cloud

Microsoft “loves Linux” as it makes Azure bigger, better

Oct

27

2014

11 million servers, new giant VMs, and more third-party app support. Wait, what happened at this thing?!? Microsoft In San Francisco today, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said something that was more than a little surprising: Microsoft loves Linux. The operating system once described as a “cancer” by Nadella’s predecessor, Steve Ballmer, is now being embraced ...

VMware plays nice with OpenStack, unveils a VMware-powered data-center-in-a-box

Aug

27

2014

SUMMARY:At VMworld, the virtualization giant will unveil new service that makes OpenStack more compatible with VMware tools and VMware-loaded data centers as well as a new appliance that will come stocked with (what else?) VMware software. Virtualization giant VMware plans to announce Monday that its lineup of tools for the data center will soon be compatible ...

Google tests out status page for its whole cloud platform

Aug

27

2014

SUMMARY:Cloud users want a dashboard that shows outages or delays across all services. Amazon and Microsoft have one already and now it looks like Google’s is on the way. Google already fields a status page for Google App Engine. And for Google Apps. Now it’s testing out one for its overall Google Cloud Platform. Clearly marked as ...

Automation is the key to saving cash in the cloud. But how to do it?

Jun

5

2014

SUMMARY:On this week’s Structure Show, we discussed how VMware handles automation both for its customers and in its own cloud, and how a startup called Mesosphere wants to turn parts of that approach on their head by taking inspiration from Google and Twitter. We’re a month out from our Structure conference, so we took the ...

Amazon woos VMware admins (and workloads) with new portal

Jun

5

2014

photo: Barb Darrow SUMMARY:Can you say hybrid cloud? AWS says its new portal will let VMware administrators manage AWS, as well as VMware, resources. Interesting. Late Friday, Amazon Web Services announced a portal that it says will make VMware admins comfortable managing workloads in the Amazon cloud. This is just the latest push by the public ...

New AWS Management Portal for vCenter

Jun

5

2014

IT Managers and Administrators working within large organizations regularly tell us that they find the key AWS messages — fast and easy self-service provisioning, exchange of CAPEX for OPEX, and the potential for cost savings — to be attractive and compelling. They want to start moving into the future by experimenting with AWS, but they don’t always ...

Tectonic shift as public cloud giants acknowledge the power of private deployment options

Jun

5

2014

photo: Barb Darrow SUMMARY:News flash: Amazon and Google start to realize that businesses want more than public cloud. Among all the cloud news this week, the bulk of attention went to dueling price cuts by Google and Amazon that went across the major services. But equally, or perhaps more important, was that Amazon continued to acknowledge the existence ...

Bringing in-memory transaction processing to the masses: an analysis of Microsoft SQL Server 2014 in-memory OLTP

Jun

3

2014

1Executive Summary The emerging class of enterprise applications that combine systems of record and systems of engagement has geometrically growing performance requirements. They have to support capturing more data per business transaction from ever-larger online user populations. These applications have many capabilities similar to consumer online services such as Facebook or LinkedIn, but they need ...

S3mper Fi! Netflix open sources library to make Amazon S3 even more awesome

Jan

13

2014

SUMMARY:For shops that want to keep using AWS S3 storage service but also want better data consistency, Netflix just open-sourced its S3mper library. Cloud architect Adrian Cockcroft may have flown the coop but Netflix continues to do its thing by enhancing or bolstering existing Amazon cloud services and then making its work available for others to use. This ...

Google Compute Engine is “generally available” and it’s still not Amazon Web Services

Dec

12

2013

SUMMARY:Google probably does need to become feature-competitive with AWS sooner rather than later, but that doesn’t mean it necessarily needs to match AWS tit for tat. Maybe being Google will actually pay off in the end. Google finally designated its Compute Engine infrastructure-as-a-service offering as generally available on Monday, about 18 months after announcing the service ...