Year: 2013

On May 30, Skytap has released Skytap Automation Pack for IBM Rational Team Concert, a solution that enables IT operations and development teams to provision IBM build machines on-demand in Skytap Cloud.

The Skytap Automation Pack will install together with IBM Jazz Team Server, the product monitors the build request queue, and incoming build requests trigger an automated process that creates build environments in Skytap Cloud based on pre-defined customer templates.
The company provides self-service cloud automation solutions and Skytap Automation Pack for IBM Rational Team Concert offers flexibility of IBM’s SmartCloud Continuous Delivery solution by allowing customers to use on-demand cloud resources to meet indeterminable demand for build machine capacity.

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VMware has released vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) 5.2 based on DynamicOps Cloud Automation Center 4.5 that VMware acquired in July 2012.

The product offers automated virtual machines and physical server provisioning on both on-premises and cloud infrastructures with a good level of process governance.

Among the new features introduced noticeable are the support for Hyper-V 2012 and KVM on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1, a better integration with VMware vCloud Director and resource reclamation for Amazon Web Services.

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In March this year cloudcomputing.info reported that VMware was set to announce the vCloud Hybrid Service. vCloud Hybrid Service provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) from the cloud providing a common management, orchestration, networking and security model and will be delivered by VMware’s partner ecosystem. Today VMware announced that the vCloud Hybrid Service will be generally available in Q3 of this year, with an Early Access program which starts in June.

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From China a new wind of changes came to stay, Beijing-based cloud startup focusing on “IDE” for Amazon Web Services MadeiraCloud developer of a graphical monitoring and management product, has just been awarded with a new round of funding.

MadeiraCloud’s product provides a self-service interface to create a graphical scheme of the architecture and resources used by an application, that allows IT Administrators to design and deploy AWS based architectures with an intuitive visualization.

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Amazon last week released a management pack for use with System Center 2012 Operations Manager (OpsMgr). By importing the management pack into OpsMgr, customers can monitor their EC2 instances (Windows and Linux), Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, Elastic Load Balancing, CloudFormation stacks, Auto Scaling groups, and Elastic Beanstalk applications using OpsMgr.

The Management Pack also provides CloudWatch integration, allowing customers to watch performance counters and get alerts when their AWS resources exceed alarm thresholds. Also resources are mapped to AWS Availability Zones so customers know which resources are in which zones to make understanding your high availability and disaster recovery easier.

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Since its announcement Google Compute Engine is in the spotlight as a potential competitor of Amazon AWS.

Up to now Compute Engine has been based on customized versions of Ubuntu and CentOS but after the release of Debian 7.0 “wheezy” on May 4th, Google has officially chosen Debian as the default OS, a reasonable move, from a technical point of view, as wrote Jimmy Kaplowitz (Site Reliability Engineer and Debian developer) on Google App Engine Blog.

From a business perspective the choice of Debian is more complex to understand.

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Dell today announced that it has acquired Enstratius, which used to be known as enStratus. Enstratius delivers a private and public cloud management product either available via Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or on-premise. Dell states that the acquired technology of Enstratius will complement the technology which Dell acquired from Gale Technologies in November last year which is now called Active System Manager (ASM) offering multi-cloud management and application configuration capabilities.

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Microsoft has released a paper titled: "Infrastructure-as-a-Service Product Line Architecture Fabric Management Architecture Guide". The paper which contains 69 pages provides guidance to develop solutions for a Microsoft private cloud infrastructure in accordance with the IaaS PLA patterns that are identified for use with the Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1). This paper also has an accompanying paper titled: ”Infrastructure-as-a-Service Product Line Architecture Fabric Architecture Guide” which covers the development of the associated fabric architecture.

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Microsoft has released a paper titled:”Infrastructure-as-a-Service Product Line Architecture Fabric Architecture Guide“. The paper which contains 112 pages provides guidance to develop solutions for a Microsoft private cloud infrastructure in accordance with the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) product line architecture patterns that are identified for use with the Windows Server 2012 operating system. This paper also has an accompanying paper titled: ”Infrastructure-as-a-Service Fabric Management Architecture Guide” which covers the development of a fabric management architecture.

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On May 1, Canadian Embotics Corporation announced to have joined the OpenStack community.

Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, Embotics focuses on virtualization and private cloud management software and it has committed to integrate with OpenStack in future Embotics vCommander releases.

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