Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Werner Vogels joined Amazon.com in 2004 and a year later became CTO. During the past decade he helped define the public infrastructure as a service cloud market. To do so, Amazon Web Services built a massive network of data centers around the world, which to this day continues to grow rapidly. This month at the AWS Summit in New York, Network World Senior Editor Brandon Butler spoke with Vogels about the state of the cloud industry, challenges facing AWS, its relationships with partners and customers, and what he’s learned from growing AWS into the business it is today.

Amazon Web Services is credited by many as the market-leader in the public IaaS market, but Microsoft is hot on your tail. One of the key differentiators for Microsoft Azure is its focus on the hybrid cloud. What are you doing to support hybrid cloud computing? Customers have made major investments in their infrastructure, so that will not disappear overnight…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

The technological and economic benefits offered by cloud services are accelerating enterprise migration from on-premise IT infrastructure solutions to hosted alternatives. This is driving rapid growth in the European infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market. Cloud providers are also pursuing regional strategies such as setting up of local data centres to fast-track uptake among European customers.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, Analysis of the European Infrastructure-as-a-Service Market (https://www.frost.com/mab4 [https), finds that the market earned revenues of 1.95 billion USD in 2014 and estimates this to reach 10.11 billion USD in 2019. For complimentary access to more information on this research, please visit: http://owl.li/PDhQC …

Grazed from MorningNewsUSA. Author: Sohini Auddy.

Microsoft and Rackspace are going to team up to provide a better experience to users with Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service. The Microsoft-Rackspace partnership will provide assistance to the companies using Azure. They will be presenting a guide to make them get the best out of data storage, processing, database and other services.

Microsoft needs no introduction to be precise. Rackspace Hosting Inc is a data center service company known for its top-tier technology support. The company is also known for its customer support. The reputation of the company can give Microsoft a significant boost while competing with Amazon as far as the latter’s web service is concerned…

Grazed from e-CommerceTimes. Author: John K. Higgins.

The U.S. Defense Department, often cited as a bit sluggish in taking advantage of the benefits of cloud computing, appears now to be emerging as a government leader in adopting the technology. In the short run, DoD has far outpaced other federal agencies in setting up cloud contracts. During the first quarter of fiscal 2015, the value of all federal contracts for cloud projects amounted to US$668 million, of which the overwhelming amount, $531 million, was attributed to the Defense Department.

The DoD upsurge in 2015 versus 2014 "is largely attributable to the award of the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Enterprise Storage Solutions II contract, which calls for a hybrid cloud data storage service, with vendors supplying hardware housed in the agency’s data centers," said Alex Rossino, a research analyst at Deltek…

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: Phil Cristensen.

 Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Andrew Froelich.

• "Beginner mistakes" on the part of service providers. This is when the provider starts out or grows at a rate faster than can be properly managed its by data center staff. Cloud giants, including Amazon Web Services and Google Compute, were often plagued with outages early on as each company grew at incredible rates. Even Microsoft, which entered the cloud game later than the others, ran into outage problems early and often…

Grazed from Fortune.  Author: Barb Darrow.

Engineering jobs—things like the design of a complex airplane or car part and the virtual testing of that design—pose special and intense computing challenges. And that’s the job San Francisco-based Rescale, which just announced $6.4 million in funding,

The money comes in the form of a seed round led by the Data Collective with contributions from such luminaries as Amazon AMZN -0.84% founder Jeff Bezos, Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson, Ycombinator’s Paul Graham and Sam Altman, and Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel…

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: James Bourne.

If organisations could track all cloud consumption and usage across the enterprise, the majority (57%) would utilise it to improve IT forecasting. That was the key takeaway from a survey undertaken by enterprise software provider Cloud Cruiser, who collared 279 IT professionals at the recent Microsoft Ignite event in Chicago. Interestingly, 16% of respondents admitted they did not use Microsoft cloud technologies.

39% of those polled said they would use more wide-ranging tracking skills to compare costs across different platforms and vendors, while 34% said they would expand their on-demand and self-service access to cloud. 72% said tracking cloud usage and costs was extremely or very important to their IT function…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Colm Keegan.

Summertime and the living’s easy, or so the song says. For some overworked IT pros, the summer might represent an opportunity for a brief vacation and some much needed downtime to recharge their depleted batteries. But for many others it could be more like the old ’80s song “Cruel Summer,” particularly if they can’t get a grip on their businesses’ cloud strategy.

Many businesses are turning to cloud services alternatives as a way to increase business agility and reduce costs, a trend that appears to be accelerating. For example, when ESG started tracking the use of cloud as an IT cost-containment measure back in 2009, it ranked dead last compared to eight other cost containment measure strategies…

Grazed from WinBeta.  Author: Jonathan Caldwell.

Microsoft has been developing more and more of their infrastructure and services to support enterprising businesses new and old, and now is no different. Microsoft has announced that they are expanding cloud hybridization as well as cloud hyperscaling, which will bring unprecedented speed, economy, and accessibility for all users and consumers—and for any environment or platform.  What is Cloud Hybridization?   First, a brief explanation of private and public clouds, which a hybrid cloud is made up of.

*  A public cloud is a cloud that quickly handles single or homogeneous and easily scalable services. When a public cloud is used, it’s generally for a wide variety of people and uses lots computing, so typically a public cloud services things like emails or photos- these things are especially scalable services for maximizing cost efficiency…