Author: David

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Like it or not, sweeping software bugs are just part and parcel with operating the largest computing systems the world has ever seen. On Monday night, Amazon Web Services published a detailed post-mortem of its latest cloud outage, which struck on Friday night as massive thunderstorms knocked out power to one of the company’s east coast data centers. However, issues with the data center’s backup generator were just a catalyst — it was a handful of latent software bugs that manifested themselves as the system attempted to restore itself that did the real damage.

Although AWS is already working on fixes at all levels, this won’t be the last cloud computing outage we see, either from AWS or its competitors in the cloud provider space…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Riverbed Technology RVBD +2.14% , the performance company, today announced that Riverbed Steelhead(R) Cloud Accelerator has been named the Best of TechEd Award winner in the Cloud Computing category. Steelhead Cloud Accelerator, developed by Riverbed(R) in partnership with Akamai(R) Technologies, provides a first-of-its-kind solution to accelerate software-as-a-service (SaaS) performance for Microsoft Office 365. Winners were announced during the Microsoft TechEd Conference, which took place at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Fla.

This award recognizes the innovation behind Steelhead Cloud Accelerator, which provides a complete solution to overcome the potential performance problems created by the distance between end users and their applications, problems that must be addressed to realize the full potential of SaaS…

Grazed from IEEE. Author: PR Announcement.

The IEEE Technical Activities Board has approved the launch of an IEEE Computer Society journal dedicated to cloud computing.

The online IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing will debut next year with two issues, advancing to quarterly during its second and third years. TCC will fill the need for a cross-disciplinary and internationally archived journal that publishes novel cloud computing developments.

“We wanted a high-quality research publication that can capture all content relative to cloud computing,” said Alicia Stickley, IEEE Computer Society senior manager of Publishing Services.
Besides the IEEE Computer Society, the journal is being sponsored by the IEEE Communications Society, IEEE Power and Energy Society, IEEE Consumer Electronics Society, and IEEE Systems Council…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Stuart Johnston.

Google launched its IaaS platform last week to compete with AWS and Windows Azure, but the Web giant may have an uphill battle with a cloud offering that only supports open source operating systems.

The Google Compute Engine, revealed during the Google I/O conference in San Francisco last Thursday, is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform that allows customers to launch and manage virtual machines (VM) running either Ubuntu or CentOS Linux on one, two, four or eight virtual core instances with 3.75 GB of RAM per virtual core…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Emma Joseph.

IBM has come up with great and easy ways to understand cloud computing and make it functional as well. IBM is a leader when it comes to cloud computing, so it is no surprise that they have managed to do this. Cloud computing can also go beyond cost savings by allowing your users to access the latest software and infrastructure offerings to foster business innovation. Think about what that simple statement means. Yes, saving money is good – even important – but even more important is how the end user uses software and infrastructure. Do you know what that really means?

From the infrastructure side of things, you should be able to offer something that has enough servers, storage and other essential components to get the task at hand done. In this case, the task is setting up a cloud computing structure. IBM offers four different types: X86, Power7, zEnterprise System and iDataplex…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Alexander Haislip.

It ought not surprise anyone that Google has entered the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) business. GigaOm’s Derrick Harris broke news of the plans in mid-May, but among knowledgeable cloud circles, it was a foregone conclusion that the search giant would enter into rentable infrastructure.

It was a natural move for Google to join the fray. HP entered the cloud game in April. Microsoft hit CTRL+ALT+DEL on its Platform as a Service (PaaS) in early June and brought it back as an IaaS. Google couldn’t afford to sit idle and hand over the future of an eleventy billion dollar industry to an online book store.

And Google needs new things to talk about. New tablets, new glasses, new media players, etc. “New” is the gas that keeps Google going, what gives it that sheen of innovation that makes it seem like more than an advertising company. More product launches mean more bonuses too, so it’s critical to keep putting products out the door. That’s the incentive plan that brought us Google Wave, Google Buzz, Google Answers and GoogleFlooFlaFlippidittyFloop…

Grazed from CloudTimes.org. Author: Florence de Borja.

Experts do not believe that an API standard will be implemented in the near future. This is primarily because each of the cloud computing service providers has its own API definition. Although there is a real need to standardize APIs, these providers are really not bent on moving towards standardization because the APIs are expensive to create and modify. As such, the public can’t expect API standardization.

Amazon Web Services, being the most successful cloud computing service provider to date, has become the norm. Proof to this is that other companies like Eucalyptus now offers API compatibility with Amazon Web Services. Other companies are also following suit. Because of this movement, it can be said that AWS’s API has become the norm…

Grazed from The Age. Author: Quentin Hardy.

June 2012 may well go down as the month the tech world entered a new era.

On June 11, Apple showed its next operating system for iPhones and iPads. It offered maps and speech recognition, plus music and movies on iTunes, all tied via the internet to Apple’s "cloud" of servers.

A week later, Microsoft, known better for software, demonstrated the Surface tablet, its answer to the iPad. The Surface interacts with both the web and Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure, called Windows Azure…

International Data Corporation (IDC) recently pubished the report, Guides on Implementation of Cloud Computing Infrastructure Projects in China, which proposes roadmaps for Chinese enterprises in constructing cloud computing infrastructures. The report is based on IDC’s in-depth surveys on the current status of China’s cloud computing market. It aims at offering suggestions to enterprises and organizations that are constructing cloud computing infrastructures that will help them to deploy cloud platforms rapidly and successfully.

IDC believes that the implementation of cloud computing infrastructures involves not only the integration of software and hardware, but also the transformation of businesses’ IT strategies. Therefore, users should evaluate cloud computing projects before implementation and cooperate with experienced IT consultancies or service providers to ensure that their plans take the management pattern of cloud computing centers into consideration and includes future operations. The cloud computing platforms should be expected to truly benefit the enterprises.