Grazed from Wired. Author: Cade Metz.

Google started work on the Google Compute Engine over a year and a half ago, and it was all Peter Magnusson could do to keep his mouth shut.

Magnusson is the director of engineering for Compute Engine’s sister service, Google App Engine, and over the past 18 months, as he spoke at various conferences and chatted with various software developers about Google’s place in the world of cloud computing, he couldn’t quite explain how serious the company is about competing with Amazon’s massively popular Elastic Compute Cloud and other commercial services that seek to reinvent the way online applications are built and operated.

Google entered the cloud computing game back in 2008, when it unveiled Google App Engine, a service that lets outside software developers build and host applications atop the same sweeping infrastructure that runs Google’s own web services, such as Google Search and Gmail…

Grazed from LiveMint. Author: Editorial Staff.

With the advent of cloud computing, the Web is no longer used only as an application, but as a data provisioning system. Dropbox is one of the most popular tools available today for online file saving and syncing, and is one of the first steps towards full-scale cloud computing (true cloud would have the computer as only an input-output device; with Dropbox the storage and processing of your files happens on your own computer, and copies are saved online).

Dropbox allows its users to store at least 2 GB of free data, and has a number of incentives to add more free storage. In addition, there are paid data plans as well, with 50 GB costing $99 (Rs. 5,425) per year. You can access your data from any device connected to the Internet, using the Dropbox clients for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and even the mobile clients for iOS, Android and BlackBerry phones. Here are things you don’t already know about Dropbox…

Grazed from The Motley Fool. Author: Daniel Ferry.

Enterprise software is typically a staid field. Customers in this industry tend to be sticky: businesses often stay with their incumbent provider due to the high switching costs of retraining staff and IT departments for a new system. This has been especially true while business software required physical installation on local machines.

However, as storage and processing increasingly takes to the cloud, companies are rethinking their software needs. Cloud computing is typically more efficient, as the machines that actually store and compute data in the cloud are far more powerful than local machines. It’s probably inevitable that most, if not all, enterprise customers will eventually migrate to the cloud. This creates a rare juncture for customers to choose new enterprise software en masse. In an industry with high customer retention rates, capturing a big market share today pays off well into the future. The rush for cloud computing customers therefore resembles an Old West-style race for prospectors to stake their claim in gold country…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Like it or not, sweeping software bugs are just part and parcel with operating the largest computing systems the world has ever seen. On Monday night, Amazon Web Services published a detailed post-mortem of its latest cloud outage, which struck on Friday night as massive thunderstorms knocked out power to one of the company’s east coast data centers. However, issues with the data center’s backup generator were just a catalyst — it was a handful of latent software bugs that manifested themselves as the system attempted to restore itself that did the real damage.

Although AWS is already working on fixes at all levels, this won’t be the last cloud computing outage we see, either from AWS or its competitors in the cloud provider space…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Riverbed Technology RVBD +2.14% , the performance company, today announced that Riverbed Steelhead(R) Cloud Accelerator has been named the Best of TechEd Award winner in the Cloud Computing category. Steelhead Cloud Accelerator, developed by Riverbed(R) in partnership with Akamai(R) Technologies, provides a first-of-its-kind solution to accelerate software-as-a-service (SaaS) performance for Microsoft Office 365. Winners were announced during the Microsoft TechEd Conference, which took place at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Fla.

This award recognizes the innovation behind Steelhead Cloud Accelerator, which provides a complete solution to overcome the potential performance problems created by the distance between end users and their applications, problems that must be addressed to realize the full potential of SaaS…

Grazed from IEEE. Author: PR Announcement.

The IEEE Technical Activities Board has approved the launch of an IEEE Computer Society journal dedicated to cloud computing.

The online IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing will debut next year with two issues, advancing to quarterly during its second and third years. TCC will fill the need for a cross-disciplinary and internationally archived journal that publishes novel cloud computing developments.

“We wanted a high-quality research publication that can capture all content relative to cloud computing,” said Alicia Stickley, IEEE Computer Society senior manager of Publishing Services.
Besides the IEEE Computer Society, the journal is being sponsored by the IEEE Communications Society, IEEE Power and Energy Society, IEEE Consumer Electronics Society, and IEEE Systems Council…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Stuart Johnston.

Google launched its IaaS platform last week to compete with AWS and Windows Azure, but the Web giant may have an uphill battle with a cloud offering that only supports open source operating systems.

The Google Compute Engine, revealed during the Google I/O conference in San Francisco last Thursday, is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform that allows customers to launch and manage virtual machines (VM) running either Ubuntu or CentOS Linux on one, two, four or eight virtual core instances with 3.75 GB of RAM per virtual core…