Author: David

Grazed from The Washington Post.  Author: Alex Rossino.

Three years ago, cloud computing was generating all of the hype in information technology. Now the spotlight is on “big data,” a term used to describe the exploding volume of data accumulated by federal agencies.

Despite the attention, big data spending within the federal government is likely to be limited at first and probably will not pick up until cloud computing is more established.

Private industry has already realized the value in the collections of data stored on their servers. This data can tell companies what their customers have bought, and what they might buy again, particularly if a targeted marketing campaign reaches them at the right time…

Grazed from FierceCommunications.  Author:  Chris Rizo.

A quick-moving catastrophic storm late Friday night knocked part of Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) data center temporarily offline, and with the crash down came the websites of some of the marquee customers of Amazon.com’s (Nasdaq: AMZN) cloud-computing unit.

Downed was AWS’s vaunted Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, which remotely hosts the public-facing websites of movie-streamer Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX), cloud platform-as-a-service Heroku, photo-sharing service Instagram, and the social-networking site Pinterest, among other online services that similarly rest on Amazon’s digital infrastructure.

The content-delivery failures–blamed on a two-hour massive electrical storm–affected one AWS availability zone, the US-East-1 Region, which resides at Amazon’s data center in northern Virginia…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: James Urquhart.

This week’s announcement by Google of its new Google Compute Engine cloud offering is a big deal, and GigaOM’s coverage to date has been pretty spot on. However, having read the excellent coverage by Om Malik and Derrick Harris, as well as some interesting analysis on other sites (like here and here), I’m stuck with the feeling that most are missing the real reason Google will get some stalwart Amazon Web Services customers to give Compute Engine a try. Google’s quest to win over users will be all about performance.

The Google Developers Blog post announcing the service broke down three key “offers” of GCE,  which I interpret as the three key differentiators from Google’s perspective of its service over the competition (not necessarily just AWS):…

The panel, known as the Article 29 Working Party, is expected to make the recommendation as part of its long-awaited guidelines on cloud computing, which have the potential, some industry experts say, to allay concerns over data privacy and pave the way for wider adoption of the remote-computing services that are more common in the United States.

The report will highlight the advantages of using cloud computing to encourage innovation and economic efficiency, said a person with knowledge of the recommendations, who spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to speak for the group. This would reflect a new, more practical approach by European officials to remote computing’s role in the broader economy….

Trying to overlay cloud services on the same pipe being used for best-effort internet is going to disappoint users, and limit cloud service adoption. Specifically, we need to add speed and intelligence to these networks, and several factors are driving this requirement. For example:…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Patrick Burke.

Cloud computing is being embraced by most enterprise IT shops – at least according to attendees and vendors at the 10th Cloud Expo in New York, writes Roger Strukhoff of Cloud Computing Journal. Many organizations now want to know how to harness the strengths of cloud computing.

The word of the day at Cloud Expo was "multi-cloud," Strukhoff explained:

"It turns out that enterprise IT is complex, and that cloud is not going to eliminate that complexity, at least with larger shops. However, it will continue the push in recent years to eliminate silos, decouple and loosely recouple services, get a grip on measuring things, and provide the vaunted ‘single pane of glass’ through which IT management can view and manage what’s going on," he writes…

Grazed from Wall Street Journal.  Author: John Letzing.

Large electrical storms on the east coast disrupted power for Amazon.com Inc. cloud-computing operations Friday night, causing outages for customers such as Netflix Inc. and photo-sharing service Instagram.

The Seattle-based online retailer operates data centers with servers that manage the Web operations of many other companies, a practice often called cloud computing. Power outages caused by catastrophic storms that blanketed the east coast affected Amazon’s operations in Virginia.

On Saturday afternoon, Amazon was still reporting performance issues for what it calls its elastic cloud compute, relational database and elastic beanstalk services. The problems appeared to have begun appearing on the site at around 11:21 p.m. EDT on Friday…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Robert J. Mullins.

As Microsoft moves forward with its acquisition of enterprise social networking company Yammer, industry analysts are starting to identify opportunities for the upstart Yammer to help the software giant to make a faster transition to cloud computing.

Microsoft’s $1.2 billion deal to acquire enterprise social media company Yammer still has some people scratching their heads about the synergy the two companies will generate, but Yammer could actually teach Microsoft a thing or two, an industry analyst says.

Microsoft built its fortune by selling software licenses to computer makers, businesses and consumers. Yammer built its business into something worth paying $1.2 billion for by what’s called the “freemium” model…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Anthony Wing Kosner.

What a Cloud-a-palooza! I am neither a climate scientist or cloud computing expert, but I know that many of our readers are those things and more. To me, as a commentator on how the distribution and format of content effects user experience, the Amazon cloud outage raise some really pressing questions for the technology industry. Since I have more questions than answers, I will limit myself to asking some (perhaps leading) questions and hope that our own expert cloud of readers and contributors can fill in the (perhaps contentious) details:…