June 22, 2012 Off

An unStructured Future For Cloud Computing

By David
Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Reuven Cohen.

I’ve spent the last few days here in San Francisco attending the 5th annual Structure conference put on by GigaOM.  The event brings together an impressive mixture of cloud computing influencers, pundits and entrepreneurs, sometimes referred to as the “clouderati.” The conference is a great place to connect with the people and companies innovating, shaping and defining the ongoing evolution in the technology industry.

There seemed to be an underlying sense that cloud computing is no longer the new kid on the block with one person noting that “the shine is gone.” Regardless of the whether cloud is or isn’t exciting for some, it’s become pervasive.  In a conversation with Michael Skok, a venture capitalist at North Bridge Venture Partners, he told me that cloud computing has become the standard operating procedure for any company looking at building or deploying software today. It’s no longer a question of whether a company should deploy to the cloud, but instead how and when…

June 22, 2012 Off

Netflix exec: The master copy of our data is in the cloud

By David

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Janko Roettgers.

If there’s one key lesson startups in the consumer web space can learn from the big guys, it’s this: Don’t invest in in-house servers. That was one of the key take-aways from the guru panel at GigaOM’s Structure conference in San Francisco, where Netflix’s director of architecture Adrian Cockcroft confided: “The master copy of our data is now stored in the cloud.”

Dropbox’s VP of engineering Aditya Agarwal agreed, and gave founders this bit of advice: “If you are a startup, you’d be crazy if you built your own infrastructure.” He added that using the cloud instead of homegrown infrastructure wasn’t just about costs, but also about giving your own engineers the flexibility they need. “If you build it in-house, it should be easier to use than AWS,” he said…

June 22, 2012 Off

Vendor lock-in and the challenge to Platform as a Service

By David

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Ryan Kim.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) has a bright future but one of the big concerns is vendor lock-in, which can prevent companies from making their applications portable. That’s going to be one of the big challenges for PaaS to grow, said Lucas Carlson, founder and CEO of AppFog.

Speaking on a panel at the GigaOM Structure conference Thursday, Carlson said every time a company adds a new service to an existing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider, there’s the danger of getting more entwined in their services, making it harder to move…

June 22, 2012 Off

Using a Cloud Service at the Office Without Permission? You’re Not Alone.

By David
Grazed from All Things Digital.  Author: Arik Hesseldahl.

I don’t usually like to look too deeply into surveys of customers by one company or another, usually because they tend to arrive at some kind of self-serving point. But sometimes there’s some interesting nuggets in them that illustrate something interesting, or confirm something widely suspected but not often quantified.

The case in point is a new survey by the Texas-based cloud computing outfit Rackspace. This is the company that is the subject of constant and recurring speculation that it’s about to be acquired, with similarly constant and recurring insistence by its senior executives that it doesn’t want to be acquired.

Anyway, Rackspace conducted a survey of 500 IT decision makers who happen to work for companies that use cloud computing services. (Again I ask, rhetorically, given all the surveys they seem to be responding to from vendors, trade publications and so on, when do “IT decision makers” ever get the time do their jobs?) Among the findings are the usual bits that naturally lead one to reach positive conclusions on the part of the company who commissioned the survey: Nine out of 10 IT decision makers like cloud computing, and they prefer vendors with strong customer service but higher prices by a ratio of 3 to 1. No shockers there…

June 22, 2012 Off

The Cloud needs a new global trade agenda to prevent economic contagion

By David

Grazed from BusinessCloud9. Author: Stuart Lauchlan.

Some of the fastest-growing emerging global markets are erecting new trade barriers that discriminate against foreign ICT and services – and holding back the progress of Cloud Computing.
That’s the grim conclusion of the Business Software Alliance (BSA), the global software industry lobby group, in a new study that concludes that the actions of some of the new economic giants – most notably China, India and Brazil – are having what the BSA calls “a contagion effect” by encouraging other smaller markets to take similarly protectionist measures.

“The global scope of the problem poses immediate and long-term threats to the IT industry and the broader global economy,” warns the BSA. “ These threats cannot be overstated or ignored . Leading IT economies should press a concerted bilateral, multilateral, and regional effort to combat discriminatory trade barriers where they already exist and eradicate them before they spread further.”…

June 22, 2012 Off

Risks associated with cloud computing addressed by advisory group

By David
Grazed from Business Insurance.  Author: Rodd Zolkos.

The Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission has released a new thought paper providing guidance on applying the advisory group’s Enterprise Risk Management Integrated Framework to risks associated with cloud computing.

 

Released Wednesday, “Enterprise Risk Management for Cloud Computing” notes that technology research and advisory firm Gartner Inc. has estimated that cloud computing will be a $140 billion industry by 2014. But as companies look to benefit from cloud computing’s potential, they should be aware that “cloud computing entails commensurate risks,” the paper states…

June 22, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: Gizmox Salvages Client/Server Apps

By David

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

Tel Aviv-based Gizmox says it’s figured out how to salvage all those scads of Microsoft client/server desktop apps – pointedly the enterprise ones – transform them – relatively painlessly – into secured-by-design HTML5, and move them to the web, the cloud and mobile devices all without rewriting any code or re-engineering anything.

It’s agnostic about what mobile device. It could be Apple or Android as well as the new Windows 8 stuff.

It calls its tool-base solution Instant CloudMove Transposition Studio, a name that will never fit on a marquee. But Gizmox will still know if it gets applause for the downloadable community technology preview (CTP) it’s just put out…

June 22, 2012 Off

Cloud outage report of 13 providers reveals downtime costs

By David
Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Stuart Johnston.

Amazon’s cloud services downtime earlier this month annoyed some AWS customers but beyond that, it raised the question of how expensive cloud outage downtime can be.

This week, a study group called the International Working Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency (IWGCR) released its first Availability Ranking of World Cloud Computing report. The working group was formed in March by two Paris-based higher educational institutions, Telecom ParisTech and Paris 13 University.

The report’s bottom line isn’t pretty. It estimates the average unavailability of cloud services at 10 hours per year or more, while the average availability is estimated to 99.9% or less…

June 22, 2012 Off

Red Hat’s RHEL 6.3 aims at large-scale cloud deployments

By David

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

With the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.3, Red Hat has tweaked the enterprise grade Linux distribution to add new capabilities in storage, virtualization, security, scalability, and performance.

"This is one of largest update release to date," said Tim Burke, Red Hat vice president of Linux engineering development. "It has a lot of performance scalability optimizations specifically targeted at virtualized cloud deployments in the data center."

To improve overall performance, RHEL 6.3 features a new technology called NUMAD (Non-Uniform Memory Alignment Daemon [5]). NUMAD is based on ideas behind NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Architecture), a memory management technology developed for supercomputers with large-scale distributed memory. NUMAD will align data in working memory so it is most easily accessible by the processor working on the data…

June 22, 2012 Off

If AWS is the Walmart of cloud, is OpenStack the Soviet Union?

By David

 

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Kevin Fitchard.

The stage was set for a lively debate between public cloud rivals at GigaOM Structure in San Francisco Thursday – representatives from Citrix, Eucalyptus and the OpenStack project certainly delivered. Nebula CEO and OpenStack co-founder Chris Kemp didn’t even get past the introductions before he challenged his fellow panelists on their “closed” cloud implementations and embrace of Amazon Web Services’ API, which he compared to the Walmart of infrastructure.

“It’s reasonably fast, reasonably priced and reasonably secure,” Kemp said, which is why it has the lion’s share of the cloud business today. But AWS will never be incredibly fast or incredibly secure, Kemp said, and while AWS may be emerging as a de facto standard, it doesn’t change the fact its API is proprietary. “I don’t think a de facto standard is a standard,” he said…