Grazed from Talkin Cloud.  Author: Brian Taylor.

When Amazon and Eucalyptus finally announced plans to partner on cloud computing, the big winners were cloud integrators seeking to move workloads between on-premise IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and Amazon Web Services. But ultimately, Talkin’ Cloud believes Amazon and Eucalyptus were reacting to OpenStack — which is available as both an on-premise or public cloud platform.

Eucalyptus has always positioned itself as an Amazon-compatible cloud computing platform for on-premises workloads. Now, Amazon is publicly confirming that Eucalyptus compatibility and promising more joint work.

According to a joined announcement from Amazon and Eucalyptus, the relationship:

“enables customers to more efficiently migrate workloads between their existing data centers and AWS while using the same management tools and skills across both environments. As part of this agreement, AWS will support Eucalyptus as they continue to extend compatibility with AWS APIs and customer use cases. Customers can run applications in their existing datacenters that are compatible with popular Amazon Web Services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).”

No doubt, the Amazon-Eucalyptus relationship is good news for CIOs and cloud integrators — two audiences who want to make sure public cloud and private cloud investments don’t require completely different architectures…

Grazed from Ars Technica.  Author: Matthew Braga.

Maybe you’re a Dropbox devotee. Or perhaps you really like streaming Sherlock on Netflix. For that, you can thank the cloud.

In fact, it’s safe to say that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has become synonymous with cloud computing; it’s the platform on which some of the Internet’s most popular sites and services are built. But just as cloud computing is used as a simplistic catchall term for a variety of online services, the same can be said for AWS—there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes than you might think.

If you’ve ever wanted to drop terms like EC2 and S3 into casual conversation (and really, who doesn’t?) we’re going to demystify the most important parts of AWS and show you how Amazon’s cloud really works…

Grazed from New York Times.  Author: Quentin Hardy.

Last week three of the biggest companies in tech were busy positioning themselves for the future. Collectively, their actions tell you a lot about the turmoil now in tech, which is headed for the rest of the business world.

The three are IBM, EMC, and Hewlett-Packard, with a collective annual revenue of about $250 billion (EMC is by far the smallest, about one-fifth the others’ size.) All of them got very big by selling hardware. All of them have, at different times, sought ways to cope with the immense changes wrought by the Internet, cloud computing and mobile computing…

Grazed from CloudTimes.org.  Author:  Irmee Layo.

Two studies made by SAP and Microsoft brings light to the long standing economic crisis as cloud computing creates jobs and fuels the business market. Sand Hill Group who conducted the study said that the trendsetters for cloud computing will be the mobile cloud, data storage and social networking. The group said that the influence of these platforms may outrun the opportunities created when the Internet was introduced several years back.

In the US alone, cloud computing has already provided thousands of job opportunities that gave hope to people who were badly hit by the recession. It also shows a very promising future for the IT industry and various companies who will maximize the cloud computing services. This cloud trend, however, as promising as it is also presents some risks for users, providers and vendors…

Grazed from Financial Times.  Author: Barney Jopson.

Amazon’s cloud computing service is being used to operate Nasa robots on the surface of Mars, Netflix’s video streaming service and the Guardian’s dating website, as the retailer’s little-known IT business rapidly expands.

The six-year old cloud business remains overshadowed by Amazon’s vast online store, but clients and analysts say the company’s various cloud-computing services are replacing a growing number of in-house IT functions and dominate the sector.

“We continue to see equally rapid growth across all of our [cloud] services as we have in the past,” Adam Selipsky, vice-president of Amazon Web Services, told the Financial Times. The number of files in the Amazon cloud nearly tripled to 762bn last year…

Grazed from Network World.  Author: Brandon Butler.

Last August the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) announced at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas a registry that it hoped would serve as a place for prospective cloud users to go to easily inspect and compare cloud vendors’ security controls. But to date, only three companies have submitted their cloud security data, making the registry of limited use.

The Security, Trust and Assurance Registry (STAR) is designed to index the security features of cloud providers using a 170-point questionnaire that end users are then able to peruse. Soon after the CSA announced STAR, big names such as Google, Intel, McAfee, Verizon and Microsoft all agreed to take part. So far though, Microsoft is the only one of that group to have followed through…

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

EMC Tuesday confirmed a report that it had bought 22-year-old privately held web development house Pivotal Labs for its agile development methodology and its widely used Pivotal Tracker tool.  How much EMC spent buying the San Francisco-based software consulting operation wasn’t disclosed. It did say it paid cash.

EMC imagines tuning datasets in its newly available Greenplum Chorus, which adds a Facebook-like social collaboration tool to Big Data for the data science team, and rapidly building out insightful Big Data applications using modern programming environments such as Ruby on Rails complements of Pivotal. Pivotal worked on Chorus’ development with EMC last year…

Grazed from Network Computing.  Author: Rob Dutt.

IT departments looking at standing up private cloud environments in a hurry, and without some of the complexity usually associated with cloud infrastructure, would do well to take a look at Piston Cloud from Piston Cloud Computing.

In a new Information Week Report on the Piston Cloud OpenStack Environment, Kurt Marko finds that “its unique setup process can enable enterprise IT teams to build a private cloud in an afternoon, with commodity gear."…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: Doug Dineley.

"If you build it, they will come" may be a line from a baseball fantasy, but it describes what really happened in the world of cloud computing. One late summer day in 2006, online bookseller Amazon.com quietly made a portion of its excess data center capacity available to curious developers over the Web. Within hours, hundreds of developers had jumped at the chance to spin up some servers simply by opening their browsers and typing in their credit card numbers. Today, Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud is the foundation for countless tech startups, and Amazon counts its business customers in the hundreds of thousands…

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

Zumbox, the American digital mail start-up, has changed its overseas strategy. Rather than try to involve the local postal operator – as it has once with New Zealand Post – it’s going to go it alone.

It’s starting in Australia where its wholly owned licensing arm, Zumbox Software Inc, has just climbed in bed with two big publicly traded mail outsourcers to create a joint venture called Digital Post Australia (DPA) that will offer consumers a way to get their paper mail electronically…