and sanctioned — use of cloud resources. Read more »
New Node.js blocked by Great Firewall of China
The Great Firewall of China is preventing local programmers from downloading the latest Node.js programming framework. The problem is that the version number corresponds to the June 4, 1989 government crackdown on Tiananmen Square demonstrators. Read more »
More proof that enterprises love Node.js
Node.js is following in Ruby on Rails’ and NoSQL’s footsteps to become the next hacker technology to be embraced by the enterprise. Just ask Flotype, the Berkeley, CA. startup which built its NowJS architecture atop Node.js, the server-side JavaScript-based toolset. Read more »
AppFog gets (more) multilingual with Java support
AppFog, which started out as a PHP-based Platform-as-a-Service, just added Java to its roster of supported programming languages. AppFog already added support for Ruby and Node.js. Still to come: support for Python, .NET and “smaller languages like Erlang,” said AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson. Read more »
Prices are dropping, but IaaS isn’t a commodity yet
There’s a long-running debate in the cloud computing world about whether standard IaaS resources have become true commodities, but it doesn’t look like they’re there yet. Even as prices drop closer to zero across the cloud-provider landscape, there are still plenty of points of differentiation. Read more »
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Infrastructure Q3: OpenStack and flash step into the spotlight
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 »
The Internet of Things and the cloud
For the Internet of Things to achieve its full potential, Alex Salkever of Joyent believes that operators must fundamentally change the way they build and run clouds. In particular, they need to update the decades-old infrastructure technology and create more flexible APIs. Read more »
Inside the SuperNAP and its high-tech clouds
You might have heard of the SuperNAP data center before because of its military-grade security, more-than-400,000-square-foot footprint and roots as Enron’s attempt to build a bandwidth exchange, but the cutting-edge facility is also home to some very interesting customers. Read more »
Joyent Cloud takes on kingpin Amazon
Joyent pitches its revamped Joyent Cloud as a faster, cheaper platform that will give customers more insight into their cloud-based operations than the incumbent leader Amazon. Read more »
