Category: News

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Daniel P. Kent.

Over the last year, we’ve seen another technology phenomenon added to the long list of IT hype: software-defined networking (SDN). You might ask: "Haven’t networks been defined by software since the days of the ATM or the introduction of VLANs?" The answer is yes, there have been efforts to manage and manipulate physical network components through software, but most of these efforts have focused on easing network management tasks.

What makes SDN different is its intent to allow programmability of the network based on real-time information and data traffic flows. This allows for a closed-loop system where the network can be reconfigured to optimize applications or protect against threats dynamically, based on the current environment…

Grazed from The VarGuy. Author: DH Kass.

Microsoft (MSFT) has plunked down $11 million to buy 200 acres of industrial land in rural Port of Quincy, WA to build a second data center there. Is this another huge bet on Windows Azure, Office 365, Xbox Live and other cloud services? Perhaps. The new facility will triple the size of Microsoft’s current 470,000 square foot server plant.

The vendor has some history in Quincy–first setting up a data center there in 2007 on 75 acres of agricultural land, attracted by cheap electrical power fed by hydroelectric generators drawing water from the nearby Columbia River–and three years later signaling its intention to expand its facilities in the area…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Public cloud giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) has now opened access to Amazon DynamoDB in the AWS GovCloud (US) Management Console. The announcement was made in a AWS blog post this morning. The access enables developers to leverage DynamoDB, a "fully" managed NoSQL database service.

According to AWS, the service "makes it simple and cost-effective to store and retrieve any amount of data, and serve any level of request traffic." All data items are stored on solid state drives (SSDs) and are replicated across three of Amazon’s availability zones, the company said. Amazon has offered several other AWS updates recently. Recent noteworthy AWS updates include the following:…

Grazed from TheServerSide. Author: Jason Tee.

Over the past few years, it has become increasingly clear that DevOps represents a significant cultural shift for the programming and production sides of IT. Today, the tooling that supports this new, more enmeshed way of developing, deploying and maintaining apps is just coming into its own. However, the fact that both Dev and Ops are transitioning to the cloud adds another interesting wrinkle. What steps might help when blending DevOps with the Cloud?

#1: Use cloud-friendly tools

According to Simon Maple, the technical evangelist for ZeroTurnaround, clients have to take command—literally. The key to managing DevOps in the cloud is a command center hosted by the client to which each managed server connects directly. "For a new instance to become accessible to the command center, all it would need is an agent running on that local server…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Ofir Nachmani.

2013 has been incredibly eventful for the cloud industry, mostly for making itself an eminent presence in the mainstream IT market. Businesses of all sizes have made their ways to the cloud, confirming my 2013 predictions. Government agencies worldwide take the cloud seriously, as demonstrated by the CIA’s contract switch over to Amazon from IBM. AWS has proven its rapid pace of innovation and has introduced great leaders who have completely replaced the concept of sluggish IT servers with instances. While the market is still relatively small, I believe it will take over the IT market sooner than some of us think. I am not alone in my forecast… another analyst predicted that AWS will become a $50B business in 2015, which means it will multiply 12 times its size from last year. So, have a look at my 2013 predictions and read on to see what 2014 has in store for the world of cloud computing.

1 – Google Cloud Already Pulled the Trigger on AWS

Last year, the GCP (Google Compute Platform) team managed to clearly identify their direct competition, the AWS cloud. Consequently, they realized that they also need to invest in their IaaS offering. With a great deal of research, they quickly focused their attention on cloud lock-in. They presented out-of-the-box tools that import large chunks of data and "surprisingly" do actually ease the one-way data transfer process from Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage. Moreover, the Google cloud team learned that granularity of cloud resources is a key in the cloud and presented the ‘charge per minute’ of the their compute which is definitely a game changer…

Grazed from SDTimes. Author: Rob Marvin.

The cloud got a lot more crowded in 2013. Cloud providers, users and enterprises have begun to realize the capacity for what’s possible up there, and it’s a lot more than just storage. Cloud computing platforms, PaaSes and IaaSes, mobile and enterprise app migration, virtualization, public versus private clouds, hybrid cloud architectures, cloud security: These are but some of the issues driving competition and expansion as companies big and small vie for cloud supremacy.

In the cloud computing space, Amazon Web Services and EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft’s Windows Azure and Team Foundation Server continued to expand their application, testing, and deployment tools and services while increasing scalability and elasticity…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Patrick Lee.

Choosing the right cloud service provider for your company requires more than just visiting the prospective cloud vendor’s website and reading the reviews on other websites. If you’re looking to find the right scalable cloud hosting service to improve business success, then opt for a suitable cloud service provider that can offer an easily scalable shared and virtualised infrastructure. Whether you are in the process of migrating to the cloud or a current cloud adopter, we provided the acronym: “PERFECTION” to remember these 10 technological and business considerations when choosing a cloud service provider.

Pricing – Make sure you look at the pricing plans before purchasing a package. Whilst some cloud vendors claim to have the cheapest rates, this won’t spare you on upfront payments and any long-term contracts. Sign up for a cloud account that offers flexible pricing and allows you to scale up and down according to your IT needs…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Open Invention Network (OIN) announced today that it has extended its Linux-protective network to include OpenStack and other cloud computing technologies. Specifically, it significantly expanded the technologies covered by OIN’s network of royalty-free cross-licenses and by its defensive patent portfolio. "Cloud computing’s flexibility and scalability are enabling previously unimagined innovation and value creation," said Keith Bergelt, CEO of Open Invention Network.

"Our objective with this important extension is to support that innovation." Alan Clark, chairman of the board of OpenStack Foundation, remarked: "We applaud OIN’s efforts to promote patent non-aggression in the cloud by adding the OpenStack packages to its Linux System definition. The OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors appreciates that the rapidly-growing OIN community has been, and is now explicitly, supporting freedom of action in the cloud of the future that OpenStack has been formed to enable."…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Eric Knorr.

Why wouldn’t you want a dynamically scalable infrastructure and self-service provisioning? That’s the cloud model in a nutshell — and it has proven itself to the degree where you have to ask why you wouldn’t adopt it, rather than why you would. There remain reasons not to, of course. Why switch to SaaS versions of enterprise applications, for example, when your old client-server deployment is working just fine?

Not to mention all sorts of compliance and security reasons to be conservative about core applications that differentiate a business. But in 2013, it became clearer than ever that both the private and public cloud — particularly the latter — provide the platforms of choice if you want to stay competitive…

Grazed from WashingtonPost. Author: Alex Rossino.

This past year will long be remembered by government contractors as the year that federal cloud adoption began in earnest. Between October 2012 and September 2013, federal agencies awarded over $17 billion in cloud computing-related contracts. After a couple of years evaluating and piloting cloud technology, federal customers dove in headfirst, awarding large contracts, such as the Interior Department’s $10 billion Foundation Cloud Hosting Services program and the CIA’s hotly contested $600 million cloud infrastructure award.

Practically every federal agency awarded cloud-related contracts in fiscal 2013, but this growth was not evenly distributed across the government. Awards by civilian agencies totaled $16.5 billion, far outstripping the $65 million in total awards made by defense agencies and the military services…