Iaas News & Articles

More enterprises have begun to see the cloud as a viable option for everything from physical servers to end user facing applications. This increased user demand is allowing companies such as data platform-as-a-service provider Cloudant to grow rapidly. The company announced that it is further expanding its data centers globally to improve reliability and performance.

Far be it from me to spread gossip and rumor BUT… well, yesterday when we took a look at the new upgrade to v2.1 of IBM’s SmartCloud, we came across a number of references to the fact that Google is building a c loud computing offering that is to compete with Amazon’s EC2 cloud.

It took a while to figure it out from the press release, but IBM has upgraded its SmartCloud 2.1, which comes with a number of enhancements that is going to make working with Big Blue‘s cloud a lot easier, and to all appearances, a lot more productive.

There are few ways better to dispel rumors that your baby might be ugly than taking your carefully incubated bundle of joy out for the entire world to see. That’s precisely what Rackspace has done with its open source progeny, OpenStack.

Amazon Web Services has released its cloud search offering, CloudSearch, which has been rumored for months. The new service is based on the same technology that powers product searches on Amazon.com. Amazon is the first company to offer search-as-a-service, but something tells us the Internet giant’s competitors will soon be scrambling to keep up now that Amazon has entered the market.

Hewett-Packard (HP) has finally revealed details for its new massive cloud program, which has been generating rumors for weeks. HP is calling the new bag of services the Converged Cloud, and the name signals HP’s plans -- a unified architecture for all flavors of the cloud -- public, private and managed.

Rackspace has taken the next step in getting two-year old open source cloud, OpenStack, ready for prime time. This week the hosting giant will begin stress-testing its OpenStack implementation by running tens of thousands of instances.

Having leaked its own information a couple of weeks back, Amazon has now officially unveiled Simple Workflow (SWF) to control business apps and processes across the cloud and your own systems.

Amazon had a content management snafu yesterday, accidentally revealing an as of yet unannounced workflow service for Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon quickly removed the content, but not before observers took note of the new goodie.

It's been described as the "Wild West of Cloud Computing" -- no slick "urban" services like Amazon provides, but HP is in beta with its cloud services, and the time is ripe to make your land grab with free real estate (for now) hosted by the world's second-largest PC maker, looking to move into Web services in a big way.

 Microsoft has been taking big steps to make its cloud platform, Windows Azure, more attractive. Just last week the company announced support for several popular open source development tools including Node.js and Hadoop. It seems that the company is intent on ensuring that Windows Azure remains the leading choice for Microsoft-based cloud services, but the company shouldn’t get too comfortable on its throne. VMWare and little-known Tier 3 have stepped forward to provide Microsoft a little competition. Game on, Azure.

Are you curious how the multitudes of public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers stack up? Thanks to Gartner, there is no longer a need to wonder. The analyst firm has released its first magic quadrant for the public IaaS market.

Microsoft is taking big strides to make its Azure cloud service more attractive. The company has announced several updates to the platform aimed at improving its usability. The company, which has long been criticized for a less-than-friendly stance on open source, is continuing to show that giants can change. Several of the recently announced updates improve support for open source development on Azure.

Rackspace is capitalizing on the trend for organizations to mingle with the masses while working in its own cozy little cloud. The company announced that it is making enhancements to RackConnect, the hybrid cloud solution it introduced late last year.

Cloud adoption and open source were just a few years ago considered risky, cutting-edge approaches only pursued by the most confident (or poor) of technology departments. Times have changed. Even the federal government -- definitely not known for its propensity to be early adopters -- has embraced both. Despite the growth in adoption and acceptance, the intersection of cloud and open source still has a quite a bit of maturing to do, and from the looks of things, some of that growing up might be quite a battle.