DigitalOcean, the cloud for developers, today announced new pricing to deliver more memory, compute power and flexibility for customers at every price point. The offering will help businesses more confidently scale their deployments by providing the best value for performance and a flexible, predictable pricing model that makes billing simple.

"When we launched the Droplet five years ago, we offered a price point and product to help developers deploy their workloads quickly and easily. Now, we are seeing their projects grow, with many of them using DigitalOcean in a large-scale production environment," said Shiven Ramji, VP, Product, DigitalOcean. "While the rest of the market has offered complex discounts structured to force growth, we are focused on what our customers want most – a simple and predictable pricing model that enables them to rapidly scale their businesses without overpaying for the resources and flexibility they need."

Tintri, Inc., a leading provider of enterprise cloud platforms, today announced Neverfail, a global cloud IT service provider, has developed a comprehensive Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) platform with a secure private cloud built on Tintri’s all-flash storage solution for replication. The new DRaaS solution connects Tintri storage solutions at customer sites and at Neverfail’s data center for data to be quickly replicated and restored over a private cloud in the case of a disaster or emergency.

The joint solution incorporates a Tintri T5000 in Neverfail’s data center to replicate with the customer’s Tintri storage device, enabling images to be easily and quickly restored to Neverfail’s private cloud and data center. Customers can use the solution to reduce spending on purchasing and managing onsite DR solutions.

The Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC), an end-user advocacy group dedicated to accelerating cloud’s successful adoption, today published version 2.0 of its whitepaper, Interoperability and Portability for Cloud Computing: A Guide. Authors of the paper will present a complimentary webinar on January 24, 2018, from 11:00am – 12:00pm ET to introduce the paper.

Today, organizations are employing a wide range of cloud services and transitioning data and applications to cloud computing environments. The topics of "interoperability" and "portability" are significant considerations in relation to the use of cloud services, but there is also confusion and misunderstanding of exactly what this entails. The aim of this guide is to provide a clear definition of interoperability and of portability and how these relate to various aspects of cloud computing and to cloud services.

Grazed from Amazon and Comcast

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, today announced that Comcast Cable has selected AWS as its preferred public cloud infrastructure provider. Comcast Cable will expand its use of AWS by migrating material workloads and building new applications on AWS.

AWS provides important infrastructure and services to Comcast as it focuses on building cloud-native products and services on AWS that adapt and evolve to meet the needs of customers. That focus is reflected in the class-defining X1 Platform, award-winning voice-control technology, and Xfinity xFi, Comcast’s personalized Wi-Fi experience that gives customers pinpoint control over their home networks. Comcast’s primary businesses, Comcast Cable and NBCUniversal, are currently running workloads on AWS which has enabled these businesses to become more nimble and launch new, revenue-generating initiatives in the competitive entertainment industry.

"With the addition of Managed Microsoft Azure Services, Cogeco Peer 1 is offering customers flexible, customizable solutions that enable them to unlock the full potential of Azure to accelerate their enterprise transformation," said Bertrand Labelle, Vice President Marketing and Innovation, Cogeco Peer 1. "These services will power the potential of businesses looking to simplify their journey to the cloud and optimize their investment in Azure. They will benefit from a secured, monitored and optimized Azure environment entirely designed for their specific business needs and managed by our team of experts. This is about optimizing return on investment for customers who don’t always have the expertise or capacity to take full advantage of the power of Azure".

ZeroStack, Inc., creators of a self-driving on-premises cloud, today unveiled new host-based metrics that enable better, more proactive IT management of its cloud platform. Cloud administrators can now define and enable alerting policies based on the status of physical hosts. Alerting policies can be defined on specific host-based CPU utilization, storage, network bandwidth, and other parameters, providing proactive alerting that allows the IT department to control and monitor the cloud environment. This visibility ensures that DevOps workbench users have access to the resources they need without overloading IT infrastructure. DevOps users can also set up their own alerting policies within their workbench for monitoring the virtual resources they are using.

Customers leveraging the integrated solution will experience greater return on their cloud investments. They will be able to automate cloud cost control, simplify management, and consequently free up teams to focus on driving more strategic projects within their organizations.

Start small

Don’t think you need to wait until your company is a behemoth in order to begin worrying about brand management. Even if you are a solo entrepreneur, there are plenty of ways to begin getting your message out, and this will ultimately pay great dividends as your company grows.

Bear in mind that, at this stage, the line between yourself and your company is virtually invisible and that everything you say, whether you intend it to be purely a personal opinion or not, will ultimately reflect on your company. Choose your words with care and ensure you are always in line with the expectations and perceptions of your brand.