Survey: Companies Adopt the Cloud to Use Tablets, End Up Saving Less - ReadWriteCloud. One of the drivers of the current cloud computing revolution was supposed to be cost reduction. Even private cloud implementers are supposed to be spending considerably less on storage and computing power, by virtue of greater utilization and tolerance for commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) components. But a global survey of some 3,645 enterprise cloud computing users over the last two months, conducted by TNS for professional business services provider CSC reveals a pair of startling discoveries: First, while most businesses are saving money, the amount in most cases ranges from slim to none.
Second, businesses aren't really put off too much by that fact. Given a list of reasons why businesses chose cloud adoption in the first place, a full one-third of respondents worldwide, and 46% of U.S. -based businesses, said it was mainly to give employees greater options for accessing resources, including from tablets and smartphones. Are You a Server Hugger? Don't Be Ashamed - ReadWriteCloud. The Social Gaming Leadership Alliance (SGLA) has this week (November 13) testified before a Massachusetts committee on a bill that contains provisions that could see Social Plus games banned in the Commonwealth.
Just the day before, the alliance announced the introduction of ‘Social Plus’ which they say is a new term that defines the category of freemium social games provided by SGLA partners. They describe these as being online social games with sweepstake promotions that “deliver interactive board, card and casino-style games to millions of Americans.” The online casino-related bill, H.4431, was referred to the committee on Economic Development and Emerging Technologies. At present, nothing has yet been actioned as the committee will accept written testimony until November 20. The organization believes that allowing the ‘thriving’ industry to continue will generate new revenue for the Bay State. The SGLA also suggests that voters are opposed to the potential ban.
Featured Image: Canva. VMware's Case for Reducing Cloud Management to Its Basic Tasks - ReadWriteCloud. Yesterday, during their rollout conference for WebLogic Server 12c, engineers from Oracle introduced developers to a concept they called Virtual Assembly Builder. Their idea was this: When you take a Java application, with all its myriad underpinnings and dependencies, and move it into a virtualized environment such as a cloud, certain libraries that the app needed when running on a physical server will need to be substituted with VM-aware components for optimum performance.
The philosophy there is, you want the virtual machine to closely approximate the characteristics of the physical one, including how it works and how it's managed. When I ran that concept past a pair of VMware marketing managers this afternoon, they could not have disagreed any more pointedly with Oracle's basic philosophy. "We're currently seeing this bifurcation between what we call cloud providers and cloud consumers," begins Steve Henning, VMware's head of applications product marketing. Just the facts, ma'am.
How Do Business-Critical Database Applications Perform Under Virtualization? - ReadWriteCloud. Two Free SMB Tools You Should Check Out - ReadWriteCloud. This week two cloud-based services opened their doors. (Can a cloud open? Whatever.) One, myERP.com, purports to replace the likes of Quickbooks and Salesforce. The other, EazyBI.com, offers low cost analytics on a wide variety of metrics. MyERP is like a question-and-answer sparse interface that takes some getting used to. And once you fill out enough of your financial landscape, you can use it for rudimentary billing and keeping track of your accounts. MyERP is free for 2 users. EazyBI has an interface in the opposite direction: you start out with a blank canvas and add analytic tools and what you want to measure. It is also free for a single user, and its pricing scheme is a bit complicated best shown from the screen capture below: I think both services are worth further investigation.
Cartoon: The Inner Workings of Cloud Security - ReadWriteCloud. First Look at NodeSocket: Node.js Hosting in Private Beta - ReadWriteCloud. Node.js is not only attracting a lot of developer interest, it’s also proving interesting to entrepreneurial types. Case in point, NodeSocket, a Node.js hosting business that’s in development. NodeSocket bills itself as a “hosting platform and community for developers.” Currently in private beta, NodeSocket is a hybrid service play that will offer pre-configured VPSes with Node.js set up for easy application deployment. Founder Justin Keller says that NodeSocket isn’t a PaaS play. NodeSocket gives users the ability to create one or more VPSes with full root access to modify and install packages.
Node.js Package Manager (NPM) is installed by default. “This allows the flexibility to install things like MongoDB or Redis locally on the same server that is running their node.js applications, but at the same time, utilize our software platform and API’s to abstract away the pains of setting up blank VM’s on say Amazon EC2,” says Keller. Look for more from NodeSocket next year.
Oracle Gears WebLogic Server 12c for the Private Cloud - ReadWriteCloud. Larry Ellison's dream for Oracle has always been to deliver "out-of-the-box" functionality - software that was less distinguishable from devices, devices that were vehicles for delivering software. So Ellison's vision of functionality has always been to some degree, shall we say, "cloudy.
" But it's hard to put a cloud in a box. And when you try, your competitors and even your (former) friends are liable to try to burn you for it. They've already started getting out their matches. Today, Oracle formally announced the impending delivery of WebLogic Server 12c, which is software for deploying Java EE 6 applications via servers that can be virtualized. Next week, Oracle will begin delivering this critical next stage of its software delivery architecture. Whether it qualifies as "cloud" may depend on whether you spell it with an upper- or lower-case "c. " The "g" in "Oracle WebLogic Server 11g," released in the summer of 2009, stood for "grid. " "Beware of the false cloud," pronounced Benioff. Teamviewer v7 Eases Remote Access - ReadWriteCloud. Teamviewer, one of the most popular remote access apps for programmers now has a new version and plenty of features. Earlier this year, Pam Baker wrote that Teamviewer is "A very comprehensive tool that's incredibly easy to use" and we're in agreement.
This week v7 was out of beta. It allows the creation of an online meeting with just a single click. You have a full collection of collaboration tools, including screen sharing, video conferencing, text chat, a whiteboard for presentations, and the new 'File Box' for drag and drop document sharing. You can even record your sessions and save them as AVI files for documentation. New is a TeamViewer Meeting App, available for Android and (later this year) iOS devices.
ZooKeeper Library First of Netflix's Open Source Menagerie to Escape - ReadWriteCloud. Netflix has taken the wraps off of its ZooKeeper library and has given some insight to coming open source projects as well. The company announced four projects in its pipeline, and a portal on GitHub for its projects.
Curator is a set of libraries that are supposed to make using Apache ZooKeeper simpler. While ZooKeeper has its own client, Netflix says "using the client is non-trivial and error prone. " What is Curator? ZooKeeper is a "coordination service" for distributed applications, originally developed by Yahoo. Problem being that using ZooKeeper itself may be more complicated and error-prone than some companies want to deal with.
Curator comprises a replacement client for ZooKeeper, a framework to simplify using ZooKeeper, tools for error handling, and several recipes built with the Curator framework. Curator adds a "pluggable retry mechanism" to ZooKeeper so that when something throws an error, there's a set of policies that can be used when trying to retry an operation. More to Come. Brightcove Extends Its Video Platform to Host HTML5 Apps - ReadWriteCloud. For the last three years, Brightcove has been implementing a steady transition from a YouTube alternative, to a premium video services provider, to a Web functionality provider. The last critical step in that transition may have taken place yesterday, as the company once considered a Google takeover target makes its move in the fast-growing HTML5 apps platforms market.
Unlike appMobi, whose mobiUs ecosystem uses a utility model for billing customers on a granular scale, Brightcove's new App Cloud will be a premium Web apps host. It will provide APIs that aim to fill in HTML5's many device-specific gaps, including for accessing tablets' built-in cameras, accelerometers, and location finders. And it will charge developers fees starting at $15,000 per year once their apps go live.
It's the wrapper that substantiates Brightcove's value proposition. Appirio Makes Salesforce Chatter + Twitter Integration into a Contest - ReadWriteCloud. To a rapidly increasing degree, Salesforce Chatter is becoming the communications platform for essentially all classes of business, in both the public and private sectors. There was a time when Salesforce tools were considered to be leveraged against Twitter and Facebook as social platforms, but for certain segments of the user base, that leverage is reversing itself. Now the mobile application framework provider Appirio, which ReadWriteWeb introduced to you last June, is opening up a kind of persistent contest for the open source community, with a channel for distributing a new class of tools that would effectively leverage these consumer social tools on Salesforce's business social tool.
Today at the Cloudforce conference in New York City, Appirio is launching a Social Enterprise Toolkit built with its mobile apps framework. "Some organizations are very collaborative; others are very structured," remarks Singh. Talend Opens Up Data Integration Processes to the Community - ReadWriteCloud. Here's an interesting predicament: Suppose your business' only problem isn't with the quality of the services your software performs, but just with getting all of its databases to work together.
So you're not out to replace the software, and maybe that would be a bad idea anyway. Getting data and processes built for SAP, Siebel and Tivoli to work together may require input from at least one of these companies - something which neither of them may have a business interest in providing, if only for one customer at a time. Organizations today are relying on their own IT departments' scripting abilities to synchronize their data, but the results are almost always too intricate and volatile to bet the integrity of your business on for too long. We've talked about the Informatica Cloud as one option. Another cloud-based service relies upon the open source community - literally, from the willingness of contributors to help other folks solve the same problems they're solving for themselves.
Au-to-do: Google Releases App Engine Ticket Tracker - ReadWriteCloud. Google is hoping to entice a few developers over to Google App Engine (GAE) by providing a ticket tracker that runs on GAE for developers to study and test out. Called Au-to-do, it's written in Python and uses Google Cloud Storage, the Prediction API, Tasks API and OAuth 2. The getting started guide will walk you through all of the requirements and show you how to set up your own instance of Au-to-do. (It can be pronounced as "auto-do" or "ought to do. ") To get started you'll need the Google API Client Library for Python, a GAE application ID, and you'll also need to enable billing. GAE has a free quota for Cloud Storage, but you still need to hand over your billing info. If you're just getting started with GAE, you might want to start with Google's Guestbook application instead, as it's a bit easier to set up.
The interesting thing about this application is that it makes use of the Predictions API to try to label incidents as they come into the system. Malware-as-a-Service Blooms - ReadWriteCloud. To all the other "aaS" providers out there, add this one: MaaS, for malware as a service. Yup, the bad guys have their own routines that can provide a one-stop, full-service shopping for fraudsters. How depressing is that? Turns out, very depressing. Here is how full service this industry has become.
According to this report from Trusteer Research, it starts with offering infection services, including polymorphic encryption to get around the standard anti-virus scanners. Curiously, the MaaS guys run their business in much the same way that other SaaS and Web advertising businesses operate: you pay for unique addresses that receive the malware. These guys actually advertise online too. As we wrote earlier this summer about how Stuxnet was created, each virus is actually custom-coded per desktop to avoid detection. "Fraudsters use encryption services that can change the files signature without changing the underlining code functionality," says the report from Trusteer.
You have been warned. Marc Benioff Live from Cloudforce Winter 2011 Keynote - ReadWriteCloud. BitNami Bundles Plugins with WordPress and Drupal Stacks - ReadWriteCloud. BitNami is going beyond the value-add of bundling popular open source "stacks" of software to start including popular plugins and modules for the software. BitNami is starting with WordPress and Drupal by adding popular plugins for each of the popular Content Management Systems (CMS). We've covered BitNami before. The service started by offering pre-configured "stacks" of popular open source software to simplify deployment.
Initially the offerings were binaries that would install self-contained stacks on Linux, Mac OS X and/or Windows. (Not all stacks run on all OSes.) Over time the company has moved from offering just the binaries to also offering full virtual appliances, and finally to offering cloud images and Cloud Hosting to simplify cloud deployment. Now BitNami is expanding scope once again to simplify deployment by adding popular modules to its stacks so users don't have to. The Five Signs That an Application is Ripe For the Cloud - ReadWriteCloud. When you're in the process of establishing your cloud architecture, figuring out what can be moved to the cloud, and when it should be moved, is job one. That can seem like a daunting task, depending on the size of your organization, the number of applications in use, the complexity of your network architecture, and so on.
But it's not as hard as it first seems. You can kick start your cloud migration by looking for applications that share some or all of these five characteristics: Apps that are already virtualized Apps that are loosely coupled and modular in their design Apps that have low requirements for privacy and security Apps that can tolerate latency Apps that are unencumbered by regulatory requirements Mapping your path to the cloud will be easier once you understand how and why these characteristics matter, so let's drill down into each. 1. Apps that are Already Virtualized Bert Huelman is Senior Solution Architect at SHI.com. Virtualization isn't limited to the cloud. 2. 3. 4.
Cisco, Google Ventures and VMware Back Puppet Labs with $8.5 Million - ReadWriteCloud. Survey Says: WordPress Leads Open Source CMS Market - ReadWriteCloud. Improving How OpenStack Nova Runs Privileged Commands - ReadWriteCloud. Netflix Benchmarks Cassandra on AWS - ReadWriteCloud. A Look at Unified Networking for Cloud Environments - ReadWriteCloud. COPS: A New Consistency Model for Wide-Area Storage - ReadWriteCloud. A New Cloud Drive With a Twist From Pogoplug - ReadWriteCloud. Amazing Kickstarter Project Twine: Cheap and Easy Internet of Things - ReadWriteCloud. Heroku Launches PostgreSQL Standalone Service - ReadWriteCloud. Forrester: VDI, PaaS Technologies Stuck in the Gestation Phase - ReadWriteCloud.
Engine Yard Introduces Labs and Node.js Support - ReadWriteCloud. Nexenta's Bid to Simplify, Speed Up Virtual Desktops - ReadWriteCloud. MacBook Air Contest Winners and November Extension - ReadWriteCloud. Comparing VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V Virtual Machine Migration - ReadWriteCloud. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 Beta Available - ReadWriteCloud. A 'Carrier Cloud:' Alcatel-Lucent's Bid to Compete with Amazon - ReadWriteCloud. Red Hat Veteran Putting Eucalyptus on the Open Source Path - ReadWriteCloud. Box.Net Launches $2MM Innovation Fund - ReadWriteCloud. Box. VM Capacity Tools Maker VKernel Links Up with Quest Software - ReadWriteCloud. EnterpriseDB's Karen Padir: From MySQL to Postgres + Hadoop - ReadWriteCloud. Smoothly Hopping from Cloud to Cloud: VMware vCloud Connector 1.5 - ReadWriteCloud.
Informatica's Integration Cloud Bridges SAP, Salesforce, Others - ReadWriteCloud. Amazon Goes XXL: Introduces CC2 Instance - ReadWriteCloud. Amazon EC2 Now #42 Supercomputer, IBM BlueGenes in the Dust - ReadWriteCloud. Red Hat Beefs Up Java Experience for OpenShift PaaS - ReadWriteCloud. RevealCloud Adds Windows, Mac Server Monitoring - ReadWriteCloud. New WiFi Routers Managed in the Cloud - ReadWriteCloud. Apprenda Eases Moving .Net Apps to the Cloud - ReadWriteCloud. Three Levels of 'Intelligence:' Windows v.Next to Preview in Q1 - ReadWriteCloud.
Hollywood and Congress Target Mozilla - ReadWriteCloud. From DevOps to NoOps: 10 Cloud Services You Should Be Using - ReadWriteCloud. New Agile Cloud Management Solutions From CA - ReadWriteCloud. 5 Problems with Gmail's New Design - ReadWriteCloud. How The Web Became Just Another Interface to the Cloud - ReadWriteCloud. What's Powering the NYSE Technologies Community Cloud? - ReadWriteCloud.
In the Wake of Estonian FBI Bust, Have You Checked Your DNS Settings? - ReadWriteCloud. Yet Another Reason to Use Boingo, Free VPN! - ReadWriteCloud. Hacker News and the Damage Done? 10gen Responds on MongoDB - ReadWriteCloud. New Amazon AWS Cluster Lowers Costs for Both Customers and Amazon - ReadWriteCloud. Sprout Social Updates Its Social Media Manager - ReadWriteCloud. Infographic: The Crowdfunding Landscape - ReadWriteCloud. Startup Pancake.io Hosts Websites Using Dropbox - ReadWriteCloud.
The Eight Things the Simpsons Can Teach You About Cloud Computing - ReadWriteCloud. Red Hat to Help Wean the DoD from Supercomputers - ReadWriteCloud. Sign Up Now for One of 200 Free Invites to Do.com Select Beta - ReadWriteCloud. Salesforce's Do.com Aims to Torpedo Microsoft's Collaboration Stronghold - ReadWriteCloud. Do and it's done. Is Rackspace Ready to Support Private Clouds? - ReadWriteCloud. Best Buy Reorganizes in the Cloud, Acquiring 123Together.com - ReadWriteCloud.
Hosted Exchange 2010 | Exchange Hosting Provider | Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 & 2007 | Dedicated & Shared Exchange 2010 Hosting. Infographic: The State of OpenStack Adoption - ReadWriteCloud. How to Send Large Files, But Not as Attachments - ReadWriteCloud. November MacBook Air Contest and Poll: What Application(s) Make Up the Biggest Workload for Your Virtual Servers? - ReadWriteCloud. How eMusic Scaled WordPress - ReadWriteCloud. O HAI: AWS Says WB SRVR IS DNW - ReadWriteCloud. Infographic: What SMB Should Demand For Cloud Services - ReadWriteCloud. Can Eucalyptus Compete with OpenStack? Mårten Mickos Says Yes - ReadWriteCloud. Joukuu Floats a Web-based 'Cloud Cloud' for Online Storage - ReadWriteCloud.
A Better Way to Print From Your Phone - ReadWriteCloud. Cloudability offers cloud cost-tracking APIs, free beer — Cloud Computing News.