Amazon's Data Shipping Goes Both Ways Now by PC World: Yahoo! Tech

Amazon's Data Shipping Goes Both Ways Now by PC World: Yahoo! Tech: "The AWS Import/Export service, announced in May, lets customers use standard shipping services to send Amazon chunks of data that would take days or weeks to get there on typical leased lines. For example, enterprises with a T-1 line (1.5Mb per second) typically can avoid an 82-day upload by sending 1TB of data via AWS Import/Export, according to Amazon. Customers are already uploading terabytes of data every week, the company said."

Amazon Web Services Secrets Revealed - Plug Into The Cloud - InformationWeek

Amazon Web Services Secrets Revealed - Plug Into The Cloud - InformationWeek: "Rosen plans to provide more data and analysis sometime soon around the growth rate of AWS. Here's a sneak peek: Rosen tells me that EC2 is experiencing monthly growth of 'almost 10%.' If accurate, that's huge growth, and it reinforces our general impression that cloud computing is out-pacing the rest of the IT industry. I've got a query into Amazon to check Rosen's estimate, but no response yet. Financial analysts should press Amazon for details on AWS revenues and growth during its upcoming conference call on results for the second quarter of the year."

Microsoft announces Azure pricing, details | Beyond Binary - CNET News

Microsoft announces Azure pricing, details | Beyond Binary - CNET News: "On a pure consumption basis, Microsoft said it will charge 12 cents per hour for computing, 15 cents per gigabyte for storage and 10 cents per 10,000 storage transactions. For network bandwidth, the software maker is charging between 10 cents and 15 cents per gigabyte.
The discount plan, dubbed the 'development accelerator' comes in two forms and offers a 15 percent to 30 percent discount off the consumption charges. It requires a six-month commitment, with overage charges billed at the regular rates. After six months, the pricing reverts to the standard Azure rates.
Microsoft also announced pricing for its SQL Azure database, charging $9.99 for the basic Web edition, including up to a 1GB relational database and $99.99 for the Business Edition, which includes up to a 10GB database."

McKinsey’s Cloud Computing Report Is Partly Cloudy

McKinsey’s Cloud Computing Report Is Partly Cloudy: "The report paints cloud computing as over-hyped and maintains that cloud computing services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) overcharge large companies for a service the companies could do better on their own. The study also says that while cloud computing is optimal for small and medium-sized businesses, large companies will spend less if using traditional data centers. Virtualization is the optimal way to go, says McKinsey, and by implementing virtualization in-house, corporations can reduce costs when factoring in depreciation and tax write-offs."

With Hadoop, Amazon Adds A Web-Scale Data Processing Engine To Its Cloud Computer

With Hadoop, Amazon Adds A Web-Scale Data Processing Engine To Its Cloud Computer: "This is actually a big deal because it allows developers to better take advantage of the massive computing power Amazon has to offer and create applications which process huge reservoirs of data (conveniently stored in Amazon S3) in parallel. MapReduce is the name of the data processing framework Google created to index and search the Web. It literally breaks up huge computational tasks and spreads them to different servers. This is called mapping the data. Once each processor is done with its portion of the math problem, it sends the result back so that all the different partial answers can be combined and then “reduced” into one final answer."

Get Ready For Java On AppEngine

Get Ready For Java On AppEngine: "Here’s a juicy rumor (if you’re a geek, this is good stuff): A source tells us that Google AppEngine, a platform for building and hosting web applications in the cloud, will begin letting developers write applications in Java in the near future. Until now only Python applications were supported. The announcement should come at the Google I/O conference in late May."

Yahoo! News - Nick Carr: The many ways cloud computing will disrupt IT by InfoWorld: Yahoo! Tech

Yahoo! News - Nick Carr: The many ways cloud computing will disrupt IT by InfoWorld: Yahoo! Tech: "IW: Now, this idea that such a small number of companies are buying such a large chunk of servers -- what are the implications?
NC: Well, first of all this comes from a guy at Microsoft [Rick Rashid, senior vice president who oversees Microsoft Research]. So I'm assuming he has good information and that's an accurate number. But if that is, 20 percent is a huge chunk of the server market, and to have that consolidated into the hands of a few purchasers in what's only the last few years, really shows a fundamental shift in the nature of that industry that more and more of the product is going to be consumed by fewer and fewer companies. That radically changes the server industry.

Is it surprising to me that that trend is underway? No, it reflects the fact that more and more computing is done in central datacenters now. Forget about the corporate world. If you look at how individuals use their PCs or smartphones today, a huge amount of stuff that used to require buying a hard drive is now done out in the cloud. All Web 2.0 is in the cloud. It doesn't surprise me because it reflects how people view the way their computers work. But if it's already at 20 percent that seems pretty remarkable in such a short span of time."

Seeding Cloud Computing: A Conversation With Java Champion Alan Williamson

Seeding Cloud Computing: A Conversation With Java Champion Alan Williamson: "Microsoft's Azure platform and Google's App Engine are two prime examples of proprietary cloud offerings that, once you deploy code to either, you've cut off any portability avenues. For some, this is pure evil, while others don't mind."

BeyondVC: Hybrid clouds are coming

BeyondVC: Hybrid clouds are coming: "Any enterprise looking at potentially leveraging the cloud would love to have a hybrid solution which allows them to manage their own internal cloud and then burst over to a public cloud for either automated failover, extra storage, or to port an application over after using an internal platform for development.�"

What is Cloud Computing? 10 Defining Points | HaveMacWillBlog (aka Robin Bloor’s Blog)

I doubt anyone reading this blog would need this article, but it does reinforce some points.

What is Cloud Computing? 10 Defining Points | HaveMacWillBlog (aka Robin Bloor’s Blog): "“Cloud Computing” is currently a marketing term. And that’s why I’m writing this; to divorce the use of Cloud Computing, the marketing term, from the use of Cloud Computing as an architectural idea. Marketing terms don’t have to conform to precise definition. They get used, then abused, then severely exploited and finally, as their bandwagon grinds to a halt, they get pitched onto the sorry stack of broken buzz words. That’s what happened to “eBusiness”, “Web Services”, “On Demand” and so on. Until the recession began in earnest Cloud Computing was a reasonably sane marketing term. That’s now changing because, in the minds of the IT audience, the cost of cloud computing is lower. That makes cloud the hype-word du jour."

Sun to Announce Open Cloud APIs at CommunityOne | High Scalability

Given that Sun is trying to sell itself (most recently to IBM), does anyone really care about their plans? Does anyone actually use these "Open Cloud" services? I've never heard of anyone using them.

Sun to Announce Open Cloud APIs at CommunityOne | High Scalability: "One of the key items Sun will be talking about in today's cloud computing announcement (at 9AM EST/6AM PST) will be Sun's opening of the APIs that we'll use for the Sun Cloud. We're making these available so that those who are interested will be able to review and comment on these APIs. Continuing our commitment to openness, we're making these APIs available via the Creative Commons Version 3.0 license."

Cloudera Raises $5 Million Series A Round For Hadoop Commercialization

Hey hey, don't argue with Free. FYI, Hadoop is a software framework that alllows you to use the MapReduce and BigTable concepts, which are key to large scale processing.

Cloudera Raises $5 Million Series A Round For Hadoop Commercialization: "Cloudera is pushing a commercial distribution for Hadoop, a free Java software framework born out of an open-source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure and fostered within the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop supports distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers processing enormous amounts of data, technology that’s being put to use by Internet juggernauts like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon, AOL, Baidu, The NY Times, Joost and many more.

Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop is distributed as a pre-packaged RPM bundle for Red Hat Linux systems or an Amazon EC2 image, for free under the Apache 2 software license. The startup is launching the my.cloudera.com portal today where people can use a Web-based configuration tool to create custom packages that are optimized to their specific needs.

There are some big names involved with Cloudera. The founding team at Cloudera includes Mike Olson (former VP at Oracle and prior to that CEO at open source database pioneer Sleepycat Software), Christophe Bisciglia (created and led Google’s Academic Cloud Computing Initiative), Dr. Amr Awadallah (co-founder of VivaSmart, acquired by Yahoo!) and Jeff Hammerbacher (key member of the data team at Facebook)."

Welcome!

I've been interested i Cloud Computing for awhile now and keep up on many of the latest offerings and developments. So, I thought I would share those as I find them, and maybe add a few thoughts too.