AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and everything public cloud. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2010
Skytap has released an update to its Cloud Platform adding security and control features, this update follows the February update this year, which added a the Self-Service Hybrid Cloud feature, a GUI for setting up IPSec connections. Skytap also added some configurable options for Virtual Machines and advanced networking in this months release.
The new features in this release are:
During TechEd Europe in November last year, Microsoft announced a set of programs dubbed Hyper-V Cloud. One programme was called Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track, and was developed and executed in partnership with six OEMs: Dell, Fujitsu, Hitachi/HDS, HP, IBM and NEC, providing reference architectures for private Hyper-V powered Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds.
At that time cloudcomputing.info concluded that appearantly there was no difference between a bleuprint for cloud computing and one for virtualization for these vendors, while other vendors just provided a landing page.
In February this year, Microsoft published a blog article giving more information about the Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track program, detailing more about what the programme exactly consists of by releasing a whitepaper titled: Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track Program – Reference Architecture Technical White Paper which provides an overview of Microsoft guiding principles and design criteria for this solution, and how our Hyper-V technology cloud solution conforms to these principles.
This week storage company NetApp announced that it has joined the Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track programme, by releasing a paper titled: NetApp Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track with Cisco. The paper which consists of 57 pages, details a reference architecture (coming from the Architectual Technical White Paper) – with NetApp storage using Cisco hardware.
Oregon homed company PHP Fog announced last week that the beta period for its cloud PaaS is over, with its product entering the general availability phase.
PHP Fog platform enters a market which have seen a few players so far, with the recent announced availability of a joint effort between Zend and RightScale and the european PaaS cloudControl still in beta.
VMware has released Horizon App Manager, a centralized authentication solution to access Software as a Service (SaaS) applications and which is the first product released as part of Project Horizon, which eventually will consist of several products in a Suite.
Project Horizon is VMware’s single sign on (SSO) portal for Software-as-a-Service applications which was announced during VMworld 2010 and is powered by the TriCipher technology which VMware acquired in September last year.
VMware has made available a bundle of white papers under the name of “vCloud Reference Architecture Kit”, aiming to help cloud architects designing cloud infrastructures (IaaS) using vCloud Director.
Amazon has announced the availability of Custom Metrics for its real-time monitoring tool CloudWatch. This update follows the one reported on cloudcomputing.info in December, which introduced basic monitoring, elastic cloud balancer health checks, alarms and some auto scaling tools.
With Custom Metrics, the developer is able to add metrics collected for Amazon EC2 Instances, EBS Volumes, Elastic Load Balancers, and Relational Database Service DB Instances.
In April 2008 Google launched its public Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud computing infrastructure called App Engine (GAE). Initially only supporting Python, GAE later added support for Java, Ruby on Rails, Clojure and Scala, as reported by cloudcomputing.info in August last year.
Now Google announced version 1.5.0. at its annual I/O conference in San Fransico. The new version introduces backends for Java and Python which are developer-controlled, long-running, addressable sets of instances which are as large as the developer specifies. Improvements concerning the Task Queues by introducing Pull Queues which allow developers to pull tasks, instead of relying on pull from a queue as applications are ready to proces them.
Also support for the Go programming language, a open source, statically typed compiled language is introduced, and High Replication Datastore is now provided as the default configuration.
ManageIQ, the company which provides Virtual Machine lifecycle management software announced that it has released version 4 of its Enterprise Virtualization Management Suite. The last time virtualization.info reported on ManageIQ was in September 2009 when version 2.3 was released which at that time introduced support for VMware vSphere 4.0. It is unclear if the company released versions in between or decided to shift to version 4.0 coming from version 2.3.
In the meantime the product evolved to a private cloud, virtualized infrastructure and virtual desktop infrastructure management tool and added support for other virtualization solution like Hyper-V and KVM on Red Hat.
With an announcement at the latest Interop conference in Las Vegas and a press release, Intel’s McAfee launched its Cloud Security Platform. The initiative is basically a bundle of different security products meant to integrate with companies’ cloud strategy.
The different modules will eventually be part of a fully integrated platform, complete with APIs and a common interface, supporting various deployment models (hybrid, SaaS and on-premises).
Microsoft announced the availability of development toolkits for its cloud computing platform Azure targeted on various mobile devices, namely Windows Phone, iOS and Android (even though in preview).
With these toolkits, developers can integrate their application with the Azure platform, quickly porting applications between various devices sharing authentication, storage and common, even high-level, components.