Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Ted Samson.

Amazon Web Services has once again found itself in the unenviable position of being the poster-boy-turned-whipping-boy for the cloud computing world due to another high-profile service disruption that severely slowed down or knocked out a handful of heavily trafficked websites and services, including Netflix, Reddit, Airbnb, imgur, Pinterest, Heroku, and Foursquare. Like clockwork, the outage has generated a healthy debate around the blogosphere as to whether this most recent downtime spells doom for the cloud in general or for Amazon in particular, or whether affected AWS users accept a share of the blame for taking the cheap route and signing up for the bare-bones, single-region AWS services to host their mission-critical services.

AWS confirmed on its status page at 11:11 p.m. PT yesterday that it had experienced "degraded performance for a small number of EBS (Elastic Beanstalk Service) volumes." The page said that the issue was restricted to a single Availability Zone within the U.S.-East-1 Region, which is in Northern Virginia…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

With a difficult job market continuing in 2013, Certifications are a must for IT employment and here are the Certifications to have this coming year:

1. MCSA: Windows 2012 Server This certification provides the information on how to install, maintain, and manage the Windows 2012 Server Operating System. Windows Server powers many of the worlds’ largest datacenters, enables small businesses around the world, and delivers value to organizations of all sizes in between. Windows Server 2012 redefines the server category, delivering hundreds of new features and enhancements spanning virtualization, networking, storage, user experience, cloud computing, automation, and more. Simply put, Windows Server 2012 helps transform IT operations to reduce costs and deliver a whole new level of business value.

2. MCSE: Private Cloud

Companies are looking for IT professionals who can help them build private cloud solutions to optimize IT service delivery…

Grazed from Trefis. Author: Editorial Staff.

EMC (NYSE:EMC) is due to release its Q3 earnings on October 24. Last quarter it reported consolidated revenue of $5.31 billion, a 10% increase y-o-y driven by the growth in Big Data and cloud computing with high-end and mid-end storage network revenues growing by 7%. This is also the tenth consecutive quarter of double digit y-o-y revenue growth for EMC.

The company generated operating cash flows of $1.24 billion and free cash flows of $958 million, a y-o-y increase of 16% and 36%, respectively. It has maintained its outlook for FY 2012 at $22 billion in revenues. [1] We highlight some of its key business drivers and what to expect from the company in 2012…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Why do tech-savvy companies like Heroku, Pinterest, AirBNB, Instagram, Reddit, Flipboard, and FourSquare keep so much of their computing horsepower running on Amazon’s aging US-East infrastructure given its problematic track record? US-East experienced big problems again Monday, impacting those sites and more. The latest snafu comes after other outages in June and earlier.

Why they’re sticking with US-East — especially since Amazon itself preaches distribution of loads across availability zones and geographic regions — is the multimillion dollar question that no one at these companies is addressing publicly. But there are pretty safe bets as to their reasons. For one thing, Ashburn, VA-based US-East came online in 2006 and is Amazon’s oldest and biggest data center (or set of data centers).That’s why lot of big, legacy accounts run there. Moving applications and workloads is complicated and expensive given data transfer fees. Face it, inertia hits us all — take a look at your own closets and you’ll probably agree. Moving is just not easy. Or fun…

Grazed from Executive Biz. Author: Ross Wilkers.

CGI Federal will transition the Federal Trade Commission‘s public websites to a cloud computing infrastructure under a five-year, $3.5 million contract. The company said it won the contract through the General Services Administration‘s Infrastructure as a Service blanket purchase agreement, through which the company delivers certified cloud services to the government.

“The demand for cloud continues to grow as agencies seek to implement affordable solutions that have increased security, provide more availability, and have better performance,” said Toni Townes-Whitley, a senior vice president…

Grazed from Information Week. Author: Charles Babcock.

Cloud computing customers tend to view it as a vehicle for absorbing their websites’ or other public-facing applications’ heavy traffic periods. But Amazon appears to be increasingly successful at getting more of them to use it for long-term, steady-state purposes.

The data is skimpy, and Amazon Web Services wouldn’t divulge how much of its business is now based on Reserved Instance versus on-demand servers. On-demand servers are ordered up without prior notice; they start and stop whenever the customer wants. Reserved Instances, available since 2009, are lined up through one- or three-year agreements in exchange for an upfront payment. Reserved Instances don’t have to run continuously for that length of time, although one of the options for purchasing them, heavy utilization, assumes that they run most of the time…