Over the last week, the cloud world seems to have received some significant announcements from Microsoft and Amazon. Also, HP Cloud has introduced a new messaging service. Plus, Appcelerator has announced the release of Titanium 3.1 and Node.ACS GA.
Here’s a quick sum up of Cloud happenings over the last week.

Microsoft has announced the general availability of Windows Azure Infrastructure Services. This new service allows users to host Virtual Machines in Azure. In addition, they have also reduced GA prices on virtual machines and cloud services by 21-33%. Next, they have also announced the availability of Django (a high-level Python Web framework) in the Windows Azure Web Application Gallery. This tutorial helps users to create a website on Azure for Django Framework in just a few clicks.

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The International Data Center (IDC) has released a report which reveals that Microsoft remains the largest software vendor globally through 2012 revenues and overall market share.

Figures from the Worldwide Semiannual Software Tracker put the Washington-based tech giant at a 17.1% market share, lower than its 2011 figure of 17.4% but still nearly twice as far ahead as its nearest competitors, IBM and Oracle.

IBM has an 8.5% market share, compared to Oracle’s 8.1%, with SAP and Symantec comprising the top five.

Elsewhere, the report provided further evidence that cloud computing is at the epicentre of enterprise growth.

For many cloud-based segments, including data access, CRM applications and security software, their growth rate was double the rate for enterprise software overall.

Yet the overall growth in the software market for 2012 was at 3.6%, less than half the overall growth of 2010 and 2011 …

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Department of Commerce, intends to sponsor a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) to facilitate public-private collaboration for accelerating the widespread adoption of integrated cybersecurity tools and technologies.
This is the first of three notices which must be published over a 90-day period in order to advise the public of the agency’s intention to sponsor an FFRDC. DATES: Written comments must be received by 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on July 22, 2013.

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Google’s impressive Chromebook Pixel is just the latest in a series of devices which are trying to entice users to compute in a different way. With (almost) ubiquitous connectivity, and an increasing reliance upon web-based services for mail, calendars, document creation and more, might we be reaching a point at which the browser really can be our means of accessing everything? Philosophically, the idea resonates. And yet, although I am not a power user who needs to regularly process video or edit high resolution images (the usual excuses for not embracing the Chromebook vision), I still remain uncomfortable with giving up my non-browser tools. Despite living and working in the cloud, I find that locally installed client software continues to deliver real value. Maybe, the next time I upgrade a computer, I need to try installing nothing more than a browser for a week or two, and see if it’s as painful as I feel it could be… The cloud powers my business. The cloud is what I talk to clients about, it’s what I write about, it’s what people pay me to know about. The cloud (and, more generally, the web) make it possible for me to work with clients […]

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Many enterprises are pursuing cloud computing to reduce costs and speed time to value, all with lower risk and improved service levels. We’ve seen many customers succeed by organizing their transformation into distinct, manageable phases: a Journey to the Enterprise Cloud.
Service Delivery is an advanced phase of the journey, and provides elasticity, resiliency, automation and self-service capabilities. When the journey is planned and executed correctly, enabling these capabilities does not require upgrades or re-architecting. Instead, meeting these goals is a natural evolution that builds on the earlier phases by employing the relevant features and options.

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Before you start to envision and design your cloud, you’ll need to make sure it’s built on a solid architectural foundation.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Matt Mullins, Principal Consultant – Cloud Platform Implementation Engineer with Citrix Systems, will cover critical concepts and principles for architecting your cloud and best practices for supporting multiple workloads from a single cloud platform. You will learn about:
Components and architecture of a cloud orchestration
How workloads and workload availability drive cloud architecture
Sample reference architectures from leading implementations

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Network perimeters are all but erased and traditional security strategies such as stacking don’t adequately address the current needs of a modern enterprise. Many companies are still using strategies rooted in 2002 technologies and approaches. The new intelligence-based security model is one that integrates several alerting, analytical and preventative tools into a central monitor and management best practice.
In a recent blog post, Art Coviello, the executive chairman at RSA, posed an important question. How do we move from traditional security to intelligence-driven security? In his answer he described that the quickly interdependent exchanges between parties (B2C, B2B, B2P, etc) have grown beyond the traditional means of securing the enterprise.

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At the OpenStack Summit this week NetApp submitted a prototype and proposal for consideration by the OpenStack Foundation Technical Committee and the unity at-large for file share service capabilities.
OpenStack doesn’t have native management support for file-based storage systems so NetApp is proposing to add a file-share service broad enough to address a range of file system types in the next Havana release of OpenStack.
It says it got good feedback for its blueprint during the previous Grizzly development cycle and its proposal is abstracted to address any number of shared or distributed file system types from CIFS and NFS/pNFS to Gluster or Ceph.
The widgetry, it says, could either be an extension to the existing Cinder project (currently referred to as OpenStack block storage) or implemented as a separate project.
The point of the integration is to extend access to applications written for file-based storage without needing a separate management interface.

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What’s the best way to put the kibosh on your competitor’s latest key cloud release?

Make a statement loaded with braggadocio yourself, as Amazon has done by announcing that two trillion (2 x 10¹²) objects are now stored on its S3 cloud – a turnaround of 1.1m requests per second.

Microsoft, of course, launched Windows Azure Infrastructure Services earlier this week, and knocked off the price of compute, storage and bandwidth between 21% and 33% in a bid for direct competition with Amazon Web Services.

As a result this latest update, in a blog post from AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr, becomes even more interesting.

Amazon hit one trillion objects in S3 back in June last year, with each object in the cloud ranging from zero to 5 TB in size.

“It took us six years to grow to one trillion stored objects, and less than a year …