Grazed from FierceEnterpriseCommunications. Author: David Weldon.

Don’t kid yourself that cloud computing prices are justified, despite recent pricing gouging. That is the claim of cloud hosting company ProfitBricks, which this week lashed out at rivals for misleading customers on their pricing strategies. Andreas Gauger, founder and CMO of the German-based ProfitBricks, blogged this week that his company would cut its cloud services fee in half, making his service as cheap to use as Amazon, according to a report in CloudPro.

Gauger said ProfitBricks is slashing prices for CPU core and RAM, with single-CPU core server prices cut from 5 cents per hour to 2.5 cents per hour. Despite recent reports about Google and Amazon dropping their cloud computing rates, Gauger says those rates are still hiding huge profit margins. "So here is the deal: If I were to sell our product at the same prices as Amazon or Rackshare does, I would have gross margins far higher than the quoted 60 percent to 80 percent," Gauger said…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Randall Jackson.

The issue of data sovereignty is starting to drive business decision making with regard to data held in the cloud, according to New Zealand email security and hosting company SMX. SMX co-founder and chief technology officer, Thom Hooker, said government organisations are particularly sensitive about the sovereignty issue, which is a driver behind SMX’s high uptake among government and local government organisations.

More than half of New Zealand’s local government organisations and around one third of the District Health Boards have now subscribed to SMX’s cloud service. Hooker said data sovereignty is an even more important issue nowadays as businesses begin to move mail servers to the Cloud…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Last week it was IBM. Now CenturyLink has joined the community advisory board that will, in theory, help Cloud Foundry establish itself as a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that enterprises will use. cloudfoundrylogoThat’s no mean feat. Developers often love PaaSes, which give them an easy environment to build their applications, but big companies often balk at deploying those applications on a third-party platform and bring them in house.

Pivotal, the spin-off partially owned by EMC and VMware, is backing this Cloud Foundry play big time but apparently realizes it needs strong third-party support — including from cloud competitors — to avoid the perception that any one company is big-footing the process…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

Midsize firms often turn to cloud computing for increased efficiency, and this move is now proving to help the environment at the same time. A new study shows that the cloud is reducing energy use annually by 80 percent at both public and private companies thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions. These green traits are proving to be a big plus for midsize firms.

Reducing Dependence

A global green IT association called The Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI), recently released a study in cooperation with Harvard University, Imperial College, Reading University, and Microsoft Europe entitled "The Enabling Technologies of a Low-Carbon Economy – a Focus on Cloud Computing." The study, featured in the Cloud Times, found that as more companies utilize the cloud, the U.S. will reduce its energy dependence and save $2.2 billion in energy costs…

Grazed from Network World. Author: Brandon Butler.

Google Wednesday rolled out load balancing features to its public cloud service, allowing customers to automatically scale up and down virtual machines to accommodate unexpected spikes in demand. The rollout comes just a few months after Microsoft improved its Azure cloud service with new auto-scaling features. Both companies are effectively playing catch-up with leading IaaS provider Amazon Web Services, which already offers such features.

Load balancing is a “critical” feature for any highly scalable cloud deployment, Google engineers wrote in announcing the company’s service today. It allows Google Compute Engine (GCE) to automatically and intelligently route traffic across a collection of servers. This replaces a manual process where new virtual machines (VM) would be provisioned by the user…

Grazed from VentureBeat.  Author: Event Announcement.

Returning for its third year, CloudBeat will track the growing maturity of the cloud and identify the hot issues for the next twelve months.  CloudBeat 2013 is held in San Francisco, USA, on September 9-10, 2013.

We’ll cut through the hype surrounding the cloud by gathering real customers who have gone through the pain of adoption and change, and who have compelling stories to tell about the ways in which the cloud continues to transform their business…

Grazed from The Web Site Host. Author: Editorial Staff.

Infrastructure-as-a-service provider DigitalOcean announced on Wednesday it has raised a $3.2 million seed round led by IA Ventures, with participation from CrunchFund and TechStars. The move comes a few months after DigitalOcean suffered a data breach that impacted a “small percentage of customers”, and promptly rolled out a fix for those affected customers.

DigitalOcean nearly has 350,000 cloud servers to date, adding an average of 500 new subscribers a day. The company says it plans to use the proceeds from this funding round to hire more marketing and engineering employees, as well as build out its infrastructure…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Datadog, the SaaS-based monitoring and data analytics platform that provides a unified view of IT infrastructure, released today a troubleshooting guide for developers and system administrators using Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). In the new eBook, The Top 5 AWS EC2 Performance Problems, Datadogs technical team details the top five EC2 performance issues and provides instructions on how to detect and remediate these problems.

For many developers and system administrators, AWS’ EC2 promises ease of deployment and instant scalability. However, EC2 also introduces significant changes to coding, deployment and application maintenance which makes this infrastructure behave differently from traditional on-premise servers. These differences lead to performance issues such as unpredictable EBS disk I/O, EC2 instance ECU mismatches, and ELB load balancing traffic latency. Applications running on AWS infrastructure that are affected by these issues experience a decrease in performance or downtime…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Recent news that the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating how IBM reports its cloud computing revenues begs the question: Why are companies so coy about reporting their cloud revenues? Basically, the answer is because they can be. Although, the SEC’s most recent probe could change that, for at least some companies.

Perhaps the biggest player in the IaaS market of the cloud, Amazon Web Services, is a good example of the issue. In financial filings, the company reports revenues from its cloud computing division – Amazon Web Services – in a line item lumped in together with two other items, advertising services and credit card agreements. So, it’s difficult to decipher exactly how much revenue is derived from AWS alone…