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This Week in Cloud, January 6, 2011: Making ‘good enough’ the new normal, virtual stall, 7 cloud infrastructure requirements, cloud hiring trends. And More…
Feature Article
Making ‘good enough’ the new normal
By Jay Fry, CA Technologies
In looking back on some of the more insightful observations that I've heard concerning cloud computing in 2010, one kept coming up over and over again. IT is being weighed down by more and more complexity as time goes on. The systems are complex, the management of those systems is complex, and the underlying processes are, well, also complex. The cloud seems to offer two ways out of this problem. Read the full article.
Cloud News
- Amazon is creating pre-configured templates for Oracle applications to make it possible for Oracle users to run their apps on Amazon Web Services and take advantage of EC2 for elastic load balancing, auto scaling, security groups, performance monitoring and reserved instance pricing. Supported applications include PeopleSoft, Oracle’s e-business suite and JD Edwards Enterprise One, according to this TMCnet article.
- IBM has been selected by NATO to build a cloud-computing system to support intelligence gathering, surveillance and reconnaissance, according to this CNet article.
- Five cloud startups were identified by ReadWriteWeb as ones to watch in 2011: ClearDB, Netuitive, Loggly, RethinkDB and Tropo.
- The top five countries using cloud services are Brazil (27%), Germany (27%), India (26%), the U.S. (23%) and Mexico (22%), according to a study commissioned by Cisco. This Silicon India article provides more detail.
Upcoming Cloud Events
- Global Services Conference 2011: Enabling Business Transformation through Global Sourcing, January 27, NYC
- ComputerWorld IT Leaders Conference: Extreme Convergence: Fusing IT and Business in a Leaner, Global, Virtualized World, March 6 – 8, Palm Springs, California
- Cloud Connect, March 7 – 10, Santa Clara, California
Cloud Views
- This CloudTweaks article includes a graph of the hiring trends for Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure and Google AppEngine skill-sets over the past few years. This InfoWorld article provides advice for IT practitioners on how to enhance your career with cloud computing.
- This CIO article identifies 7 requirements for building a cloud infrastructure. Included in the list: heterogeneous systems support, service management, dynamic workload and resource management, reliability/availability/security, integration with data center management tools, visibility/reporting and administrator/developer/end user interfaces.
- Wrapping up 2010, GigaOm published a list of the most influential cloud infrastructure companies. Channel Insider and CloudAve published lists of the most important cloud acquisitions of 2010.
- This InfoWorld article cites Gartner research that data center server utilization has remained stagnant at 18% over the past four years. One main reason: virtualization deployments stall once the low hanging fruit has been addressed. Gartner estimates that just 16 percent of production workloads are running in virtual machines, according to the article.
