Amazon Cloud News & Articles

Could mobile apps offer a solution to the inherent risks that your business faces when moving its data and functions to cloud-based applications or services? 

A story with an apparently broken embargo -- that moved us to revisit the science of media embargoes -- brought the news that Marten Mickos, the former CEO of MySQL (which recently ended up in hands of Oracle as part of the Sun acquisition) became the CEO of open source cloud computing company Eucalyptus.

Alfresco (news, site) is expanding its cloud horizons by offering complex configuration deployment options in the cloud for its Enterprise CMS via a partnership with RightScale.

The joint solution is aimed to provide faster full-blown deployments and better management of the cloud infrastructure. RightScale is a cloud computing management company that has a SaaS cloud management platform and supports Amazon EC2 among other clouds.

The RightScale Cloud Management Platform has several features that many organizations may find appealing, including prepackaged cloud-ready ServerTemplates, ability to manage entire deployments centrally, automation throughout the deployment lifecycle, and visibility and control of all levels of a cloud app.

For Alfresco customers it means that they have a way of deploying fully-configured, fault-tolerant and load-balanced Alfresco cloud instances that can automatically scale to meet various infrastructure needs as they arise. As often it is with the cloud, one of the benefits is reduced costs, when customers only pay for what they use, when they use it.

In addition to the recently released Alfresco EC2 image and the Cloud Content Application Developer Program aimed at developers wanting to try out the Enterprise CMS in the cloud, the vendor now also offers a hosted Amazon cloud-based trial of a full implementation of Alfresco Share, using Alfresco Enterprise Edition 3.1, for you to explore.

Back in September, Alfresco (news, site) released an Amazon EC2 image for those wanting to use Alfresco Server in the cloud. This image has recently received some significant updates that might interest those who've been following recent developments with Alfresco products.

Ever thought that the cloud is not secure enough for your organization to even consider adopting it? You may want to give that thought another swirl. And the reason for that is the new Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

Albeit in limited beta, the offering aims to provide the best of the both worlds by securely bridging your existing IT infrastructure and the AWS cloud-based resources in hybrid architectures.

The cloud appears to be the new black in the fashion of web content management. One after another, vendors are conquering the cloud in hopes of dazzling their customers with more hosting options and improved scalability.

Ektron’s (news, site) CMS400.NET content management system is now also cloud-friendly, thanks to their eSync technology that can do bi-directional synchronization with the cloud.

Hosting is also part of the offering. Ektron is using the Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) as a hosting option, allowing customers to run and manage their production, development and staging environments in the cloud, in any combination.

Ektron’s eSync technology can be used for bi-directional synchronization between the cloud and a customer’s local environment for the entire web site, specific pages or select pieces of content; giving developers the ability to code locally and sync up with the cloud.

Ektron says it will provide a set of free Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), on which customers can deploy their CMS400.NET instances. Using these Ektron-provided AMIs, new virtual machines can be provisioned with CMS400.NET. Developers can take advantage of the provisioning and automated software deployment.

While the cloud option may not necessarily work for all Ektron Web CMS customers, it is certainly worth looking into.