Age old questions answered: Star Wars beats Star Trek, engineers like beer
… at least according to 4,800 PHP developers participating in Zend’s annual Developer Pulse survey. 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 »
White House open sources “We the People” petition app
photo: Flickr user Tom Lohdon
You never know what you’ll find on GitHub. Starting Thursday, you could download the source code to the Obama Administration’s “We The People” online petition application from the open source repository and start adapting it for your petition needs. Read more »
Uhuru platform spans .NET, open-source worlds
Uhuru’s AppCloud Ready To Go service targets developers who want to write applications that span the .NET and open source worlds. The PaaS runs atop Cloud Foundry and supports Java, Ruby, PHP, Node.js as well as Microsoft .NET, the company says. Read more »
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Cloud computing’s impact on chip and hardware design
Cloud computing is changing the world of microprocessor-chip design. Soon we will see a division between the traditional players (typified by Intel and AMD) and a group of new incumbents (Tilera and others) that offer fresh solutions to make the world’s microprocessor chips as efficient as possible. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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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 »
How Tumblr went from wee to webscale
Tumblr hits 500 million page views a day, deals with 40,000 requests per second and sends more than a terabyte of data into its Hadoop cluster. Here’s how it went from nothing to a startup that needed to serve 15 billion page views a month. Read more »
Veteran PaaS player Engine Yard claims big momentum
Engine Yard, the popular platform as a service, said its revenue doubled to $28 million and the number of paying customers rose 50 percent to 2,000 in 2011. The company, which started in the Ruby universe, now supports PHP, Node.js and other languages. Read more »
Survey: NoSQL adoption driven by schema hate
Database professionals planning to take the NoSQL leap this year said the restrictive schemas in the RDBMS world drove their move. High latency, high cost and inability to scale out were also cited as reasons to move beyond SQL databases. Read more »
Jaspersoft parlays Red Hat OpenShift in BI push
The free version of Jaspersoft’s analytics software will be offered as part of Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service. As Red Hat, Microsoft, Heroku, and Cloud Foundry PaaSes compete, watch for them to add more services and capabilities just as they’ve raced to add language support. Read more »
Developers will flock to public cloud in 2012
The cloud is looking pretty good to software developers this year, according to new Zend Technologies’ research. More than half of the 3,335 developers surveyed said they expect to use a public cloud for their work in 2012, with AWS being the top draw. Read more »
PHP fans embrace Metallica, fight Bieber fever
Metallica may not be the house band for PHP programmers, but it comes close. The heavy metal rockers are the group that most PHP coders like to listen to while they work, according to a new survey of 3,335 coders by Zend. Read more »
.NET comes to Cloud Foundry
Up-and-coming Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider Tier3 has made a significant contribution to the Platform-as-a-Service world by releasing a .NET implementation of the Cloud Foundry PaaS project. A fork project called Iron Foundry will serve as the primary source of .NET development within Cloud Foundry. Read more »
Facebook speeds PHP development again with HipHop VM
Never content with good enough when it comes to speed, Facebook has taken its open-source PHP-boosting HipHop technology to the next level for programmers. With the new HipHop Virtual Machine, Facebook claims it has improved upon HipHop interpreter performance by 60 percent. Read more »
Engine Yard plugs Node.js into its cloud
In the latest indication that Node.js support is table stakes for all Platform-as-a-Service players, Engine Yard is adding support for the popular server-side framework as part of a trial program. Developers like to use Node.js because it supports JavaScript and is fast and scalable. Read more »
AppFog, now with Ruby and Node.js support
AppFog, the Platform-as-a-Service startup that began life a PHP Fog, now supports both Ruby and Node.js applications. The expanded support comes as no surprise, but speaks volumes about the potential for Cloud Foundry as a PaaS equivalent to what OpenStack is for Infrastructure as a Service. Read more »
Cloud Foundry adds PHP, Python; AppFog now a user
VMware has added support for the PHP and Python programming languages to Cloud Foundry, it open source Platform as a Service. Such news isn’t necessarily groundbreaking considering the project’s focus on multi-language support, but how it added PHP, at least, is very noteworthy. Read more »
Engine Yard goes PHP with Orchestra acquisition
Platform-as-a-Service veteran Engine Yard is getting on board with the recent trend of multi-language support by acquiring Dublin, Ireland-based PHP PaaS startup Orchestra. An industry shift toward supporting more than one language and/or framework likely influenced the decision to close the Orchestra deal now. Read more »
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A field guide to cloud computing: current trends, future opportunities
Cloud computing has grown from a pie-in-the-sky vision to a major IT movement over the past few years. As its promise has grown, though, so too has its scope. This report covers six key sectors in cloud computing: commodity Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), enterprise IaaS, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), cloud storage and private clouds. We highlight the current state of each and provide informed insights into where they — and cloud computing in general — are headed. Much like any market in a still-evolving state, the infrastructure of the cloud-computing transition is still being built by startups, practitioners and even a big-name company or two. Companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Amazon, Nasuni, Terremark and Heroku. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Facebook’s PHP Codebase: It’s Complex
Facebook today published an interesting visualization of just how complex its codebase is. Actually, the visualization is part of an application within the company, but it gets the point across: Making code changes is no small feat when every module is dependent on so many others. Read more »
Apache, Microsoft Take Baby Steps Toward Open Clouds
The dream of open cloud computing took a couple of small steps forward in the past 24 hours with Apache promoting the Libcloud project to top-level status and with Microsoft releasing a new software development kit for PHP applications on its Windows Azure platform. Read more »
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Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
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 »
RightScale, Zend Team on PHP Platform as a Service
RightScale and Zend are now offering a platform-as-a-service offering for developing PHP applications in the cloud. RightScale and Zend are targeting their joint RightScale Zend PHP Solution Pack for enterprise applications that require advanced development tools and high service levels. Read more »
Morphlabs Tries to Reinvent Private Cloud Pricing
Los Angeles-based startup Morphlabs is rolling out two new features designed to bolster sales of its mCloud line of cloud computing offerings in a crowded field of management platforms. In doing so, however, it might actually be helping show the future model for internal-cloud software pricing. Read more »
Facebook & Friends Moving Faster With HipHop
Six months ago, Facebook open-sourced a set of technologies called HipHop for PHP. It was a way to turbocharge PHP. Facebook says it has helped them get faster, it has helped improve php using open-source software that like WordPress, MediaWiki, phpBB and Drupal. Read more »
