Money for IaaS, money for streaming data
$83 million for Digital Ocean, with its bare-bones spin on cloud-based infrastructure… and $24 million for Confluent, the company behind Apache Kafka. Digital Ocean’s not an AWS-killer (and doesn’t think it is, either), and Kafka addresses a rather specific set of use cases around messaging between devices and/or application components… but both are solid pieces of […]
451 Research on IaaS
This diagram, from a recent 451 Research report, is intriguing. AWS is top of the heap, “used by the majority of enterprise IaaS customers in the study (57%) and is also cited as the most important IaaS provider by 35% of these current IaaS customers.” But look at Rackspace, ahead of AWS on ‘promise’ and only just […]
Amazon binds itself more tightly to the enterprise
Amazon Web Services (AWS) spent years being dismissive of anything that didn’t run in an AWS data centre. Private and hybrid clouds were, we were repeatedly and vehemently told, ‘false clouds.’ There was no value in doing anything cloudy any way but the Amazon way. Non-cloudy workloads were, simply, anachronistic. Left alone, they’d get on with the […]
Amazon’s Cloud Price Reduction, A Desire To Compete Hard And Move Up The Value Chain
Recently Google slashed price for their cloud offering. Amazon, as expected, also announced their 42nd price reduction on their cloud offerings since its inception. Today, Microsoft also announced price reduction for their Azure offerings. Unlike many other people I don’t necessarily see the price reduction by Amazon as waging a price war against the competition. […]
Adaptive Computing CEO Robert Clyde talks about Big Data, and lessons from the world of High Performance Computing
It’s sometimes easy to assume that the large clusters of commodity servers commonly associated with open source big data and NoSQL approaches like Hadoop have made supercomputers and eye-wateringly expensive high performance computing (HPC) installations a thing of the past. But Adaptive Computing CEO Robert Clyde argues that the world of HPC has evolved, and […]
Cloud, DevOps and Herding Cats
The conventional wisdom is that 2014 is that year that enterprise IT finally “rolls up the sleeves” and gets serious about cloud adoption. But what does this really mean? Basically we’re seeing the era of cloud pilots and proof-of-concepts in the enterprise drawing to close, especially around IaaS and to a certain extent PaaS. CIOs […]
Podcasting again… with StorSimple’s Marc Farley
I used to podcast pretty regularly, on this site and elsewhere. Then other things got in the way and, before I knew it, almost two years had passed since my last podcast here. Well, it’s time to put that right. I’m podcasting again, and I’ve got a nice pipeline of guests lined up over the […]
How ITaaS is Reviving the Service Catalog
The service catalog hasn’t exactly been one of the hotter topics in enterprise IT. Introduced as a IT service management best practice with ITIL v3, the general idea is that IT should provide a central list of services, SLAs, and prices along with service request processes. Users go to the service catalog, pick what they […]
ITaaS is About More Than Just Cloud
ITaaS, short for IT-as-a-Service, is one of the more misleading acronyms around. Because it follows the somewhat annoying “XaaS” pattern, many assume that like SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS it’s just another cloud delivery model or technology platform. This mistaken assumption will prove to be very costly for many in enterprise IT. ITaaS is in fact […]
Unpicking the multi-cloud at GigaOM Structure
Image © Mission Bay Conference Center Last month, RightScale’s State of the Cloud report got me thinking about the rise of multi-cloud solutions. Next month, I’ll be moderating a Mapping Session at GigaOM’s Structure event to work out how, where, when, why and if this trend is going to prove significant. Hybrid clouds, in which one […]
Discussing Virtual Machine interoperability with the Open Data Center Alliance
The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) is holding its Forecast event in San Francisco in June, and I’ve been invited to moderate the panel discussing Virtual Machine Interoperability. As moderator, I’ll be far more interested in facilitating insights from panel and audience than in wittering on about what I think, so I wanted to use this […]
OpenStack Infighting: Will It Affect The Project?
It has been 2+ years since OpenStack was launched and the project is slowly maturing as organizations are exploring the use of OpenStack for their private cloud needs. As money gets into the ecosystem, it is natural for bickering to start among the ecosystem players. In fact, naysayers of the project has been saying this […]
Eucalyptus’ AWS Bet
Yesterday Eucalyptus announced the new version of their software and, in the process, more closely aligned with AWS. It is not surprising given the ground realities of cloud infrastructure market. I would even argue that it is a smart bet by Eucalyptus which could help them as enterprises are seriously considering AWS off late. Before […]
OpenStack Summit – Fall 2012: My Expectations
As I travel to San Diego to attend the OpenStack Summit (Fall 2012 edition), I am thinking about what to expect from the event. I wrote about the enthusiasm I saw in the community after the April 2012 Summit. Even though I expect to see the same (more) enthusiasm in the community, I also want […]
SUSE’s OpenStack Cloud Is Good For The Ecosystem
Last week at CloudOpen 2012, SUSE (previous CloudAve coverage) announced the availability of SUSE Cloud, a commercially supported private cloud solution based on OpenStack. SUSE Cloud is a cloud management platform built with OpenStack and integrates with existing SUSE products like SUSE Studio and SUSE Manager. This will essentially allow their enterprise customers to deploy […]
