Disney Builds Private Cloud for Videogame Empire
Grazed from Wired. Author: Klint Finley.
Cloud computing isn’t just a new way of hosting and running applications. It’s also a new way to think about how applications are designed in the first place, how they store and retrieve data. Joe Arnold was the chief technology officer at Engine Yard, a San Francisco company that offers a cloud service where developers can house their applications, and over the last half decade, he witnessed firsthand the shift towards a new way of building software that runs across tens, hundreds, or even thousands of servers. “We were watching people build more mobile and web applications,” he says. “And how they used storage was a lot different from how it started when we first started doing infrastructure.”
That was because Engine Yard plugged into a cloud storage service from Amazon known as Simple Storage System, or S3. By stripping away many characteristics of traditional storage systems — such as the hierarchical “file folder” style of organization — S3 and systems like it can provide more speed and scalability while remaining extremely reliable. It’s an approach called “object storage,” and thanks to Amazon, it has become a popular way for websites and web applications to serve static content, such as images, videos, and other media…
The cloud is an amorphous technological construct with varying degrees of performance and availability, depending on the location and the network of the end user. That’s where the Cedexis Radar cloud app performance and benchmarking service comes into play, providing users with visibility into cloud availability and performance metrics.
Seagate Technology (STX) Plc, a maker of storage drives, is on the lookout for software acquisitions that can help it meet booming demand for cloud computing, said Chief Executive Officer Stephen Luczo. The company is determining where it has holes to fill and what to potentially buy, Luczo said in an interview yesterday at Bloomberg’s New York headquarters. The CEO said he sees a bubble in the valuation of cloud-storage providers, which could present buying opportunities when it deflates, he said.
Enhancing their Managed Service offering for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Datapipe, a global provider of managed services and infrastructure for outsourced IT and cloud computing, today announced it has acquired Newvem, a pioneer in cloud usage analytics and operations optimization.
The Discovery Center in Times Square has a fascinating exhibit of sculptures built out of Legos. Human figures of various sorts emerge from the blocks, providing a similar feeling to the exhibition of partially finished sculptures of Michelangelo, which are in the same gallery in Florence that houses his famous statue of David. Looking at these sculptures and thinking about Michelangelo led me to consider building a replica of David out of Legos (note to self: it’s been done).
After going live on its own Oracle Sales Cloud application one year ago, Oracle now relies on a single global deployment of its SaaS CRM tool to support its global sales operations—from opportunities to accounts to territories in 145 countries around the world.
Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service spending is expected to exceed $7.2B, and 71 percent of financial service executives will invest more in cloud computing in 2013. At the same time, cloud computing remains one of the highest perceived threats to protecting regulated data. Nonetheless, most businesses have the cloud as part of their strategic IT plan.