During VMworld in October this year, VMware announced version 6.0 of its automated virtual machine and physical server provisioning tool vCloud Automation Center (vCAC). It provides end-users with an Self-Service catalog in which they can request infrastructure components.
Year: 2013
Run any software in a browser using Mainframe2
Mainframe2 is candidate to be added soon to a list of game changing cloud technologies like Dropbox & Spotify. We are already familiar with music streaming from the cloud, documents storage in the cloud and we might soon be running any application from the cloud using only a browser.
Mainframe2 is a US startup which came out of stealth mode in October 2013 after developing the solution for two years. They offer a new cloud service which enables to use graphical intensive applications like Adobe AutoCAD , Photoshop or Autodesk Inventor from any HTML5 compatible browser. With no plugins needed! Any device like a Windows desktop, an iOS tablet, a Macbook or Linux machine can use Mainframe2 applications as long as it has a HTML5 browser. Currently however during beta Mainframe2 supports the latest Chrome (Windows/Mac) or Safari (Mac) browsers.
Click here for a live try of Mainframe2
RightScale announces its Cloud Appliance for vSphere
RightScale today announced that its working on an Appliance for VMware vSphere. It provides a simple, lightweight option for brining cloud features of vSphere environments. It presents a compute cloud API on top of VMware vSphere and adds cloud capabilities so that a vSphere environment can be managed as if it were an on-premise private cloud.
In combination with RightScale Cloud Portfolio Management, it will enable enterprises to seamlessly manage applications across supported public and private clouds as well vSphere environments.
The Xen Project releases version 1.0 of its Mirage Operating System
The Xen Project, the community which develops the Xen hypervisor under the GNU Public License (GPLv) and which is now part of the Linux foundation yesterday announced the release of version 1.0 of the Mirage Operating System.
The Mirage OS represents an approach where only the necessary components of the OS are included and compiled along with the application into a "unikernel", resulting in more efficient and lean "appliances" which the same or better functionality but a much smaller foodprint and attack surface. Application code is developed in a high-level functional programming language OCaml on a desktop OS such as Linux or Mac OSX, and compiled into a fully-standalone, specialized unikernel that runs under the Xen hypervisor APIs. Since Xen powers most public cloud computing infrastructure such as Amazon EC2, this lets your servers run more cheaply, securely and finer control than with a full software stack.
Microsoft announces new Windows Azure datacenter in Brazil
In first half of 2014 Microsoft will open its first Windows Azure region in South America. The Brazil South Region will provide Azure customers based in Brazil reduced latency as well as the option of data not leaving the country. Something quite important seeing the recent spying by the NSA on Brazilian oilcompany Petrobras.
When the region has opened services like Web Servers, Azure Storage , HD Insight and Virtual Machines will be offered. There will not be a paired second Azure datacenter in Brazil initially. So when customers select the Geo-replication option of data, their data will be replicated to the Azure US South Central region datacenter located in San Antonio, Texas.
VMware vCloud Hybrid Service now supports Direct Connect
VMware yesterday announced that the VMware vCloud Hybrid Service now supports Direct Connect. Direct Connect offers a dedicated and secure private line connection in addition to IPsec VPN which is already available with each cloud service offering from VMware.
Customers can set up private line connectivity into their vCloud Hybrid Service instance via dedicated circuits from their facility, or cross-connections from their co-located data center, into the VMware cloud.
Release: Red Hat OpenShift Enterprise 2
OpenShift Enterprise is Red Hat’s on-premise private PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) offering, introduced in November 2012, that has now reached version 2.0.
Built on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and OpenShift Origin, OpenShift Enterprise competes in the same area of the recently released Pivotal CF, providing a platform that manages elastic environments for application development, testing and hosting.
Google Compute Engine now generally available
In June 2012 Google revealed its IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) offering, called Google Compute Engine (GCE), with the beginning of this December the service is finally Generally Available (GA), available with 24/7 support and 99.95% monthly SLA.
The announcement is enriched with a set of new features and a price drop of 10% for the Standard Instances intended to catch that kind of customers that are evaluating Amazon AWS.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u34fLAe_1Y[/youtube]
Book: Microsoft System Center: Cloud Management with App Controller
Microsoft has made available for download a new free eBook titled:”Microsoft System Center: Cloud Management with App Controller“. The book which contains 104 pages provides an introduction to implementing and managing hybrid computing solutions using App Controller as part of the System Center suite of products from Microsoft. It describes the basic concepts, processes, and operations involved in connecting, consuming, and managing resources that are deployed both on and off premises. Each chapter provides a concise, self-contained walkthrough for a specific aspect of managing private, public, and hybrid clouds using App Controller.
Pivotal CF now generally available
Pivotal CF is the commercially supported hybrid Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) based on Cloud Foundry, technology launched by VMware in 2011 and moved to Pivotal in this April as part of the merge of cloud application and big data assets from both VMware and EMC.
This week Pivotal made the platform generally available as a standalone product that runs on vSphere and consists in two main components: Pivotal CF Elastic Runtime Service, the actual runtime environment and Pivotal CF Operations Manager, its management platform with IaaS integration.
