Startup says its visualization tool is an easier way to see all AWS resources associated with a given application and will use its new money to advertise that feature. Read more »
Companies like Cloudyn want to make Amazon Web Services less of a mystery to its users, but they have lots of competition — including from Amazon itself. Read more »
RightScale research says one cloud won’t fit all; mobile development landgrab continues with Facebook-Parse deal; Michael Dell talks up cloud opportunity. Read more »
A survey from cloud-management player RightScale shows a rise in both cloud computing use and multi-cloud adoption. That bodes well for the company and its competitors. Read more »
Scrappy London startup Server Density is adding AWS and Rackspace provisioning capabilities to its existing monitoring service, says co-founder and CEO David Mytton. 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 »
Don’t like the cost of your cloud deployment? Wait a second, it’ll change. And Rightscale says it can help you make sense out of all those changes and cut your costs. Read more »
The RightScale-GCE deal gives RightScale early lead on capturing Google cloud customers and gives Google infrastructure credibility — and support — for business customers. Read more »
Even folks who love using Amazon Web Services admit that it’s difficult to configure and manage them. That application management, some of which was handled by Chef and Puppet till now, is the problem OpsWorks takes on. Read more »
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 »
Newvem has tested its analytics with customer data for 8 months and says its key finding is that customers need to hear how use of Amazon services will make them more profitable. Saving money is one thing, making money is better. Read more »
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 »
There’s nothing like the holiday shopping season to test an e-commerce site’s ability to ramp up and down as needed. RightScale says it can help sites proactively respond to changing loads so they don’t run out of juice and don’t pay for more resources than needed. Read more »
Rackspace CTO John Engates said the company’s new monitoring service, based on its Cloudkick acquisition two years ago, will give customers a better way to monitor the performance of their cloud resources. As more companies consider cloud deployment, tools like these are becoming essential. Read more »
The beauty of Amazon Web Services is they’re easy to set up and run. The problem with those services is they’re easy to set up and run. Now Amazon is offering companies a better way — with a little prep work — to track those costs. 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 »
The need for a way to plan and deploy cloud computing most efficiently is growing. The latest proof: RightScale’s acquisition of ShopForCloud, a free service that assesses the costs for cloud deployments before they’re rolled out. It works across multiple clouds and currencies. Read more »
iFixit, the popular DIY repair site, will parlay its Amazon Web Services, Rightscale foundation — and its own secret sauce — to take on the problem of product support and documentation for businesses. It’s new Dozuki business division targets large retailers and manufacturers. Read more »
Now that at least some of the smoke has cleared from the blockbuster news that Citrix is putting its CloudStack technology into the Apache process to compete with former partner OpenStack, here are 5 takeaways emerging from the latest cloud kerfuffle. Read more »
For anyone interested in cloud computing, Adrian Cockroft’s recent presentation on how Netflix uses a combo of Amazon Web Services and its own home-grown PaaS is a must read. Cockroft is director of cloud architecture systems for Netflix, the giant streaming media company. Read more »
Zynga the newly public company behind the games played by gazillions of people, is relying far less on Amazon’s public cloud than it has in the past: 80 percent of its daily average users now run on Z Cloud — not on that other cloud. Read more »
99designs’ use of Amazon services to run its crowd-sourcing site is seen as a model for how small companies can leverage cloud services. The company’s site claims to handle hundreds of thousands of unique visitors and tens of millions of pageviews monthly. 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 »
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 »
Minneapolis-based cloud computing startup enStratus has raised $3.5 million in Series A funding to grow its business of managing all types of clouds across a common interface. EnStratus’ technology provides a secure platform for managing and monitoring numerous cloud offerings through a single interface. Read more »
RightScale, which lets companies peer into the innards of their cloud computing workloads, just surpassed the three-millionth server mark. Its cloud agnosticism could help it maintain share even as Amazon, RackSpace et al. add their own management capabilities, says CEO Richard Crandell. Read more »
Big data and Platform-as-a-Service offerings highlighted the second quarter, suggesting that we can expect to see a shift in enterprise IT practices around application development and analytics very soon. On the PaaS front, we saw new projects like DotCloud and Cloud Foundry gain incredible momentum in just a few short months. The big-data activity ranged from major new Hadoop vendors to heavy investment in flash storage that will speed the serving of data to processing engines. In other areas, we saw an uptick in cloud-computing plans from large vendors, OpenStack continued to mature and pick up both contributors and users, and Facebook caught our eye by launching an open-source project around the designs for its specialized servers and data centers. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Salesforce.com, IBM, Heroku and Calxeda. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
When done right, cloud computing actually can be a source of significant competitive advantage. So says Zynga, at least, which highlighted its unique cloud infrastructure, as well as its advanced analytics efforts, as part of its core strengths in the S-1 statement it filed this morning. Read more »
If there’s one thing that can make the idea of platform as a service (PaaS) succeed, it’s this: make it easy for developers. That was the overall consensus from a panel of execs working on the platform as a service at Structure 2011. Read more »
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 »
Zynga has been releasing details about its innovative hybrid cloud deployment, called Z Cloud, over the past year, and it has finally revealed the final piece of the puzzle. Namely, that the private cloud component of its infrastructure was built using Cloud.com’s CloudStack software. Read more »
Cloud-management platform provider RightScale is launching a service to help customers manage private and hybrid clouds similar to what RightScale customer Zynga does with its vaunted Z Cloud infrastructure. Hybrid cloud computing is hot, and MyCloud might represent a better way of thinking about the model. Read more »
The new trend in cloud computing appears to be app-store-like marketplaces where software vendors and infrastructure experts can share their operational know-how. Cloud-computing management platform RightScale became the latest to hop on the trend today with its MultiCloud Marketplace. Read more »
After years of hype, the IT industry finally had a rude awakening this spring that reminded us that cloud computing infrastructures are vulnerable to the same genetic IT flaw that plagues traditional data center operations: Everything fails sooner or later. Here’s how to build around that. Read more »
In five short years, cloud computing has gone from being a quaint technology to a major catchphrase. Amazon and others are now moving at Internet speed, trying to offer better security, faster networking, more compliance and a host of other products that are attempting to meet the demands of startups, consumers and enterprises alike. On GigaOM’s Structure channel, we cover the gear and software that comprises the cloud, the services and the people who are changing the industry. Now for the first time, we’ve decided to condense that knowledge into the Structure 50, a list of the 50 companies that are influencing how the cloud and infrastructure evolves. All of these players, big or small, have people, technology or strategies that will help shape the way the cloud market is developing and where it will eventually end up. Companies mentioned in this report include Amazon, Rackspace, Cloudera, China Telecom and SeaMicro. For a full list of companies, and to see the Structure 50 as one full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The four-day-long Amazon Web Services outage was no doubt a traumatic experience for many customers, but that didn’t have to be the case. There were plenty of users that were not affected, were minimally affected or that acted in a hurry to resolve the problem. 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 »
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 »
Forget AngelGate and shift your attention to the big-money world of cloud computing and infrastructure startups. While the clashing egos clang in the Silicon Valley echo chamber, massive amounts of money have started to flow into the cloud companies, at nosebleed valuations. Read more »
RightScale, a Santa Barbara, Calif.-based cloud management software maker, has raised $25 million in new funds from Tenaya Capital, joined by DAG Ventures and current investors: Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Presidio Ventures. RightScale has raised a total of $42.5 million in three rounds Read more »
