How Web APIs Unlock Value in the Cloud by David Schoenbach, Vice President of product management at Exadel.
Red Hat Bets the Farm on Hybrid Clouds
Red Hat has talked to enough enterprises – ‘cause that’s where the money is – to know that what they want now is a hybrid cloud. The capex and opex temptations are just irresistible. How to get there is the problem.
To ensure Red Hat get a chunk of this hybrid action it’s proposing to let enterprises manage a hybrid cloud (presumably through its CloudForms management widgetry) so it looks like part of their on-premise Red Hat infrastructure.
AWS Power-related Outage in Older Data Center Ends, Once Again Hits Single Center Customers
From the AWS Service Health Dashboard:
9:32 AM PDT Connectivity has been restored to the affected subset of EC2 instances and EBS volumes in the single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 region. New instance launches are completing normally. Some of the affected EBS volumes are still re-mirroring causing increased IO latency for those volumes.
As happened earlier this month the failure was apparently triggered by power systems failures. The US-EAST-1 data center in Virginia is Amazon’s oldest.
As in the past, the outage hurt customers relying on a single center.
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Cloud Computing: Dispelling the Remote Revolution Misconceptions
Cloud computing is a few years old, but despite the many benefits and the fact that the term has entered the public consciousness, there are still a lot of people that are in the dark concerning what the cloud actually is and what it can do. It’s not like the Internet, which had a clear definition and immediately visible perks, like online commerce.
GoDaddy Guest Blog: Announcing Parallels Plesk Panel 11
Go Daddy is excited to announce the launch of Parallels® Plesk Panel 11 on VPS and dedicated hosting environments. Starting June 26, all new Plesk installations will provision with version 11, and existing Go Daddy customers can request a server reprovision to update their control panels to the newer version.
What’s in store for Parallels Plesk 11 users? First and foremost is the integration of NGINXTM as the end-user Web server. NGINX edge server technology lets you increase the number of maximum concurrent website connections, decrease server CPU and memory resource consumption, and improve the efficiency of serving your visitors with slow connection speeds on your Linux® server.
If increased server performance doesn’t get you excited enough, Parallels Plesk 11 promises improved security features to really get you fired up.
Enhanced security mode introduces advanced protection of sensitive data in Panel. With enhanced security mode enabled, password reminders and remote API features are updated to further protect your server from unauthorized access.
Additional security updates include password-protected backups and minimum strength requirements for user generated passwords. Secure backups lock attackers out of backup data if your external storage backup is compromised.
With Parallels Plesk 11, you can now force stronger user passwords by choosing from five password strength levels. Setting a minimum strength password requirement helps ensure server login integrity.
Plesk 11 gives you increased server performance, added security and more to your panel and websites!
Be sure to check out the Go Daddy Virtual Dedicated Server and Dedicated Server product pages for more information on advanced hosting solutions.
AWS US-EAST-1 Troubles
From the AWS Service Health Dashboard this morning:
7:45 AM PDT We are investigating possible connectivity issues for a small number of instances in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region.
8:11 AM PDT We can confirm network connectivity issues for some EC2 instances in the US-EAST-1 region. Customers may be experiencing network impairment or connectivity issues to their EBS volumes performing read/write operations. We are actively working to resolve this issue.
8:37 AM PDT We can confirm network connectivity issues for some EC2 instances in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 region. Customers may be experiencing impaired read/write access to their EBS volumes. New instance launches are also delayed. We are actively working to resolve this issue.
In 5 Minutes or Less Video – IP Intelligence Service
I show you how to configure the IP Intelligence Service available on BIG-IP v11.2, in 5 Minutes or Less. By identifying relevant IP addresses and leveraging intelligence from cloud-context security solutions, F5′s new IP Intelligence service combines valuable information on the latest threats with the unified policy enforcement capabilities of the BIG-IP application delivery platform. Deployed as part of the BIG-IP system, F5’s IP Intelligence service leverages data from multiple sources to effectively gather real-time IP threat information and block connections with those addresses. The service reveals both inbound and outbound communication with malicious IP addresses to enable granular threat reporting and automated blocking, helping IT teams create more effective security policies to protect their infrastructures.
OpenNebula Unveils New Virtual Appliance Marketplace
The OpenNebula Project is proud to announce the public availability of the OpenNebula Marketplace, an online catalog where individuals and organizations can quickly distribute and deploy virtual appliances ready-to-run on OpenNebula clouds. The new Marketplace is fully integrated with the new OpenNebula 3.6 so any user of an OpenNebula cloud can find and deploy virtual appliances in a single click. The OpenNebula marketplace is also of interest to software developer looking to quickly distribute a new appliance, making it available to all OpenNebula deployments worldwide.
Implementing Cloud Data Security
A recent SC magazine cloud data security article provided an interesting glimpse to a soon-to-be-released “2012 Global SMB Security Market Assessment” by Access Markets International Partners (AMI). According to AMI, SMBs are projected to increasingly shift their security dollars toward protecting the cloud. Cloud security currently accounts for nearly 17 percent of total spending, or […]
Cloud Service Usage Now Mainstream in UK and Ireland: Report
The increased uptake in cloud service adoption is truly a worldwide phenomenon. New research published by Cisco Systems demonstrates the dramatic shift in attitudes towards cloud services in the UK and Ireland.
The report — entitled “Cisco CloudWatch 2012” — is the second in Cisco’s annual Cloud series and finds IT decision makers in a bullish mood, increasingly placing applications and services from across their business into the cloud and planning for further investment over the coming 12 months.
Furthermore, the message that cloud services can deliver significant cost reduction is now resonating within the IT community — cost saving has become a top driver for adopting cloud applications.
Granted, security remains the number one concern when migrating services and applications to the cloud. But that concern is noticeably less pronounced than in last year’s report.
The use of public cloud is up 11 percent, although private cloud still dominates.
Key findings of the market study include:
- IT decision makers say that cloud is now on their agenda — a resounding 90 percent up from just 52 percent in 2011.
- Of this number, 31 percent consider cloud as being critical and underpinning much of the organizations’ activity (this was just 7 percent in 2011).
- Of those organizations where cloud is on the agenda, 85 percent are planning further investment in the next twelve months.
- In CloudWatch 2011, reducing cost ranked fifth in a list of most important things when considering cloud — in today’s report it ranks as the number one priority.
- 20 percent reduction in concerns over security (52 percent in 2012 compared to 72 percent in 2011).
- 54 percent of respondents currently use private cloud (up from 34 percent in 2011) and public cloud usage is up from 18 percent in 2011 to 29 percent in 2012
Cisco commissioned independent research amongst IT decision makers across a broad range of vertical sectors including retail, finance, healthcare, public sector and service provider.
The results clearly show that cloud has moved from hype to reality, with cloud now seen as a mainstream element of IT strategy.
“This new report validates a shift that many of us in the IT industry have been witnessing first hand over the last 6-12 months. Cloud usage has now gone mainstream. After several years of ‘hype’ across the IT industry, it now seems that cloud is maturing and organizations across a broad range of sectors are realizing the benefits of moving to a cloud model, said Ian Foddering, Chief Technology Officer and Technical Director, Cisco UK and Ireland.
Foddering continues, “Against this backdrop it’s encouraging to see progressive companies realize the potential of cloud to revolutionize their respective industries. All these signs point towards a well-established market where the previously blurred boundaries of cloud computing are clearing. IT decision makers now more educated about the distinctions between cloud and managed services and more willing to invest.”
