Christmas For the Cloud Comes in June Break out your naughty-or-nice list! Bake those cookies, and pour a complementary glass of milk. Structure 2012, one of the most important gatherings of the year, nigh on holiday, for true cloud cognoscenti. And once you arrive at the event in San Francisco, being held this year from June 20-21, don’t be surprised if your eyes catch passing glances of DropBox elves or iCloud Kris Kringles. For the fifth year, the Structure cloud conference has been produced by GigaOM, the online news network heralded for its coverage of emergent technologies and the shifting
Windows Azure
Are You Using The Right Cloud Providers For Your Business? Do you know where the users of your services are? Are some of your customers complaining about slower load times, while you are noticing no performance issues at all in your country? Depending on the providers used, you could have wide differences in performance among different regions of the world. For instance, an Amazon EC2 in Singapore has the fastest response time in Singapore (115 ms), while the same instance might have the slowest response time for US visitors (450 ms). The former is lighting fast, while the latter is
Bill Gates Caves In to the Cloud? Apparently, even Bill Gates battled his own personal Bogeyman. A new article penned by Austin Edwards, aka “The Motley Fool,” alleges that the technological legend was forced into an early retirement by a fear of the then unknown and upcoming “cloud.” Apparently Mr. Gates had sent a foreboding message to the top flight members of his company, alerting them to a “disruptive wave [which was] about to wash over the entire world, forever changing the way we get information and do business.” To save face, Gates would never publicly name the cloud as
Microsoft Azure Outage Blamed on Leap Year All of us will remember the fears associated with the Y2K problem, where computers’ inability to distinguish between the years 1900 and 2000 was supposed to create a slew of problems. Although problems were never as severe as some doomsday prophets predicted, often due to precautionary measures, there were some incidents that did affect normal life. Now, it seems that another date problem is to blame for Microsoft’s cloud outage late last month. 28 February saw Azure customers facing problems throughout the globe. According to Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet, “Azure problems began with an outage in the Windows
The Cloud is Here (and Not Going Anywhere) Lately, there have appeared many articles on the Internet about how the cloud is now approaching maturity, and definitely here to stay, so I thought we should have a look at the evidence and what it actually means. This State of the Cloud 2011 Global Survey shows us some essential numbers: Three-fourths of organizations are at least discussing cloud adoption. In fact more than half are in trials, implementing or have already implemented the cloud. If we are looking at predictions for the future, the figures are overwhelming. This white paper from
The Public Cloud While I was writing my article on the history of cloud computing the other week, I have realized how far we have come, starting from brilliant ideas in Internet and computing as services, to today’s world where both are common place. The dream of on-demand computing where services are available much like how our electricity is delivered and paid for to anyone and everywhere when they want it and how they want it has been delivered. Cloud computing today comes in various forms that should serve all of our needs from public cloud, private cloud, or a
A Brief History of Cloud Computing I have been talking about cloud computing for quite a while now, about what it is, about trends, about what can it do and why it should be adopted and I would like now to talk about how it has evolved. Once upon a time, well, mid twentieth century, the Internet started to take shape. And on paper, in diagrams and presentation it was usually shaped like a cloud, probably because it was out there somewhere, an unknown fuzzy entity which brought some services to our computers. At around the same time, in 1961,
