Grazed from WindowsITPro. Author: Richard Hay.

Are you interested in learning more about Microsoft Azure, its offerings and the basics about Microsoft’s cloud services that are available on the growing platform? Yesterday, Microsoft Press announced the availability of an electronic book by authors Michael S. Collier and Robin E. Shahan that is actually the first in a series about Microsoft Azure.

I have been poking around Azure for several months now and currently host several aspects of my WindowsObserver.com website on the service including my Observed Tech PODCAST MP3 files, Windows Themes and other miscellaneous downloads. Recently I even built a few small websites on the service using WordPress to see how reliable it is and so far with these sites and the downloads I mentioned it has been rock solid...

Grazed from Tom's IT PRo.  Author: William Van Winkle.

Operating officially since 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is closing in on its 10-year anniversary. Some might call that old, while others would say that Amazon has merely had that much more time to build an incredible head start over its competition. One of those competitors, Microsoft Azure, entered the market in 2010. But by this time had Amazon already sprinted ahead to an insurmountable lead?

Microsoft doesn't think so, clearly, and has been building its infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering out from AWS' shadow ever since.  Of course, insurmountable leads and shadows are largely irrelevant to your own enterprise. These companies are both global titans with the resources to make their respective cloud services as robust and expansive as they want...

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Barb Darrow.

Amazon Web Services already offers software development kits (SDKs) for Java, C#, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, PHP and Objective C programming languages. Now it says it will add Go (aka Golang) to that list. More accurately, it says it’s taken over aws-go, an SDK developed by Stripe. The SDK is in a sort of beta stage, with work continuing.

While Go doesn’t have nearly as many users as Java or C — an IEEE Spectrum survey ranked it as the nineteenth most popular language between Scala and Arduino — it’s gained traction among developers. That’s especially true for those building cloud or web services infrastructure. Docker, which has taken the development world like a gale force wind, is written in Go, for example...

Grazed from HostReview. Author: Editorial Staff.

MilesWeb proudly announced the launch of cloud hosting services powered by OnApp for supporting diverse IT projects and for maximizing the potential of cloud computing. This is a major milestone for MilesWeb after the launch of virtual data center platform. The cloud hosting servers offered by MilesWeb are fully equipped for meeting the requirements of large and extensive software developments and business production requirements.

MilesWeb has employed leading and unbeatable cloud server technology available in the market for providing the customers with a profound cloud solution. All the cloud servers are crafted to ensure supreme performance with minimum cost of computing along with the resilience for accommodating the growing technology needs...

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Pedro Hernandez.

Microsoft has been beefing up its Azure cloud computing platform, and the company has the certifications to prove it, according to Lori Woehler, principal group manager for Compliance and Trust at the software and cloud computing giant.

Woehler revealed in an Azure blog post that Microsoft Azure had "completed an ISO 27001 renewal audit to the 2013 version of the standard, following the ISO [International Organization for Standardization] 27002 best practices for comprehensive information security and risk management." ISO 27001 is a set of standards governing information security within organizations...

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Serdar Yegulalp.

If uptime and availability are what matter most in a cloud provider -- for many, they are -- Amazon and Google currently lead the pack. Azure, on the other hand, has a ways to go. Cloud-service analytics firm CloudHarmony, which harvests statistics about the uptimes and reliability behaviors of dozens of cloud hosts, recently released statistics detailing total availability across 2014 for all the hosts it tracks.

The list includes major names like Amazon and Azure, up-and-comers like SoftLayer, midtier players like Rackspace, and other, smaller providers like Vault Networks and DigitalOcean. Tracked services don't include only cloud VM services like Amazon's EC2, but also CDN, DNS, object storage, and application engines...

Grazed from TechTimes. Author: Quienten Plummer.

Microsoft's presence in GameStop stores is moving beyond Xbox consoles. The company will prop up in-store beacons pushing video and promotions via the Azure cloud to customers' mobile devices as they shop in the retailer's brick-and-mortar stores. Microsoft is the latest company to sign on as a partner in the GameStop Technology Institute (GTI). Microsoft's Azure cloud will also fuel employee tablets with customer data.

The "magic" begins as soon as a customer enters a GameStop location and an Azure-connected beacon pushes a "digital welcome message" to a shopper's device. The welcome message will detail in-store promotions and deliver a map of the store's other beacons, which will serve up game trailers and other product data...

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Daniel Robinson.

Amazon has made available new C4 virtual machine instances on its Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud platform, designed to offer a higher level of processor performance for customers with demanding workloads. First announced last year, the new C4 instances are being delivered from infrastructure based on a custom version of Intel's latest Xeon E5 v3 processors, created specifically to meet the requirements of the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, according to AWS.

The new instances are available from today in seven AWS regions covering the US, Europe, and Asia Pacific, the firm said, with charges starting at $0.116 per hour for the smallest c4.large instance with two virtual processor cores (vCPUs) and 3.75GB of memory. This scales up to 36 vCPUs on the c4.8xlarge instance with 60GB memory, which is charged at $1.856 per hour...

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Pedro Hernandez.

As promised back in October as part of an expansion of the Microsoft's hyperscale cloud capabilities, the company has made its new G-Series virtual machines (VM) for Azure generally available.

G-Series is the new king of Azure VMs, according to Corey Sanders, director of program management for Microsoft Azure. "G-series sizes provide the most memory, the highest processing power and the largest amount of local SSD [solid-state drive] of any virtual machine size currently available in the public cloud," he said in a Jan. 8 Azure Blog post...

Grazed from SysConMedia.  Author: Natalie Lerner.

Hosting a website shouldn't be a tedious task. With so many web hosting vendors to choose from, it can be hard to know where to start. Before you begin shopping, it is imperative that you create a list of traits that each web host must possess before making your short-list.

As many with experience will tell you, all web hosting companies are not created equally and depending upon the types of apps you are trying to launch, it may be important to note that not one size fits all when you are shopping for web hosting services...