Grazed from ProgrammableWeb. Author: Michael Vizard.

One of the most efficient routes to market for any developer is through an application store that is used by a lot of other applications. For that reason there’s naturally a lot of interest in the AppStore from Apple, GooglePlay or app stores associated with specific cloud computing platform such as Salesforce.com. Essentially, all of these function as central points of application distribution.

But beyond certifying that applications work, Apple, Google and providers of cloud computing services don’t do much in terms of promoting the adoption of third-party applications. By way of an alternative, a new class of application distributors has emerged in the form of organizations such as AppDirect, which not only showcases cloud applications to potential customers but also helps market them, provide financing, and manage the billing services needed to actually monetize them…

Grazed from TheServerSide. Author: Editorial Staff.

What are the two most expensive mistakes enterprise architects and IT professionals make when running their IT infrastructure in a cloud based PaaS or IaaS solution like Amazon Web Services (AWS)? According to Pete Adams, chief operating officer at Cloudability, the problem is a purchasing paradox, where those who are in charge of managing operations either buy too much of one thing or not enough of another.

The scourge of overprovisioning

And what are the DevOps teams buying too much of? Quite simply, they’re too often purchasing too much cloud computing power. "People overprovision infrastructure, buying capacity just in case they need it, but the cloud allows you to spin up infrastructure as you go and as you need it," Adams says. It’s an old habit that dies hard, as historically, IT departments have had to build systems that were big enough to handle peak demand. But that’s not how you provision in the cloud. In the cloud, you provision based around average consumption, and then allow the cloud vendor to deal with the occasional spike. "Overprovisioning is a cost you don’t need to incur," he says…

Grazed from Utilizer. Author: Liz McMillan.

GreenButton™ on Thursday announced the GreenButton WarpDrive, a solution providing accelerated and secure transfers of large datasets to the cloud. Previously this capability was only available to GreenButton customers for running Big Compute and Big Data workloads; however, demand from other use cases, such as enterprise backups, has led to a new standalone service.

"WarpDrive provides the best performing UDP data transfer technology for moving large datasets to the cloud." said Dave Fellows, Chief Technology Officer at GreenButton. "UDP is far more efficient than TCP over high latency and congested networks. The ability to deliver this capability for a fraction of the cost of what’s currently on the market should open the door for many exciting cloud-based initiatives."…

Grazed from SysCon Media. Author: MarketWire.

Piriform, the creator of CCleaner, announces it has launched a unique new product that lets users manage and optimize multiple computers via a cloud-based platform, directly from their web browsers. It is currently being offered in beta, available upon request at www.agomo.com. Agomo uses patented technology from Piriform’s hugely popular CCleaner and Defraggler software. This means users can speed up slow computers, fix problems, and more:

• Clean and defrag one or many computers from anywhere
• Add or remove software and control start-up programs
• Monitor system stats, components, memory, disk space, and much more…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Mikael Ricknäs.

Rackspace Hosting is extending its support offerings to include DevOps tools such as Chef to help enterprises automate the management of their clouds. Through its new DevOps Automation Service, Rackspace will provide support for DevOps tools that help enterprises deploy and scale applications running on Linux. The service will soon work with Windows as well, Rackspace said on Thursday. DevOps is a software development concept that aims to smooth out the interaction between development and operations departments.

Although the service can be used by anyone, it fits best when enterprises need to scale up infrastructure quickly or expect to do so in the future. Enterprises can, for example, turn to Rackspace to get help with infrastructure automation using Chef or with monitoring using StatsD, Graphite and New Relic, the company said on its website. Rackspace also offers support for tools used for workflow automation, log aggregation and source control…

Grazed from TomsITPro. Author: James Sullivan.

HP has announced improvements to its HP CloudSystem toolset, aiding in hybrid OpenStack cloud management. The improvements to HP CloudSystem come at a time of increasing demand for hybrid clouds. "Research indicates that 40 percent of enterprises say they are currently in a hybrid environment and 75 percent of IT executives plan to pursue a hybrid cloud delivery model by 2016," according to HP. The new HP CloudSystem interface has a more streamlined management console and deployment process. Improvements also extend public cloud integration. Newly supported platforms include Microsoft Windows Azure and two European based cloud providers, Arsys and SFR.

HP is also introducing the HP Hybrid Cloud Management Platform that provides service automation support for HP Cloud OS with OpenStack and Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA). TOSCA is an open source OASIS standard designed to promote portability and cloud applications and services…

Grazed from SysCon Media. Author: Pat Romanski.

Dell on Thursday announced it is expanding the Dell Cloud Partner Program to include CenturyLink and its new CenturyLink Cloud, giving customers added choice and flexibility in their cloud computing pursuits. Through the Dell-CenturyLink alliance, Dell customers globally now have access to a slate of public cloud services, including Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), which can be deployed across CenturyLink’s global data center footprint. In addition, customers gain the added benefit of having Dell serve as the single-source supplier through the Dell Cloud Partner Program, providing centralized solution integration, control and direct support.

Jeremy Ford, executive director and general manager, Dell Cloud Services, noted that "CenturyLink’s best-in-class public cloud offerings combined with Dell’s leading end-to-end, scalable solutions and services enable customers to build, control and use cloud-based solutions to drive a competitive business advantage."…

Grazed from TechRadar. Author: Alex Hamilton.

OpenStack, the cloud computing foundation, has gained Oracle as one of its corporate sponsors following planned integration with the company’s Exalogic Elastic Cloud. The Californian technology corporation will begin integrating OpenStack components into a number of its own products. Solaris, Linux and VM as well as Oracle’s own cloud-based services will all be part of the assimilation. Oracle chief corporate architect Edward Screven said in a statement that the company goal through the sponsorship was to give their customers greater choice and flexibility.

Oracle began to eye integration with Openstack in September this year, joining alongside HP, IBM, Red Hat and Dell, who had already placed their support behind the cloud project. Executive vice president of software development, Thomas Kurian, said the ability to abstract storage is critical to the use of Oracle’s cloud services…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

With other methods of tracking usage and access to cloud services and data already on the market, it was probably only a matter of time before someone aimed to help organizations track the geographic location services that are being accessed. Enter CloudLock, which launched not only its CloudLock Labs "innovation-focused projects" brand, but also GeoFence for Google Apps, the first service being offered under the new brand.

Available in the Google Apps Marketplace, GeoFence for Google Apps provides organizations—or their trusted solutions providers—with the ability to track where their users are accessing data from, what location users are logging in from, and any changes made by admins in their domain. Say "so long" to the ability to log in from sunny beaches secretively (you didn’t really think we believed you were at home sick for a week, did you?)…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Cloud certifications are popping up more and more. Some are vendor-specific. Some are vendor-agnostic. And across those two categories are certificates that cover various categories of cloud technology. Enter Mirantis, the pure OpenStack play vendor, with a new vendor-agnostic certification around the open source cloud platform.

Mirantis Certification for OpenStack is being targeted at systems administrators and OpenStack cloud operators as the first vendor-agnostic OpenStack certification. Whether it’s truly the first vendor-agnostic certification is debatable, but the company is aiming to certify OpenStack cloud professionals on their proficiency to deploy and operate vendor-agnostic OpenStack cloud environments. That’s a good step, and one that could play well in the open source cloud space as it continues to grow and gain traction…