Seemingly every tech vendor seems to have a cloud strategy, with new products and services dubbed “cloud” coming out every week. But who are the real market leaders in this business? Gartner’s IaaS Magic Quadrant: a who’s who of cloud market article shows Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for IaaS. Research firm Gartner’s answer lies in its Magic Quadrant report for the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market.
It is interesting that missing from this quadrant figure are big-name companies that have invested a lot in the cloud, including Microsoft, HP, IBM and Google. The reason is that report only includes providers that had IaaS clouds in general availability as of June 2012 (Microsoft, HP and Google had clouds in beta at the time).
Gartner reinforces what many in the cloud industry believe: Amazon Web Services is the 800-pound gorilla. Gartner has also found one big minus on Amazon Web Services: AWS has a “weak, narrowly defined” service-level agreement (SLA), which requires customers to spread workloads across multiple availability zones. AWS was not the only provider where there was something negative to say on the service-level agreement (SLA) details.
Read the whole Gartner’s IaaS Magic Quadrant: a who’s who of cloud market article to see the Gartner’s view on clould market today.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
AWS scores same Oz gov sec creds as Azure
Welcome to the cloud, where competitive advantage lasts a whole day
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/28/aws_scores_same_oz_gov_sec_creds_as_azure/
Microsoft yesterday pressed the ON button for Azure Australia, and one of the things the Redmondian outpost was keen to point out was that it was the only cloud in Australia to have earned the Australian federal government’s Industry Security Registered Assessors Program (IRAP) certification.
Those who score an IRAP tick are allowed to store non-classified government data.
That’s obviously an important thing for a global cloud provider’s antipodean branch to achieve, given that data sovereignty concerns are so often cited as the prime reason the likes of Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) bother to build bit barns down under.
AWS has just announced that it, too, has jumped through all the IRAP hoops
Microsoft’s competitive advantage, at least with government clients, therefore lasted one whole day of Azure Australia’s official operations.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lack of centralized cloud infrastructure team hampering Apple’s development of iCloud services – report
http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/11/24/lack-of-centralized-cloud-infrastructure-team-hampering-apples-development-of-icloud-services—report
Apple’s work-in-progress iCloud Photo Library still hasn’t fully realized the original concept, code-named “Hyperion,” that was pushed years ago by late company co-founder Steve Jobs, according to a new report.
“One person close to the company says Apple is taking some steps to build some common cloud technology but has moved slowly in part because it’s used to projects residing in isolated teams,” the report said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
10 Skills IT Pros Need for Cloud Computing
- See more at: http://www.buildyourbestcloud.com/147/10-skills-it-pros-need-cloud-computing#sthash.oyYX9aLi.dpuf
Tomi Engdahl says:
Inside Aurora: how disruptive is Amazon’s MySQL clone?
Storage engine made for the cloud – shame it’s only for MySQL
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/26/inside_aurora_how_disruptive_is_amazons_mysql_clone/
At its recent re:Invent conference in Atlanta, Amazon announced its new database engine Aurora, claiming it to be a commercial grade database engine at open-source cost. “It’s at least as available, durable and fault-tolerant as the enterprise editions of the proprietary commercial database engines and high-end SANs,” said senior AWS VP Andy Jassy, “and it’s a tenth of the cost.”
So what makes Aurora tick? The database engine is compatible with the open source MySQL, and most of the smarts are in the storage, according to general manager Anurag Gupta, who described the new service in detail at a re:Invent session. When you use the new service, currently in limited preview, you rent a virtual machine (VM) instance in which the SQL and transaction engine runs. Caching also lives on this instance, though it runs in a separate process so that you can restart the database engine without losing the cache. Logging and storage are handled by an external layer that runs on Amazon’s storage service.
This approach means that failover to a replica, if you maintain multiple instances, is almost immediate, since all replicas use the same logging and storage layers. Similarly, there is negligible lag between updating the primary instance and reading the data back from a read replica. Gupta quoted 7.27ms replica lag at 13.8K updates per second. Arguably it is not really a replica at all, since the storage layer is the same; but the data is already replicated six times across three “availability zones”,
Aurora uses a technique called Log Structured Storage, which means that the log is integrated into the file system; there may be several versions of any particular piece of data but by consulting the log, the system knows which is current. The storage is SSD-backed for performance. A data insert in MySQL requires six writes, says Gupta, whereas in Aurora it requires only two, because only the log is updated.
The outcome is improved performance versus MySQL, measured by the standard SysBench benchmark tool, and comparing the same operations with Amazon’s MySQL service, according to figures presented by Gupta. The quick summary is 3x write performance and 5x read performance,
Tomi Engdahl says:
SF Has An S&M Problem
http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/23/sf-has-an-sm-problem/?ncid=rss&cps=gravity
Our Sales and Marketing costs are killing us.
For years, subscription-based pricing popularized by Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) startups has been pitched to us as a way of reducing S&M costs. Traditionally, software was sold as a license along with a maintenance contract that ensured deep upfront revenues and a continuous stream of income.
Unlike the complexity of that on-premise implemented and managed software, SaaS was supposed to be simpler for customers to use and pay for. That simplicity not only saves on maintenance costs for overburdened IT departments, but also theoretically lowers the sales touch required for a sale, generating revenue efficiency for the provider. By pricing software as a subscription, startups forego upfront revenue from a license fee in exchange for higher and more reliable renewable revenue.
It hasn’t worked out that well.
The evidence is strikingly poor for the subscription model when it comes to actual dollars and cents.
New Relic, the SaaS application monitoring startup, announced its IPO earlier this month as well, and its earnings record is similar. The company had revenues of $63 million in the year before March 31, with $58 million in sales and marketing costs.
These high ratios between revenues and sales and marketing expenses are certainly not new for companies heading to the public markets.
Now, I know the standard excuse here is that these subscription companies are “growing rapidly” and this is all just “an investment in the future.” With subscription pricing, the entire model follows from renewals, with the logic being that once you have acquired a customer, the profit margin will rapidly increase as active sales costs come down.
The challenge is that low-touch sales never seem to be low cost. If a customer is shelling out a serious amount of money from its IT budget to pay for a service, there is going to have to be constant attention paid to that customer to ensure that they are happy with the service while ensuring that they don’t defect to a competitor. This goes far beyond a support subscription, which handles the day-to-day maintenance of ensuring performance of the service for the customer. The CIO needs to know the provider is listening to their concerns, and that means a sales infrastructure.
Furthermore, gross margins for SaaS startups in particular are lower than for companies selling traditional software licenses, since these startups don’t just sell code, but also have to manage data centers and other infrastructure to maintain the software service. With less margin, startups should be more efficient with S&M spending.
Even a company as massive as SalesForce has arguably not found its marketing scale yet. In its most recent quarter, SalesForce’s S&M costs represented more than 51% of total revenue, and more than 67% of gross profit.
Does SaaS still offer a compelling model for some startups? Sure, just take a look at Slack. Given its innate virality as a social tool in the workforce, it is entirely credible to believe that the company can have an off-the-shelf product with a subscription pricing model and avoid the S&M problems that plague others in the enterprise space. But it has an advantage with organic growth that few other B2B startups share.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Do not rely too much on cloud security
Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority Kyberturvallisuuskeskus points out that many factors affect the organization of cloud computing security. The complex is composed of both the service provider and the customer’s security practices, and also to the application to the cloud data security.
“Organizations its own security policies should be maintained also when utilizing cloud services. Cloud service provider secure technical implementation only allows secure cloud service implementation, but does not guarantee it,” security expert Tom Kinnari says the release.
“Different countries, the legislation deals with, for example, personal data protection, or electronic communication in different ways. The general rule is that the law imposed responsibilities can not be outsourced cloud service provider, “Kinnari says.
Kyberturvallisuuskeskus has prepared a checklist of things you need to remember the conclusion of the service contract:
data ownership and rights
information on the geographical location of
data security, taking into account the life cycle of information, processing of personal data and backup
procedure of exceptional situations, such as in connection with the service outage
service level agreement
Agreement, the applicable law and the right to place any dispute
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/kaikki_uutiset/ala+luota+liikaa+pilven+tietoturvaan/a1032352
Pilvipalveluiden turvallisuus
https://www.viestintavirasto.fi/attachments/tietoturva/Pilvipalveluiden_tietoturva_organisaatioille.pdf
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ron Miller / TechCrunch:
Over 40% IT pros in survey chose Dropbox as preferred enterprise sync and share tool, leading OneDrive’s 25% and Google’s 20%
The Most Popular Enterprise Sync and Share Product Might Surprise You
http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/27/the-most-popular-enterprise-storage-product-might-surprise-you/
451 Research released a report this week with details on the enterprise sync and share market and what they found may surprise you. It certainly surprised me. That’s because the most popular sync and share tool in the enterprise today is not Box or even Microsoft OneDrive. It’s Dropbox, the cloud service IT supposedly loves to hate.
Dropbox was the enterprise leader by far with more than 40 percent of responders saying their companies used that. The next in line was OneDrive with just over 25 percent followed by Google in third with over 20 percent and Box in fourth with just under 15 percent. All the rest had less than 10 percent.
What’s more, just 18 percent of those surveyed currently pay for an enterprise sync and share product. It’s hard to know what this all means exactly, except that as the report indicated, we are still (surprisingly) in the very early days for this market and there is a lot of room for all the players to grow.
“Dropbox comes up in virtually every discussion we have with buyers. To be honest with you my opinion is that firms are often consolidating on whichever is the most popular being used in their enterprise – its a pragmatic approach. If you have 5,000 active Dropbox accounts and would love them to move to your preferred enterprise class alternative – that’s a huge change management issue,” he said.
He added, “I think the survey data tells us a few things. It’s early days and this stuff is just starting to really play out in the enterprise, few folks have a ’strategy’ as such and brand visibility and strength is very important (Google, Dropbox etc). Also, I expect EMC Syncplicity and some true enterprise options to make good traction over the coming year and this space to look very different indeed in 18 months.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
UpCloud bets on storage performance, US datacenter to dent market
http://www.cio.com/article/2851193/upcloud-bets-on-storage-performance-us-datacenter-to-dent-market.html
It may be a minnow in a market of whales, but Finnish cloud service company UpCloud is hoping that improving its storage performance and adding datacenter capacity in Chicago will make customers take a look.
The cloud arena has become very competitive, but there still is room for smaller companies that can find a way to stand out. While UpCloud, which expanded operations outside its native Finland last year, can’t compete with Amazon Web Services’ range of services, it believes it can still distinguish itself as a provider of cloud-based servers and storage.
“We believe very strongly that the cloud isn’t a commodity, because behind the price there are multiple decisions on how services are produced that all affect performance,” said CEO Antti Vilpponen.
One area where UpCloud is convinced it can beat the competition is storage performance. An upgrade launched this week speeds reads and writes from servers to storage with a new SSD-based storage type called MaxIOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second).
“We can perform up to 90,000 IOPS on the read side, and two-thirds of that can be easily achieved on the write side,” Vilpponen said.
Vilpponen claimed that exceeds what Amazon, Google and Microsoft can offer.
UpCloud can go head-to-head with its U.S. competitors on price, as well, Vilpponen said. For example, a virtual server with four processors, 8GB of RAM and 200GB of storage costs US$140.11 per month from its datacenter in London. By comparison, a c3.xlarge instance from Amazon’s datacenter in Ireland with the same spec and Provisioned IOPS storage (with the maximum 4,000 IOPS) costs $490.55 per month with pay-as-you-go pricing. For users that are satisfied with Amazon’s general purpose SSD storage, the price drops to $193.65.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Selling Services on Amazon BETA
http://services.amazon.com/selling-services/pricing.htm?ld=EL-www.amazon.comAS
“It’s a whole new world out there. People buy differently than they did in the past. It’s all Internet based. Selling on Amazon has helped me compete with a whole new channel.”
- Dutton Clarke, Super Stereo Warehouse
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon Cognito
http://aws.amazon.com/cognito/?sc_channel=BA&sc_campaign=cognito_US&sc_publisher=techmeme&sc_medium=sponsor_posts_1&sc_content=free&sc_detail=free_sponsor_posts_1_headline&sc_category=cognito
Amazon Cognito is a service that makes it easy to save user data, such as app preferences or game state, in the AWS Cloud without writing any backend code or managing any infrastructure. You can save data locally on users’ devices allowing your applications to work even when the devices are offline. You can also synchronize data across a user’s devices so that their app experience will be consistent regardless of the device they use.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon Web Services adds no-money-down reserved instances
https://gigaom.com/2014/12/02/amazon-web-services-adds-no-money-down-reserved-instances/
Amazon Web Services didn’t announce any new price cuts at its annual re:Invent conference last month, but there’s more to the economics of cloud computing than just lower prices. The company demonstrated as much on Tuesday by announcing two new billing tiers for its pre-paid virtual servers, which it calls Reserved Instances.
Now, AWS customers have the option to pay only part of the Reserved Instance cost upfront, or, if they prefer, nothing at all. This is a pretty substantial change from the original all-upfront pricing model in place since AWS launched Reserved Instances in 2009.
The catch with the new payment options is that cost-savings are tied to how much a user pays upfront.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dig into Iron Mountain and you’ll find Seagate and EVault
Cloudy DR dares to enter underground data dungeons
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/03/iron_mountain_supported_by_seagate_evault_cloud_disaster_recovery/
Cloud-based backup, recovery and disaster recovery (DR) services are being offered from an Iron Mountain data dungeon using Seagate kit and EVault software.
Seagate is helping Iron Mountain move into the digital storage business again. Autonomy, in pre-HP days, bought the rusty heap’s cloud archive storage business in 2011 after Iron Mountain threw in the towel on a failed enterprise, prompted by activist investor Elliott Management.
Now, three years later, it is partnering with Seagate to get back into the cloud storage business. Iron Mountain will offer EVault’s Cloud Backup and Cloud Disaster Recovery services.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Drive now lets you edit Microsoft Office attachments right from Gmail
http://venturebeat.com/2014/12/02/google-drive-now-lets-you-edit-microsoft-office-attachments-right-from-gmail/
Google today announced a very useful new addition to Gmail: editing Microsoft Office documents that arrive as email attachments. A new Google Drive edit icon has been added to Gmail attachments that you can click to automatically convert Office files to Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides.
Google notes that the new feature means you can turn Microsoft Office documents into a Google Drive file so that you have a single document to keep track of, as well as get access to revision history. This document can be accessed “from anywhere” since it resides in the cloud, and you can choose to make it available for offline access as well.
Google Drive today also gained support for importing 15 new Office formats, though they’re not very widely used ones: presentation show files, macro-enabled files, and template files. Here’s the full list:
dot, dotx, dotm*, docm* conversions to Google Docs
xlt, xltx, xltm*, xlsm* conversions to Google Sheets
pot, potx, potm*, pptm*, pps, ppsx, ppsm* conversions to Google Slides
Google is also promising “improved charts, images, and tables support” for these file formats, but didn’t go into detail.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dropbox Steps Up to Rescue Us From Corporate Software
http://www.wired.com/2014/12/dropbox-steps-rescue-us-corporate-software/
Dropbox is going corporate.
On Wednesday, the file-syncing startup launched an application programming interface, or API, that lets outside developers build software on top of its Dropbox for Business service. That may sound like a jumble of tech speak, but it could be very useful to businesses, and ultimately, it represents a kind of finale to a decades-long contest: consumer technology has now emerged triumphant over corporate IT as the way to get work done.
Whether it’s Gmail at work or Apple partnering with IBM to bring iPhones into the office, workers are more and more the ones bringing new software and hardware into the workplace, not sales teams. This hasn’t come without difficulty, as companies struggle to balance the best tool for the job with the tools they can control. But the momentum appears to be irresistible, and the path of Dropbox from consumer convenience to corporate necessity is typical.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Open Sources Its Secret Weapon in Cloud Computing
http://www.wired.com/2014/06/google-kubernetes/
When Google engineers John Sirois, Travis Crawford, and Bill Farner left the internet giant and went to work for Twitter, they missed Borg.
Borg was the sweeping software system that managed the thousands of computer servers underpinning Google’s online empire. With Borg, Google engineers could instantly grab enormous amounts of computing power from across the company’s data centers and apply it to whatever they were building–whether it was Google Search or Gmail or Google Maps. As Sirois, Crawford, and Farner created new web services at Twitter, they longed for the convenience of this massive computing engine.
Unfortunately, Borg was one of those creations Google was loath to share with the outside world–a technological trade secret it saw as an important competitive advantage. In the end, urged by that trio of engineers, Twitter went so far as build its own version of the tool. But now, the next wave of internet companies has another way of expanding their operations to Google-like sizes. This morning, Google open sourced a software tool that works much like Borg, freely sharing this new creation with the world at large.
‘It’s a way of stitching together a collection of machines into, basically, a big computer.’
Releasing Kubernetes as a way of encouraging people to use these cloud computing services, known as Google Compute Engine and Google App Engine.
But the new tool isn’t limited to the Google universe. It also lets you oversee machines running on competing cloud services–from Amazon, say, or Rackspace–as well as inside private data centers. Yes, today’s cloud services already give you quick access to large numbers of virtual machines, but with Kubernetes, Google aims to help companies pool processing power more effectively from a wide variety of places. “It’s a way of stitching together a collection of machines into, basically, a big computer,” says Craig Mcluckie, a product manager for Google’s cloud services.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The age of the hybrid cloud desktop hypervisor is upon us
VMware workstation 11 arrives, complete with cloudy connection
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/04/the_age_of_the_hybrid_cloud_desktop_hypervisor_is_upon_us/
VMware has sent version 11 of its Workstation desktop virtualisation product down the slipway.
But the most interesting item is integration with VMware’s very own cloud, vCloud Air, as Workstation can now “scale … virtual machines in the external cloud.”
It’s apparently possible to “… connect to vCloud Air and upload, run, and view virtual machines right from the Workstation 11 interface.” And to do more or less the same thing to and from a private cloud.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s Azure RemoteApp app-delivery service to be generally available December 11
http://www.zdnet.com/microsofts-azure-remoteapp-app-delivery-service-to-be-generally-available-december-11-7000036381/
Summary: Microsoft’s Azure RemoteApp service — which will allow users to remotely access corporate applications on a variety of devices — will be generally available starting on December 11.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM’s Watson Analytics enters public beta
http://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-watson-analytics-enters-public-beta/
Summary:IBM has made it cognitive analytics package more widely available.
IBM has launched the public beta of Watson Analytics, its set of cloud-based predictive and analytics tools.
The move to public beta for Watson Analytics on Thursday follows its private beta launch this September. IBM said at the time of the beta releas the service will be made available under a freemium model through iOS, Android mobile devices and the web.
Watson Analytics is a cognitive service that’s meant to bear some of the load executives face when preparing data, while making it easier to run predictive analyses and use ‘visual storytelling’, such as using graphs, maps and infographics to illustrate a point.
Watson Analytics is one piece of IBM’s $1bn gamble that it can commercialise Watson. The company claims it has 22,000 registrations for Watson Analytics since launching in September.
Currently, the beta lets users look at visualisations of their data to find patterns and relationships, and experiment with its Watson’s predictive capabilities. Soon, it will let users create their own dashboards and infographics.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mesosphere Announces First Data Center OS And $36M In Funding
http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/07/mesosphere-releases-first-data-center-os-and-announces-36m-in-funding/
Mesosphere, the commercial entity built on top of the open source Apache Mesos project, announced some major milestones today, starting with $36M in Series B funding along with the early release of what they are calling the first data center operating system.
the bigger news was the announcement of their first data center operating system (DCOS). This is a new kind of operating system that operates on the scale of the entire data center, which means instead of controlling a single machine, the operating system sits on top of the data center and enables administrators to treat all of the resources in the data center as a single, virtual entity. This allows for much simpler management and lets administrators spin servers and software up and down as needs require much more quickly than with current methods.
The virtual machine allowed you to make the best use of your resources on a single machine, but Mesosphere wants to take that concept a step further and allow you to apply that same principle to the entire data center. Because today’s applications tend to work across multiple servers, no matter how many ways you break down a single machine’s resources, it’s just not going to suffice anymore.
The virtual resource pool is designed to span thousands of machines. In fact, Mesosphere mentioned a reference customer running 50,000 nodes on DCOS, and they believe they can scale to 500,000 nodes by the end of next year.
Administrators can operate the DCOS from a command line or use a graphical user interface to quickly drag and drop resources from a library to the command line panel. This gives administrators the ability to start multiple instances of any software in the library very quickly. The library includes popular open source products by default such as Apache Spark, Apache Cassandra, Apache Hadoop and Google Kubernetes, or customers can add internal software packages.
Apache Mesos
http://mesos.apache.org/
Program against your datacenter like it’s a single pool of resources
Apache Mesos abstracts CPU, memory, storage, and other compute resources away from machines (physical or virtual), enabling fault-tolerant and elastic distributed systems to easily be built and run effectively.
Mesos is built using the same principles as the Linux kernel, only at a different level of abstraction. The Mesos kernel runs on every machine and provides applications (e.g., Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, Elastic Search) with API’s for resource management and scheduling across entire datacenter and cloud environments.
Project Features
Scalability to 10,000s of nodes
Fault-tolerant replicated master and slaves using ZooKeeper
Support for Docker containers
Native isolation between tasks with Linux Containers
Multi-resource scheduling (memory, CPU, disk, and ports)
Java, Python and C++ APIs for developing new parallel applications
Web UI for viewing cluster state
Tomi Engdahl says:
3-Front Attack On Microsoft’s Cloud
http://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2014/10/01/3-front-attack-on-microsofts-cloud/
On the surface it seems unwise to bet your business on something as ephemeral as a cloud. Even if you apply tech’s appropriation of that term — a $100 billion market for services that let organizations rent access to information technology – the cloud seems a little risky as a business proposition.
How so?
The barriers to entry are pretty low — especially for the many big companies looking for new growth like IBM IBM -0.48%, and Microsoft MSFT -0.86%;
Price competition is intense — as one might expect from any industry in which Amazon is a rival;
Startups might deliver customers a better service than do the big players; and
Customers fear the risk of letting some other company run an operation the failure of which — either through hacking, power outage, flooding, or fire — could be costly or catastrophic. Last month, for example Rackspace and Amazon rebooted their cloud systems due to “an apparent Xen hypervisor bug,” according to TechTarget.
This comes to mind in considering Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Service
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP flings big data at cloud, sysadmins’ faces
Another attempt at ‘your log files can tell you what’s about to go wrong’
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/07/hp_flings_big_data_at_cloud_sysadmins_faces/
Your log files, the story goes, aren’t just a record of every every stray packet that grazes your firewall or every temperature spike inside your servers when someone uses the microwave in the lunch room. They’re really a treasure trove of hidden indicators that can tell you not just how to stop IT breaking at the worst possible moment, but perhaps also show you how to run your data centre more efficiently.
Stop us if you’ve heard that one before, because HP’s wheeled it out again with sprinklings of Big Data.
HP’s Haven, a big data toolset with bits of Autonomy inside, is the beating heart of the company’s new IT Operations Solutions, said to be able to “predict system outages before they occur, manage deployments in a secure and compliant way, and even gauge customer response and experience for applications in real-time.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Use Windows software on Android – Microsoft couldn’t be app-ier
Run code anywhere, all the time, just in time for Christmas
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/05/microsoft_rolls_out_remoteapp_just_in_time_for_christmas/
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has made getting Windows apps everywhere via the cloud a central theme of his tenure at the top and next week the next stage will begin in this process when RemoteApp rolls out as a commercial service.
Redmond announced RemoteApp at TechEd earlier this year and the system has been in preview for months now. RemoteApp runs Microsoft’s applications on Azure and lets users use them on any internet-connected device.
“Azure RemoteApp is designed to provide scale, agility and global access to corporate applications,” said Redmond’s enterprise mobility team in a blog post.
Microsoft has two packages; Basic and Standard. Basic is aimed at people who are light users and costs $10 a month for 40 hours access, with overage charges that are capped at $17 per user per calendar month.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat:
Google Cloud Platform now supports Microsoft server app licenses, Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter Edition
http://venturebeat.com/2014/12/08/google-cloud-platform-now-supports-microsoft-server-app-licenses-windows-server-2008-r2-datacenter-edition/
Google today announced it has expanded Windows support on the Google Cloud Platform. New additions include Microsoft License Mobility, support for Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter Edition, and the Chrome RDP app available for free.
Microsoft License Mobility for Google Cloud Platform means Google’s customers can move their existing Microsoft server application software licenses (SQL Server, SharePoint, Exchange Server, and so on) from on-premises to Google Cloud Platform without any additional Microsoft software licensing fees. This makes the transition to Google’s cloud easier, and it also lets customers who prefer to purchase perpetual licenses to continue to do so.
There is an asterisk worth noting: Google says use of Microsoft products on Google Compute Engine is subject to additional terms and conditions. Before you dive in to use this new functionality, check out the Google Cloud Platform service terms.
Next up, Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter Edition is now available to all Google Cloud Platform customers in beta on Google Compute Engine.
Why not just use Microsoft Azure? The company naturally believes its Google Cloud Platform is “the best place to run your Windows workloads” thanks to features like Local SSD and multiple ways to connect your datacenter to the cloud.
Google also said it is working on support for Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google App Engine has THIRTY flaws, says researcher
Java VM mess unresolved as probe crosses the line and leads to account shutdown
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/09/google_app_engine_has_thirty_flaws_says_researcher/
Adam Gowdiak of Polish security consultancy and research outfit Security Explorations claims to have found myriad security holes in Google’s App Engine.
Gowdiak says “There are more issues pending verification – we estimate them to be in the range of 30+ in total.”
“Taking into account an educational nature of the security issues found in Google Apps Engine Java security sandbox and what seems to be an appreciation Google has for arbitrary security research [and] all sorts of sandbox escapes, we hope the company makes it possible for us to complete our work,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google and Microsoft, sitting in a tree,
L I C E N S I N GEE!
Here’s a happy hybrid: your Microsoft licences, Google’s cloud, Chromed desktops
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/09/google_hearts_windows/
Google has announced that Microsoft users can now deploy their licenses in its cloud.
The announcement means Windows Server, SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint and other Microsoftery can now happily run in Google’s cloud without the need for extra licenses.
The news brings Google to parity with Amazon Web Services, so this isn’t a startling piece of news even if Google/Microsoft relations don’t appear cordial. Those who’d like to vaporise their Microsoft workloads need to be Software Assurance customers and jump through a few hoops, but Microsoft doesn’t stand in the way of moving licences to either cloud. And why would it? Customers who choose to do so are clearly still rather interested in its products. Redmond would doubtless prefer they moved to Azure, but you can’t win ‘em all!
Tomi Engdahl says:
AWS control freak can now manage ON-PREMISES servers
Reverse hybrid cloud with a double twist!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/10/aws_control_freak_can_now_manage_onpremises_servers/
Apologies if you’re tired of the word “disruption”, but please tolerate it just one more time because Amazon Web Services has just done something mighty disruptive: allowed its OpsWork control-freak-as-a-service to wrangle on-premises servers.
OpsWorks is an infrastructure automation tool that aims to make it easier to deploy applications, through tricks like scaling of cloud instances, automated provisioning of storage and databases, and package installation.
Until Monday, those tricks applied only to AWS resources.
But the company has now announced that OpsWorks can “deploy and operate applications on any server with an Internet connection including virtual machines running in your own data centers.”
It doesn’t look hard to pull off this trick: AWS says you’ll need to install its command line interface tool and an OpsWork agent for each on-premises workload you want to manage. Next fork over “$0.02 per hour for each on-premises server you use under this arrangement.
Almost all discussions of hybrid cloud have, hitherto, imagined that on-premises workloads would stretch into the cloud. Microsoft and VMware certainly think along those lines, promoting the fac that their respective System Center and vCenter control freaks can treat cloud servers as if they were on-premises servers, but generally imagining that one’s own bit barn is an organisation’s heartland.
AWS seems to be thinking the other way, suggesting OpsWork will allow its users to address on-premises resources.
Tomi Engdahl says:
MPs in SHOCK discovery: G-Cloud has yet to impact govt SME biz
Multi mega contract juggernauts roll relentlessly on
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2014/12/10/mps_believe_gcloud_is_yet_to_impact_gov_sme_biz/
Just 27 per cent of MPs believe the G-Cloud has enabled SMEs to more easily access the UK government’s notoriously closed ICT market, according to a survey of MPs and peers.
By contrast, peers were more encouraging, with 52 per cent believing the programme has improved SME access – although many may be surprised the right honourable members had heard of the G-Cloud at all.
According to separate research from TechMarketView earlier this year, around £10.4bn of public sector spend goes on the top 20 largest IT suppliers.
The G-Cloud was set up in 2012 with the intention to create a level playing field so that SMEs can compete with larger providers without having to go through the notoriously lengthy and costly traditional framework process.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft Azure and Halo engine to be released as open source
Project Orleans benefits from Microsoft’s new and improved generosity
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2386852/microsoft-azure-and-halo-engine-to-be-released-as-open-source
PROJECT ORLEANS, the cloud engine that powers XBox hits Halo Reach and Halo 4, is being taken open source.
The engine, which has also played a vital role in the development of Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform, will be released under an MIT licence next year by Microsoft Technologies after being trailed at this year’s Microsoft Build Conference.
At the same Build conference, the company also announced that it will open source the .NET framework, on which most Windows applications depend.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s Azure Is Starting to Close the Gap With Amazon’s Cloud Service
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-12-11/microsofts-azure-is-closing-the-gap-with-amazons-cloud-service
Last year software maker K2.com stopped relying on Amazon.com (AMZN) for its cloud services and turned to Microsoft (MSFT) instead. K2 Chief Executive Officer Adriaan van Wyk says he’s happy with the choice—most of the time. The developer tools of Microsoft’s Azure cloud service are superior, he says, and he likes its personalized customer service. Yet occasionally Azure is slow, and on Nov. 18 it suffered a global outage that lasted several hours. As insurance, Van Wyk has moved 5 percent of his business back to Amazon Web Services. “We still like Microsoft,” he says. “At the same time, it’s been a bit bumpy. The 5 percent makes sure if we have to move back to AWS we can do it quickly.”
Van Wyk’s divided loyalties underscore the challenges Microsoft faces as it tries to wrest market share from industry leader and crosstown competitor Amazon. Venture capitalist John Connors has dubbed the rivalry “The Battle in Seattle.” Synergy Research Group puts Amazon’s share of the $14.5 billion worldwide market for cloud infrastructure services at 27 percent as of this year’s third quarter, down slightly from 28 percent the year before, while Azure’s has climbed three percentage points to 10 percent. “It’s clearly a two-horse race now, whereas two years ago it was probably more of a one-horse race,” says Scott Guthrie, who leads Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise division.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM: Get yer cloud services! Analytics, mobile, ten a penny
Mouthpiece gives us pile of guff about Cloud Marketplace – so we cut through it
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2014/12/16/ibm_cloud_marketplace/
With all bets placed behind software and services, IBM needs to quickly re-tune its route to customers to get the right suppliers on board and the revenue dial moving in the right direction again.
The grand lady of tech is challenged on multiple fronts; the System x volume hardware business is transferring to Lenovo along with some of the incumbent Business Partners of size; the existing software channel is largely made up of specialist boutiques; and monolithic outsourcing contracts are harder for the services teams to come by.
Big Blue has already said it wants to sell all products as a service, and with this in mind it rolled out the Cloud Marketplace in the States in September. It’s presumably holding back on a global launch to ascertain how the concept develops and analyse adoption rates.
In essence, the virtual market stall allows Big Blue to sell its “capabilities-as-a-service” to end users or trade customers. It also includes services and wares from channel types and third party vendors.
There are hundreds of services ranging from data stores, to security, infrastructure, IoT, DevOps, analytics, risk and compliance, gaming, business and operations support to mobile.
There are currently 100 Business Partners plugging their web-based services via the portal, which is not that impressive when considering IBM has 120,000 BP’s worldwide.
For legacy tech providers there’s a heap of potential pitfalls that are unavoidable, from re-engineering sales commissions to a different billing structure – not to mention updating the skills of sales folk.
IBM is not alone is facing these business challenges; nearly all of the mega-brands are trying to be software and services sellers. HP is breaking up in a bid to be more adaptable to market changes; Symantec decided it can’t get the storage and security arms motoring together; and EMC is still mulling a split.
Tomi Engdahl says:
ODF Support In Google Drive
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/12/17/0533207/odf-support-in-google-drive
Google’s Chris DiBona told a London conference last week that ODF support was coming next year, but today the Google Drive team unexpectedly launched support for all three of the main variants — including long-absent Presentation files.
Google’s surprise: ODF support launches ahead of schedule
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2860082/open-source-software/googles-odf-gift-surprise.html
In a post on Google+, the team announced immediate support of ODT (ODF text documents), ODS (spreadsheets) and ODP (presentations), which can now all be imported into Google Docs.
Google faces significant pressure securing government business in many countries around the world, especially the U.K. — including in the health and education sectors — now that ODF is a requirement in so many procurement policies. Until now, the support for ODF in Google’s products has been weak and uneven, with no support at all for presentations.
Google, like Microsoft, does not make it easy to use ODF as part of a workflow. Change tracking information, annotations, and other metadata gets lost in the import process and doesn’t get exported, so for both companies, ODF is seen as a migration format rather than as a working format.
That will have to change, because there’s no doubt official interest in ODF around the world is growing. Google wants to sell Drive and Chromebooks into government-controlled markets, and ODF is becoming a gating factor.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Oracle Profit, Sales Top Estimates Amid Shift to Cloud
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-17/oracle-profit-sales-top-estimates-amid-shift-to-cloud.html
Oracle Corp. (ORCL)’s profit and sales surpassed analysts’ estimates in its fiscal second quarter as the company moves toward delivering more software and computing power via the Web.
New software license sales, a closely watched indicator of future revenue, fell 3.6 percent to $2.05 billion, Oracle said.
“I think folks will look past that if they see meaningful traction on the cloud initiatives,” said Bill Kreher, an analyst at Edward Jones & Co. who has a buy rating on the stock.
Combined sales in Oracle’s cloud software, platform and infrastructure businesses was $516 million, up from $475 million in the fiscal first quarter.
“The billion dollar question to me is can they make the transition from being a large database licensing, revenue-generating company where they’re collecting maintenance fees?” Morgan said. “Or is this subscription-based Salesforce, Workday model going to erode margins?”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Oracle, the King of Cloud? Maybe in Ellison’s world
Claims that cloud will drive Oracle’s future growth ring hollow
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/18/oracle_the_king_of_cloud_maybe_in_ellisons_world/
Oracle’s executive team spent most of its second-quarter earnings conference call on Wednesday talking about its business – which made sense, since that was the only part of the business that showed significant growth.
As in last quarter’s call, the trio of Safra Catz, Larry Ellison, and Mark Hurd chirped away about the Oracle cloud’s double-digit growth, while deftly skating around the fact that the database giant’s core software and hardware businesses are still showing the same worrying softness they have for many quarters now.
“I would think of it as we’re just winning,” co-CEO Hurd said, perhaps channeling Charlie Sheen. “That’s the overriding thing that I’d take away from it.” But the overall numbers didn’t really support that claim.
Tomi Engdahl says:
TALE OF FAIL: Microsoft offers blow-by-blow Azure outage account
Buggy software and bad deployment borked Redmond’s cloud
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/18/microsoft_tells_blowbyblow_azure_fail_tale/
Microsoft has published a full, frank, and ugly account of just what went wrong when Azure Storage entered Total Inability To Support Usual Performance – TITSUP – mode in November.
The nub of the problem was that Azure’s update procedures and code had “… a gap in the deployment tooling that relied on human decisions and protocol.”
At the time of the incident, Microsoft said it was caused by “… an issue that resulted in storage blob front ends going into an infinite loop, which had gone undetected during fighting (testing).”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google launching open source Cloud Dataflow SDK for Java
http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-cloud-dataflow-open-source-java/
Summary:Cloud Dataflow fills a major puzzle piece in Google’s rapidly evolving and growing cloud stack as the Internet giant continues to challenge Amazon Web Services.
Google is looking to woo cloud developers once again with the debut of an open source for Java based around its fairly new Cloud Dataflow service.
Read this
2014: The year the cloud killed the datacenter
This year more and more CxOs pulled the life support on their own datacenter infrastructure in favor of ever-maturing public and private cloud offerings.
First unveiled at Google’s annual I/O developer summit this summer, Cloud Dataflow is a big data analytics solution designed to crunch information in either streaming or batch mode.
Cloud Dataflow has since been pushed out as an alpha release as Google preps a managed service model for data processing.
Cloud Dataflow also fills a major puzzle piece in Google’s rapidly evolving and growing cloud stack as the Internet giant continues to challenge Amazon Web Services, among other cloud providers.
More specifically, Google’s Cloud Dataflow lines up against data warehouse service AWS Redshift as well as Hadoop tool AWS Elastic MapReduce.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Love the cloud? Be a ‘Cloud Hero’ with Microsoft
Take the challenge, win prizes
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/19/love_the_cloud_be_a_cloud_hero_with_microsoft/
This ‘Cloud Hero Challenge’ requires you to complete ONE of the following:
Set up a virtual machine in less than 10 min
How to create an online SQL database in less than 10 min
Provision a develop & test workstation with Visual Studio in less than 10 min
Provision a highly available, scalable website in less than 1 hour
Once you’ve done that you just submit your Azure Subscription ID & web URL in the entry form, and you will get a free t-shirt sent to you. Simples.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft: How to run Internet Explorer 11 on ANDROID, iOS, OS X
Test your site on Redmond’s browser without using Windows
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/04/remoteie_for_osx_ios_android/
Microsoft has unveiled a new tool to allow web developers to test their apps against the very latest version of Internet Explorer – even if they don’t have any Windows clients running in-house.
Enter RemoteIE. With this new tool built on Redmond’s Azure RemoteApp technology, developers can stream a copy of the most up-to-date version of IE11, complete with its F12 developer tools, to their Windows, OS X, iOS, and Android devices via Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) client.
For “most up-to-date,” however, read “bleeding edge”
This version of IE isn’t available for any OS but Windows 10 yet, so RemoteIE is one way for Windows 7 and 8 users to try it out early, without the hassle of maintaining an unfinished OS installation themselves.
There are some limitations to running a browser this way, though. For one, because it’s running on Windows Azure, RemoteIE lacks GPU support, so you won’t see some of the graphics effects that you’d see if you were running it on local hardware.
For another, because the actual browser is running not on your local machine but on a server in Microsoft’s cloud, it can’t access any websites that are hosted behind your firewall.
Finally, Redmond is placing some restrictions on RemoteIE while it’s still in preview. Sessions that are idle for 10 minutes will be logged out, as will sessions that have lasted for longer than 60 minutes.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/13/microsoft_desktop_as_service/
Tomi Engdahl says:
The downsides of cloud
http://www.cloudpro.co.uk/cloud-essentials/cloud-security/4737/the-downsides-of-cloud
The benefits of cloud are well-documented, but there are some drawbacks that cannot be ignored
There’s been an inexorable rise in cloud use this past year, and we’re getting to the stage where something like three-quarters of companies are now moving off-premise, with many others expected to follow suit.
Now cloud is universally accepted as the way forward, are there still any sceptics out there? Consultant Mike Cadden, a former CIO, says there are still issues with cloud, but security isn’t one of them.
“Security is a big issue for everybody, it’s not just a problem with cloud,” he says. “In fact, reasonable cloud providers will provide better security than most companies have for themselves. Cloud providers live and die by the security systems they provide.”
For Cadden, there’s another, more pressing issue. He says, with cloud, there’s a lot more leg-work to do before taking up a cloud service, which is not something a customer can skimp on. “Taking a cloud service will save money in the long run but only if you put in the hard yards upfront.”
For Laurent Lachal, an analyst at Ovum, one of the major downsides of cloud implementation is what he terms “Frankencloud”, a concept that can’t be defined too precisely but relates to the lack of standardisation around the notion of cloud. Not only do the cloud providers package and define their cloud offerings in different ways but there’s “a lack of integration between the various elements of some cloud solutions,” he says.
For Cadden, even successful cloud projects can have their downsides. “There can be a lack of control with cloud”,
Another common issue with cloud is unexpected costs. This could be because of business departments buying software without recourse to IT.
Or it could be due to a lack of understanding of cloud.
While many organisations continue their move to cloud, it’s not always the case that it will be best way forward. Potential customers will have to put in the effort to ensure that they’re not going to be paying over the odds or left high and dry after a dispute. The technical arguments may have been won but there are still legal battles ahead.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google’s developer diagnostic tool Cloud Trace enters beta
http://www.zdnet.com/article/googles-developer-diagnostic-tool-cloud-trace-enters-beta/
Summary:Originally introduced last June during Google I/O conference, Cloud Trace helps app developers spot hiccups and performance issues by finding the traces for slow requests.
Isolating the root cause of poor app performance can be a headache for developers, explains Google product manager Pratul Dublish in a blog post. It’s also major hindrance on app success. On average, 25 percent of users abandon a web page if its load time is more than four seconds and 86 percent of users delete an app if it underperforms, Dublish wrote.
But with Cloud Trace, the difficulty is mitigated with the help of detailed reports on where time is spent within an app while requests are processed. Cloud Trace can also analyze a set of requests to show their latency distribution, and use sample traces to give a percentile latency of values.
Diagnose Service Performance Bottlenecks with Google Cloud Trace Beta
http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.fi/2015/01/Diagnose-Service-Performance-Bottlenecks-with-Google-Cloud-Trace-Beta.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s Azure cloud adds G-Series virtual machines & a key management tool
http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/08/microsofts-azure-cloud-adds-g-series-virtual-machines-a-key-management-tool/
Microsoft is moving right along in its efforts to maintain a leading position in the public cloud market. Today the company is announcing a public preview for a new service for storing cryptographic keys in the Azure cloud — and it’s rolling out the G-Series of virtual machines for running applications.
New virtual machines, each of which is a sliver of a physical server in a Microsoft data center, are par for the course in the highly competitive cloud business, where it’s only natural for computing power to increase over time.
The new Key Vault service, for its part, could be interpreted as Microsoft’s answer to the Key Management Service, which cloud market leader Amazon Web Services announced last year to manage keys, and Amazon’s older CloudHSM service, which provides dedicated gear called hardware security modules (HSMs) for key storage. Microsoft’s Key Vault lets people store and manage keys on HSMs in Microsoft data centers.
“We offer a full hardware-protected, FIPS-certified, high-security solution, but one that scales, and one that’s easy to use and simple to program, too,”
Microsoft is also coming out with a new virtual machine image for the Ubuntu Linux operating system from Canonical that features Docker — a trendy tool for packaging up applications in containers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google and Microsoft, sitting in a tree, L I C E N S I N GEE!
Here’s a happy hybrid: your Microsoft licences, Google’s cloud, Chromed desktops
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/09/google_hearts_windows/
Google has announced that Microsoft users can now deploy their licenses in its cloud.
The announcement means Windows Server, SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint and other Microsoftery can now happily run in Google’s cloud without the need for extra licenses.
The news brings Google to parity with Amazon Web Services, so this isn’t a startling piece of news even if Google/Microsoft relations don’t appear cordial.
Google’s also let it be known that it is now beta testing Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter Edition in its cloud. Those who want to party like it’s 2008 can now do so.
A third piece of news is the arrival of Chrome’s remote desktop app as a way to connect to Windows instances in Google’s cloud. The Chocolate Factory doesn’t come right out and say this is a desktop-as-a-service play, but it’s doable.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon WorkSpaces
http://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/?sc_channel=BA&sc_campaign=workspaces_US&sc_publisher=techmeme&sc_medium=sponsor_posts_1&sc_content=free_get_started_v1&sc_detail=free_sponsor_posts_1_headline&sc_category=workspaces
Amazon WorkSpaces is a managed desktop computing service in the cloud. Amazon WorkSpaces allows customers to easily provision cloud-based desktops that allow end-users to access the documents, applications and resources they need with the device of their choice, including laptops, iPad, Kindle Fire, Android tablets, and zero clients.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Domains opens to all in the U.S., gets Blogger and Dynamic DNS integration
http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/13/google-domains-opens-to-all-in-the-u-s-gets-blogger-and-dynamic-dns-integration/
Google today announced that Google Domains, the company’s domain registration service, is now available to all in the U.S.
Google Domains first went into testing in June 2014, with the goal of helping businesses not just get online, but to build a proper online presence. To pull this off, Google partnered with website building providers Shopify, Squarespace, Weebly, and Wix.
Google didn’t share when it hopes to have Google Domains available everywhere. A spokesperson, however, confirmed with VentureBeat that, for now at least, it’s technically still in beta.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Oracle data centre offers its back end to banking upstart
Larry’s cloud to host Hampden & Co’s bulging accounts
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/15/oracle_datacenter_offers_its_back_end_to_banking_upstart_hampden_cloud/
Oracle is becoming a British banking back end, with its data centres about to start holding the money and details of some of the UK’s wealthiest citizens.
Hampden & Co, due to launch in the first quarter of 2015, has picked Oracle’s Flexcube as its core banking platform, the database giant said Tuesday.
Unlike other Flexcube customers, Hampden’s will be run as a service hosted at an Oracle data centre – a 160,000 square foot facility in Linlithgow, Scotland.
Flexcube will run on Oracle SPARC T5 servers at the centre.
The system will let Hampden’s staff provision and manage customers accounts, and it’ll provide online banking initially, with mobile banking planned.
Banking is Oracle’s second largest vertical, and the plan is to let more customers run inside Oracle’s own data centres as it tries to grow its cloud footprint.
At the same time, Hampden – a private bank – didn’t want to work with lots of different service suppliers.
“Hampden preferred to have soup to nuts from one single vendor,” Senthil Kumar, veep, business development of Oracle Financial Services, told The Reg.
“We eliminate the risk of multiple parties coming together and trying to connect it up, and in the cloud we give them fairly good level of comfort to run core businesses.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hands on: Implementing Azure Active Directory
Free hands-on guidance
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/15/hands_on_implementing_azure_active_directory/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google-gulped Stackdriver reborn as cloudy control freak
AWS operations platform extended in beta
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/15/google_spits_up_cloud_monitoring/
Google has regurgitated Stackdriver, eight months after swallowing the cloud monitoring service.
Google Cloud Monitoring has been released to beta here, built on Stackdriver to deliver performance, capacity and uptime management.
The service targets Google App Engine, Compute Engine, Cloud Pub/Sub and Cloud SQL.
Performance metrics and logs will be served up for VM instances, MongoDB, Apache, Nginx and Elasticsearch in addition to the Google-stamped infrastructure.
The idea is Google cloud users can build their own dashboards and get alerts.
Google’s cloud hosting infrastructure has been somewhat eclipsed by the success of Amazon’s AWS and the PR-enhanced rise of Microsoft’s Azure.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Importance of Hybrid Cloud and Why It Matters
http://www.metaoptionitsolutions.com/blog/cloud-management-services/the-importance-of-hybrid-cloud-and-why-it-matters.aspx
If you are going to avail the mesmerizing benefits of cloud computing, you must want to choose the best option. When it comes to cloud computing, there are three options available to go with such as:
Public cloud
Private cloud
And Hybrid cloud
In case of going with private cloud, you can either run and manage all the operations yourself or hire a third-party. In private cloud, companies get unlimited power and security, but it is very expensive to use. On the other hand, public cloud utilizes a network that can be used by public and accessible through the internet. It is certainly just opposed to direct or private cloud.
There is no doubt that a private cloud offers an organization great control, but is very costly to run. Public cloud can be swiftly and effortlessly accessed. It offers cost savings via offloaded maintenance as well as scalability duties, but it is significant to monitor reliability and security.
Therefore, if you neither want to go with a private cloud nor with public cloud, you need to go with the third alternate called hybrid cloud. Actually, hybrid cloud is a blended form of private and public cloud. It means that companies can easily avail the benefits of both i.e. private and public cloud if they go with hybrid cloud.
Many companies certainly want to store confidential and precious data on their private cloud app, while availing the cost efficient and dynamic nature of popular public cloud for enterprise resources planning and billing. Companies can easily turn to public cloud infrastructure when they find their limit is exceeded.
Why You Will Go to a Single, Hybrid Cloud
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141201051600-2527944-why-you-will-go-to-a-single-hybrid-cloud
Here’s why — the primary functions of leveraging the cloud as it pertains to data are distinctly three:
offsite data protection
long-term secure archiving
secure file sharing to any device
When you look at the landscape (cloudscape?), what do you see? Many companies trying to grab marketshare with their initial offering that does one of the above. And most of them trying to add on capability to do more than one as they see they are being replaced by multi-function competitors.
Why is the latter happening? Because corporate IT does not want to have to support and/or protect themselves from the vagaries each of these products provide. They need something, but having half a dozen different products (Barracuda, Mozy, Panzura, Twinstrata, Dropbox, Egnyte, etc.) that are “one-trick ponies”, exacerbates the IT challenges. Now, you can say that each of these can do more than one thing. And you would be correct, but you’d no longer be working with an optimized tool-set. You would begin making allowances for the products inherent shortcomings because it wasn’t built from the ground up with the additional features in mind.
So, all of your data should be in the cloud, right?
That’s a big, “Well, it depends…”, but is most likely a bad idea. For reasons of business continuity, having data locally as well as redundantly in the cloud, saves you from internet connection outages as well as in-house hardware device outages. It gives you the right piece of mind for when something is needed immediately, and it can be delivered at GbE LAN speeds. But when something is needed to be accessed while on the road, it too can be available on demand. Actually, with the right solution, on demand can be anticipated and immediately available on your mobile or remote device.
Which is why, in the end, you will be going to single, hybrid cloud.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft and mate release Azure transporter beam
Open source migration code shunts your IaaS around inside Redmond-land
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/19/microsoft_and_mate_release_azure_teleportation_tool/
As cloud providers add more regions, folks who’ve committed to one data centre may find they have good reasons to move to another.
At that point users are likely to discover that for all the talk of cloud making one more agile than an Olympic, moving infrastructure-as-a-service around inside and between clouds requires extraordinary contortions.
Microsoft and partner Persistent Systems have a fix: the Azure Data Center Migration Solution (ADCMS), a tool that allows one to automate the migration of Microsoft Azure resources:
From one subscription to another subscription in the same data center (region);
From one subscription to another subscription in different data centers;
In the same subscription with different data centers;
In the same subscription with the same data center.
Wielders of the tool will be able to shunt Affinity groups, virtual networks, cloud services, storage accounts and virtual machines between Azure bit barns.
The tool’s manual suggests that attempting to roll-your-own migration tool will probably work, but is unlikely to be much use for your next migration.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Network virty comes to VMware’s cloud
vCloud Air gets closer to servers-by-the-hour and hangs out the ‘startups wanted’ sign
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/21/network_virty_comes_to_vmwares_cloud/
VMware’s made some tweaks to its vCloud Air public cloud.
The biggie is the addition of network virtualisation. VMware looks to have baked just about all of its NSX network virtualisation platform into its cloud, so users get very fine-grained control over how data flows among virtual machines. Presumably this spans private clouds and vCloud Air.
Disaster recovery is an obvious cloud service: VMware has it and so does Microsoft, both in hybrid mode. VMware’s offering now has multiple recovery points, failback from the cloud to primary data centres and more automation. Virtzilla’s also taken strides towards becoming a servers-by-the-hour cloud. vCloud Air has, to date, offered rather structured consumption options, usually with either up-front commitments to required resource levels. The new vCloud Air Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand offering is touted as “pay-as-you-go” infrastructure.
VMware’s blunt about its cloud being different to the likes of Azure, AWS and Google’s. The company doesn’t mind people showing up with credit cards and a workload, but is far more interested in hybrid clouds in which its management software oversees rigs that span on-premises bit barns and vCloud Air.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon Agrees to Buy Israel’s Annapurna Labs for AWS Cloud Unit
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-22/amazon-agrees-to-buy-israel-s-annapurna-labs-for-aws-cloud-unit.html
Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) agreed to acquire Israeli semiconductor company Annapurna Labs, seeking to improve performance within its Amazon Web Services cloud unit.
A deal has been reached but hasn’t yet closed, said Mary Camarata, a spokeswoman at Amazon Web Services.
Annapurna Labs develops microprocessors that allow fast data traffic for power-efficient computing and storage servers, according to the newspaper. Annapurna’s website doesn’t explain what it does.
Seattle-based Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, is constantly seeking to improve the cost and performance of the equipment in its data centers and has been hiring more semiconductor engineers to add to its capabilities