Welcome!

Cloud Expo Authors: Greg Schulz, Elizabeth White, Elad Yoran, David Honan, Jeremy Geelan

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
In an ideal developer/systems administrator’s world, most applications would deploy seamlessly to multiple platforms and scale elastically with minimal effort bringing the unprecedented agility of the cloud within immediate reach of developer teams and IT organizations. OpenStack, a RackSpace and NASA initiative, is now managed by an independent foundation and is supported by multiple vendors. It defines APIs for compute, storage, networking, services, monitoring, and additional infrastructure...
Companies around the world are moving into on-premise private cloud environments. Many connect their private cloud to their public cloud service providers. In his session at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York [June 10-13], Brian Patrick Donaghy will talk about examples of what worked, what failed and why we should think about this evolution.
Enterprise cloud adoption revolves around pushing the BYOD movement and focusing on data security. In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Ross Brouse, COO and President of Solar VPS, will cover how cloud adoption is driven by consumerism, humanity’s need to socialize, our addiction to new gadgets and the ability of data to stay secure in a growing collaborative world. The cloud is a drug and we’re just getting hooked. Ross Brouse is the COO and President of Solar VPS. He is a tr...
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...
A recent study by analyst firm IDC reports that in 2012, 1.7 million cloud computing-related roles across the globe could not be filled due to the lack of training, certification and experience in the applicant pool. As the global demand for cloud and big data expertise increases, employers are finding it difficult to recruit talent, which is slowing down the ability for organizations to adopt, implement, and realize benefits from innovative platforms like OpenStack. In this session join Clo...
Our more interconnected planet is accelerating the adoption and convergence of next-generation architectures, in the form of cloud, mobile and instrumented physical assets. Organizations that can effectively balance optimization and innovation, will be in a position to leverage new systems of engagement, out maneuver their peers and achieve desired outcomes. In the Opening Keynote at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York, IBM GM & Next Generation Platform CTO Dr Danny Sabbah will detail the crit...
The cloud-enabled data center sits at the center of IT transformation. It facilitates the interconnection and communities that come together, propelling growth for both buyers and sellers. In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Gerry Fassig, CoreSite’s Vice President of Sales, will discuss how CoreSite is bringing together best-of-breed partners through the Open Cloud Exchange resulting in public, private, and hybrid cloud interconnection and management as well as connectivity to...
Companies around the world are collecting massive amounts of data everyday that’s sitting around and not being utilized. Take for example the fact that companies collect demographic and location-based data via mobile devices all the time, but have to figure out how to monetize that data. In this session, Joyent CTO and founder Jason Hoffman will examine the state of Big Data, taking a look at what we're doing now to discussing what's on the horizon, as companies prepare and realign their busines...
Enterprises can't close their doors just because integration tools won't cope with the volume of information that their systems produce. As each day goes by, their information will become larger and more complicated, and enterprises must constantly struggle to manage the integration of dozens (or hundreds) of systems. Apache Hadoop has quickly become the technology of choice for enterprises that need to perform complex analysis of petabytes of data, but few are aware of its potential to hand...
Planning scalable environments isn't terribly difficult, but it does require a change of perspective. During this session we'll broaden our views to think on an Internet Scale by dissecting a video publishing application built with The SoftLayer Platform, Message Queuing, Object Storage, and Drupal. By examining a scalable modular application build that can handle unpredictable traffic, you'll be able to grow your development arsenal and pick up a few strategies to apply to your own projects.