It may not be pleasant for the competitors, but cloud competition is nothing but good for cloud consumers — whether they’re startups or Fortune 100 companies. Read more »
There are lots of potential cloud workloads out there but there are also about a zillion clouds. Is there really enough paid work to support them all? Read more »
Company tells users of its cloud-based MySQL database service to move their instances by May 8 or else. (May 15 for paying customers.) Read more »
So who will be number two in public cloud after Amazon Web Services? Smart money is now on Google Compute Engine. With caveats, of course. Read more »
VMware is banking that its brand and customer base will make it a power in public cloud infrastructure. Others bet that VMware’s “hybrid public” cloud plan is too little too late. Read more »
Mega data centers’ innovations in serviceability, automatically detecting and recovering from failures, procurement practices, and so forth will become standard practice in all modern data centers. Read more »
VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger sketches plans to take on Amazon Web Services in public cloud. Hint: The strategy keys on existing vCloud private cloud customers and the channel supporting them. Read more »
New Gartner predictions hold that the U.S. will remain number 1 in overall public cloud services deployment — by a wide margin — into 2016. Read more »
For big service providers that feel “disrupted” by Amazon’s prodigious cloud, Morphlabs is pitching mCloud Osmium as a way to get up to snuff. Read more »
Entrepreneurs spoke about the value of Amazon Web Services, took home prizes and destroyed servers at AWS’ sixth annual Global Start-Up Challenge event on Thursday. Read more »
Without needing to snoop, your cloud provider has access to crucial data about your business. Allan Leinwand, of ServiceNow, says that’s why you may need a Chinese Wall between you and your cloud provider. Read more »
Most financial services companies officially forbid the use of public cloud (aka Amazon Web Services) completely. But the forward thinkers among them — like State Street — keep their options — and minds — open about such deployment in the future. Read more »
Zorawar Biri Singh, who leads HP’s cloud effort, says the company’s vision aligns nicely with what enterprises want. HP will fill in check marks to its OpenStack-based game plan next month but the big question is whether HP’s brand still carries weight. Read more »
Another busy week for Amazon Web Services which added new compute instance types, cut prices on others, and upped the limit on provisioned IOPS for EBS volumes. Amazon is getting busier as more public cloud options come on line. Read more »
Chasing a potentially huge market, Microsoft has inked a pact with the municipality of Shanghai and with ISP 21Vianet to offer Windows Azure services in China. The deal could be huge but also problematic, given problems Google and other U.S. companies have had in China. Read more »
At just a few months old, Google Compute Engine is seen as a threat to public cloud leader Amazon Web Services. At least that appears to be what Amazon thinks given its lawsuit against a former exec who is joining Google. Read more »
Twitter has been awash (again) with banter about the myth or reality of private clouds. The conversations revolve around the technology, rehashing the “what makes a cloud a cloud” argument. Yet, all of us are right, and many of us are wrong. Read more »
Optimists hope that the EU’s expected cloud computing recommendations will resolve concerns around diverse data protection laws that slow cloud adoption. Realists hope for the best, but prepare for less. The reality is Europe remains a collection of countries, not a unified whole. Read more »
When it comes to the debate on public versus private clouds or commodity versus legacy IT, there seems no room for nuance. So, while cloud and commodity IT are the way of the future, private cloud and legacy IT are here to stay. Read more »
The stage was set for a lively debate between public cloud rivals at GigaOM’s Structure conference. OpenStack co-founder Chris Kemp challenged his Citrix and Eucalyptus on their “closed” cloud implementations and embrace of Amazon Web Services’ API, which he compared to the Walmart of infrastructure. Read more »
With more and more business leaders now turning to this topic, the questions — and confusion — are multiplying. With so much to consider, we’ve broken down the cloud discussion to help companies decide which strategy is right for their business. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cloud computing is at the top of virtually every CIO’s interest list and is expected to grow 126.5 percent over the next two years. A new report on GigaOM Pro details each sector of cloud computing and forecasts a shift toward hybrid models in the enterprise community. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
At this stage, most companies know some of the benefits of cloud computing. But many still aren’t sure what applications and data should make the trip first. That’s why Rackspace and other cloud providers are providing more consultative services and lining up systems integrators. Read more »
Cloud computing, mobile computing and the consumerization of IT are changing the game for IT departments. Section one of our three-part report describes and quantifies each of these trends, demonstrating that they are real now, growing rapidly and perilous to ignore. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
A new flock of vendors is offering capabilities that would enable private-to-public cloud bursting, or federation between clouds, to meet data privacy mandates, offer high availability to customers, and provide geographic reach. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
If you didn’t think that Amazon was the king of cloud, just look at what other cloud companies announced Monday. Even paragons of the private cloud world are trying to cloak themselves in the glow cast by Amazon, which is squarely in public cloud realm. 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 »
Amazon Web Services is making available a new US West region located in Oregon, which it is positioning as a lower-cost alternative to the company’s existing Northern California region. AWS says services in the Oregon region costs about 10 percent less than in Northern California. Read more »
This week UK Ministry of Justice official Martin Bellamy addressed concerns that the UK government has become less enthusiastic about a government cloud, saying, ”We are expecting to be able to demonstrate that moving to a cloud model is going to allow us to save substantial amounts ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The next big leap in both technology and business models around sharing elastic compute resources will be bidding for those resources at auction or acquiring them through a broker, according to Forrester. But this broker business just adds more abstraction to an already abstract business. Read more »
In addition to enhancing privacy, dedicated circuits will generally result in more predictable data transfer performance and will also increase bandwidth between your data center and AWS. Jeff Barr, evangelist for Amazon Web Services, sees plenty in the company’s new Direct Connect product that will interest […] Read more »
On Thursday Amazon announced three enhancements to its cloud computing offering. These include improvements to existing virtual private cloud and identity management solutions as well as a new option to directly connect enterprise networks to machines in Amazon’s Virginia data center, as Derrick Harris recounts and Amazon’s Jeff Barr ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cloud services have a rosy future, but a long build-out industry cycle is expected as businesses are slow to adopt and accept virtual datacenters. Instead of determining to use a public or a private cloud, enterprises should consider a hybrid, best-of-both-worlds approach. Read more »
The current public cloud computing providers have done an excellent job in bringing innovation and cloud computing technology to the masses. Cloud computing, however, is not yet a fully evolved technology and may take another decade to grow up and deliver on its full potential. Read more »
