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IBM and Amazon.com announced that they are now providing pay-as-you-go access to development and production versions of IBM Information Management database servers, IBM Lotus content management, and IBM WebSphere portal and middleware products.

This is interesting as it shows that IBM understands that people want to consume software in the cloud, but it's not clear that anyone is currently interested. But the fact is, if they don't build it, then no one will come.

The full list of currently available IBM software available on EC2.

Andy Grove wasn't in the mood to sugarcoat his words. So it was that Intel's then-CEO bluntly told Europe's elites that they were in danger of dooming the next generation to a second class future.

That was 1997. The venue was the World Economic Forum, the annual gathering of political and business leaders in Davos, Switzerland, where Grove was invited to share his views about the impact of technology on society. He didn't waste the moment: in a speech that bordered on turning into jeremiad, Grove warned that Europe was too slow to invest in computing … Read more

Most people assume that running applications in the cloud, and specifically on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, is automatically less expensive then running in your own data center.

The short answer is that the EC2 may not actually be the cheapest route, but it can provide faster time to market and additional revenue, even if it actually costs more to run.

I read a post on Geva Perry's Thinking Out Cloud blog Sunday that got me thinking about cloud economics, and if there is a missing link in the costs associated with cloud services and specifically what happens if you run everything you own on EC2 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 356 days a year. … Read more

Episode 5 of Open Sources, the podcast that fellow CNET blogger Dave Rosenberg and I perform somewhat sporadically, is now live.

Dave and I discuss open-source venture funding (We think it's going to do well now that companies actually have to make money again), as well as the importance of owning (or controlling in some way) the open-source or cloud components upon which you build your solutions. Against the grain of the common myths of open source? Maybe. But there are clear examples of why you wouldn't want to be Amazon'd out of business.

Enjoy.

Last week Oracle and Amazon Web Services held a webinar to outline how Oracle works on Amazon's EC2, including database backups to the Cloud.

Running Oracle on EC2 is not too thrilling, though it's likely welcome for many organizations. Oracle database licensing fees are similar to on-premises pricing with no immediate way to leverage an on-demand usage model. Basically, if you want/need to run Oracle in the Cloud you can. But you aren't looking at a huge cost advantage.

More interesting is the ability to run backups to the Cloud and take advantage of Amazon's … Read more

Installing an open-source enterprise application has never been easier. No hardware? No sophisticated IT department? No problem. At least, not if you use one of 38 JumpBox-enabled open-source applications, as it announced recently.

A rising number of companies offer virtualized instances of popular open-source applications, but JumpBox takes it a step further, deploying to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, almost completely obviating hardware and setup quandaries.

JumpBox offers small to midsize organizations a library of open-source applications packaged as pre-built, pre-configured virtual appliances through JumpBox Open, its annual subscription service. Public Amazon Machine Images (AMI) for 12 JumpBox … Read more

When I read today that Europeana, a digital library of Europe's cultural heritage "crashed just hours after it went online and will be out of operation for several weeks" I was pretty shocked.

How a website could crash and be offline for weeks in this age of flexible-scale Cloud offerings and caching technology is a bit mind-boggling--especially considering that a properly architected website should be easily portable to larger hardware or a scaled-out system.

There are a great many ways to deal with traffic bursts, from using Amazon S3 for storage, or EC2 for more machines, to … Read more

Could Microsoft's proprietary licensing end up hurting it in the cloud?

That's the question asked on the Cloud Avenue blog, and the answer seems to be a clear "yes." Whatever the benefit to Microsoft in a desktop and server world, proprietary licensing stands to hobble its attempts to be widely relevant in the cloud or, at least, in Amazon.com's EC2 cloud.

Why? Because Microsoft's proprietary licensing ensures it can't be a viable player in Amazon's newly announced Paid AMI (Amazon Machine Image) Support marketplace. The program allows users to "share … Read more

A central part of Amazon's online computing foundation is growing up.

The Elastic Compute Cloud, a service that gives customers on-demand access to Linux servers, is now out of beta testing, said Jeff Barr, evangelist for the collection of online options collectively called Amazon Web Services.

"Amazon EC2 is now in full production," Barr said in a blog post Thursday. And as promised, EC2 now offers Windows in a beta test, joining Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris and Solaris Express Community Edition.

Along with those moves, EC2 now comes with a service level agreement, a formal commitment that the … Read more