Cloud computing
Liberal Democrats cloud computing concerns
During their recent party conference, the UK’s Liberal Democrats published a policy paper Preparing the Ground: Stimulating Growth in the Digital Economy in which they noted the growing popularity of cloud computing but indicated that there are concerns about a “serious potential for abuse”, such as corporations taking public or private data outside the reach of UK law. To this end the paper recommends that the UK government, in co-ordination with other governments and international bodies, considers cloud computing security issues, particularly regarding data location and segregation. This falls under the headline of “Protecting and extending citizen privacy by ensuring that citizens own their own data”.
Cloud computing projects need IT departments
Whilst all parties should be involved in investigating and implementing cloud computing projects, the involvement of the IT department should not be overlooked, according to Deloitte technology risk partner, Alastair Banks. He also pointed out that security and data privacy issues need to be considered during investigation and that not every organisation will use cloud computing services.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service
High performance clusters on Amazon Web Services
Cloud computing allows organisations to use clusters on a scale that used to be the preserve of research establishments. Compute Cycles has announced that it recently created a 30,000 core cluster running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) that cost up to $1,279/hour but that lasted only seven or eight hours. Compute Cycles provides a framework to quickly create very large clusters including launching across multiple availability zones, support for spot instances to reduce costs and a custom monitoring solution.
Linode launches in Tokyo
Virtual Private Server (VPS) provider Linode has announced availability of cloud computing services in Tokyo in addition to its US and UK data centres.
No downtime cloud database available on Rackspace
With a “No Downtime SLA Guarantee” Xeround has announced availability of its cloud database on Rackspace Cloud. Xeround is an auto-scaling database-as-a-service that requires no changes for MySQL applications.
Amazon drinks its own champagne
Amazon’s Corporate IT team has written about its deployment of its corporate intranet to Amazon EC2 instances running Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server 2008 within a Virtual Private Cloud. Benefits claimed are reduced infrastructure procurement time, 22 percent reduction in annual infrastructure costs and elimination of server lease returns.
Platform-as-a-Service
Gandi launches European Platform-as-a-Service beta
Better known for its domain registration services, France-based Gandi is launching a Platform-as-a-Service. Gandi already has an IaaS offering and is currently taking beta registrations for its PaaS.
Software-as-a-Service
Github hits one million users
Hosted version control management service, Github, has hit one million registered users. Github adds social networking for developers on top of a hosted version of Git.
Software
Puppet Enterprise 2.0 released
Configuration management tool, Puppet Enterprise, has hit version 2.0. Puppet Enterprise is a commercial distribution of the open source cross-platform Puppet.
Company news
Meg Whitman appointed as HP President and CEO
HP has named Meg Whitman as President and CEO. Meg Whitman acted in the same role at eBay from 1998 to 2008, overseeing its massive expansion.
Ning acquired by Glam Media
Custom social network creation platform Ning has been acquired by Glam Media. Ning was co-founded by Marc Andreessen, who was also a co-founder of early web browser creator Netscape.
Salesforce acquires Assistly
CRM SaaS giant Salesforce has acquired Asisstly. Assistly is a SaaS that uses social media to provide customer support.