CBS tunes in to open source, cloud
Ring in open source and cloud apps, ring out old packaged software. That's the message relayed by Peter Yared, CTO for CBS Interactive, at this week's open source-focused Open Business Conference in San Francisco. And on a related software front, broadcasting giant CBS says it is not caving to patent trolls and is instead choosing to give them a fight.
"We love open source" and run a ton of it, Yared said. CBS Interactive, which includes CBS Web properties, has utilized open source software including the Apache Hadoop distributed computing system and the MySQL database. Read more...
It’s twilight for small in-house data centers
Virtualization, cloud services, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) are making it much easier to shift IT infrastructure operations to service providers, and that is exactly what many users are doing.
This trend is being felt the most at in-house data centers in small- to mid-size companies. These firms may be trying to shut down their data centers, or shift a major portion of their workloads to external providers.
Larger firms have been consolidating data centers for years, and even the federal government is shutting down hundreds of data centers in its consolidation push. But these big firms and institutions are optimizing their operations and holding on to them, even as they increase their use of SaaS and cloud services at the margins. Read more...
Google App Engine update eases cloudy mobile app development
Google has updated its platform-as-a-service to ease mobile app development in the cloud.
The "Cloud Endpoints" feature was pushed out in its preview form by Google on Thursday, along with support for the Java 7 runtime on its App Engine platform-as-a-service.
"Cloud Endpoints gets rid of all the plumbing code associated with writing custom backend server logic for mobile and web apps," Brad Abrams, a Google product manager, told The Register via email. "For example, developers no longer need to deal with serialization, user authentication, API security, load balancing or machine management." Read more...
Lenovo acquires Stoneware to expand cloud products portfolio
Lenovo on Tuesday said it plans to acquire Stoneware, a small U.S. based company specializing in cloud products for schools and governments, as part of the PC maker's strategy to bolster its cloud computing offerings.
While Lenovo did not disclose financial terms of the deal, it said it expects to complete the acquisition of the Indianapolis-based Stoneware by year's end.
Stoneware is the developer of a webNetwork, a platform designed to unify an organization's IT services, along with LanSchool, another cloud-based product that allows teachers to distribute and manage content over classroom PCs and devices. Read more...
Office 365 turns Lotus eater
Microsoft has licensed Lotus-to-anything migration software from Binary Tree, and plans to use its partner's wares to lure Lotus customers away from IBM and into the cloud.
Kevin Allison, Microsoft's general manager of Office 365. has declared the deal a tremendous idea as it “... helps simplify the onboarding process and reduce Lotus migration costs.” Binary Tree, where the balance sheet presumably looks nicely healthy since the deal, is even more effusive in its praise of the very notion that Microsoft might encourage messaging migrations. Read more...
Oracle seeks to delay cloud features in enterprise Java
Oracle is finding its road map for enterprise Java is a bit too ambitious, with the company now proposing a postponement in cloud computing capabilities that had been anticipated for Java EE (Java Platform, Enterprise Edition) 7 next year. Instead, the cloud capabilities would be included in Java EE 8 in 2015.
In a blog post, Oracle's Linda DeMichiel cites slow progress in developing cloud technologies due to immaturity in the provisioning, multitenancy, and elasticity spaces, as well as in application deployments. Providing solid support for standardized PaaS (platform as a service) programming and multitenancy would delay Java EE 7 until spring 2014, more than a year behind schedule, she said. "In our opinion, that is way too long," said DeMichiel, who has served as Java EE 7 specification lead. Read more...
Oracle backtracks from Java EE 7 cloud claims
In a move that's becoming all too familiar, leaders of the effort to develop Java EE 7 – the next version of Oracle's Java platform for enterprise computing – have recommended that certain planned components be deferred to a later version in the interest of keeping the project on schedule.
"Despite our best intentions, our progress has been slow on the cloud side of our agenda," Linda DeMichiel, the specification lead for Java EE 7, wrote in a blog post. She added that providing solid support for platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments and multi-tenancy would likely delay the project for another year.
"We have therefore proposed to the Java EE 7 Expert Group that we adjust our course of action — namely, stick to our current target release dates, and defer the remaining aspects of our agenda for PaaS enablement and multi-tenancy support to Java EE 8," DeMichiel wrote. Read more...
Python slithers up Amazon’s Beanstalk
Python has become the newest language welcomed into the Amazon’s cloud fold, through the Amazon Web Services' Elastic Beanstalk.
The cloud giant today announced that Python applications are now supported on Elastic Beanstalk – along with PHP, Java and Microsoft’s family .NET.
The news smooths the way for the DJango and Flask rapid and light-weight application development frameworks for Python apps to get an easier Amazon fluffing.
Elastic Beanstalk automatically deploys applications by taking care of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling and health monitoring. Read more...
Rackspace debuts OpenStack cloud servers
Following a four-month beta period, Rackspace has started offering its hosted servers and databases using the open source OpenStack suite of cloud software.
That OpenStack has been pressed into production use just two years after its launch, "is a great proof point for the maturity of the project," said Jim Curry, head of OpenStack at Rackspace.
Rackspace currently has over 180,000 customers of its hosted services. The company offers Windows and Linux servers, content delivery network services, and .Net and PHP hosting, all with associated management and monitoring services.
Starting Wednesday, when new customers log into Rackspace to requisition servers, they will interact with Rackspace Open Cloud services, which is based on the OpenStack Nova compute component. Rackspace has run the Swift object storage component of OpenStack for over 2 years for its Cloud Files storage service; it created the technology in-house and then contributed its code when it co-founded the OpenStack project. Read more...
Email in security hot seat with rise of cloud, BYOD
For most enterprises it is not enough to make sure their own email platform is secure. If their suppliers are not equally secure, they can be as vulnerable to criminal hackers and data leaks from human error as the weakest link in their supply chain.
The combination of a chain of usually small- to medium-size suppliers, the expansion of cloud-based email services and the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend among workers has created what Richard Parris, writing for BCW, calls a "complex melting pot of security challenges surrounding the secure transfer of sensitive data via email."
By now, the advantages and risks of BYOD have been well documented. While it promotes convenience, collaboration and mobile productivity among employees, it is vulnerable to malicious applications, theft and simple carelessness -- employees storing corporate data in public cloud services that are not secure, so they can access it anytime. Read more...
Microsoft promises resellers bumper 2013 with total line-up refresh
Microsoft closed down its Worldwide Partners Conference in Toronto with a promise that the coming year will provide the best year yet for its resellers, with a complete refresh of its ecosystem to restore Redmond's future.
"For the very first time, every single product in our portfolio is getting refreshed and relaunched in a 12 month cycle - that's unprecedented," said COO Kevin Turner. "It's the largest release cycle in our history and the energy and the momentum from that is unbelievable."
Microsoft as investing in improved partner rebates and rewards he said, as well as increasing the amount of training on offer, particularly for cloud technology.
Redmond's also spending $9.3bn in R&D, over $3bn more than its nearest technology rival, Turner claimed. This investment started in the recession year of 2008 and the result was a whole new lineup that was going to provide Microsoft's most important year since 1995. Read more...
Kindle Fire adds APIs for cloudy gaming features
Amazon has beefed up gaming on its Android-based Kindle Fire platform, in hopes that adding cloudy goodness will help bolster the device in the upcoming fondleslab wars.
The online retailer's new set of services, collectively called GameCircle, allow games to store various kinds of data in Amazon's cloud, where it can be accessed and shared by multiple players and devices. The three services Amazon is offering so far include Achievements, Leaderboards, and Sync.
Achievements allow game players to earn trophies, treasures, awards, and other prizes, and to maintain a list of the prizes they've won and ones they have yet to earn. Leaderboards allow players to track their high scores in games and rank their scores against those of other players. Sync automatically saves game state to Amazon's cloud, allowing players to pick up where they left off when they restore a deleted game or switch to a different device. Read more...
Cloud adoption pushes storage virtualization
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.
Host.net officials wanted to manage these storage components in a unified control panel, with the flexibility to add additional hardware in the future, if need be. The answer they found was storage virtualization. Read more...
Google pledges computing without limits in Compute Engine cloud platform
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 Google itself.
Unveiled at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco, the service offers scale for tasks requiring large amounts of compute power. "You can launch enormous compute clusters -- tens of thousands of cores or more" said Google's Craig McLuckie, Compute Engine product manager, in a blog post. Read more...
Group questions Google government contract claims
An organization headed by a former federal CIO contends that despite Google's claims, its consumer privacy policy does apply to government customers in some cases.
SafeGov.org, a group focused on promoting a set of best practices for cloud deployment in the government, has cited three instances where it found Google Apps for Government (GAFG) contracts governed by the company's consumer privacy policy.
In a blog post, SafeGov.org said the CAFG contracts in each case explicitly incorporated the consumer privacy policy that Google had said did not apply to government contracts.
SafeGov was co-founded by Karen Evans, de facto federal CIO during the George W. Bush Administration.
The latest Google consumer privacy policy was created earlier this year amid some controversy. Read more...