Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Netflix has a gift for anybody who needs to ensure their cloud-hosted applications keep running even if some of the virtual servers on which they’re running die. It’s called a Chaos Monkey — but don’t worry, this monkey is very tameable and is now open source.

The video rental and streaming giant is one of the world’s biggest consumer of cloud computing resources — it hosts the majority of its infrastructure on the Amazon Web Services cloud — and Netflix developed Chaos Monkey as a method for ensuring that its system is capable of healing itself or continuing to run should instances fail. “Over the last year,” Netflix cloud engineers Cory Bennett and Ariel Tseitlin wrote in a blog post announcing the open source version, “Chaos Monkey has terminated over 65,000 instances running in our production and testing environments. Most of the time nobody notices, but we continue to find surprises caused by Chaos Monkey which allows us to isolate and resolve them so they don’t happen again.”…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Thomas J. Trappler.

When contracting for cloud-computing services, one challenge is that there may be more parties involved than your company and the cloud vendor. The vendor might outsource some of the services covered in the contract, or it could end up under different ownership after a merger or acquisition. On the client end, you might choose to work with a cloud broker. Because the introduction of third parties can increase risk, it’s essential for potential cloud clients to identify third parties before adopting a cloud service, thoroughly understand their roles and ensure that their responsibilities are effectively addressed in the contract.
Outsourcing

You need to know whether your cloud-computing vendor is itself outsourcing to another cloud-computing vendor. For example, a SaaS vendor, such as Dropbox, could be running its service in the data center of a third-party IaaS vendor, such as Amazon Web Services. This can increase the complexity of a cloud-computing contract, especially in determining which vendor is responsible for which action. To mitigate risk, the contract should obligate the cloud vendor to do the following:…

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

A week ago VMware said it was buying Nicira for $1.26 billion for its cloudy software-defined network virtualization. Monday morning Oracle said it’s buying Xsigo Systems for its cloudy software-defined network virtualization.

Oracle’s not saying what it’s paying and it’s unclear how much funding the eight-year-old company took in from VCs like Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, Greylock Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners.

Like the Nicira acquisition, Xsigo in Oracle’s hands threatens Cisco and Juniper…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

The public cloud is nearly uniformly an Intel x86 instruction set environment. But when Xerox quietly launched public cloud services aimed toward small and midsize business (SMB) users in early January, it needed to host IBM iSeries (the former AS/400) and IBM Power Systems AIX servers, as well as those from Intel and AMD.

Previously, Xerox’s services unit had carried some of its existing IT services customers forward into its infrastructure-as-a-service that it had been building out over 24 months. By the time of the Jan. 3 announcement, it had five data centers in the United States, one in Telford, United Kingdom; and one in Kuala Lumpur, Malayasia. Its U.S. locations are: Dallas, Pittsburgh, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, and Tarrytown, Pa., outside Philadelphia. The latter two are organized as a high availability cluster, with one site backing the other up.

"There’s a lot of midsized businesses on midrange equipment that’s getting fairly old, and they’re looking for alternatives" to buying another round of proprietary servers, said Rob Schilperoort, Xerox’s VP of cloud product management, in an interview…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Eosensa, a leading information security professional services firm, today announced the availability of a new report that provides critical insights to enterprises that are seeking ways to ensure the security and data-privacy protection for their sensitive data being stored and processed in public cloud environments. The report, entitled "Protecting Sensitive Data In The Cloud," is available as a free download from www.eosensa.com . Data Privacy, Compliance, and IT Security professionals will find valuable information in the report that will assist them in designing and implementing the appropriate data protection strategies for their organizations.

As Security, Privacy and Risk professionals work with their business line partners to enable their companies to take advantage of cloud-based SaaS applications, they face a number of significant challenges. Issues such as Data Residency, which specifies that sensitive data needs to remain within specified geographic location, or compliance mandates such as those seen in ITAR, HIPAA and PCI DSS, which require certain data types to be protected in specific ways, make the move to the cloud a complicated proposition in many instances…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Eric Knorr.

Just 16 months ago, Leo Apotheker, the short-lived CEO of HP [1], proclaimed that HP would be a leader in cloud computing. With little to show in the way of HP cloud products or services, no one was quite sure what Apotheker was talking about.

Flash-forward to today, and HP has not only a real cloud strategy, but also a public cloud IaaS (infrastructure as a service) play, HP Cloud [2], which might eventually rival Amazon Web Services [3]. It also has Zorawar "Biri" Singh, senior vice president and GM of HP Cloud Services, to keep HP Cloud and various other cloud services and solutions on track.

This is not Singh’s first cloud gig — prior to arriving at HP, he served as vice president of Cloud Computing for IBM. In his new position, Singh sees the opportunity to couple HP’s pure-play IaaS cloud with private HP clouds that will "integrate very naturally" with each other. In that hybrid approach, Singh relies on OpenStack, the open source cloud operating system [9], to provide the underpinning for HP’s public and private cloud offerings…

Grazed from ITWeb. Author: Craig Neill.

Cloud computing has been around almost since the dawn of the Internet, albeit in different guises. Today, SaaS (software as a service), IaaS (infrastructure as a service), CaaS (computing as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service) have come about as the Internet has evolved from a content and e-commerce platform into a rich and abundant high-speed network, capable of high-volume, multi-tenant, high-bandwidth, distributed applications.

This works very well for the countries at the top of the bandwidth availability curve, but with South Africa at number 40, according to 2010 statistics, it is not surprising that the country has not been able to ride the wave of cloud computing efficiency in the application space, like the rest of the world…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jamie Yap.

Cloud computing has placed additional emphasis on communication and cooperation between enterprise developers and IT operations in order for the DevOps model to work and for business needs to be met effectively, analysts say.

Michael Azoff, principal analyst at Ovum, noted that broadly speaking, DevOps refers to the collaboration, communication, and coordination between developers and IT operations. The DevOps movement first emerged around 2009 and while many companies have already adopted the methodology, there are as many organizations which still find it a new concept, he added.

The importance of DevOps also has grown over time, particularly to catch up with today’s commercial landscape which is more competitive, fast-paced, and digitized, added Ray Wang, principal analyst and CEO of Constellation Research…

Grazed from eChannelline. Author: Mark Cox.

As the use of the Cloud grows, so do its complications. The increasingly integral role of cloud computing in IT operations is accompanied by significant change and disruption for cloud users, their IT staffs and their technology providers, according to new research from IT trade association Dell CompTIA.

Few of the data in the study — CompTIA’s Third Annual Trends in Cloud Computing report — will surprise. For instance, the general perception of cloud computing remains on an upward trend. 85% of respondents feel "more positive" or "significantly more positive about cloud computing than they did last year, compared to 72% in the 2011 study with the same sentiment. The main reason for the increase was the Cloud’s enabling of other business processes, something that both IT staff and business staff ranked highly.

The study also found that more than eight in 10 companies currently use some form of cloud solution, and more than half plan to increase cloud investments by 10% or more in 2012. This popularity is driving both IT and business staff to experiment with cloud options and to re-examine the role and functions of IT…

Grazed from CSO. Author: Puneet Kukreja.

As the world of cloud computing grows and becomes part of organisational growth strategies, procurement of cloud computing services has also reached front of mind.

Information security is a key pain-point for organisations looking to take up and rapidly consume cloud services, and with good reason. Leading cloud services providers—namely Rackspace, Google Apps and Microsoft Azure have had their fair share of outages in the past 18 months with Amazon EC2 being the latest, an outage that lasted over 45 hours.

Now traditionally, contracts have been the realm of procurement, accounting, legal or sourcing functions. Technologists and, more specifically, information security professionals kept a safe distance from them primarily because they are boring and mind numbing. But with cloud services consumption on the rise and organisations’ data assets and computing capability being rapidly cloud sourced, concern for service levels—data security, data leakage, data access, scalability, and security compliance to policies and standards—have been magnified…