cloud

Microsoft copies Google, Salesforce, and Red Hat in new partner initiative

If you attended Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference 2008, you can be excused for thinking you showed up at the partner event for Red Hat, Google, or Salesforce.

After all, Microsoft's new partner initiatives rely heavily on concepts devised and delivered by these companies:

Tech watchers will see lots of familiar concepts in software behemoth Microsoft's revamped go-to-market strategy....[Microsoft] proclaimed its newfound focus on delivering software and services to customers via "the cloud," using a subscription-based model popularized by companies like Red Hat, Websense and Salesforce.com.

Microsoft is smart: Why reinvent the business model wheel when others have pioneered successful ways to deliver software value? Of course, Microsoft has never been the most innovative of companies - it has become the market behemoth that it is by out-executing its competitors, not by out-thinking them.

But this may be one area in which Microsoft needs to think a bit more. As The Motley Fool notes,… Read more

CherryPal desktop has friendly $249 price tag

The CherryPal is a small, black, rectangular box with not much inside.

Besides a processor, some flash memory, and some connecting parts, it's definitely not the kind of computer you'd see heavyweights like Hewlett-Packard and Dell waving around. But Max Seybold, the creator and CEO of CherryPal says this barebones PC is the future.

Yes, we've been hearing for a while now that cloud computing and the browser are the next iteration of the desktop OS, but Seybold is betting big on it.

The CherryPal--so named because one early tester declared the device "sweeter than an … Read more

S3 down again with no visibility into cause or time to resolutions

More downtime for Amazon S3 doesn't make the Cloud any more appealing for enterprises.

One of the main reasons enterprises won't be quick to embrace the Cloud for meaningful applications is due to the lack of visibility associated with downtime. Most companies are too paranoid (rightly so) to have no idea what caused system downtime or to have a clear mean-time to resolution.

As an S3 customer we should definitely be able to get notifications and have the ability to ask for refunds. I couldn't figure out how to do either one.

For basic monitoring you can … Read more

Morphological analysis of Cloud Apps and Services

Over on Cloudy Times, Markus Klems has created some great diagrams that help to classify Cloud elements. Plus he used the the term "morphological analysis" which I have to tip my hat to.

The most interesting factoid is the non-existence of big vendors like IBM, Microsoft, HP, Dell and Sun who are enablers, but not players (yet.)

Via Cote

GoGrid launches Cloud Computing management API

GoGrid has gotten a lot more interesting over the last few months, going from what we had previously called Utility Computing to more of a full-on Cloud approach.

GoGrid delivers true "Control in the Cloud" by combining many of the familiar features of dedicated server or managed hosting with the flexibility and scalability of cloud server hosting

One of the more interesting (and I believe relatively new) aspects of the GoGrid solution is a REST-like API to programmatically control your infrastructure over the internet.

At the core of REST (representational state transfer) is the concept of resources which … Read more

Would the cloud have saved Apple's iPhone 3G launch?

Apple had a serious problem with its iPhone 3G product launch last week, coupled with its limp-along release of its iPhone 2.0 software. Could Amazon.com's cloud have helped? Lee Faus, in his "Popularity Sucks" post, thinks so.

As he notes, the ability to spin up resources for a short-term crush on Apple's servers could have worked wonders (at least, for the 2.0 software upgrade), just as it could have benefited Mozilla during its launch of Firefox 3.0:

This would have been ideal for Mozilla (Firefox 3 Install Images on S3 with Apache … Read more

How we setup Amazon S3 to do file downloads

I just wrote a piece about how we use Amazon S3 to manage the downloads of Mule Enterprise. Putting a mule on a cloud: one man's battle with Amazon S3 is now up on El Reg.

We had been managing and maintaining multiple archives on multiple servers. After a while, a server crash, a disk blowout, lack of memory or some other fiasco kept reminding us why we hate computers.

This brings us to reason one for liking S3: you can stop buying and maintaining tons of machines - at least for file serving over the internet.

Amazon invests in Engine Yard's cloud computing

Software company Engine Yard said Monday that it has closed on a $15 million Series B round of financing from New Enterprise Associates and Amazon.com. Its previous investor Benchmark Capital also participated in the round.

Engine Yard, a 2-year-old company based in San Francisco, handles deployment and operations for developers that work in the Web development environment of Ruby on Rails, an open-source software framework. It helps developers serve applications through so-called cloud computing, or via third-party data centers. Despite Amazon's investment, Engine Yard does not use the online retailer's Web services offering at this time. It … Read more

Can you trust your business to Google's cloud?

A large number of Google Docs users couldn't use their online word processor or presentations for about an hour Tuesday. But the glitch illustrates not just the troubles with cloud computing, but also the gradual progress in making the concept palatable.

Cloud computing, in which software runs not on PCs or company servers but instead on computers on the Internet, requires something of a leap of faith both technologically and culturally. Those making the move must get accustomed to a reliance on somebody else's computing infrastructure, and that can be scary.

What's gradually emerging, though, are guarantees … Read more