Grazed from CloudFoundry. Author: Jonas Partner.

From its beginning, Cloud Foundry has been committed to providing developers and enterprises choice of deployment options spanning public and private clouds. In this post, Jonas Partner, CEO of CloudCredo and OpenCredo, shares how their enterprise customers are using PaaS to deploy applications that span public and private clouds to increase availability, add extra capacity and prevent lock-in.

As one of the co-founders of OpenCredo I have been actively working with Cloud Foundry since its early days. We were one of the first companies to launch a production application on Cloud Foundry with the help of our friends at Carrenza. More recently we have established CloudCredo to help both enterprise customers wishing to host Cloud Foundry on their own infrastructure and cloud service providers wishing to offer Platform as a Service. We helped Ospero to bring a Cloud Foundry-based PaaS running on vCloud Director to market to better serve their customers…

Most virtual environments live off "golden images." These are virtual machines (VMs) that were built as templates. When a new VM is needed, the designer or administrator selects the golden image that will be used as a starting point, and then creates the new VM. Typically, these golden images are handcrafted, and incorporate all the libraries, tools, and software needed to support the apps and other software that will run on them. The golden image is refined by trial and error until it works as intended, then used until it comes time to change it. But let’s face it not everyone needs the same thing on their VM. There are always variations. An old-school golden image basically assumes that one size fits all, but is that really true?

Wouldn’t it be better if you could construct each VM based on what was going to run on it? Ok, maybe you’re objecting that this isn’t really a golden image, but hear me out. The problem with most golden images is that they are too complex and bound to change. What if you have a slim golden image and then add just what you need to it? You’d be creating a kind of golden image factory, where the repeatable baseline is easy to generate (the slim golden image) and additional software can be added quickly to that VM.

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Cloud computing and scalability are often mentioned in the same sentence, but often not when talking about databases. Especially not MySQL databases. A Boston-based startup called ParElastic hopes to change that, and has raised a $5.7 million Series A led by General Catalyst Partners (former VMware CTO Steve Herrod’s new home) to help fund its cause.

ParElastic sits in between the application and the underlying database and lets developers scale without having to resort to complicated sharding or maybe even moving the database back in-house where they can run it on a bigger server. Architecturally, Founder and CEO Ken Rugg told me, ParElastic’s Database Virtualization Engine is similar to a parallel database system, although it functions more like middleware that manages multiple database instances as one and is designed for operational rather than analytic workloads…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Pere Hospital.

Arguably, security is still one most significant concerns of Cloud customers. As more and more businesses continue to transition their mainstream Cloud-based I.T operations on Mobile-ready applications, it has opened the lid for security vulnerabilities in organizations.

Although, the adoption of Cloud and Mobile computing is getting bigger, with the majority of organizations and enterprises adopting this trend, it is, still, of immense importance for the general public to understand the consequences of any cyber-attack, as well as plan ahead to out-maneuver any such incidents…

Grazed from The Register. Author: Jack Clark.

Amazon has broadened the ways in which .NET users can fiddle with its platform-as-a-service cloud AWS Elastic Beanstalk. The expansion of the technology was announced on Tuesday and sees Elastic Beanstalk for .NET now support Amazon’s enterprise-focused Virtual Private Cloud technology. It follows an announcement by Amazon last week that saw it cut the cost of running Windows on its cloud by up to 26 per cent.

Elastic Beanstalk is Amazon’s free platform-as-a-service – a technology that taps into common IaaS tech like scalable storage and compute, while also automatically doing load balancing and resource provisioning…

Grazed from DeveloperTech. Author: James Bourne.

Enterprise cloud computing giants Salesforce.com has launched Salesforce Platform Mobile Services, a tool to help accelerate mobile app development for customers and partners on the Salesforce cloud platform. The platform, which runs Salesforce CRM and, according to the company, is home to over three million custom apps and a million developers, is of course the cornerstone of one of tech’s giants.

The majority of cloudy polls put Marc Benioff’s company near the top, most notably being crowned the number one software as a service (SaaS) player last month – bearing in mind Salesforce was one of the founding fathers in the SaaS space and one of its closest rivals, Oracle, was reluctant to initially use the term ‘cloud computing’…

Grazed from ERPCloudNews. Author: Patricia Jones.

Adoption rate of SaaS CRM is on a rise, especially, among small and medium businesses. According to a market survey the high adoption rate is specially driven by the cost advantages offered by cloud software solutions. Approximately 60% of the SMEs studied in the survey cited cost as the major factor for choosing web based CRM solutions in their organizations. A Gartner Hype report has mentioned that SaaS adoption is going to be 50% of all CRM adoptions by 2020 and one can safely assume that a large part of these adoptions will solely be based on budgetary advantages.

Since most of the small businesses operate on shoestring fund it is quite an attractive option for them to adopt hosted service solutions. The enterprise legacy software versions are expensive, take longer time to deploy and require a fully functioning IT infrastructure/team to keep them running…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Karen Goulart.

Mario Cruz understands an enterprise CIO’s reluctance to embrace Platform as a Service (PaaS). He used to be one of them. During his more than 20 years in IT, including eight years as CIO of Chicago-based Rewards Network Inc., he’s been around a few traditional data centers and the keeper of many legacy systems.

Now as the co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of startup Choose Digital, Cruz has harnessed his business to the cloud. He and partner Stephen Humphreys founded the company in early 2011 as a "white label" alternative to iTunes. In essence, Choose Digital is a digital supply chain for music, movies, TV shows, books and games. Their customers, which include United Airlines and Marriott, use Choose Digital’s system to render digital rewards for their respective customer loyalty programs while keeping their own branding and controlling their own user data…

Grazed from UC Strategies. Author: Editorial Staff.

An apology has been released by VMware in light of recent delays in getting users set up on the company’s Hybrid Cloud Evaluation, which is basically a “test drive” for its public cloud infrastructure operating in an anonymous partner’s data center. VMware’s vCloud Team said: “We’d like to apologize to our users for exceeding the target provisioning time for new accounts. For those who are ready to give it a try, we are making room for you.”

Last month, VMware began its free trial of the Hybrid Cloud Evaluation, and sources noted that the following error message appeared after signing up: “We were unable to log you in: Your vCloud service has not completed provisioning. If you recently signed up for service please wait at least 15 minutes for this to complete.” Although a target time was not given for provisioning the service, some would-be users of VMware’s services were still unable to log in after several days. The company noted that the huge influx of sign-ups were responsible for the delay, and the vCloud team said: “To meet that demand we are adding more capacity to get you up and running.”…

Grazed from NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Cbeyond Inc. (Nasdaq:CBEY), the technology ally to small and mid-sized businesses, today announced it is making it easier for existing customers to view, customize, manage and control their cloud computing services through a single portal – Cbeyond Online™, resulting in significant resource and time savings. The new on-demand, self-service functionality also allows Cbeyond’s customers to use the cloud to meet their dynamic business needs and serve their own customers more efficiently.

The Cbeyond Online portal now supports Cbeyond’s cloud service platform, including TotalCloud™ Data Center launched in October, 2012, and TotalCloud™ Phone System, launched in December 2012. Using this portal, all Cbeyond customers now have the ability to view computing, storage, and network utilization and performance reports, add real-time compute, storage and network capacity, as well as make changes to their cloud resources such as provision or resize their virtual machines…