Heroku

So … do you really need a PaaS?

Serious question: How many companies really need a full fledged platform as a service to build, test and deploy their next-gen apps? Here’s your chance to weigh in.

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Quarterly Wrap-up

Cloud and data third-quarter 2012: analysis and outlook

The usual suspects, Amazon and VMware made significant announcements in cloud in the third quarter, while Hadoop remains the talk of the town in big data. Emerging trends in software-defined networking and flash storage stirred up lots of M&A and venture investment in the quarter.

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Wercker aims to “fix” the app dev universe

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.

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Report

Examining open hybrid cloud options for the enterprise

Ask 100 people to define “openness” and their answers might include cost savings, agility, freedom, portability, or avoiding vendor lock-in. A major trend over the past decade has been open source, even when mature commercial alternatives exist. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the cloud, but at present, there is no true open standard that all providers obey. AWS won the API battle for the cloud, but the tide could always turn, and anyone looking for a longer-term alternative now has two exciting prospects: OpenStack and OpenShift.

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Github: database migration sparked outages

Github’s planned migration to a new 3-node MySQL cluster didn’t go as planned, resulting in outages Monday and Tuesday. In addition, Github’s status site, which runs on Heroku, had its own problems, acccording to a Github post-mortem published Friday.

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Report

Emerging trends in the non-relational database market

The market for non-relational databases is a crowded one. Technology leaders looking to extract competitive advantages from their data must now familiarize themselves with this market. This report examines the current marketplace, providing a focused view of three products from across the current non-relational spectrum: Cassandra, Neo4J, and Datomic.

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Cloud databases 101: Who builds ’em and what they do

Remember when there were just two or three cloud computing platforms to choose from, and just about as many cloud databases? Well, as clouds have proliferated, so have the database services built on top of them. Here are the available services and where they’re running.

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Heroku builds Postgres app for Mac users

Heroku built an app that makes it easy for Mac users to download and get started using the PostreSQL database. Called Postgres.app, the product should be available in the App Store soon and includes a number of popular Postgres features and libraries.

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RightScale buys into cloud cost forecasting

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.

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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.

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Severe storms cause Amazon Web Services outage

For second time in less than a month, Amazon’s Northern Virginia data center has suffered an outage and is impacting many popular services such as Instagram, Pinterest & Netflix. Amazon previously suffered an outage in its Northern Virginia facilities on June 14, 2012.

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Cloudability tool tracks Amazon reserved instances

Cloudability’s new Reserved Instances Explorer helps companies keep track of and best utilize their discounted Amazon reserved instances even across accounts. The tool can search Amazon EC2 instances by size, region, operating system and expiration date.

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Why building SaaS well means giving up your servers

Keas co-founder and former Google VP of product management Adam Bosworth knows a thing or two about building software-as-a-service applications, and he’s convinced that anyone not doing so atop a platform-as-a-service framework either will be doing so soon or will likely have an inferior product.

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Report

A guide to big data workload-management challenges

Traditional applications had a common platform that captured business transactions. The software pipeline extracted, cleansed and loaded the information into a data warehouse. The data warehouse reorganized the data primarily to answer questions that were known in advance. Tying the answers back into better decisions in the form of transactions was mostly an offline, human activity.

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Heroku stung by Amazon outage

The popular Heroku platform as a service had a pretty rough night last night. Taken down by Thursday night’s Amazon Web Services disruption, Heroku took a tumble. But, shouldn’t a tech-savvy company that follows Amazon’s best practices have avoided this mess?

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Amazon cloud moves spook partners and customers

The more features that Amazon Web Services puts on its roster, the more nervous AWS partners — and some customers — get. As the company comes up the stack, adding workflow, richer database and other services, many partners and customers fear cloud lock-in.

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How Infochimps wants to become Heroku for Hadoop

Infochimps, a startup best known for its data marketplace, is now offering a cloud-based service that takes the pain out of managing Hadoop and scale-out database environments. The company hopes its new cloud-based service can do for big data applications what PaaS did for web applications.

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Heroku makes sharing SQL data as easy as URL

Cloud platform-as-a-service provider Heroku has added a new feature to its Postgres database service that lets users share the results of an SQL query simply by sending a URL. The feature, called Data Clips, shows viewers both archived and current result sets in their web browsers.

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Heroku launches SQL Database-as-a-Service

Platform-as-a-Service provider Heroku is expanding its horizons by offering an on-demand version of the PostgreSQL Database-as-a-Service. Heroku Postgres is a commercial version of what Heroku has been providing for years, only it’s now available to all developers regardless where they host their applications.

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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.

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Cloudability offers cloud cost-tracking APIs, free beer

With the public beta of Cloudability’s cloud cost-tracking service, new APIs are available to help customers access their billing and usage information from popular cloud providers including Salesforce.com, Azure, Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. Oh, and if you refer a paying customer, there’s free beer!

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Who’s next on Oracle’s hit list?

So, what’s Oracle’s going to buy next? Here are five companies that might help the software giant fill in the check boxes on its public cloud, data analytics, management and infrastructure check list. Given Oracle’s bulging wallet, it doesn’t make sense to rule anything out.

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Here’s what happens when Heroku goes down

Delivering a cloud service isn’t easy and figuring out how to handle things when they go wrong marks a huge leap in maturity for a company as guys from Heroku and Opscode explain. So what do webscale companies do when things go wrong?

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For developers, Amazon’s cloud is a harsh mistress

Developers at the Surge conference in Baltimore have a love-hate relationship with America’s largest online retailer and cloud provider. But repeated tales of Amazon’s failures were immediately followed by assurances that the service was cheaper and better than buying your own hardware.

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Salesforce.com ponies up for a bit of Box.net

Online CRM pioneer Salesforce.com continues to back up its ecosystem with its checkbook, this time with an investment in cloud storage provider Box.net. In the past few months, Salesforce.com has made a series of outright acquisitions of Assistly, Radian6, and Heroku.

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Heroku adds Python to bring more choice to PaaS

PaaS pioneer Heroku continued its march into the multi-language world today by adding support for Python and the Django framework. It’s just the latest change in an evolutionary several months for Heroku, and for PaaS overall as tries to become the face of cloud computing.

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Facebook apps on Heroku: 34,000 in 24 hours

Heroku is reporting it saw more than 33,800 Facebook applications launched on its service since the social network giant unveiled new features at yesterday’s f8 conference. On the official Heroku blog, Adam Seligman notes “that’s more than 20 a minute.”

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For Red Hat, it’s all about (what else?) cloud

Red Hat is the Microsoft of Linux. But now, like Microsoft itself, it obsesses more on cloud infrastructure than lowly operating systems. Questions about Red Hat’s OpenShift PaaS and CloudForms IaaS dominated last night’s earnings call, but CEO Jim Whitehurst was cautious on revenue predictions.

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Facebook gives devs easy access to Heroku cloud

Facebook and Heroku have completed an integration that gives Facebook developers direct access to Heroku’s cloud Platform-as-a-Service offering for hosting their applications. It’s likely just a first step for Heroku when it comes to integrating with popular specialized development platforms.

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4 trends to watch for at VMworld

In our cloudy times, VMware is a barometer for IT, and VMworld is what CES is to the consumer electronics industry. So check out what this week’s hoopla in Las Vegas is telling us about enterprise IT and the cloud.

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StackMob integrates with Heroku as mobile backend battle heats up

StackMob, a mobile backend provider for developers, is integrating with cloud platform Heroku, extending its services to Heroku’s Ruby developers. The partnership allows StackMob to expand the languages it supports beyond Java, Scala and Clojure to include Ruby and later, Node.js.

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AppFog lands $8M for PHP Cloud

AppFog, the company formerly known as PHP Fog, has raised $8 million in a healthy second round of funding for the year-old company. The company’s name change coincides with the funding and hints at a future supporting languages beyond PHP.

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Ruby creator Matsumoto joins Heroku

Heroku might have expanded its embrace to include Node.js and Clojure, but its heart is still with Ruby. To wit, Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto is joining the company as its chief architect for Ruby, which should only improve its standing in the developer community.

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Heroku: Peer pressure is a sales strategy

When it comes to getting major companies to embrace building their applications in the cloud, Salesforce and its newly acquired platform-as- a-service company Heroku are relying on a tried-and-true method: Peer pressure.

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Heroku Revamps with Logs, Processes and Node.js

Platform-as-a-Service pioneer Heroku, now part of the Salesforce.com cloud empire, has released a new version that expands programming support beyond its Ruby roots and gives developers more control and insight than previously available. Among the new features is full support for the Node.js framework.

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Get Purchased or Perish: The Harsh Reality of Cloud Platforms

With each passing day, cloud computing — and the platform-as-a-service space, in particular — looks a lot more like a large software vendor’s game than it does a space where plucky startups might actually be able to establish a presence and remain independent for the long run.

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VMware Launches Open-Source Cloud

VMware has entered the cloud game by offering an open-source package called Cloud Foundry, a platform as a service that should strike fear in the hearts of its compeitors, especially the likes of Salesforce.com, Microsoft and Rackspace.

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Heroku Grows Up Under Salesforce.com’s Wing

Platform-as-a-Service star Heroku has grown up since Saleforce.com bought for $212 million in December, attracting the attention of some big names in systems integration an enterprise consulting through the Heroku Partner Program, including Accenture and Pivotal Labs. The traction helps validate Ruby, Heroku and PaaS.

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Report

A 2011 Infrastructure Forecast

More exciting than examining the previous quarter is looking forward into the next 12 months and using the trends of 2010 to predict the realities that will surface in 2011. Throughout this past December, GigaOM Pro’s curators did just that, making trend predictions, pointing out companies to watch and even telling us what not to expect. Former Infrastructure curator Derrick Harris’ thoughts, analyses and predictions are compiled here in a single report. Companies mentioned include Amazon, ARM, Facebook, Cloudera, EMC and Oracle. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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Report

8 Infrastructure Companies Poised to Make Headlines in 2011

Several companies made big moves in 2010, the results of which won’t likely materialize until later this year. If it all pans out as predicted, the infrastructure market — from processors to servers to cloud platforms — will undergo some major transformations. From up-and-comers like Calxeda to tech giants such as Cisco and expanding niche-market leaders like Salesforce.com, these companies have the product lineups, vision and the technological chops to deliver innovations in 2011 that will have enduring effects.

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What to Make of Benioff’s Growing Cloud Empire

Marc Benioff’s insistence on calling Salesforce.com a cloud computing company used to draw a few laughs. That’s been changing over the past several months with offerings like VMforce and Database.com, and its acquisition of PaaS pioneer Heroku for $212 million is the icing on the cake.

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Heroku CEO Talks About Salesforce, Future

Salesforce.com’s decision to buy Heroku for $212 million seems to be a giving Ruby developers a pause, making them wonder about the future of their beloved platform. Heroku CEO says there is no reason to worry, as he outlines the future plans and Salesforce’s intentions.

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How Heroku-Salesforce Deal Impacts Amazon Web Services

Heroku had built its Ruby-specific Platform-as-a-Service on top of the Amazon (s AMZN) Web Services infrastructure. It has been a shining example of Amazon’s cloud success. But what happens to the platform, now that Amazon rival, Salesforce is buying the company.

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SalesForce to Buy Heroku’s Ruby Cloud for $212M

Salesforce is bulking up its position as a cloud platform for developers by agreeing to snap up Heroku, a Ruby application Platform-as-a-Service for $212 million. The deal will further establish Salesforce as a platform for app developers along with its VMforce enterprise cloud collaboration with VMware.

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Can Heroku Become the Official Cloud of Facebook Apps?

Spotting an opportunity to formally merge cloud computing with social networking, Heroku has developed a program to help customers develop and launch Facebook apps on the Heroku platform. Given the huge number of social apps hosted atop Heroku, the time is ripe to launch this program.

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PiCloud, Python-Based Cloud Funded By Greylock, KPCB

PiCloud, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company that is developing a python-based platform as a service (PaaS) has raised $1.4 million in its first round of funding. Investors in PiCloud co-founded by Ken Elkabany (CEO) and Aaron Staley, include Greylock Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers and Andreessen Horowitz.

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Heroku: Serving Up 100,000 Apps

Heroku, the San Francisco-based Platform-as-a-Service provider is all set to hit the magical 100,000 app mark, sometime next week. The PAAS platform had 40,000 apps a year ago. Heroku’s platform is gaining momentum and as companies finds increased adoption amongst corporate users and mobile developers.

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Mobile App Boom Is Lifting Heroku’s Fortunes

The rise of smartphones is having an impact across the entire technology food chain from chip makers to handset manufacturers. San Francisco-based Heroku, which has been focused on being a Ruby-on-Rails cloud platform, has seen a sudden demand for its service from mobile app developers

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The Cloud Will Force Networking Vendors to Change Their Stripes

Many operational clouds, such as Amazon Web Services, still require their customers to corral their own machines, however virtual. On the other hand, development clouds like Salesforce.com or Google’s App Engine hide the underlying machines, and handle all the networking equipment — virtual and real — on behalf of their customers. Either model means a big transition for the makers of traditional networking equipment.

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