Facebook’s breaking up with hardware OEMs, Europeans distrust the cloud and it’s anyone’s guess whether there will be an Amazon of Europe. Those were among the key takeaways from the first-ever Structure Europe event in Amsterdam last week. Read more »
Facebook is planning to rely more on flash drives in places where most companies have used spinning disk, and based on conversations with sources and hints from Facebook, I think one of those places will be in Facebook’s cold-storage photo facility it’s building in Oregon. Read more »
What sort of amazing cloud services could Amazon have up its sleeve? Werner Vogels ain’t saying anything in detail but here are five things to watch out for where the public cloud services giant is concerned. Read more »
The fear of a US-owned cloud company turning over personal data of a European citizen to the feds is still a factor impacting growth of cloud in Europe, according to an Orange Business Services exec speaking at Structure Europe. Read more »
Damian Black, CEO of SQLstream, talks about why data flow computing is experiencing a rebirth and what it could mean for scaling in the cloud. Read more »
Analytics is not a new field, but its evolution into ‘big data’ shows how much of a growth industry it is. That means facing up to issues such as the need for talent and good models. Read more »
The cloud is a great thing when it comes to storing large quantities of data, but getting it into and out of cloud-storage services can be difficult. Technologies that speed that process up can allow for new uses of that data, says Aspera CEO Michelle Munson. Read more »
Managing cloud app-hosting services when many different locations and installations are involved can be a tricky exercise. Julian Coulon of Cedexis has some tips and tricks. Read more »
API love is all fine and dandy. But successful application programming interfaces should have a real — and measurable — business value, according to API experts speaking at GigaOM Structure Europe on Wednesday. Read more »
Datasift, the UK company that has access to the Twitter firehose analyzes petabytes of tweets and ships terabytes of insights around the world. And the infrastructure needs to keep up. That and dark social were topics of interest today at Structure:Europe. Read more »
Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens sees it as a ‘personal disappointment’ that there aren’t more companies lining up to follow his firm’s highly lucrative open source subscription path. Read more »
A new service, Eurex, promises to let broker any company’s cloud computing services to a new marketplace of consumers. GigaOM’s Structure:Europe conference heard about the opportunities and challenges from company CEOs. Read more »
Trying to come up with an Amazon of Europe is going to be hard work, said Marten Mickos, the CEO of Eucalyptus Systems. The continent has a number of issues to deal with including inertia and resistance to change. Read more »
Platform as a Service adoption, contrary to conventional wisdom, is happening as fast in Europe as in the US, according to an expert panel of PaaS vendors speaking at GigaOM Structure Europe on Wednesday. Read more »
The software-defined datacenter is just starting to become a reality, and the move to this new environment raises interesting questions around flash storage expectations and network ownership. Read more »
Although older generations might still view cloud computing as an emerging trend, their children take it for granted, largely forgoing physical devices for cloud services. We might as well come get on board and maybe change the world in the process. Read more »
Facebook users love sharing photos, and the demands of that appetite are gargantuan. Infrastructure engineering VP Jay Parikh lifted the lid on Facebook’s seven-petabytes-per-month photo upload task, during GigaOM’s Structure:Europe conference. Read more »
Where’s the best place for cloud investment in Europe? Day One of Structure Europe concluded with an interesting discussion on cloud opportunities for startup companies. Read more »
Big Switch, Nicira and Schuberg Philis share their insights on software-defined networks–how they’re being deployed today and how they will evolve to replace traditional infrastructure driven networks. Read more »
Software-defined networks and data centers are the future if enterprises want to manage their infrastructure with the agility of cloud computing providers, but they’re nowhere near ubiquity yet. However, according to two senior VMware executives, the pieces are in place and maturing every day. Read more »
Many cloud providers say they are open, or based on open-source technology, but in order to be truly open a service has to be backed by a community of users who contribute to making the technology better, says the founder of OpenNebula Read more »
Life is hard enough for the modern CIO, with BYOD taking over personal computing and cloud challenges making life more complicated. But there are plenty of benefits that accompany this shift, according to panelists at Structure Europe. Read more »
The consumerization of IT has led to the growth of cloud, a big shift for the major hardware players and new opportunities for startups to build a business using IT without huge up-front costs. Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels explains what’s going on at Structure:Europe. Read more »
Traditionally databases have either focused on real-time transactions or longer-term analytics of data, but newer technologies like Hadoop and a related open-source system called Hbase can combine those two things, according to a panel at GigaOM’s Structure Europe conference in Amsterdam Read more »
According to Equinix CTO Lane Patterson, CIOs are still learning what can and what can’t be done in the cloud. Ultimately, it’s a matter of trust. Read more »
CIOs that try to thwart user demand for latest-and-greatest consumer technologies in the workplace could be an endangered species, according to speakers at Structure Europe. Better to accommodate and bring that new technology under IT’s big tent. Read more »
Commoditization of the cloud may never happen, because like the hotel industry, there are too many variables that will matter. Some people will pay more for compute in a specific geographic location and even for computing on a specific day. Read more »
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 »
Here you’ll find our live coverage of Structure Europe 2012, as we talk to some of the best minds and brightest stars behind the cloud revolution with a special focus on how Europe is helping change the game. Read more »
Tallinn, Estonia? Berlin? London? Dublin? Those aren’t the only contenders for the title of Silicon Valley of Europe. Read more »
Wercker says its continuous delivery SaaS will fill a huge gap in today’s software landscape where developers rely on cloud services like Github to store and version their code and PaaSes to deploy it. What’s lacking is a SaaS to keep updates flowing. Read more »
Not every business wants to store their files in the cloud. FileSpirit, a German company, is launching a new service by the same name that lets companies give their mobile workers remote access to company files and databases through a mobile file browser. Read more »
OpenNebula, the European-rooted open-source cloud platform is used by more businesses and in more countries than many might expect. At the ripe old age of 7, OpenNebula remains a quiet force compared to say, OpenStack. Read more »
Can a single vendor dominate the public cloud services market in Europe as Amazon has managed to do in the US? It’s not very likely. The single biggest reason is obvious: Europe is not the US. Read more »
Many companies — perhaps blinded by all the hype and marketing claims — are still hanging back when it comes to cloud adoption. They shouldn’t. They should make the move now — but keep these 6 potential pitfalls in mind. Read more »
Bad economy aside, European government agencies and private businesses will be strongly encouraged to beef up their cloud infrastructure in a forthcoming report by the EC-sanctioned European Cloud Partnership. A leaked report said companies/agencies should invest €45 billion in cloud computing by 2020. Read more »
Yes, cloud adoption in Europe hasn’t happened as fast as in the US. But despite the difficult economy, there’s considerable interest in cloud on the continent. The market bears watching and here are 5 things you should know about it. Read more »
ComodIT, a tiny startup out of Liege, Belgium, has big plans to help you manage your IT infrastructure in the cloud. The company’s new Synapse Agent, a step towards that goal, lets you manage multiple hosts or instances from a single command-line interface. Read more »
As ProfitBricks rolls out its scale-up infrastructure as a platform in the U.S. this week, it says it can offer more powerful instances to customers cheaper than market leader Amazon Web Services. That’s a tall order, but an intriguing one. Read more »
