Welcome!

Big Data Journal Authors: Elizabeth White, Maureen O'Gara, Pat Romanski, Liz McMillan, Sebastian Kruk

Related Topics: Cloud Expo, XML, SOA & WOA, .NET, Virtualization, Web 2.0

Cloud Expo: Blog Feed Post

Weekly Roundup: Amazon Drops Prices for SQS and More News

Here’s a quick summary of cloud happenings over the last week.

Last week, there were some offerings and new features release from Amazon. Microsoft made an announcement on Windows Azure Store expansion and new add-ons. Google has published some interesting Google Cloud Platform case studies. Plus, Scalr has announced the extension of their multi-cloud capabilities.

Here’s a quick summary of cloud happenings over the last week.

Early last week, IaaS leader Amazon added three new features to the CloudWatch Monitoring Scripts for Linux. New features include IAM Role Support, Auto Scaling and Aggregate Metrics. These scripts can be run in the background to periodically report system metrics to Amazon CloudWatch. Next, they have announced the beta release of AWS Diagnostics for Microsoft Windows Server. The AWS Diagnostics tool addresses a user request to make the intersection between AWS and Windows Server easier to analyse and troubleshoot.

They have also reduced the price and expanded free tier for the Simple Queue Service (SQS) and the Simple Notification Service (SNS). Here are the pricing details:

  • SQS API prices will decrease by 50%, to $0.50 per million API requests.
  • SNS API prices will decrease by 17%, to $0.50 per million API requests.
  • The SQS and SNS free tiers will each expand to 1 million free API requests per month, up 10x from 100K requests per month.

Finally, Amazon has shared a few FAQs on AWS OpsWorks and scheduled OpsWorks webinar session for users to learn more about the service.

PaaS player Microsoft has posted that there was a Windows Azure Storage outage that impacted HTTPS traffic. This was due to an expired SSL certificate. They have decided to provide credits to impacted customers in accordance with the SLA. Next, they have announced that they have expanded the availability of Windows Azure Store in 25 new markets, raising its market count to 36. They have also introduced four new add-ons in the Windows Azure Store.

Google has published an interesting collection of case studies to the Google Cloud Platform site. These case studies help current and prospective users gain an insight into the vast array of their applications. They have also included some new content to the Google Developers Academy to help users improve their App Engine skills. New tutorial content include use of the Python NDB API, Jinja2 templates, discussion of data consistency and datastore indexes. Also, they have announced that DevTable will now support the development of Google App Engine apps with Python directly on the cloud, without having to install and run the App Engine SDK locally.

Scalr has announced the extension of their multi-cloud support for OpenStack, Rackspace Open Cloud and Google Compute Engine. Scalr now allows users to deploy and manage workloads on Google Compute Engine. ActiveState has released Stackato 2.8 as an update to its private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technology.

Stay tuned until next week!

Read the original blog entry...

More Stories By Janakiram MSV

Janakiram MSV is the Founder & Principal Analyst at Janakiram & Associates. Through his speaking, writing and consulting, he helps businesses take advantage of the emerging technologies. Founder and driving force of an initiative called www.GetCloudReady.com he enables businesses to be ready for the Cloud. As the CTO of GetCloudReady.com, he leads a highly talented engineering team that focuses on developing and migrating applications to Microsoft Windows Azure, Amazon Web Services and Cloud Foundry. Janakiram is one of the first few Microsoft Certified Professionals on Windows Azure in India. Demystifying The Cloud, an eBook authored by Janakiram is downloaded more than 100,000 times in just few months. He is the Chief Editor of a popular portal on Cloud called www.CloudStory.in where he analyzes the latest trends from the world of Cloud Computing. Janakiram is an analyst with the GigaOM Pro analyst network where he analyzes the Cloud Services landscape. Janakiram is a guest faculty at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H) where he teaches Big Data and Cloud Computing to the students enrolled for the Masters course. Janakiram has worked at world-class product companies including Microsoft Corporation, Amazon Web Services and Alcatel-Lucent. His last role was with Amazon Web Services as the Technology Evangelist where he joined them as the first employee in India. Prior to that, Janakiram spent 10 years at Microsoft Corporation where he was involved in selling, marketing and evangelizing the Microsoft Application Platform and Tools. At the time of leaving Microsoft, he was a Technical Architect, Cloud focusing on Windows Azure.

Cloud Expo Breaking News
SYS-CON Events announced today that Wowrack will exhibit at SYS-CON's 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. Wowrack’s core expertise lies in high-availability Private and Public Cloud IaaS Hosting Solutions. Wowrack provides a true Hybrid service – where business release all IT management and hardware provisioning – taking the data center and server system administrative headaches off our customer’s shoulders. ...
SYS-CON Events announced today that nfina Technologies, a provider of highly reliable cloud server products, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. nfina Technologies develops, manufactures, and markets highly reliable cloud server products, designed to solve the most demanding data center requirements in mission-critical cloud applications. Nfina’s staff has decades of experience in co...
SYS-CON Events announced today that OpenStack will exhibit at SYS-CON's 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. OpenStack software controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed by a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface. OpenStack powers some of the most widely-used SaaS app...
“Cloud has everything to do with what has happened with Big Data,” explained Jason Deck, Director of Strategic Alliances at Logicworks, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “Big Data doesn’t exist in its easily accessible way without cloud. From reduced startup costs, to cheap storage, to fast processing, to adequate security, to the easy incorporation of third-party analytics tools, cloud made Big Data accessible to customers of all sizes, with all different bud...
As enterprises deploy private IaaS clouds into production they are reevaluating their future application delivery models. SUSE and WSO2 believe that private PaaS will leverage the automation and scalability of Private IaaS solutions, such as OpenStack-based SUSE Cloud, to deliver the secure, standardized development environments that will make migrating to an agile, serviceoriented delivery model possible. In their session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Chris Haddad, VP of Technology Ev...
Organizations across the world are increasingly starting to see the benefits of moving more and more services to the cloud. The focus on the cost-saving potential of cloud is rapidly shifting to completely transforming the business with cloud. As organizations are investing enormous sums on technology they are starting to realize that in order to maximize the return on investment and accelerate the business transformation process the first area of focus should be people. By ensuring the organiza...
"Since Cloud Expo is running the week of June 10, we thought it'd be a great idea to schedule our Meetup this week. That way, if you have colleagues, friends, or family in town that week for the Expo, you can invite them to join you!" With those words, the OpenStack New York Meetup Group's organizer's launched a landing page this week where anyone interested can register for the June 12 evening event.
Cloud computing is transforming the way businesses think about and leverage technology. As a result, the general understanding of cloud computing has come a long way in a short time. However, there are still many misconceptions about what cloud computing is and what it can do for businesses that adopt this game-changing computing model. In his General Session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Gene Eun, Senior Director, Oracle Cloud at Oracle, will discuss and dispel some of the common myth...
“Open source has always provided a number of benefits, including easing adoption costs, propagating a better understanding of the technology, and allowing for faster evolution and commercialization of products and services based on it,” noted Terry Woloszyn, Founder & CEO, Leeward Security Ltd., in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “This is clearly evident with the OpenStack and CloudStack,” Woloszyn continued, “and others that have been quickly commercialized as...
Cloud enables SMBs to access new, scalable resources – previously only available to enterprises – in flexible and cost-effective ways. McKinsey’s SMB Cloud Report projects the public cloud market to reach $40-$50 billion by 2015, with SMBs comprising 65% of public cloud spending in 2015. But selling cloud to SMBs raises the questions of who, what and how. In her session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Manjula Talreja, VP of Cisco’s Global Cloud Business Development Team, will discuss the...