For businesses using and creating applications for the Internet, it is becoming more difficult to ignore Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). S3 is the massively scalable, cost-effective cloud storage solution developed specifically to house the huge influx of data created by organizations around the world. Amazon S3 commands twice the market share of all its closest competitors combined and is likely to be the storage platform of choice for on-premises hybrid or private cloud deployments for years to come. 

S3 has become the standard for cloud storage. Almost every application connects to S3 and most storage vendors have already announced that they connect to S3 or are working to do so. In addition to Amazon, there are a number of competing storage implementations that are S3-compliant, including Google Cloud Storage, Openstack Swift, Rackspace’s Cloud Files and Ceph. These services use the standard programming interface but have different underlying technologies and business models. 

The rise of S3, which Amazon describes as "cost-effective object storage," has also helped to drive the adoption of object storage. In addition to Amazon, household brands such as Facebook, Netflix, Dropbox and Twitter all use object storage. It’s also deployed by enterprises for applications that require massive amounts of unstructured data, including content media storage, bioinformatics, data analytics, private cloud, file distribution and sharing, and backup and archiving. 

CloudCheckr, the leading cloud management platform today announced a partnership with Spotinst, the leading workload management platform, which provides lifecycle management for AWS EC2 Spot Instances. The partnership enables AWS customers utilizing the CloudCheckr platform to reduce their EC2 costs by up to 80% through highly available, automated Spot Instance management.

"Cloud cost management and optimization are top of mind for all organizations as cloud adoption increases in the enterprise," said Amiram Shachar, CEO & Founder at Spotinst. "The combination of CloudCheckr’s cloud management platform with Spotinst’s EC2 workload management will enable businesses to seamlessly leverage excess capacity for computing resources at a low cost with high availability."

RightScale Inc., a demonstrated leader in enterprise universal cloud management, today announced the results of the RightScale 2017 State of the Cloud Survey. In its sixth year, the RightScale State of the Cloud Survey is the largest survey of corporate cloud users, including 1,002 technology professionals at large and small enterprises across a broad cross-section of industries.

"The RightScale 2017 survey showed that enterprise multi-cloud and hybrid cloud adoption  continues to grow, and even with that growth, challenges are decreasing," said Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale. "Companies report using 8 different clouds on average; optimizing cloud costs is the top cloud initiative; cloud challenges, including security concerns, continue to abate; and Docker continues its phenomenal growth. We also saw AWS adoption remain flat, while #2 Azure continued to gain ground on leader AWS."  

Wipro Limited, a leading global information technology, consulting and business process services company, today announced it is delivering analytics-based insights for specific industries with the Data Discovery Platform, its newest big data analytics-as-a-service solution. Built with IBM BigInsights and IBM dashDB and developed on Bluemix, IBM’s cloud platform, the solution accelerates insight-driven decision making through pre-built applications for specific industries, such as banking and financial services, retail, energy, education and manufacturing.

In many organizations, internal and external data exist in silos across the company, making it difficult and expensive to collect and analyze. The Data Discovery Platform helps businesses unlock the true value of their structured and unstructured data to deliver insights customized to the customer’s industry sector.

Wipro and IBM developers collaborated on the solution which is available in an outcome-based ‘pay-per-insight’ cloud delivery model. It has been customized for a number of specific industries and their associated overall processes, including:

Grazed from MarketRealist. Author: Naomi Gray.

Alphabet (GOOGL) has long been viewed as a cloud computing underdog alongside Oracle (ORCL) and International Business Machines (IBM). Let’s see if anything has changed The chart below shows the leading cloud vendors by market share, as estimated by Synergy Research Group.

Although Alphabet still declines to break out its Google Cloud revenues, the company hinted in its 4Q16 earnings report that it’s rapidly gaining ground in the cloud space. The tech giant’s nonadvertising revenues come from sources such as cloud, app, and hardware sales. These revenues increased 62% YoY (year-over-year) to $3.4 billion in 4Q16, a record for the segment…

Grazed from Cabling. Author: Editorial Staff.

Telecommunication experts estimate the amount of data stored “in the cloud” or in remote data centers around the world, will quintuple in the next five years. Whether it’s streaming video or business’ database content drawn from distant servers, all of this data is — and will continue in the foreseeable future to be – accessed and transmitted by lasers sending pulses of light along long bundles of flexible optical fibers.

Traditionally, the rate at which information is transmitted does not consider the distance that data must travel, despite the fact that shorter distances can support higher rates. Yet as the traffic grows in volume and uses increasingly more of the available bandwidth, or capacity to transfer bits of data, researchers have become increasingly aware of some of the limitations of this mode of transmission…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Blair Hanley Frank.

Google has turned a database service that it uses to run some of its mission-critical products into an offering for its public cloud customers. On Tuesday, the company launched Cloud Spanner, a new, fully managed database that’s supposed to provide the transactional consistency of a traditional database plus the scalability and performance of a NoSQL database.

It’s based on the same systems that run the company’s own Spanner database internally. Usually, businesses have to pick either a traditional or a NoSQL database, and each comes with particular trade-offs. Traditional databases provide better transactional consistency, but can be hard to scale. NoSQL databases are better at scaling but sacrifice consistency…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cio.com/article/3169522/cloud-computing/google-s-new-cloud-service-is-a-unique-take-on-a-database.html