Grazed from Ubergizmo.  Author: Hubert Nguyen.

“The Cloud: is a term that most people have heard of, and many of us use cloud services daily. However, it’s fair to say many others are still using computing the old-fashion way. At times, it may sound like a marketing gimmick, but “cloud computing” is real and it can bring real value to just about everyone who has an internet connection whether it is on a computer, mobile devices and preferably all at the same time! In this article, we are looking at four critical aspect of your digital life that can be improved using cloud services: data access and organization, creative collaboration, data protection and gaming.

What is Cloud Computing?

First of all, let’s define what we mean by “cloud computing”: it is the use of resources that are delivered as a service over a network (the Internet, most of the time). Cloud infrastructure abstracts the hardware to the point that its use can be invoiced based on actual usage (pay for the computer cycles, storage, bandwidth you use). This has allowed a large number of Internet services to be created since the cost of using a cloud infrastructure is much lower than the previous alternative: building and owning the infrastructure. A huge number of startups have been created because of the improved economics…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Joe Weinman.

Netflix recently announced the $100,000 Netflix Cloud Prize, dedicated to advancing cloud computing in 10 categories. (Disclosure: I am one of the prize judges.) Another InformationWeek article argued that Netflix is "ruining cloud computing" by focusing its innovation in a way the author, Joe Masters Emison, is concerned could "derail real IaaS competition." In my view, Netflix is free to select whichever partners they choose, and as far as the Netflix Cloud Prize is concerned, more companies should be looking to mimic its approach: leveraging the economics of contests, enhancing their own services and sharing core technology advances with everyone.

The fundamental philosophy underlying contests such as these is what U.C. Berkeley professor Henry Chesbrough terms open innovation. It’s open, not restricted to a company’s internal R&D staff, and it’s innovation, not merely the repetitive execution of standard processes…

Grazed from Wall Stree Journal.  Author: Tom Loftus.

Since the 2006 debut of Amazon.com Inc. ’s Amazon Web Services, more and more IT departments have caught on to the idea of renting online computing horsepower to test or develop business applications, host corporate human resources data and run Big Data-type analysis, among other tasks.  The market for public cloud services, which are open to anyone who wants to use them, is now a $40 billion business, according to IDC.

Recent price battles between Amazon Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. could lead customers to believe that competing cloud vendors, who make many similar promises, differentiate themselves in few ways beyond price. But Amazon and, to a lesser extent, Microsoft provide customers with certain amenities that Google’s new offering, at the moment,  does not…

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Thomas J. Trappler.

The fact that regulations evolve at a much slower pace than cloud computing technologies can lead to confusion regarding how to meet regulatory requirements in the cloud. If a client moves a regulated function to the cloud and later falls out of compliance due to a shortcoming on the cloud vendor’s part, the client remains accountable. So it’s essential to have as much clarity on these issues as possible. Recognizing this challenge with regards to the handling of credit card data, the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council has recently issued guidance on how to apply PCI Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) in the cloud.

PCI DSS applies to all organizations that hold, process or exchange credit card information. It was created to help ensure that consumers are not exposed to potential financial or identity fraud and theft. To accomplish this, PCI DSS provides a payment card data security framework that organizations deploy to prevent, detect and respond to security incidents. PCI DSS is not a law, and the PCI Security Standards Council doesn’t directly impose any consequences for non-compliance, but the negative repercussions of non-compliance can include lawsuits, insurance claims, canceled accounts, payment card issuer fines and government fines. To ensure none of this happens to you when processing credit cards in the cloud, it’s important to understand this new PCI DSS guidance…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Chris Kenealy.

1. Slowly becoming the next Person on a Hoarders Documentary

There are many times where I find myself sitting at home writing in my dream journal about pointless concepts and not working. This might be because people think reading anything these days that is not a description attached to a streaming video has become as glamorous as a cassette tape of Westboro Baptist Church’s Sunday morning services. One concept in particular I have been fascinating about is what if your email account could manifest itself into a house. Now bear with me, taking how many emails you have, how valuable each one is, and how they are stored I wonder if this house made by your email account would look like a Cleaver Family home – all tidy, organized, and neat where everything has its place, and everyplace has its thing. I find it hard to believe that would be the case purely on how my email looks.

My email house would be an old crazy cat lady’s home with piles upon piles of empty cat food bags stacking up over the years never cleaning up and just letting it fall into the background. The same thing can be said about the cloud. Let me prove it, let me know if you have, “Step by Step,” from New Kids on the Block stored on your cloud. Are you holding onto past parts of you that you never look or relate to anymore? Well then take it off it is 2013 it is time to do some spring cleaning! Well, actually give “Step by Step,” one more listen. Well, okay just keep that song, but only that album. To be perfectly honest I actually quit writing this article to go listen to, “Step by Step,” on YouTube. Ehhhh, I am such a hypocrite who cannot stop humming that song now…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

In the past week, a story that was originally reported in InformationWeek, among other places, said PayPal was adopting OpenStack. Then the story took on a life of its own — as some outlets reported that eBay was booting VMware off 80,000 servers and replacing it with OpenStack. Let’s examine what conclusions can be drawn about this saga — and VMware’s future.

When InformationWeek first asked a PayPal spokesman, Saran Mandair, about PayPal’s plans, he responded with a minimum of information, omitting any reference to replacing VMware. Boris Renski, a spokesman for the consultant on the project, Mirantis, was theoretically in a position to know the scope of PayPal’s plans and he offered the "80,000-servers conversion" line. InformationWeek declined to report something PayPal itself was unwilling to say, even though a seemingly knowledgeable source was claiming it…

Grazed from ReadWriteWeb. Author: Scott Geng.

It’s no secret that the public cloud market has been growing like gangbusters. In fact, a recent Gartner study found spending on public cloud services is growing at more than 28% per year and private cloud spending is three times that of public cloud. That projects total cloud spending in 2016 to hit $240 billion. Cloud computing (both public and private) will pave the way forward for how companies will deploy new IT services. Lower price points will help those organizations innovate faster, launch new services more quickly, be more responsive to market conditions and evolve their own business models.

Management And Specialization

The focus in the industry over the past few years has been on the core cloud management services of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. But to truly understand how cloud computing is evolving you have to dive deep below the surface. Two major developments are driving the evolution of cloud: Management and Specialization. In the management space, innovations like self-service portals have given IT shops and end-users a much-preferred way to request and consume services. Specialization, meanwhile, is a natural development of any market. A few of the specialized services that will contribute significantly to the adoption of cloud based products and services in 2013 include Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), Metal-as-a-Service (MaaS) and DisasterRecovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS)…

Grazed from Data Center Knowledge. Author: David Bills.

This article kicks off a three-part series on designing for dependability. Today I will provide context for the series, and outline the challenges facing all cloud service providers as they strive to provide highly available services. In the second article of the series, David Gauthier, director of data center architecture at Microsoft, will discuss the journey that Microsoft is on in our own data centers, and how software resiliency has become more and more critical in the move to cloud-scale data centers. Finally, in the last piece, I will discuss cultural shift and evolving engineering principles that Microsoft is pursuing to help improve the dependability of the services we offer.

Matching the Reliability to the Demand

As the adoption of cloud computing continues to grow, expectations for utility-grade service availability remain high. Consumers demand access 24 hours a day, seven days a week to their digital lives, and outages can have a significant negative impact on a company’s financial health or brand equity. But the complex nature of cloud computing means that cloud service providers, regardless of whether they sell offerings for infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), or software as a service (SaaS), need to be mindful that things will go wrong — because it’s not a case of “if things will go wrong,” it’s strictly a matter of “when.”…

Grazed from Technorati. Author: Andre Bourque.

What is DevOps?

The proliferation of mobile and web applications has had a dramatic impact on how applications are developed, the internal platforms that support that development, and the organizational teams involved. Today’s developers want real-time access to the latest computing and storage resources. At the same time, they need support for minor app updates. On the other hand, IT teams demand scalability, stability and reliability.

Because of this, enterprise organizations have placed more focus on creating new divisions to produce deep cross-departmental integration between IT support, QA, and development teams. These Development-Operations (DevOps) resources serve to help an organization quickly produce software products and services. In a broader sense, the DevOps approach is one that promotes better communication between the two teams…