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Cloud-infrastructure performance is a key consideration that can greatly impact quality of service the quality of service and total cost of ownership for IaaS providers.
As more enterprises focus on building applications that support vertical capabilities, PaaS providers will spend more R&D dollars to provide compatible services.
To move toward the goal of productivity and security, businesses must discard organizational silos and practices and embrace a more collaborative, transparent working environment.
Sources expect Amazon to preview its long-anticipated mobile app development infrastructure and services later this week in New York City.
Red Hat, with help from Uhuru, will let Microsoft .NET apps run on OpenShift; but if you want to run Red Hat Linux on Windows Azure? No dice.
Sure it would make for strange bedfellows, but Microsoft needs Red Hat Enterprise Linux and an acquisition would signify a bold move by new CEO Satya Nadella.
Scott Guthrie, a familiar face to legions of .Net-oriented developers, will assume the top cloud job at Microsoft on an interim basis.
For the big games, NBC Sports will use Windows Azure to encode reams of video data that will be viewed on TV or your device of choice.
Amazon Web Services? Check. Cloud Foundry? Check. Windows Azure? Check on that now, too. Cloudmunch has added another target platform for its integrated devops suite.
Company said seats of its SaaS-based Office 365 and Dynamics CRM along with WIndows Azure were up 100 percent year over year.
A cloud orchestration layer comprising VMware components integrated by Capgemini will help businesses create vertical cloud service suites to meet their needs, says a Capgemini executive.
When tech vendors want to signal they’re serious about business customers, they launch partner programs. And that’s what Google’s doing for its cloud.
China is a hot bed of cloud activity. The latest entrant — China Unicom just launched a full-service OpenStack cloud.
U.S.-based cloud providers weigh potentially huge market opportunity over risks in moving more cloud services into China.
For a variety of reasons — political, cultural, and economic — it’s a huge deal that Amazon Web Services is setting up a China-specific region in Beijing.
The week in cloud: Dell, Microsoft, HP trot out a bewildering array of alliances hoping to entrench their respective cloud technologies worldwide. Already entrenched, AWS scrambles to meet demand for new C3 instances.
HP launches a pair of new CloudSystems hardware-software bundles, this time with Cloud OS, its special take on OpenStack.
Microsoft’s chances in this new world depend on its ability to balance old successes like Windows and Office with transformative new technologies, he said.
Microsoft likes to tout the fact that it runs Windows Azure at data centers worldwide. Yesterday compute instances across most of those regions were disrupted.
A set of updates to Windows Azure include new backup services, an SDK, and a preview Hyper-V recovery manager.
The company’s virtual controllers can now run natively in Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure, and its on-prem hardware adds a flash option.
By finally just saying what we’ve all known forever — that Microsoft competes with its biggest and oldest partners, (Intel too!) HP’s CEO let some fresh air into the room.
New from AWS: the ability to change the size of your EC2 Reserved Instances. That along with an earlier change that lets you move RIs between zones show Amazon getting more flexible.
Booz Allen Hamilton’s Josh Sullivan talks about the art and science of building multi-disciplinary data science teams; MongoDB’s big payday; and Verizon’s cloud gambit.
Just in time for the government shut down! (Kidding). Microsoft gets FedRAMP certification which make it easier for Windows Azure to win more U.S. agency work.
Two-factor authentication adds an additional layer of security — and another step — to accessing your data on the Windows Azure cloud.
If you’ve been wondering what’s up with Newvem of late, now you know. Managed services provider Datapipe bought it for an undisclosed sum.
Today we’re extending our cloud coverage with the launch of the Structure Show, a weekly podcast providing discussion and analysis of cloud and data news.
MetLife wants to build products faster, and to attract smart developers it’s launched a website for submitting qualifications in JSON, not PDF.
If your app needs fast query performance, dedicated memcache can help with that and GAE is now offering that capability in preview form.
Microsoft has boasted of big Azure revenue and now it’s talking up server count. The metrics are misleading, though, because developers just don’t flock to Azure the way they do to other clouds.
Startup also rolls out One Hybrid Cloud which promises to put legacy Windows and Linux on-prem apps into Amazon Web Services with minimal wear and tear.
The hardware giant, which is trying to build up its power base in software and cloud, brings Microsoft’s former software-and-cloud guy on as a director.
Updated: Amazon Web Services cuts prices again — this time on dedicated EC2 instances and by as much as 80 percent in some scenarios.
Microsoft is pulling all its startup-wooing activity under the Microsoft Ventures umbrella.
Satya Nadella says Windows Azure should be on the short list of public clouds that every company — including AWS-loving startups — should consider. Here’s why.
At TechEd, Microsoft will keep pitching that Azure running in Microsoft data centers and Windows Server and Systems Center running at customer sites is the best of the hybrid cloud universe.
The public cloud computing landscape gets more interesting with Microsoft pushing its new Windows Azure infrastructure services vs. Amazon (and Google.)
It’s easy to characterize the cloud computing market as being Amazon Web Services’ to lose, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. McDonald’s dominates the fast food world, but life isn’t exactly bad for its dozens of competitors.
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.
With Amazon beefing up its own AWS monitoring tools, it makes sense for companies like Newvem to take on other clouds. That’s just what Newvem is doing.
Whether or not Google officially rolls out its GCE public cloud to all takers this week, GCE will take on AWS and Windows Azure for market- and mind-share going forward.
Google picked Debian as the default OS for the Google Compute Engine; AWS builds console to enable Windows IT admins to manage on-prem and AWS workloads, Adobe feels artists’ ire.
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?
Amazon Web Services’ 2013 San Francisco summit kicked off with boastful words about the public-cloud leader.
Microsoft Windows Azure GM Bill Hilf calls Amazon a competitor, a partner and a neighbor: But that won’t stop Microsoft from launching an IaaS price war against Amazon Web Services.
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.
Microsoft Azure, which started the week with kudos as the best cloud storage service, is down and out on Friday.
SendGrid is inching towards ubiquity with new integrations to Parse, Stackmob and Windows Azure mobile backend services. SendGrid is popular with developers who want easy email integration for their mobile apps and who don’t want to rely too much on Amazon services.
Mayfield Fund is backing CloudVelocity’s hybrid cloud automation vision to the tune of $5 million in Series A funding. CloudVelocity’s very bold promise is that it will move your existing enterprise apps to a public cloud and run them there securely.
Storage price slashing continues as Microsoft meets cuts Google and Amazon traded last week. There’s method in this madness — lots of businesses have yet to test the cloud, and cheap storage is a way to attract those newbies. And once they’re hooked, watch out!
Former Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie is still working on his super-stealthy mobile startup Talko, only now he has $4 million more to fund whatever it is he’s doing.
Established search technologies are being integrated with big data tools to meet real business requirements, both on-premise and in the cloud.
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.
The next release of Microsoft’s popular Halo game will run on the company’s own Windows Azure platform-as-a-service. Inquiring minds want to know when more of the company’s bread-and-butter services will follow suit.
From information on U.S. census returns to the location of every Starbucks in Canada, the demand for data to support decision making is increasing. Fittingly, a number of new data markets have emerged in the past few years that provide access to this data. A wide range of companies exists in this space, and often there are more differences than similarities in the various products on offer, not to mention the many different financial models. This report describes the basics of a data market, explores the ways in which various companies are beginning to position their offerings, and looks for evidence that there is sufficient demand for this market segment to prove sustainable.
Buying IT services should be the opposite of how you buy produce: “No you don’t want to consume your IT locally. Trust us,” says Google’s Peter Magnusson. That’s because products like Google’s platform as a service App Engine are energy efficient and carbon neutral.
With the next release of Office and SharePoint, developers can build add-ons that run in Windows Azure (or Amazon, or other clouds.) A bigger question is when Office and SharePoint themselves will make the transition into Microsoft’s multi-billion-dollar cloud. Microsoft still isn’t saying.
Microsoft issued a fuller explanation late Thursday for the 2 hour outage that afflicted Windows Azure in Europe a week ago. If vendors want to bring more businesses into their respective clouds they need to be fully forthcoming about operational issues and their causes.
A misconfigured network device caused Windows Azure to crash and burn in Europe yesterday. In a blog post, Microsoft said it is still digging into the root cause of the outage and will report back next week.
The popular Google Talk app is down for most users on Thursday morning. This snafu, which cut many people off from their instant messaging/video chat app of choice, along with today’s WIndows Azure snafu in Europe, show the dark side of cloud computing.
For anyone needing a reminder that no computing cloud is perfect — Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud went down in Europe on Thursday. Few details are available, but Microsoft says it’s on the case.
For companies wanting to put workloads on a public cloud without having to sweat the details, Appfog has a bold proposition. It says its new PaaS will abstract out all that annoying tweaking and tuning for loads running on Amazon, Rackspace, Microsoft or HP clouds.
For years, tech vendors built complicated partner programs to sell, support and maintain their stuff and break into new markets. Now Google, Amazon are following suit with new-look partner programs. The goal is to bring new customer business into their respective clouds.
It looks like Microsoft is serious about becoming the operating system for cloud computing. At its Worldwide Partner Conference on Tuesday, the company announced what amounts to a white-label version of its Windows Azure cloud platform targeting current Windows Server-based web hosts.
Microsoft plans to bring big data to the little guy, said Satya Nadella, the executive directing the company’s gigantic Windows Azure cloud effort. It’s backend work with Hadoop is a big piece, but the linkage to Excel will bring big data to the masses.
Windows Azure, Microsoft’s huge platform-as-a-service, is getting a big boost from Appfog and Apprenda, two small PaaSes that will make it easier to run hybrid clouds using Azure back-end services. That addresses a concern among business customers that want to run apps in house.
Mobilize.net aims to bring .NET applications to the Azure (or other) cloud and to the mobile devices of the customer’s choice. The company knows from Windows and .NET — between them, its CEO and VP of business development spent 40 years at Microsoft.
Google is hard at work on a cloud computing offering that will compete directly with the popular Amazon EC2 cloud, I have been told, although Microsoft probably will beat it to the punch. The timing for Google is TBD, while Microsoft should announce on June 7.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Storage Gateway is the company’s first foray into the on-premises cloud-storage space. But it isn’t the only one: A number of vendors are attacking the on-premises cloud-storage gateway market. Do these new offerings, Amazon’s foremost, signal the death of the cloud gateway as an appliance, or are they simply validation of the market?
Amazon’s Eucalyptus deal, which gives it a better hybrid cloud story and solidifies the dominance of the AWS API, plus the ever-growing AWS feature set, aren’t necessarily all good news to PaaS and other partners that run their services on Amazon infrastructure.
Amazon Web Services is indisputably the largest cloud service provider by far, and by all accounts. So what rivals could be No. 2 and maybe even give AWS a run for its money? Some of these names might surprise you.
Microsoft issues credit, apologies and an explanation to Windows Azure customers affected by the recent Leap Day outage that took down several services. Snafus like this one not only affect the specific vendor but can hurt overall confidence in the cloud computing model.
New medium Elastic Compute Cloud instance fills the gap between — you guessed it — smaller and larger “medium” EC2 instances. That brings the total number of EC2 instances to 13 (for now) as Amazon keeps churning out options for every possible compute load.
Ray Ozzie, the former Microsoft executive charged with driving the development of Windows Azure, is evaluating Azure, along with Amazon Web Services and OpenStack, for use by Cocomo, his mysterious startup company.
Amazon isn’t the only cloud power slicing storage prices. On Tuesday Google cut the price on Google Cloud Storage by up to 15 percent in some cases. With this move and new front-end storage partners, Google appears to be making a serious play for enterprise storage.
Microsoft, which looked as if it might be the odd man out on Hadoop, might actually play a big role in taking the platform into the mainstream. On Tuesday, it exposed its plans to make Hadoop data analyzable via both a JavaScript framework and Microsoft Excel.
Joe Coyle, CTO of global integrator Capgemini, sees a lot of cloud pitches from all the major technology vendors — and God knows they all have a cloud strategy. Here’s what he thinks of the current state of the market.
Amazon is hiring techies for a new digital media services push. The company seeks senior development managers and developers for a “brand new team,” although their work will grow out of an existing AWS digital media offering, according to a job post.
Up-and-coming Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider Tier3 has made a significant contribution to the Platform-as-a-Service world by releasing a .NET implementation of the Cloud Foundry PaaS project. A fork project called Iron Foundry will serve as the primary source of .NET development within Cloud Foundry.
Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform as a service (PaaS) now supports Node.js, the popular server-side JavaScript development framework. That could give Azure more traction beyond the Microsoft .NET faithful. Also new: a limited trial of Hadoop-based distribution for Azure.
When Amazon released its third-quarter earnings last week, some stock analysts were dismayed by the amount of spending that took the shine off the company’s otherwise fine overall revenue. At least when it comes to infrastructure, though, Amazon, like all web-based businesses, has to spend money now to ensure it can make even more later on. That rule might be doubly true for Amazon’s position as a cloud-computing provider, because that business requires having enough capacity to serve untold numbers of users at any given time. And going by the numbers, we’re already starting to see the fruits of Amazon’s labor on that front.
To find out how these two services measure up in the real world, Craig Knighton of LiquidSpace and Zach Richardson of Ravel Data lay out the cases for their clouds of choice to see how the services compared in real-world use at living, breathing companies.
Dell has officially become a cloud provider with the launch of an Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud built atop VMware technology. The move is just the first in Dell’s three-pronged IaaS attack, which will soon include clouds based on the Microsoft Windows Azure and OpenStack platforms.
Verizon is buying cloud computing startup CloudSwitch in a move that will give Verizon, as well as its subsidiary Terremark, a software-development edge to complement its service-provider expertise. CloudSwitch will lead software development beyond its core product, which will give Verizon additional cloud intellectual property.
OpenLogic, a software vendor that helps companies better utilize open-source software, is turning its attention toward cloud computing. On Tuesday, it announced $2 million in funding for a new Platform-as-a-Service offering featuring open-source components.
If there’s one thing certain about Amazon Web Services, it’s that the company isn’t Oracle. On Thursday, the company slashed the bandwidth charges for its various services, the latest in a series of price cuts dating back to 2008.
The dream of open cloud computing took a couple of small steps forward in the past 24 hours with Apache promoting the Libcloud project to top-level status and with Microsoft releasing a new software development kit for PHP applications on its Windows Azure platform.
At long last, Microsoft has taken a big step forward in its cloud computing fight against VMware by letting customers manage hybrid on-premise and Windows Azure environments from within Microsoft’s System Center systems management software.
Add Microsoft to the list of cloud providers offering free usage levels for their cloud offerings, as the company is now offering 750 free hours of Windows Azure usage. Like most things free, though, there is a catch.
Bob Muglia is leaving Microsoft. More accurately, he’s “retiring” this summer because CEO Steve Ballmer decided that the Server and Tools Business, which Muglia leads, needs new leadership. One has to ask what’s going on at Microsoft and what Steve Ballmer has in mind.
It’s a big news Friday. On the NoSQL front, Microsoft is giving Membase and MongoDB some love, while CouchOne distances itself from the term. In the cloud world, there was another revenue prediction, Appistry and Dell teaming on cloud storage, and Eucalyptus potentially working with OpenStack.
Dell is often characterized as a mere server maker, and it’s easy to see why when comparing it with full-service vendors like HP and IBM. With it’s cloud moves, however, Dell has been reshaping itself lately into a provider of more than just gear.
At its Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft rolled out many new features that should seriously strengthen the presence in of Windows Azure among public cloud offerings, perhaps even making the PaaS offering a closer competitor to Amazon Web Services’ industry-leading IaaS offerings.
Thanks to countless videos of the Iranian uprising now being streamed on its system, YouTube may suddenly seem to be at the…
My son and I are sitting in Philadelphia International Airport waiting for a flight and I was just catching up on the…
A quick and very unscientific poll of developers at the Microsoft Professional Developers conference in Los Angeles this week suggests that even…
Microsoft’s Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote will have a new home in the cloud, the company announced at the Microsoft Developers Conference…
