
Amazon Drops EC2 Prices. Can We Expect More Reductions?
Amazon today announced that they are dropping the on demand and reserved prices of High Memory Double Extra Large and High Memory Quadruple Extra Large instances from yesterday. Effective September 1, 2010, we’ve reduced the On-Demand and Reserved Instance prices on the m2.2xlarge (High-Memory Double Extra Large) and the m2.4xlarge (High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large) by up […]

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 […]

Cloud Pricing War Begins
Image via Wikipedia Finally, the cloud pricing war has begun. I have been complaining about the AWS pricing here at Cloud Ave for some time. In my Sept, 2009 post, I argued that Amazon needs to price aggressively to capture more market share. However, I would like to to use this post to once again […]

CloudKick Broadens its Infrastructure Management Base
Cloud management company CloudKick, a Y Combinator startup, is launching its commercial product and announcing they now support the Rackspace Cloud, Amazon EC2, Linode, GoGrid, Slicehost, RimuHosting, and VPS.NET. The CloudKick offering enables users to control cloud infrastructure from multiple different vendors, all from one dashboard which allows both monitoring and management of an infrastructure […]

Amazon Spot Instances – A Neat Way To Rent Out Unused Resources
Yesterday, Joe Weinman, whose insights on cloud computing are respected by many in the Clouderati, wrote a thought provoking post on GigaOM about various ways in which cloud computing pricing models will evolve. One of the them was the Discretionary Processing and Auctions. Discretionary Processing and Auctions — Much computing must be done on demand. […]
Malware starts using Amazon EC2 as a Command and Control structure
This is one of those things you wait for, like the other shoe to drop, but with the movement away from the data center to the cloud, it is an expectation that malware would follow the migration. There is no reason to think that your cloud applications are any more secure than any of the […]

Cloud Is Not What You Think It Is
Yesterday at Defrag, during a panel on Foundational Infrastructure and Enabling Technology, some of the panelists were trying to stretch the concept of cloud to suit their agenda. I thought I will clear the air here on those concepts. It is time for us to accept the widely adopted definitions and take the discussions to […]

Einstein Embraces EC2
Well nearly… It’s nice being able to tell a story about cloud computing being used to power some really cool projects. While Youtube is cool and all, it doesn’t come close to the coolness of exploring the depths of the oceans or outer space. It’s in this second category that this post lies – apparently […]
Layer7 – Abstracting Cloud Gateways
I recently spoke with Scott Morrison, VP Engineering at Layer 7 Technologies, a SOA and governance company that has been doing appliance based gateways for years looking at traffic, cryptography, authentication, authorization, etc, and setting rules and policy. Layer 7 is now moving what they do into the clouds. From their release; With Layer 7’s […]

Amazon EC2 Shows Amazing Growth
Amazon EC2, the public cloud service offered by Amazon, has been growing at an amazing rate. From their early days of catering to startups, they have grown to have diverse clients from individuals to enterprises. Guy Rosen, the cloud entrepreneur who tracks the state of the cloud, has done some research on the resource identifier […]

AWS Adds An Extra Layer Of Security On Authentication
Sometime back, I was lamenting about the lack of security in the authentication layer of Amazon Web Services. Especially, I found the ease with which one can gain control of AWS account by cracking just the user’s login credentials for AWS console very troubling. Before the release of console, someone who steals the Amazon […]

StrataScale – Hosting for the Edge Cases
There’s quite a divide between traditional hosting in physical servers and the somewhat ethereal (actually completely ethereal) concept of cloud hosting. Into this breech walks StrataScale. StrataScale call themselves the first fully managed server hosting solution – that’s physical servers, not virtual ones. In an answer to many peoples concerns around virtualization and cloud storage, […]

New Features for Amazon EC2 – Now You Can Truly Scale Applications
The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) allows customers build secure, fault-tolerant applications that can scale up and down with demand, at low cost. One of the core features for achieving this kind of efficiency and fault-tolerant is the ability to acquire and release computing resources in a matter of minutes according to demand. While […]
Built-in Support for the Cloud Makes Ubuntu Something Special
Krishnan wrote about the next version of Ubuntu, Karmic Koala, back in March and said; Essentially, Ubuntu has decided to focus on developing features which will help propel Ubuntu Server edition to play a major role in the Cloud infrastructure ecosystem By incorporating code from Project EUCALYPTUS into this latest version of the Linux distribution, […]