Grazed from TechCrunch.  Author: Alexander Haislip.

 Cloud computing has become a lot like the Hotel California: Once you pick a provider you can check out anytime you want – but you can never leave.

You’ve no doubt heard of “cloud lock-in,” the concept that once you architect and optimize your systems on a single infrastructure seller you’re effectively stuck with the choice. It’s an unattractive idea, especially in an industry moving as quickly as cloud computing is.

And the companies paying real money for cloud computing – signing eight- and nine-figure annual contracts – they’re the ones looking for alternatives. They know they’re going to get discounts now that HP, Microsoft, Google and Dell are all in the cloud game…

Grazed from TheNextWeb. Author: Josh Ong.

We’ve already talked at length about the division between the Chinese Internet and the rest of the world. It’s a schism that has broad-reaching effects on censorship and culture, and it also has a heavy impact on the development of the Chinese cloud industry.

That industry, like its nebulous namesake, is itself vague and undefined. These days it has become such a buzzword that almost anything related to the Internet will have the label slapped onto it. As such, in our survey of the Chinese cloud industry, we’re going to look at several different cross-sections, from back-end computing infrastructure to personal storage…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Bob Prince Alo.

Amazon has dropped prices on its popular cloud database servers and added a range of rentable hardware that customers can use to host cloud technology and related platforms. The cloud computing juggernaut lost some popularity in the wake of power outages that received its fair share of media coverage earlier this year. Amazon hopes to regain its market share by reducing prices and expanding product lines.

Amazon’s price cuts comes amid a backdrop of increasingly steep competition from other cloud vendors like Microsoft and Oracle. Lower prices and diversified cloud products attract many small and midsize firms to cloud solutions…

Grazed from CBROnline. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud based browser could allow mobile devices like smartphones with limited computing power to perform large scale computing tasks. Researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of Oregon have found a new way of performing large scale computing tasks through cloud based browsers.

The researchers claimed that the cloud based browser could allow mobile devices like smartphones with limited computing power to perform large scale computing tasks. Cloud browser can create a web interface in cloud though which computing tasks can be performed in the cloud instead of performing it on the devices…

Grazed from IDC. Author: Editorial Staff.

The increasingly rapid evolution of both cloud services and of user understanding of its benefits and use modes in 2012 pushed consumption of cloud services to business managers as well as IT managers. As we move into 2013, International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts this evolution to accelerate and business buyers to further test the capabilities of the available services and their CIOs to deliver them.

By 2016, IDC envisages a very different scenario, where cloud services have become an everyday sourcing option for the CIO and LOB manager alike, forcing change on both the infrastructure vendors, the owners of business IP and the consumers of cloud services and technologies…

Grazed from ChipDesignMag. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing offers many challenges including the division of graphic-processing IP and rendering tasks between the mobile device and cloud-based servers.

Cloud computing has created new challenges for system designers in terms of the division of functionality between the mobile device and the cloud. This division will directly affect the design of system-on-a-chip (SoC) processors and graphic processing units (GPUs). Autodesk Media & Entertainment Tech Innovators asked the experts at Imagination Technologies and AMD to address the question of graphic processing and rendering partitioned between mobile devices and cloud-based servers. The answer, as is so often the case, depends on the use.

By and large, we think that the cost, silicon area, and power budget of our GPUs makes them efficient enough to be in the device rather than the cloud. This is especially true of the mobile space and most consumer devices…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

According to Amazon Web Services Chief Data Scientist Matt Wood, big data and cloud computing are nearly a match made in heaven. Limitless, on-demand and inexpensive resources open up new worlds of possibility, and a central platform makes it easy for communities to share huge datasets.

For Amazon Web Services Chief Data Scientist Matt Wood, the day isn’t filled performing data alchemy on behalf of his employer; he’s entertaining its customers. Wood helps AWS users build big data architectures that use the company’s cloud computing resources, and then take what he learns about those users’ needs and turn them into products — such as the Data Pipeline Service and Redshift data warehouse AWS announced this week. He and I sat down this week at AWS’s inaugural Re: Invent conference and talked about many things, including what he’s seen in the field and where cloud-based big data efforts are headed. Here are the highlights…

Grazed from Phys.org. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing offers an on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable resources; big data explores large and complex pools of information and requires novel approaches to meet the associated computing and storage requirements. The workshop will focus on the intersection of the two—the meeting is part of the traditional semi-annual cloud computing forum and workshop series with the additional dimension of big data and its relation with and influence on cloud platforms and cloud computing. "Cloud computing and big data are each powerful trends.

Together they can be even more powerful and that’s why we’re hosting this workshop," said Chuck Romine, director of the NIST Information Technology Laboratory. "The cloud can make big data accessible to those who can’t take advantage today. In turn, big data opens doors to discovery, innovation, and entrepreneurship that are inaccessible at conventional data scales."…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Peter Cohen.

If you’re a company trying to lower the cost of running your computers, the idea of sending it to the cloud could be a dream come true. But that’s only the case if the cloud’s promise of lower operating costs does not come at too high a price.

That high price, of course, is that once its systems operate on the cloud, the company loses its ability to control its own computing capabilities — and has the unintended, but nonetheless painful result of suffering security problems and diminished service quality that makes the company wish that it had never taken the fateful step of putting its computing on the cloud…

Grazed from ITWeb. Author: Martin May.

As most IT industry analysts will confirm, new developments in bring-your-own-device (BYOD) technologies, as well as advancements in public and private clouds, are among the top trends that will be strategic for most organisations in 2013.

A public cloud is one based on the standard cloud computing model in which a service provider makes resources, such as applications and storage, available over the Internet. The public cloud is available to private as well as corporate users…