Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

In China, “cloud computing” means something a lot different than it does in the United States. Because of cultural, regulatory and linguistic issues, private clouds are the hot topic while public cloud services (e.g., Amazon Web Services or any of the myriad SaaS startups in the United States) have little to no presence. This situation can make it tough for U.S. IT companies to make a strong cloud play in China, leaving the door open for Chinese startups to define the technologies that will sate Chinese companies’ immense appetite for cloud computing and shape the country’s nascent cloud ecosystem.

In December, I spent 11 days in Beijing, speaking at conferences and meeting lots of people. Across two whole days at different locations — coffee shop/co-working space Garage Cafe and startup investor/adviser/office provider Cloud Valley (see disclosure) — I met with about a dozen startups doing everything from social media marketing on Weibo to building solid-state drives. Here are seven of the cloud computing companies I met, all trying to do some progressive things. They don’t necessarily look like what you’d expect to come out of Silicon Valley, but their chances for success probably don’t depend on meeting American expectations…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Eric Lundquist.

Six months ago, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel asked CIO Brett Goldstein to bring the Windy City into the digital age. The most visible example of Goldstein’s digital sprint came in the first week of January with an announcement that the city was shifting its 30,000 employees to cloud-based email and desktop applications based on the Microsoft 365 office cloud.

Cloud computing, which often seems too much hype and too little reality, is starting to capture real customers. And government organizations, cities in particular, are paying attention and starting to sign up for cloud services. Chicago, a city not known for being trendy for trend’s sake, is the latest to make a big cloud commitment…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Netflix open sourced the code to Janitor Monkey, a tool it uses to automate the deletion of unused Amazon Web Services resources. It’s easy to spin up cloud compute instances, but not so easy to shut them down as they fall into disuse.

Those Netflix engineers are at it again — releasing source code to an in-house tool they use to keep their Amazon Web Services pared down and tidy. Janitor Monkey is a tool they use to automate the detection and clean up of unused AWS resources. The advantage of public cloud infrastructure is it’s so easy to spin up new compute instances and add storage willy nilly but not so easy to keep track of those resources as they fall into disuse. That leads to a profusion of under-utilized or totally unused resources — the untidy closet aspect of cloud computing…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

On Christmas Eve, Amazon Web services experienced an outage at its Northern Virginia data center. In a prompt follow up, it issued an explanation on Dec. 29, apologized to customers and said it wouldn’t happen again. It was the fourth outage of the year in its most heavily trafficked data center complex.

Explanations in the press of what happened, based on the Dec. 29 statement, were relatively brief. The Wall Street Journal, for example, stated that Amazon spokesmen blamed the outage "on a developer who accidentally deleted some key data … Amazon said the disruption affected its Elastic Load Balancing Service, which distributes incoming data from applications to be handled by different computing hardware."…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Jim Ditmore.

We’re long into the hype cycle of cloud computing. That means clear criteria to assess and evaluate the different options are critical. Which of the many cloud approaches should medium to large enterprises take to optimize their data center operations?

Typically, the cloud is envisioned as an accessible and low-cost compute utility in the sky that’s always available. Despite this lofty promise, companies will need to select and build their cloud environment carefully to avoid fracturing their computing capabilities, locking themselves into a single, higher-cost environment, diminishing their ability to differentiate themselves and gain competitive advantage — or all three…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Dan Kuznetsky.

Floyd Strimling, VP Community, Technical Evangelist for Zenoss, stopped by a while ago to speak about his opinions on the topics of OpenStack, Google App Engine versus Amazon Web Service, and different approaches to open source projects he’s seen companies adopt. Our conversation started by focusing on cloud computing frameworks and the approaches organizations are using to deploy their applications. I’m not going to attempt to capture all of the thoughts that were discussed. Here is a short summary:

1. Often cloud computing services are being selected based upon the the expected costs rather than what the service will do for the organization. These perceptions often are developed by business decision makers without the help of IT support…

Grazed from Daily Commerical News. Author: Peter Kenter.

Cloud computing is an esoteric name for a simple concept. Instead of relying on one’s own hardware and software for a suite of services, users rely on software, information storage and computing resources accessed over the Internet.

Construction companies, however, have been slow to make use of cloud technology, says James Benham, founder and president of JB Knowledge Technologies, Inc., a Texas-based information technology services provider, focusing on the construction, real estate, risk and insurance industries. “With cloud computing, you can access the digital information you need from anywhere, any time through any device — from mobile devices to the computer at home, to the computer at your desk,” says Benham…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum

Although federal agencies have expanded their use of cloud services, many challenges remain for full implementation, says Citizens Against Government Waste in its 2012 review of the federal cloud efforts.

There is some good news. According to a 2012 survey of federal civilian and defense personnel, $5.5 billion had been saved through the use of cloud computing technology. However, the survey respondents also stated that wider cloud adoption could have saved as much as $12 billion…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

Apple reportedly wants to buy Waze to help fix its giant maps gaffe but according to what TechCrunch heard it doesn’t want to spend the $750 million asking price. It’s reportedly offering $400 million plus $100 million in incentives.

The three-year-old Israeli-born Waze uses crowdsourcing to plot routes around traffic jams and in the process create real-time maps.
It’s said to have shaved five minute off the daily commute in Israel…