Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Use of infrastructure as service is growing, but do users know what they’re doing in the cloud? Two critical analyses would suggest that they don’t. Cloudyn is one of several usage assessment and optimization firms that have been started to serve cloud customers. These new companies often make a basic online service available for free, upping the ante with monthly charges once users discover how much they can learn from the monitoring and diagnostic services.

Cloudyn and another such firm, Cloudability, for example, charge $49 a month for usage analysis and reporting. The two paired up at Cloud Connect 2013, a UBM Tech event in Santa Clara, Calif., to offer snapshots of their customers’ cloud practices and how those practices could be improved…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Jane McCallion.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider Rackspace has reignited its battle against alleged patent trolls, who it claims are stifling cloud innovation. The company is suing a patent assertion entity (PAE) named Parallel Iron that it claims is one America’s "most notorious patent trolls". During the last week of March, Parallel Iron sued Rackspace and 11 other defendants in a Delaware court for allegedly infringing three patents the PAE claims cover the use of the open source Hadoop Distributed File System.

In a blog post, Alan Schoenbaum, senior vice president, general counsel and secretary of Rackspace, said: “Parallel Iron is the latest in a string of shell companies created to do nothing more than assert patent-infringement claims as part of a typical patent troll scheme of pressuring companies to pay up or else face crippling litigation costs.”…

Grazed from SavvisDirect. Author: Editorial Staff.

It’s a good question if you really think about it. Software-as-a-Service or SaaS basically takes your traditional desktop software applications and moves them to a cloud computing platform, which is accessible via the public Internet. These applications are managed by third-party cloud providers. You access these applications generally via a website with a login.

Difference Between Standard Apps and Cloud Apps
With standard software applications, you need to purchase a software license or multiple ones. You generally have to renew these licenses on a yearly basis, and you must upgrade the software each time that a new version is released.

With SaaS, you buy a subscription from a third-party provider like savvisdirect. Subscriptions vary based on needs. For example, for one customer, the price is determined by the number of users while another customer’s price may be based on how much storage that they need. The point, however, is that you only pay for what you need, and the company is responsible for paying for the software upgrades. Because of this arrangement, you often see significant savings using SaaS as opposed to traditional apps…

Grazed from The Register. Author: Phil Muncaster.

Japanese ICT giant Fujitsu has announced plans to build out its cloud business with the acquisition of little-known French PaaS vendor RunMyProcess (RMP) and the development of a new Global Software Center in Silicon Valley. RunMyProcess, a member of the Cloud Alliance for Google Apps, essentially allows customers to build and deploy workflow apps in the cloud using simple drag and drop functionality.

A major selling point of the firm, which Fujitsu describes as providing “integration Platform as a Service” (iPaaS), is in allowing customers to integrate their processes with a range of both SaaS and on-premise apps, thanks to over 1,000 so-called “connectors”…

GigaSpaces Technologies has developed infrastructure solutions for more than a decade and in recent years has been enabling Big Data solutions as well. The company’s latest platform release – XAP 9.5 – helps organizations that need to process Big Data fast. XAP harnesses the power of in-memory computing to enable enterprise applications to function better, whether in terms of speed, reliability, scalability or other business-critical requirements. With the new version of XAP, increased focus has been placed on real-time processing of big data streams, through improved data grid performance, better manageability and end-user visibility, and integration with other parts of your Big Data stack – in this version, integration with Cassandra.

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Barb Darrow.

Amazon and Google trade price cuts. Again

The incumbent public cloud champ and its wanna-be rival took turns cutting prices again last week.  Amazon Web Services sliced the price on Windows on-demand EC2 instances by 26  percent – although as the price still depends on region. That move came within hours of Google cutting prices of most of its GCE instances by an average of 4 percent — that little tidbit was buried in larger news that Google is opening up access to Google Compute Engine to any customer willing to pay $400 a month for Google Gold Support.

But because the AWS price cuts were for Windows, that move may have been directed at Microsoft Windows Azure more than Google, but why quibble? NetworkWorld has more as does the Motley Fool.   ProfitBricks, another cloud contender, extended its scale up vs. scale out cloud pitch last week as well, making its biggest instance bigger. The new super-duper instance weighs in at 62 cores and 240GB of RAM up from 48 cores and 196GB of RAM…

Grazed from CorrelSense.  Author: PR Announcement.

Correlsense, an application management and IT monitoring software provider, today announced it is partnering with Red Hat to focus on collaboration around Red Hat’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, OpenShift. This partnership allows OpenShift customers and community access to SharePath, a leading application performance management solution. By using the OpenShift platform and SharePath together, both developers and IT operations professionals will have the ability to manage applications from development, through testing, deployment and in production.

Since its launch, developers have leveraged OpenShift for deploying PaaS-based applications in a streamlined and efficient manner. Users can upload their Java, Ruby, PHP, Perl, Python or Node.js code and leave the configuration, management and scaling headaches behind. With the application monitoring capabilities of SharePath, IT operations and development can use one tool to manage the performance of their applications after deployment. SharePath traces 100% of user transactions across multiple tiers and stacks, auto-detects interdependencies, and correlates the performance data on a single dashboard in real time…

Grazed from CompositeCode.  Author: Editorial Staff.

For a quick recap of last years Deploycon & related talks, check out my “Day #3 => DeployCon && Enterprise && Data Gravity” entry from last year.  PaaS Systems aren’t always effectively distributed. Heroku has fallen over every time east-1 has gone down at AWS. Not that I’m saying they’ve done bad, just pointing that out. With Cloud Foundry, there’s several key SPOFs (Single Points of Failure), and with all PaaS Systems the data tier is often the neglected pairing of the system. I’ve been wanting to write about this for a few months now and Deploycon has lit a fire for me to do just that.

Deploycon – “Platform Services and Developer Expectations”

I’m on a panel at Deploycon titled “Platform Services and Developer Expectations” and this leads right back around to that. This SPOF issue is concerning to me as PaaS Providers talk up the offerings more and more with little light actually shone on this issue. In some ways each is moving away form their respective SPOFs, but overall they’re all pretty prevalent throughout. For security, each has a non-distributed database, which technically needs backed up still – no clear replication or other mechanisms setup to ensure data integrity in a failure situation. Of course, the huge saving grace with a PaaS, is that if the overall system goes down or a SPOF blows up, all the existing deployed applications will generally continue to run. Unless of course the routing and networking are also SPOF. This is the largest glaring concern with PaaS Systems that I see today….

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Patrick Burke.

Gartner has been looking toward the future, and what it sees is a future in the cloud.  Gartner believes that service-led solutions – software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) – will usurp more traditional sourcing methods by 2015.

IT companies will need to "bridge legacy offerings and new services" to pave a way to the cloud for service providers, according to an article on CloudComputingNews.net.  Cloud services appear to be growing at a much quicker rate than other segments of the IT services market. Hardware and software support will grow slowly compared to IaaS and BPaaS (business process as a service), which will grow 13.1% and 47.3% in 2013, according to Gartner…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Bridget Botelho.

Any financial adviser will tell you it’s better to own than to lease, but that pragmatism is ignored when it comes to cloud computing.  More and more companies pay cloud providers monthly subscription fees for instant access to the latest and greatest infrastructure, platforms and applications that they can’t afford to buy outright. The market for leased IT platforms, applications and operations is so hot right now that companies can get just about anything as a service (XaaS) — and they seek out those services with the hope of lowering IT expenses.

Nearly three quarters — 73% — of IT pros using public cloud services listed cost savings as the primary reason, according to a 2012 TechTarget survey of 1,500 IT professionals…