Rackspace Acquires Cloudkick Getting Ready For A Federated Clouds Future
Rackspace, a leading player in the traditional hosting world with some level of difficulty gaining traction in the cloud based world, today announced the acquisition of Cloudkick, one of the cloud management vendors with a pretty dashboard having HTML 5 based 3D server visualization. Rackspace is mum on the details of valuation. Interestingly, this is [...]
In a world of niche Clouds, how do you define a useful niche?
There are a couple of interesting posts on the blog of the UK’s FLESSR project, detailing their efforts to work out how feasible it might be to offer a new Cloud service to universities. More on that in a moment. I don’t think I’ve ever really been convinced by the argument that everything will end [...]
The Rise Of Managed Cloud Services
Looks like it is time to take “self service” out of cloud definition. There is a new trend that is slowly gaining traction which, even though it is not cloud washing, appears to be a desperate repackaging of services by companies with deep roots in the managed hosting world. I still feel that the availability [...]
OpenStack Released Today
OpenStack (see previous CloudAve coverage), the open source cloud computing stack supported by Rackspace, NASA and many other companies, unwrapped their first version, codenamed Austin release, today. This marks a crucial milestone of a project that has the potential to change the cloud computing market upside down. Ever since they announced the project during OSCON [...]
Yawn, Joyent Announces Windows And Linux Virtual Machines On Cloud
Joyent (See previous CloudAve coverage), the San Francisco based infrastructure cloud service provider, today announced the availability of Windows and Linux virtual machines in their cloud. They are targeting the enterprise customers who want to move their existing apps to VMs on the cloud. The new Windows and Linux solutions are available at all of [...]
Appmatcher.com: eHarmony For SaaS Apps
Yesterday, Rackspace launched Appmatcher.com, a match making service which will help businesses find suitable apps for their needs. Imagine it to be something like Match.com but catering to the business users helping them find the right set of SaaS applications for their organization from accounting to project management to HR. This is a pretty interesting service [...]
Amazon Micro Instances – Rackspace Has Competition On The Lower End
For a long time Amazon Web Services didn’t bother to focus on the light users. From the beginning, Rackspace offered plans catering to the low end VPS crowd with Linux Cloud Servers with 256 MB RAM available for 1.5 cents a hour (with an estimated monthly cost not including bandwidth consumption at $10.95). It was [...]
Updated: Openstack.org – A Rackspace Hailmary Pass?
Last week, Clouderati Twitter stream was full of back and forth arguments on possible dumping of Amazon API by Openstack. It all started with a recent Silicon Valley Cloud Computing Group meetup on Openstack. One of the takeaways from the meeting is that Openstack is dumping the API compatibility mode. Nebula, the cloud computing project [...]
Openstack iPad App Is Coming To A Store Near You
After Openstack was launched with much fanfare during OSCON, there has been a flurry of activity on the development community with thousands of contribution from hundreds of developers. Even though the main contribution is towards compute and storage, there are many smaller projects underway in the Openstack ecosystem. One such project is the iPad app [...]
Rackspace Offers Windows Cloud Servers
Today, Rackspace announced the release of Windows based Cloud Servers to compete with Amazon EC2 Windows instances and Windows Azure. According to Rackspace, the new service delivers a highly scalable environment ideal for Windows-based hosting, testing and developing applications and supporting the high levels of traffic required for launching online gaming platforms or the next [...]
Simon Wardley’s Prophecy: Is Openstack The Small Guy Going To Disrupt Amazon’s Dominance?
When I wrote about Openstack last week, I talked about the disruptive potential of an Openstack.org and how it can make the market by empowering the smaller players. Many people who dismiss Openstack.org as a non-starter fail to understand that it is just a start. Openstack.org doesn’t claim it has the miracle pill for all [...]
OSCON Week: Openstack.org, A Game Changer?
Yesterday, we saw the announcement by Rackspace that they have joined hands with NASA and 25 other companies to create Openstack.org, an open source cloud community. Rackspace also announced that they are open sourcing their entire cloud stack and give it to the project. As expected, it has created both positive and negative reactions from [...]
Spiceworks Reaching Out To Cloud Players
Spiceworks, the provider of IT Management software for small and medium businesses, has announced a new partner program with which they are reaching out to cloud vendors to let their users use Spiceworks management interface to manage their cloud services. With supposedly 1,000,000 IT professionals from SMB sector using their software, this presents a good opportunity [...]
Rackspace Gives Email Users Choice
I believe that all generic technology services should be outsourced. Anything that doesn’t provide a point of differentiation for your business is a candidate to move to the cloud. One of the first applications in this class is, I believe, email. Beyond security of your data, there is no compelling reason to keep your mail [...]
The Cloud Top 3’s
Rackspace’s earnings report prompted a Twitter exchange between myself and Michael DeSilver (of LTech) that seemed interesting enough to report here. Rackspace reported year over year growth in their cloud business of 77%, and sequential growth of 13% — all on $19 million in revenue (for the cloud biz). This prompted Mike and I to [...]
