Google kicked off the second day of its I/O conference by announcing offline text editing for Google Docs, and a version of its Drive storage service for Apple's iOS.
It also announced a version of its Chrome Web browser for iOS, and demonstrated the software running on Apple's iPad and iPhone.
Red Hat is bullish on cloud computing. That's no surprise: Its version of GNU/Linux has been a driving force behind the last decade's infrastructure revolution, from which the idea of cloud computing arose.
Looking for your first cloud computing project? Chances are you're considering a very small, very low-risk application to create on a public PaaS or IaaS cloud provider.
I get the logic: It's a low-value application. If the thing tanks or your information is hacked, no harm, no foul. However, I assert that you could move backward by hedging your bets, retrenching further and further into the data center and missing out on the game-changing advantages of the cloud.
With its Google Compute Engine launched Thursday, Google is offering an IaaS (infrastructure as a service) cloud for running Linux virtual machines on the same infrastructure that powers the company itself.
About three years ago Host.net, a collocation and managed service provider, decided it was going to fully embrace the cloud as a new suite of offerings for customers. When migrating to the new service, the company wanted to use its legacy hardware infrastructure -- mostly Dell and EMC storage servers -- with new hardware that had been purchased for the upgrade. But they didn't want to be tied down to any one vendor moving forward, in case application needs or markets changed.
Salesforce.com experienced system problems in a number of regions on Thursday, starting at 3:34 a.m. PDT, according to an online status page.
The problem began in Salesforce.com's NA2 instance in North America, according to a notice on the page. A subsequent note blamed a "fault" in Salesforce.com's storage tier for the issue and said it was preventing customers from accessing the service.
How do you get your Google+ app featured at Google's blockbuster I/O conference? According to Bjorn Haugland, the CEO of Symphonical, you just invite product manager Amit Fulay to join you in a Hangouts video chat and show him your stuff.
Red Hat is planning to roll out a number of product sets for building hybrid clouds over the next few months, the company announced Wednesday at the Red Hat Summit conference in Boston.
It may feel like a wolf chasing you through the woods at night -- yet another Windows Server migration closing in on its prey. This is one migration you'll want to look at very closely before trying to pull it off.
The way analyst Alan Lepofsky figures it, organizations have several options when it comes to their worker productivity applications. Besides ignoring the cloud option completely, IT leaders could:
Move their existing on-premises products (likely Microsoft Office) to the cloud, opting for the same or similar applications in a Web-based format.
The Museum of Modern Art's migration to the cloud started last June, when MoMA moved from an on-premises email system to Google's cloud-based Gmail and Calendar, says Juan Montes, IS manager for the New York-based museum. And now, he says, he's seeing employees turn to other cloud-based productivity applications on their own as they become more comfortable with the notion.
CliQr Technologies, a startup backed by Google Ventures, has an unveiled a service called CloudCenter designed to allow organizations move applications across different cloud providers with a minimum amount of work.
"What we see is IT departments having to do massive, complex integrations to a single cloud architecture" said Gaurav Manglik, co-founder and CEO of CliQr Technologies. "Applications should be completely unhooked from infrastructure, so they interoperate with any cloud, and be able to move between clouds."
There are a growing number of open source cloud infrastructure players in the market, but Eucalyptus says it is the best bet for private enterprise clouds. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix caught up with CEO Mårten Mickos, who, as the former CEO of MySQL, has loads of experience growing significant open source companies, to learn more about the company and how Mickos sees private clouds evolving.
It's almost a certainty that Google will announce an enhanced IaaS offering at its developer conference this week in San Francisco. Most industry analysts, and yours truly, have been expecting this move -- and hoping it would happen. It will build on Google's existing PaaS product and Google App Engine, as well as Google storage services.
For the second time this month, Amazon.com's Northern Virginia data center suffered an outage caused by a line of powerful thunderstorms coming through the area late Friday night. Disrupted services included Elastic Compute, Elastic Cache, Elastic MapReduce, and Relational Database Services. The outage has affected Instagram, Pinterest, Netflix, and Heroku, used by many startups and mobile apps.
Expanding beyond the delivery of software for its own cloud platform, VMware is acquiring DynamicOps for its heterogenous cloud management offerings.
When NewsGator Technologies decided to play in the nascent enterprise social collaboration market a few years ago with a product that worked only with Microsoft's SharePoint, it was making a big bet.
It was gambling that by making a deeply integrated SharePoint add-on, it would carve a profitable niche that was different from the broader opportunity pursued by competitors with vendor-agnostic products.
About two years ago, I suggested the cloud had jumped the shark -- not in the sense it had ceased to become an important part of the future of IT, but that the hype surrounding it had reached such a fever pitch that what it means to be "in the cloud" had almost become meaningless. I've been surprised to find that the hype has not died down.
Finally, we've come full circle. The popular notion of cloud computing really began with Google: A sea of cheap white Google servers shimmered before the eyes of C-level execs everywhere, igniting the dream of commodity computing. Pool everything! Allocate resources wherever you need them! No waste! No downtime!
InfoWorld described yesterday how Compute Engine is Google's first unabashed IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) product, a clou
