Grazed from CNBC. Author: Ari Levy.

At Amazon.com’s annual cloud computing gala last month called re:Invent, recruiters from on-demand learning company Pluralsight were on the hunt for experts to teach coding. Pluralsight offers a library of over 5,000 online courses for software developers and IT pros to gain new skills, ranging from learning popular open-source languages and big data tools on Amazon Web Services to mastering the latest in cybersecurity and designing mobile games.

The explosive growth of technology platforms like AWS has driven Pluralsight’s expansion, enabling the 12-year-old company to reel in a recent round of $30 million at a valuation exceeding $1 billion, CEO Aaron Skonnard told CNBC.com in an exclusive interview. Pluralsight, based near Salt Lake City, is using the cash as part of its push beyond individual subscriptions and into big businesses, where a host of new web and infrastructure technologies as well as cyberthreats are forcing developers into a constant state of learning…

Grazed from TheCSuite. Author: Grant MacDonald.

With IDC recently predicting that IT infrastructure spending will grow at a CAGR of 15.1% from 2014 to 2019, and given that spending on cloud will be 46% of the entire IT budget – it’s clear that now is the time harness the best that the cloud has to offer. Research commissioned by Fruition Partners in 2015 showed that CIOs had a range of serious concerns over cloud control. This year, the research was repeated and it looks as though little has changed.

The research found that 80 per cent of CIOs do not apply the same comprehensive IT service management processes to cloud as they do for in-house IT services. When compared to last year’s figures, the research found while there has been a slight improvement in overall cloud maturity, we’ve still got a long way to go. In fact, more than 85 per cent of CIOs still say that the proliferation of public cloud computing services is reducing the control their organisation has over the IT services it uses. CIOs are highly concerned by the negative impacts of this trend, with three-quarters of them saying it leads to financial waste, and increases the business and security risks to the organisation…

For owners and operators of small- to medium-sized buildings, the cost of adding smart building technologies can often be expensive. The high price tag is usually due to proprietary software solutions that are tied to the building equipment or to LED lighting systems. Magnum provides solutions that allow standalone lighting options without the need of software. If data visualization and remote control support are needed, the cBox provides a cost effective alternative. 

VMware has released its long-touted vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC), the company’s way of making vSphere a fine place to run containers.

Plenty of pundits have suggested that containers stand a good chance of killing virtual machines, citing the former as lighter, faster and better-suited to building the kind of apps that work well at scale on the web and with mobile devices. VMware’s response has been to agree that containers are wonderful things, even more so when running inside a virtual machine.

Last week at HPE Discover 2016 London, Dave Vellante & Paul Gillin of theCUBE chatted with Bryan Jacquot, Worldwide User Experience Architect at HPE. Vellante started the interview by commenting on the fact that they don’t typically interview someone with Jacquot’s title.

Jacquot agreed, yet his job is vital at HPE. By studying human-computer interaction and cognitive psychology, software designers can improve user experience. For example, he mentioned that the careful use of color and sound is important in how the brain interprets and accepts information. Using basic fundamentals of cognitive psychology, designers can take complex systems and make them easier to understand and use.

As a member of the STAR program (Security, Trust & Assurance Registry), Astute Solutions joins more than 200 other businesses in demonstrating their dedication to providing secure technology products. The STAR program acts as a resource for potential customers and business partners to evaluate the risk of conducting business with a particular service provider. Instead of the typical time-consuming work of managing lengthy questionnaires and RFP processes, the CSA helps companies evaluate service providers more quickly and effectively by vouching for the provider’s credibility.

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, today announced the launch of the AWS Canada (Central) Region. With this launch, AWS now provides 40 Availability Zones across 15 technology infrastructure regions globally, with another seven Availability Zones and three regions in the UK, France, and China expected to come online in the coming months. Tens of thousands of Canadian customers are using other AWS Regions and starting today, developers, start-ups, and enterprises, as well as government, education, and non-profit organizations can leverage the AWS Cloud to run their applications and store their data on infrastructure in Canada. Developers can sign-up and get started today at: http://aws.amazon.com.

The AWS Canada (Central) Region offers two Availability Zones at launch. AWS Regions are comprised of Availability Zones, which refer to technology infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting availability, yet near enough for business continuity applications that require rapid failover. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, physical security, and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can architect their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even higher fault-tolerance. AWS also provides two Amazon CloudFront edge locations in Toronto and Montreal for customers looking to deliver websites, applications, and content to Canadian end users with low latency. These locations are part of AWS’s existing network of 68 edge sites across North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

Ixia, a leading provider of network testing, visibility, and security solutions, today announced that the company has extended the capabilities of CloudLens, Ixia’s recently announced integrated cloud visibility platform, with CloudLens Virtual Packet Broker (vPB). CloudLens vPB is a software solution that delivers visibility into virtual data center traffic for enterprises leveraging private cloud deployments to support and expand their business. 

Monitoring virtual machine (VM) to VM traffic (east-west traffic) in a virtualized data center creates a variety of challenges for IT and network administrators. One of the foremost challenges is the volume and transport of data to security and performance monitoring tools, virtual or physical.

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud Platform. The new offering brings Red Hat’s award-winning container platform as a managed service offering to enterprise customers who want to build, launch, and manage applications on OpenShift Dedicated with Google Cloud Platform as their underlying cloud infrastructure. With the availability of OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud Platform, users can speed adoption of containers, Kubernetes, and cloud-native application patterns, benefiting from Red Hat’s deep enterprise experience. Users also benefit from Google’s global, container-optimized infrastructure and can more easily augment their applications with Google’s ecosystem of data analytics, machine learning, compute, network, and storage services.