Last week the OpenNebula project launched a survey to collect feedback from their community regarding what is their preferred interface for cloud consumers and how they should invest their resources in cloud API enhancement and development. The survey was open for two days receiving feedback from almost 200 OpenNebula clouds.

Targeted to OpenNebula cloud administrators, its aim was firstly to have information about the level of use of the two cloud APIs offered now by OpenNebula, namely AWS and OGF OCCI. The results show that:
38% do not expose cloud APIs, their users only interface through the Sunstone GUI
36% mostly use the AWS API
26% mostly use the OpenNebula’s OCCI API or the OCCI API offered by rOCCI

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Coraid, a provider of scale-out Ethernet storage solutions, will be speaking at Cloud Expo on the use of software-defined storage to build large, scalable cloud architectures. Cloud Expo, now in its fifth year, is an annual conference dedicated to senior technologists that focuses on how to improve business agility while lowering operating and capital costs. It is larger than all other cloud events put together and is taking place June 10-13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Kevin Brown, CEO of Coraid, will present a general session on software-defined storage for cloud architectures on Tuesday, June 11, at 11:45 a.m. Brown will explain how Ethernet storage architectures employ off-the-shelf hardware, standard Ethernet and distributed storage processing to enable a building-block approach, with no forklift upgrades required. These architectures leverage a powerful REST API policy engine and automation to enable one-click provisioning to deliver flexible software-defined storage that offers simplicity at scale. Paul Roberts, principal architect at Coraid, will provide a technical overview of the rapidly changing landscape in enterprise storage on Thursday, June 13, at 1:40 p.m.

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Recently, there have been an increasing number of cloud-based static code quality analysis tools, or should I say services. A few that I’ve been watching include:
Code Climate consolidates the results from a suite of Ruby static analysis tools into a real-time report, giving teams the information they need to identify hotspots, evaluate new approaches, and improve code quality.
Codeq imports your Git repositories into a Datomic database, and then performs language-aware code quality analysis. By doing so, Codeq allows you to: track changes at the program unit level (e.g. function and method definitions); query your programs and libraries declaratively, with the same cognitive units and names you use while programming; and query across repos.
HP Fortify on Demand is a Security as a Service (SECaaS) testing solution that allows any organization to test the security of software quickly, accurately, affordably, and without any software to install or manage.

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In this fast-moving discussion at the 12th International Cloud Expo, moderated by Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan, topics discussed will be at a deliberately high level and will include:
What specific Cloud implementations can we be most proud of, to date?
What are the remaining barriers perhaps still preventing some companies from moving some of their on-premise computing to the Cloud, in whole or part?
What impact has the arrival of Oracle, Microsoft, Dell, IBM, HP, Cisco and the other giants had on SMBs – has it increased Cloud traction in that sector of IT?

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Cloudant has announced an Accelerator Program to help young companies on a start-up budget go to market on its highly scalable, always-on NoSQL Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS).
The goal of the sales program is to make it more affordable for start-ups to launch their businesses on a data layer that gets them to market fast and doesn’t inhibit their growth or profitability.
The services provided through the program are identical to Cloudant’s full-priced services.
Cloudant figures many web and mobile start-ups are financially pressured into going to market without a growth strategy for their back-end operations and that sudden success can cripple the database systems powering their applications.

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ScaleOut Software, a provider of in-memory data grids (IMDGs), has announced that its founder and CEO Dr. William Bain will present at the upcoming Cloud Expo conference in New York City.
In-memory data grids (IMDGs) have seen rapid adoption over the last several years, driven by the need to help applications scale their performance as workloads grow. Because IMDGs host fast-changing (“operational”) data in memory across a cluster of servers, they also offer the ability to perform real-time analytics on this data as it flows through the grid. Recent advances in IMDG technology now enable Hadoop MapReduce-style analytics to be integrated into the IMDG’s architecture, performing parallel analysis even while operational data is changing. This exciting new capability creates the opportunity for real-time analysis in financial trading systems, credit card fraud detection, power systems monitoring, and many other applications.
Dr. Bain’s session will explain how to use an IMDG to perform real-time analytics and will describe recent benchmark results that demonstrate its power to deliver fast results for operational systems.

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Cloud storage start-ups don’t seem to be lacking for money. Panzura just raised $25 million in a reportedly oversubscribed D round that

should take it to profitability. That makes $58 million since it got started in

2008.

It’s the one that claims to have the most petabytes under management

and the largest companies in several key verticals like finance, media,

entertainment and government among its customers. It says it grew its

customer base 700% last year and at this point in 2013 has already exceeded

2012 bookings.

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“We really do things differently than anyone else in this space,” declared SoftLayer CEO Lance Crosby, in a Q&A published yesterday in conjunction with IBM’s announcement of its definitive agreement to acquire SoftLayer Technologies, Inc. “We provide bare metal dedicated servers with the same delivery model as virtualized cloud instances: self-service, on-demand, pay by the hour or month.”

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Tech giant IBM has announced the acquisition of cloud infrastructure provider SoftLayer, evidently hoping to strengthen IBM’s position in the cloud infrastructure as a service space.

It’s not hard to imagine the reasons around this. Dallas-based SoftLayer calls its platform “cloud without compromise”, and describes itself as the largest privately held cloud infrastructure provider in the world.

IBM’s cloud portfolio certainly hits home enterprise-side, particularly with its public backing of OpenStack, and SoftLayer’s technology will give the enterprises a wider range of cloudy options.

Therefore, it’s the perfect sort of company for IBM to swallow up, and adds another player into the bubbling IaaS mix.

The past couple of months have seen acquisitions, launches and rollouts galore from major players looking to get ahead in the race – or, perhaps more pertinently, get closer to Amazon, as CloudTech examined yesterday.

From Google’s Compute Engine release …