RightScale

Amazon hones its cloud reporting tools

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2014/01/amazon-ec2-instance-usage-and-reserved-instance-utilization-reports.html Amazon(s amzn) Web Services has launched two new interactive usage reports to help customers get a better grip on their use of…

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A field guide to the software-defined data center

IT leaders are now looking to build data centers that are abstracted from legacy hardware, and early users are turning to software-defined data center (SDDC) technologies are introducing flexibility into their enterprise while reducing costs and also fueling the drive toward the cloud.

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RightScale gets your cloud ready for the holidays

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.

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Rackspace launches cloud monitor

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.

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Amazon sets sights on cloud cost sprawl

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.

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Google launches Amazon rival, Compute Engine

Google has announced plans to start offering a compute-on-demand service that rivals Amazon’s EC2 service. The company will initially offer this as a limited preview to larger customers. It is a strong and logical move by the company as it continues to view for developer affection.

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The 7 deadly sins of software development

Companies today are often so focused on growth that they commit one (or several) software development sins. Magne Land, the tech lead at RightScale, outlines these seven deadly sins and offers his advice on how to avoid committing these critical errors.

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Fan fave iFixit taps Amazon cloud for new division

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.

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Zynga lessens its Amazon dependency

Zynga the newly public company behind the games played by gazillions of people, is relying far less on Amazon’s(s amzn) 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.

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EnStratus raises $3.5M for hybrid cloud management

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.

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RightScale: More than 3 million servers launched

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.

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Zynga S-1 highlights cloud as competitive advantage

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.

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When it comes to PaaS, the developer is king

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.

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The Good, the OK & the Ugly of Cloud Architecture

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.

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Cloud Startup Values Are Getting Insane

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.

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RightScale Raises $25 Million in New Funds

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

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What’s Being Done About Cloud Lock-in?

Lock-in. The scourge of cloud computing. While issues like security and reliability supposedly are improving, concern over lock-in never goes away. Although there are projects, organizations and even vendors trying to solve the problem, we’re a long way from the Promised Land of true cloud interoperability.

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Video: Michael Crandell, CEO of Rightscale

Cloud computing no longer needs its own introduction, but the use cases and implementation are still being defined. In the video below, I chatted with Michael Crandell, CEO of Rightscale, a cloud management platform, about the changing ecosystem that’s occurring in the cloud world as software as a service (SaaS) providers morph into platform as a service (PaaS) providers and several big providers forgo offering an infrastructure as a service (Iaas) in favor of a PaaS. We also discussed the challenge of moving data into the cloud and moving applications from one cloud to another. The conversation began with a discussion of Rightscale’s business and ended up focusing on security and compliance.

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Out of Beta, Cloudkick Launches Cloud Management Service

Cloudkick, a San Francisco-based startup, launched its cloud server management and monitoring services while in the process taking on better-funded rivals such as Rightscale. By focusing on startups, the company hopes to make a business out of solving the complexity of managing multiple cloud servers.

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Telcos Eye the Cloud

The TM Forum, a standards organization that’s active in the service provider community, is developing standards for cloud best practices and interoperability — a move that could move cloud providers out of the realm of offering cheap infrastructure for startups and into providing enterprise-class services.

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Why Amazon's EBS Should Worry Data Centers

Amazon has announced Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), persistent storage offering that can be used in tandem with applications using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). With this move, they are the heat on everyone from storage area network vendors, server companies and of course data center operators. Continue Reading

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