Category: News

Grazed from Financial Times.  Author: James Kaplan and Chris Rezek and Kara Sprague.

The use of very large, shared, and automated IT platforms – known as cloud computing – is growing rapidly, driven by the prospects of increasing agility and gaining access to more computing resources for less money.

Large institutions are building and managing private-cloud environments internally (and, in some cases, procuring access to external public clouds) for basic infrastructure services, development platforms, and whole applications. Smaller businesses are primarily buying public-cloud offerings, as they generally lack the scale to set up their own clouds…

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Brandon Butler.

Storing information in the public cloud from a growing market of vendors is a viable alternative to on-premise, traditional storage options for some use cases, research firm Gartner says.  But cloud-based storage providers vary widely in their ability to meet the requirements of enterprise IT, which is why customers should rigorously plan and vet vendors before first engaging in a pilot and then deciding if mission-critical data should be moved into the cloud-based storage service.

The benefits of cloud-based storage are similar to those offered by other forms of cloud computing: It can provide significant cost and agility benefits to end user customers. Concerns around security, privacy and accessibility – which are common concerns for other cloud use cases as well – also exist in the cloud storage market, however…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

In China, “cloud computing” means something a lot different than it does in the United States. Because of cultural, regulatory and linguistic issues, private clouds are the hot topic while public cloud services (e.g., Amazon Web Services or any of the myriad SaaS startups in the United States) have little to no presence. This situation can make it tough for U.S. IT companies to make a strong cloud play in China, leaving the door open for Chinese startups to define the technologies that will sate Chinese companies’ immense appetite for cloud computing and shape the country’s nascent cloud ecosystem.

In December, I spent 11 days in Beijing, speaking at conferences and meeting lots of people. Across two whole days at different locations — coffee shop/co-working space Garage Cafe and startup investor/adviser/office provider Cloud Valley (see disclosure) — I met with about a dozen startups doing everything from social media marketing on Weibo to building solid-state drives. Here are seven of the cloud computing companies I met, all trying to do some progressive things. They don’t necessarily look like what you’d expect to come out of Silicon Valley, but their chances for success probably don’t depend on meeting American expectations…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Eric Lundquist.

Six months ago, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel asked CIO Brett Goldstein to bring the Windy City into the digital age. The most visible example of Goldstein’s digital sprint came in the first week of January with an announcement that the city was shifting its 30,000 employees to cloud-based email and desktop applications based on the Microsoft 365 office cloud.

Cloud computing, which often seems too much hype and too little reality, is starting to capture real customers. And government organizations, cities in particular, are paying attention and starting to sign up for cloud services. Chicago, a city not known for being trendy for trend’s sake, is the latest to make a big cloud commitment…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Netflix open sourced the code to Janitor Monkey, a tool it uses to automate the deletion of unused Amazon Web Services resources. It’s easy to spin up cloud compute instances, but not so easy to shut them down as they fall into disuse.

Those Netflix engineers are at it again — releasing source code to an in-house tool they use to keep their Amazon Web Services pared down and tidy. Janitor Monkey is a tool they use to automate the detection and clean up of unused AWS resources. The advantage of public cloud infrastructure is it’s so easy to spin up new compute instances and add storage willy nilly but not so easy to keep track of those resources as they fall into disuse. That leads to a profusion of under-utilized or totally unused resources — the untidy closet aspect of cloud computing…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

On Christmas Eve, Amazon Web services experienced an outage at its Northern Virginia data center. In a prompt follow up, it issued an explanation on Dec. 29, apologized to customers and said it wouldn’t happen again. It was the fourth outage of the year in its most heavily trafficked data center complex.

Explanations in the press of what happened, based on the Dec. 29 statement, were relatively brief. The Wall Street Journal, for example, stated that Amazon spokesmen blamed the outage "on a developer who accidentally deleted some key data … Amazon said the disruption affected its Elastic Load Balancing Service, which distributes incoming data from applications to be handled by different computing hardware."…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Jim Ditmore.

We’re long into the hype cycle of cloud computing. That means clear criteria to assess and evaluate the different options are critical. Which of the many cloud approaches should medium to large enterprises take to optimize their data center operations?

Typically, the cloud is envisioned as an accessible and low-cost compute utility in the sky that’s always available. Despite this lofty promise, companies will need to select and build their cloud environment carefully to avoid fracturing their computing capabilities, locking themselves into a single, higher-cost environment, diminishing their ability to differentiate themselves and gain competitive advantage — or all three…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Dan Kuznetsky.

Floyd Strimling, VP Community, Technical Evangelist for Zenoss, stopped by a while ago to speak about his opinions on the topics of OpenStack, Google App Engine versus Amazon Web Service, and different approaches to open source projects he’s seen companies adopt. Our conversation started by focusing on cloud computing frameworks and the approaches organizations are using to deploy their applications. I’m not going to attempt to capture all of the thoughts that were discussed. Here is a short summary:

1. Often cloud computing services are being selected based upon the the expected costs rather than what the service will do for the organization. These perceptions often are developed by business decision makers without the help of IT support…