Grazed from Datamation. Author: Jeff Vance.

The cloud may not have quite reached maturity yet, but it’s getting there. Plenty of businesses rely on the cloud for mission-critical applications, and cloud adoption is steady enough in the U.S. that offshore public cloud providers fear they’ll never catch up to Amazon, Google, Rackspace and other cloud providers in the U.S.

From outsourcing to automation

"The initial resistance to public cloud has begun to subside and customers are beginning to realize its efficiencies as the solutions mature," said Ian Marriott, research vice president at Gartner. According to Gartner, spending on public cloud services is expected to grow 18 percent in 2013 to $131 billion. By 2015, Gartner believes the public cloud services market will exceed $180 billion…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Beth Pariseau.

The cloud offers easy resource provisioning and flexible pricing, but there are several cloud computing costs beyond the instance price lists to consider before deploying workloads there. Beyond the initial server instance, cloud computing pricing usually includes storage, networking, load balancing, security, redundancy, backup, application services and operating system licenses. Certain cloud computing costs — resource contention, storage, bandwidth and redundancy — can come as a surprise.

Server instance performance and provisioning costs

So-called noisy neighbors — server instances from other tenants in the cloud that share the same hardware and cause resource contention — are a common problem. "In a public-cloud world, you tend to have to have more capacity because of noisy neighbors consuming more resources than you’d expect on that shared host, the fact that certain hosts will become unresponsive, or the fact that you have to replace hosts frequently," said Jim O’Neill, CIO of the hosted marketing software provider HubSpot Inc., based in Cambridge, Mass. "We tend to see extra investment in additional capacity just to keep performance at a known state."…

Grazed from CMSWire. Author: David Roe.

There is further evidence this morning that cloud computing is getting specialized with reports that Microsoft may be in the process of developing one or more versions of its cloud operating system customized for government users.

Microsoft Government Cloud OS?

The report that Microsoft is in the process of doing this surfaced in a report by ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley who, citing unnamed sources, says that a new specialized version of Microsoft Cloud OS’s platform is currently under development. While this probably won’t be confirmed until the final product is ready for release, it does correspond with an emerging trend that we saw last week with ClearData where verticals that are managing sensitive data, and who want to move to the cloud, are looking for specialized, secure products…

Grazed from UBM Tech.  Author: Event Announcement.

Cloud platforms are shifting today’s business models by enabling companies to quickly build, deploy and manage applications. The unlimited resource of the cloud is driving a breakneck pace of innovation and unprecedented value for companies prepared to take full advantage.

Cloud Connect Chicago, to be held on October 21-23, 2013, is the only venue where you will learn how to leverage the cloud ecosystem to develop new services, new revenue streams and new business models.  Cloud Connect offers three days of in-depth boot camps, panel discussions and access to a host of industry experts, all designed to help you weigh your cloud options and drive transformation. This year’s Sessions and Boot Camps include all the major cloud stack players including OpenStack, CloudStack, and AWS & Eucalyptus. Plus, don’t miss the Cloud Security Summit hosted by Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) or the CompTIA Cloud Essential Training…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

In the fiercely competitive world of IaaS cloud computing driven by a race to the bottom on prices, service providers are constantly looking for new services that can be outsourced from the enterprise to their cloud data centers. Hoping to ride the wave of mobile computing, cloud service providers’ latest target is mobile application development.

This week Amazon Web Services made it easier for mobile developers to send push notifications at massive scale to all types of end points, including iOS, Android and Kindle mobile devices. AWS enabled the push notification functionality through its Simple Notification Service (SNS), which also supports e-mail, Simple Queue Service (SQS), which is a messaging platform, and HTTP. Amazon’s not the first to be targeting mobile developers, though, as Rackspace and Microsoft have each equipped their clouds with services targeted specifically at mobile developers…

Grazed from CloudPhysics. Author: PR Announcement.

CloudPhysics, a start-up based in Mountain View, California, announced $10 million in Series B funding and released its SaaS offering, which automatically uncovers hidden operational hazards before problems emerge as well as identifies radical efficiency improvements in storage, compute and networking with VMware workloads. The CloudPhysics tools give IT more power to understand, troubleshoot and optimize their virtualized systems.

CloudPhysics is opening a Card Store, essentially an app store built on an industry-wide dataset and community. The CloudPhysics user interface is composed of Cards, each of which is a highly focused app to solve a particular IT operations problem. Cards are built by CloudPhysics and members of its user community using the Card Builder feature of the cloud-based service and range across all IT operations use cases from planning, procurement, reporting, analysis, troubleshooting and capacity management…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Tom Kemp.

Historically, IT was one department that handled IT services for an entire company — one department to rule them all, if you will. From email to software to printer problems, they were relied upon for a variety of issues. As technology continues to evolve, more companies are turning to Software as a Service (SaaS) for their business needs. Of course there are various benefits that are associated with this new IT and employee dynamic, but also unintended consequences — a rift in the way IT works.

Gartner says enterprise apps will generate nearly $40 billion in sales for developers by 2016. A stronghold for consumer-friendly photo apps, games, and renegade business apps, the app stores of today are now going through a major renovation as the enterprise-class comes into its own…

Grazed from Basho. Author: PR Announcement.

Basho Technologies, the leader in distributed systems software, announced today the availability of Riak CS 1.4 and Riak CS 1.4 Enterprise. Riak CS 1.4 continues Basho’s commitment to provide cloud storage software that is simple to operate, highly available by design, and compatible with industry cloud standards. Riak CS is used by organizations worldwide to power their public and private clouds.

Riak CS 1.4 introduces formal integration with OpenStack, provides enhanced performance and manageability, includes community requests, and improves performance at scale. Riak CS 1.4 Enterprise significantly boosts the performance of multi-data center replication by allowing for concurrent channels, so the full capacity of the network and cluster size can scale the performance to available resources…

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Rebecca Grant.

Tradescape has raised $43 million for its software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions to help online businesses handle their finances. The $43 million sum is the first chunk of of a proposed $114 million round. Tradecape works with ad agencies, content publishers, and content creators to manage transactions that start in digital media marketplaces.

Its “financial clearing” technology automates financial reconciliation, clearing, billing, settlement, invoicing, reporting, and auditing. Buying and selling media is a complicated process. Tradescape’s tools helps brands, agencies, and marketers ensure that they stay on-budget without constantly needing to check in with their partners and track campaign performance…