Google and Verizon take big steps in the cloud
Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Bulter.
Google and Verizon each made announcements this week that are significant in their race to catch the company many consider to still be the market leader in the IaaS public cloud: Amazon Web Services. Google announced a robust partner program this week, including three tiers of third-party vendors who provide technical and consulting services for the company’s cloud product.
Verizon, meanwhile, further committed itself to embracing application development in its cloud with an extension of its previously announced partnerships with CloudBees and CloudFoundry. Through its venture arm, Verizon committed a monetary investment to PaaS provider CloudBees. The moves show how some of AWS’s competitors hope to compete in this market, and highlight the different approaches IaaS vendors are taking…


We’ve been writing quite a bit about the Aereo case lately, which is scheduled to be heard by the Supreme Court in late April. The case has an awful lot of powerful people and organizations lining up on both sides, filing briefs with the Supreme Court. Some have pointed out that Aereo’s technology really isn’t particularly innovative, and in fact, we’ve discussed how its setup is basically insane from a technology standpoint, but that the company is forced into building it that way to stay within the law (or so it and its supporters believe).
A few weeks my colleague Bob, blogged (here) about how GPU-passthrough on XenServer under OpenStack had been achieved by the xlcloud project. This is a delightful demonstration of Citrix’s open technology stance. Although Citrix has heavily invested in CloudStack, over the last few years we have remained active in OpenStack development. You can find out more about building products using XenServer as the hypervisor using both OpenStack and CloudStack, here.