Grazed from TechCheatSheet.  Author: Nathanael Arnold.

Earlier this week, Apple and several other major U.S. tech companies renewed their calls for the U.S. government to reform its controversial electronic surveillance programs. In an open letter addressed to President Barack Obama, NSA Director Admiral Rogers, Attorney General Eric Holder, and several prominent members of Congress, Apple and dozens of other signatories urged the government to end the bulk data collection practices that were authorized under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act.

As noted in the letter, Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act is used as the legal basis for the NSA’s bulk collection of electronic communications metadata. The letter also asked the government to institute “transparency and accountability mechanisms for both government and company reporting” for decisions made by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court…

Grazed from ScriptRock.  Author: Editorial Staff.

As a group of concepts, DevOps has converged on several prominent themes including continuous software delivery, automation, and configuration management (CM). These integral pieces often form the pillars of an organization’s DevOps efforts, even as other bigger pieces like overarching best practices and guidelines are still being tried and tested.

Being that DevOps is a relatively new paradigm – movement – methodology – [insert your own label here], standards around it have yet to be codified and set in stone. Organizations are left to identify tools and approaches most suitable for their use cases, and will either swear by or disparage them depending on their level of success…

Grazed from DailyHypervisor.  Author: Sid Smith.

If you have been looking into Openstack as a standardized api for your cloud infrastructure you have undoubtedly realized how complex it is to get an Openstack environment up and running.  VMware Integrated Openstack or VIO takes the deployment of Openstack and literally makes it brain dead simple.  I mean let’s face it, if I can deploy it then you know it’s simple 😉

About a year ago started down the path of deploying open stack into the MoaC lab.  The project was very short lived because I just didn’t have weeks to dedicate to getting it done.  Fortunately VIO has been released and I can not implement Openstack in the Moac is about an hour.  No that wasn’t one of my many typos you may find in my articles I did mean to say “an hour”…

Grazed from SysCon.  Author: Roger Strukhoff.

The stack is the hack, Jack. That’s my takeaway from several events I attended over the past few weeks in Silicon Valley and Southeast Asia.  I listened to and participated in discussions about everything from large datacenter management (think Facebook Open Compute) to enterprise-level cyberfraud (at a seminar in Manila attended by the US State Dept. and Philippine National Police) to the world of entrepreneurial startups, app deployment, and mobility (in a series of meetups and talks in both the US and Asia.)

I also attended the announcement of a very high-level report from the Asian Cloud Computing Association, Internet Society of Asia-Pacific, and TRPC Research on the topic of "Re-Thinking the Digital Economy," in which a presentation by a member of the Philippine Cabinet on bringing free WiFi to the masses was just one topic. This report will be discussed in several other meetings within the ASEAN community over the next weeks…

Grazed from GeekWire.  Author: John Cook.

Two former Amazon.com employees are merging their cloud computing startups, hoping to grab a bigger pool of clients that need help transitioning to cloud-based infrastructure.

Tacoma-based Options I/O — started by former Amazon Web Services sales executive Matthew Scott — and Santa Monica, California-based DualSpark — led by former AWS manager Simon Plant — are combining operations in a deal of undisclosed size that they say will “deliver world-class service, support and enablement to our clients and partners.”…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Jeffrey Burt.

An energy company and a technology startup in the Netherlands are the latest companies to test whether housing servers in residences can help families reduce their heating costs as the systems run their workloads.

Eneco is installing radiator-size servers that the energy company is calling eRadiators in five homes in the country. The servers, built by 2-year-old Nerdalize, will be part of the system maker’s compute cloud. While the servers are churning away, the heat they generate will be used by Eneco to heat the homes…

Grazed from TelecomPaper. Author: Editorial Staff.

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, announced a three-year partnership with Ericsson to drive innovation around IT cloud and telecom cloud products, the latter in line with OPNFV. The move will help both organisations respond to increasing demand from telecoms companies and enterprises for more flexible, scalable options to meet the ever-growing appetite for new services.

Under the terms of the partnership, Ericsson will deploy Ubuntu as the host OS for Ericsson’s Cloud System platform. Ubuntu Server OS will underpin Ericsson’s offering for its telecommunications network, internal data centre and cloud computing customers. Ericsson chose Ubuntu Server OS as the host OS for its Cloud Execution Environment, a core component of the company’s cloud infrastructure…

Read more from the source @ http://www.telecompaper.com/news/ericsson-canonical-enter-cloud-partnership–1073693

Grazed from TopTechNews. Author: Jennifer LeClaire.

Availability is not merely disaster recovery in the cloud Relevant Products/Services — it’s the empowering connection between a data Relevant Products/Services center and the cloud for protection Relevant Products/Services and value creation. That’s what Microsoft Azure Product Marketing Group Manager Joel Ferman said when he announced new features for the Azure Backup service.

Microsoft now offers on-demand availability in Azure for both hybrid and heterogeneous environments. That lets organizations harness a nearly unlimited amount of compute and storage in the cloud for developing and testing cloud bursting, migration, reporting and analytics, recovery, backup and long-term data retention, Ferman said…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Sedar Yegulalp.

Google’s latest enhancement to Cloud Platform is not a new feature but a repackaging of an existing innovation. But it’s a downright useful offering all the same. Cloud Launcher is a gallery of applications that can be deployed to Google Cloud Platform with one click. Many of the offered apps are courtesy of a partnership with an existing app-packaging solution, Bitnami. The service’s catalog includes many commonly deployed applications, such as WordPress or SugarCRM, plus development stacks (LAMP) and stack components (Nginx, Node.js).

The blog post detailing Cloud Launcher indicates that the service is aimed mainly at admins who want to deploy VM-based applications — as opposed to containerized ones — but don’t want to deal with the hassle of setting up a VM, then deploying an app into it. Enter Bitnami, which has been providing VM-packaged application solutions for some time…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/article/2902931/cloud-computing/google-cloud-launcher-spins-up-vm-based-apps-in-a-snap.html

Grazed from TheWhir. Author: Cheryl Kemp.

A new 104-page document describing best practices for cloud providers was released on Tuesday by OpenCloud Connect (OCC). The organization’s focus is to provide cloud providers with guidelines for scaling and enhancing ethernet technology to better deal with the increasing demands of cloud services.

“One of the primary goals of OpenCloud Connect is to advance technology standards, vendor interoperability and best design practices,” stated the executive summary. “These initiatives will help businesses create a flexible and dynamic cloud infrastructure.” “Where other standards bodies had the space to shape standards in advance of market penetration, cloud computing is already surging ahead in every direction powered by NFV, SDN, virtualization technologies and networking – technologies that are themselves still evolving quickly…