Author: David

Grazed from ReadWriteWeb. Author: Antone Gonsalves.

It’s a great time to jump into cloud computing. If your business runs on the Web, you can reap the benefits of a good old fashioned price war among Google, Microsoft and Amazon. The trio is lowering prices for their Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud-computing platforms in order to attract developers. For startups and other companies not tied to legacy platforms, that means the time is right to get a good deal on building and running websites and client-side applications on any one of three state-of-the-art data centers.

A New Round Of Price Cuts

Less than six months after launching Compute Engine, Google dropped prices this week by about 5% for its baseline services, even though the cloud service is still in preview mode and available only to select customers. Amazon and Microsoft are expected to bring their prices in line with Google’s for their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Azure services, respectively…

“AWS helps companies get started by offering a technology infrastructure with no capital expense and low pay as you go pricing, and providing a technology platform with broad functionality and global scale. This year, at the first AWS re: Invent conference, we have created a dynamic, live stage environment for start-up companies to launch publicly for the first time,” said Ariel Kelman, Head of Worldwide Marketing, AWS. “It was a great experience for us to watch these eight exciting companies show off their new apps on AWS in front of 6,000 members of the AWS community.”

Grazed from XtremeTech. Author: Grant Brunner.

Today, most large online services aren’t hosted on a single server. Amazon, iTunes, and Xbox Live are all run on countless networked servers all over the world. There is a lot of benefit to splitting up the load over many different servers and locations, but cloud computing also has its own problems, such as latency and stability. Top network engineers are working on smoothing out problems as they arise, and Netflix just made a big step in helping cloud services become more resilient.

Announced this week as Hystrix, this system was originally developed by the Netflix API team back in 2011 to control the interactions between Netflix’s distributed services and systems, stepping in to prevent cascading failures if they seem likely. As of today, anyone can use Hystrix completely free because it has been officially released on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. The announcement does a good job at showcasing the enormous scale at which this system works: “Today tens of billions of thread-isolated and hundreds of billions of semaphore-isolated calls are executed via Hystrix every day at Netflix and a dramatic improvement in uptime and resilience has been achieved through its use.” This might not sound all that exciting at first, but this could have huge implications for the online services we already use as well as the services of the future…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Rick Whiting.

Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) has added 14,000 channel partners to its Cloud Essentials initiative in the past week since making it easier for solution providers to enroll in the cloud computing starter program.

The Cloud Essentials enrollment effort is one of a number of changes Microsoft has made to its Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) programs in recent days. The Redmond, Wash., company also has created several new "competencies," or technology areas in which partners can become certified, and consolidated others. The changes, some of which were previewed at the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Toronto in July, come as the MPN re-enrollment season begins for Microsoft partners…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Edwin Schouten.

Cloud computing is a trend towards the industrialization of IT, but this industrialization of IT services also has significant impact on the influence the consumer has on the services. Contracts are standard and cannot be tuned to meet consumers’ wishes; ”what you see is what you get.” But IT still needs to govern regulatory compliance, so how does this work with cloud services?

Cloud in the Financial Sector

I will illustrate this using the regulatory organization from my home country The Netherlands (aka Holland). Recently I was a panelist for a discussion on cloud computing in the financial sector at the national outsourcing congress where I represented the cloud providers. On the panel with me were a representative of consumers, a lawyer and a representative of DNB (De Nederlandse Bank), a public limited company responsible for safeguarding financial stability…

Grazed from Phys.org. Author: Editorial Staff.

Researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of Oregon have found a way to exploit cloud-based Web browsers, using them to perform large-scale computing tasks anonymously. The finding has potential ramifications for the security of "cloud browser" services.

At issue are cloud browsers, which create a Web interface in the cloud so that computing is done there rather than on a user’s machine. This is particularly useful for mobile devices, such as smartphones, which have limited computing power.The cloud-computing paradigm pools the computational power and storage of multiple computers, allowing shared resources for multiple users. "Think of a cloud browser as being just like the browser on your desktop computer, but working entirely in the cloud and providing only the resulting image to your screen," says Dr. William Enck, an assistant professor of computer science at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Eric Bloom.

Rick Chapman, the Founder of SaaS University, managing editor of Softletter and author of the just released book SaaS Entrepreneur: The Definitive Guide to Success in Your Cloud Application Business, and I spoke earlier this week. Our discussion centered around the use of SaaS within IT and its future effect on IT jobs.

Rick’s belief is that the number of jobs within IT will decrease over the next ten to twenty years. This is the case because many of the systems previously developed and/or purchased and supported by IT staff members will eventually be replaced by SaaS (cloud) based applications which do not require internal IT staff. He went on to say that not all applications would be replaced, primarily only those applications which companies do not feel are truly key to their internal process or contain proprietary algorithms. For example, it’s unlikely that a financial trading firm management firm will outsource the software used for stock analysis and trading or that a large retail company processing milions of transactions will outsource its credit card processing systems to a “cloud” outsource…

Grazed from GNOME.ES. Author: Editorial Staff.

In the coming year, the Internet of Things will change how consumers and enterprises use technology, interactive displays will become common in public spaces, robots will be used to rehabilitate patients, and visualization will help solve the big data problem.

Those are just some of the technological advances that experts from the IEEE Computer Society, a membership organization for technology leaders, foresee in 2013. “The promise for the coming years is not just technology,” said incoming IEEE Computer Society President David Alan Grier. “But technology and data–how we get data from the right sources and get it to the right people in the right forms. That is the big issue that engages many of our members.” Among the major advances that IEEE Computer Society experts forecast for 2013:…

Grazed from The Var Guy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

In days past, virtualization platforms that relied on an amalgamation of different technologies could present complications for IT managers. But in a sign that hybridized virtualization environments are becoming the accepted norm, Convirture has announced a new version of its management tools that supports all major virtualization and cloud platforms.

If the world of virtualization and cloud computing were simpler, there might be one clear preferred solution for building computing infrastructure. But organizations now have an array of enterprise ready hypervisors to choose from, ranging from Xen to VMware to KVM. At the same time, several major cloud platforms, including Eucalyptus, OpenStack and Amazon EC2, are available. Because all of these technologies have different strengths and weaknesses, many IT infrastructures rely on a mix of these various solutions…