Grazed from Fortune. Author: Barb Darrow.

Fran Shammo, Verizon’s chief financial officer, strongly denied recent reports that the company is selling off the infrastructure underlying its cloud business. These stories are “factless conjecture with no foundation,” Shammo said in response to a question at the Wells Fargo Securities 2015 Technology, Media & Telecom Conference on Tuesday.

Late Friday, Reuters reported that Verizon was weighing a sale of enterprise assets, including what used to be known as MCI and Terremark, a data center-and-cloud company Verizon bought 5 years ago to boost its presence in cloud computing. The report said the company was seeking up to $10 billion in a potential sale. A Verizon spokesman had no comment on the report…

Grazed from BusinessInsider. Author: Editorial Staff.

One of Amazon Web Services’ most potent weapons in the cloud-computing wars with Microsoft and Google is also one of its least understood. About a year ago, Amazon introduced Lambda, which it describes as "a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources for you."

That sounds like a lot of buzzwords, but developers and customers like Major League Baseball and Twitter’s Periscope love Lambda because of how it makes running apps simpler. So far, none of Amazon’s competitors has come up with anything similar. "As a technologist, there’s almost always a ‘gotcha,’" says Matt Wood, Amazon Web Services’ general manager of product strategy. "Lambda kind of is as magical as it appears."…

Read more from the source @ http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-web-services-lambda-explained-2015-11

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Blair Hanley Frank.

Google unveiled some major enhancements to its container-focused cloud offerings on Tuesday to take advantage of new open-source developments and boost the performance of its products in a competitive market. Google Container Engine, a service based on the Kubernetes open-source project that manages clusters and orchestrates Docker containers in Google’s cloud, now has the latest updates to Kubernetes.

Those enhancements came out on Monday, so it’s a quick turnaround. The upgrades include support for horizontal pod autoscaling, which is a fancy term for a feature that scales up resources to smooth out performance during periods of high demand. Container Engine also gets a new networking system that reduces latency, cuts down on CPU overhead and improves reliability…

Cloudnexa enables clients, particularly small-to-medium businesses that lack the in-house expertise and resources, to cost-effectively maximize their WordPress deployment on AWS. The new offering is available in economy, standard, and performance service plans to meet the specific needs of companies deploying WordPress on AWS, managing AWS on their own, or using a web host service to support their WordPress site.

IndependenceIT, an integrated workspace automation software platform provider allowing IT departments, service providers and ISVs to easily deliver workspaces, applications and desktops as a service, today announced general availability of Cloud Workspace Suite Version 4.2. The newest version of the company’s WaaS enablement software provides greater control over how solutions are built and delivered on a customer-by-customer basis to match customer workloads on Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine, Artisan Infrastructure, and other cloud platforms.

Cloud Workspace Suite has been enhanced for the benefit of the IT service provider with the availability of version 4.2. Advancements give administrators greater infrastructure alternatives with new support for Microsoft Azure. New features improve controls over how the platform is aligned with compute, memory and capacity resources under management to accelerate performance in unique customer environments. Now, customers with more demanding workloads or who require more customized delivery of applications and data have the industry’s most responsive platform for catering to their computing demands.

Scale Computing has an enthusiastic following among small-to-midsized users because of its simple, scalable, and affordable approach to hyperconvergence in varying IT infrastructures. With no virtualization software to license and no external storage to buy, the HC3 platform reduces out-of-pocket costs while providing reliable performance and capacity to keep business applications running.

"In just the past year, Canadian IT insiders have witnessed a dramatic change in the market as hyperconvergence in general became more and more validated, and Scale Computing in particular has gained credibility and recognition for our focus on midsized users," said Jeff Ready, CEO and Co-founder of Scale Computing. "On the basis of pure percentages, our sales in Canada are growing faster than in the U.S. and EMEA, so it’s vital that we build a strong team and partnerships here. The majority of businesses in Canada employ fewer than 1000 employees, and these are the ideal environments for our HC3 platform."

Containers simplify software development and deployment across multiple domains – what Docker refers to as, "Build, Ship, Run" – because containers package an application with all of its dependencies into a standardized unit for software development.

The largest pain-point today for organizations moving to a container strategy is that containers are being adopted and managed by developers. Operations and Security do not have the level of visibility and control that they are accustomed to. At the same time, for DevOps to succeed, security and operations controls must be as agile and move as quickly as the assets to be protected. Twistlock’s Container Security Suite, the only dev-to-production security product on the market today, enables just that. The Suite allows security operations to come together with developers to achieve security control and compliance without impeding the operational benefits of container technologies.

With a successful beta program that included 15 enterprise customers, including Wix, AppsFlyer and HolidayCheck, Twistlock’s technologies are now available for all eligible customers worldwide. This makes it possible for many additional businesses to benefit from the vulnerability management, fine-grained access control and smart runtime protection capabilities offered by Twistlock.

Through Tesseratic Container Engine, deploying a Docker container becomes extremely easy and developers can immediately enjoy the benefit of high availability, load balance and scalability naturally built on the platform. It truly provides an efficient platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for programmers to focus on service development without disturbing infrastructure. What is even better is that the Tesseratic Container Engine actually packages itself as a container, so that it can be easily run on any public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, OpenStack or even bare metals. It provides flexibility and high mobility for developers to build their services wherever they want. Via Tesseratic Container Engine, orchestration has never been this easy and that brings DevOps into real implementation. If agility is king, then TC Engine is the king of agility.

Trend Micro Incorporated, a global leader in security software solutions, today announced it has joined the VCE Select Program, to bundle Trend Micro Deep Security with the VCE converged and hyper-converged infrastructure systems, offering customers and partners security solutions for easier consumption. Trend Micro Deep Security has received both Vblock Ready and VCE Validation Ready certifications. With this step, VCE and Trend Micro significantly deepen their alliance and commitment to customers and partners to strengthen cloud security.

“By joining the VCE Select Program, VCE and Trend Micro can offer customers a seamless experience securing their cloud and data centers, allowing them to focus on business objectives rather than infrastructure compliance and security,” said Partha Panda, vice president of global channel & strategic alliance, Trend Micro. “The close alliance with VCE confirms our commitment to deliver best-in-class security solutions to our customers as they are adopting our joint solution to secure their enterprise workloads.”