Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: Mikael Ricknäs.

Hoping to move new applications to the cloud, Amazon has launched a new virtual server with four high-end GPUs, while Microsoft has made its SSD-based storage offering generally available.

Amazon and Microsoft have methodically been launching new services and adding features to EC2 and Azure, respectively, to make the platforms more competitive and a better fit for different applications…

Grazed from SmartDataCollective.  Author: Kyle Cebull.

A lot of people think that, like the internet, the cloud is just a fad. Sorry to burst your bubble, but this so-called fad is gaining some serious momentum. According to a recent Siliconangle.com article, throughout the next five years, a 44% annual growth in workloads for the public cloud is expected. With Millennials demanding that small businesses revolutionize their processes and workflows, more and more companies are jumping into the cloud to help streamline workflows and bring mobility to their workforce.

But it’s not for nothing, because the same article reports that 80% of cloud adopters saw improvements within 6 months of moving to the cloud. If you’re questioning the way things are moving or just aren’t on board with the cloud, here are a few reasons that we’re saying that the cloud and mobile are inevitable…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Joe McKindreck.

David Linthicum, sage of sages of the IT world, has some advice for those hoping their vendors will come to the rescue to untangle their ever-growing hairballs of big data and services: don’t hold your breath. "Those who think they can sit on the sidelines and wait for their data integration technology provider to create the solutions they require will be very disappointed," he cautions.

Instead of waiting on new releases of products, look to a rising breed of cloud-based services, David continues. As he explains in a new report (Sponsor: SnapLogic.), "everything you currently understand about data integration is changing. Assume that your traditional technology provider will soon be dead…

For those of you who haven’t yet had the chance to take a look at Docker, it enables apps to be quickly assembled from multiple components and eliminates some of the friction between development, QA, and production environments. With new Docker Platform tools Swarm, Machine and Compose, it is a growing component of modern infrastructure.

Docker, the open platform for distributed applications, today released new platform capabilities that enable organizations to more efficiently build, ship and run multi-container distributed applications across the entire application lifecycle. Using Docker’s platform, teams can collaborate on the development, testing and management of an application with an integrated effort that guarantees portability, improves productivity and accelerates deployment. These new capabilities for the first time – and moving forward – will be released simultaneously through coordinated updates of Docker Engine 1.6, Registry 2.0 and orchestration tools including Compose, Machine and Swarm. This unified release effort has been put in place to provide Docker users with incremental integrated platform capabilities every two months, providing continual improvement to all aspects of their application development lifecycles.

“Our community, which includes millions of developers and sysadmins, is depending on the Docker platform to support all stages of the application development lifecycle,” said Solomon Hykes, founder, chief architect and CTO of Docker. “These platform enhancements create new efficiencies and facilitate greater collaboration and a tighter integration between dev and ops. By synchronizing our releases, we are simplifying the evaluation and deployment process and enabling the community to immediately benefit from the integrated value that we’re building for them.”

According to IDC, cloud IT infrastructure spending, which includes storage, server, and networking, was up 14 percent in the fourth quarter to $8 billion. About 30 percent of all IT infrastructure spending goes to the cloud.

A number of RightScale enterprise customers already combine RightScale with ServiceNow. Today’s integration will make integrating RightScale and ServiceNow in the enterprise even easier.

“We are very excited to represent vArmour during this next phase of growth,” Carr & Ferrell attorney John Ferrell said. “They have structured a substantial patent portfolio built around a framework of inter-related, individual patents that will provide crucial protection for vArmour’s revolutionary new approach to data center security.”

Grazed from Fool.com.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Amazon (recently unveiled its cloud-based Amazon Machine Learning (Amazon ML) service. "Machine learning" is how machines make predictions based on accumulated data. Enhancing cloud-based services with machine learning exponentially widens their horizons.

Amazon ML synchronizes with three services: its online storage service S3, its data warehousing solution Redshift, and its Relational Database Service (RDS). These services provide Amazon with a goldmine of data for learning.  Let’s take a closer look at the business of machine learning, and what its growth means for Amazon’s future…