Year: 2014

Google announced beginning this week that it’s going to support running Windows workloads on top of its Google Cloud Platform. For now this means that you can now run Windows Server 2008 R2 in beta, and it will work on supporting later releases like Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 as well.

Besides that Google also announced that customers can use their current Microsoft licenses so that they can move those to workloads running on top of Google Cloud Platform, under the Microsoft License Mobility for Google Cloud Platform program. Also customers can use the Chrome RDP application from Fusion Labs for free allowing them to connect to the workloads using RDP via the Chrome browser.

Microsoft has published a series of articles on the subject: Cloud Platform Integration Framework. The Cloud Platform Integration Framework (CPIF) provides an enterprise or cloud service provider architect patterns that helps bridge the gaps between infrastructure and workloads by providing guidance to application and workload teams for integrating with the Microsoft cloud platform.

The framework presents a number of best-practices patterns that:

• Focus on enabling hybrid cloud solutions
• Provide a lightweight framework for cloud integration which is application across diverse workloads
• Surface practical examples of Azure design patterns
• Minimize the need for customer development

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The OpenStack Foundation regularly conducts Elections for Individual Directors of the Foundation’s Board, next elections for the 2015 Board of Directors are going to be held from Monday January 12, 2015 to Friday January 16, 2015. It is time to decide who are the candidates as nominations are occurring during these days, from November 24 to December 12, 2014.

This process is important for the legitimacy of the Foundation and for the strenght of the open source cloud computing project. These directors are meant to represent the voices and interests of the developers and contributors to the OpenStack project as a whole, and of the operators of OpenStack-based clouds. Among the responsabilities of the 24 person Board is the budget of the Foundation, strategy and goals, the board is constituited by directors elected by the 8 Individual Members, directors elected by the 8 Gold Members and directors appointed by the 8 Platinum Members.
Individual Members Director board seats are meant to serve as the Individual Members of the Foundation and they are the connection between the community of the Foundation and the Board, it is important to mention that they are not supposed to represent the companies for which they work.

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VMware has released a paper titled:"Creating a VMware Software-Defined Data Center". The paper which contains 29 pages describes a reference architecture for a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) using VMware vCloud Suite Enterprise 5.8, VMware NSX for vSphere 6.1, VMware IT Business Management Suite Standard Edition 1.1, and VMware vCenter Log Insight 2.0.

The design uses three cluster types, each with its own distinct function. It provides a management plane that is separate from the user workload virtual machines. In addition, it leverages an edge cluster, which provides dedicated compute resources for network services such as edge routers; these provide access to the corporate network and the Internet.

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Today, November 20, IBM announced an interesting update to its PaaS (Platform as a Service) Bluemix. The new “Dedicated” offering allows developers to create applications and deploy them in a single tenant, dedicated cloud environment hosted in an IBM cloud center.

IBM is also expanding its offering with a private API catalog on its public instance of Bluemix that is going to help developers to more easily access their on-premise data.

Among the announcement that IBM made, there is also the enlargement of its Bluemix Garage network to Canary Wharf Group’s Level39, which is Europe’s largest tech accelerator based in London, the network provides a central location for financial, retail and future cities tech companies.

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Microsoft has published a series of blog articles called the "Microsoft Infrastructure as a Service Foundations". The goal of the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Foundations series is to help enterprise IT departments and cloud service providers understand, develop, and implement IaaS infrastructures. This series provides comprehensive conceptual background that combines Microsoft software, consolidated guidance, and validated configurations with partner technologies such as compute, network, and storage architectures, in addition to value-added software features.

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The Day 2 at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas saw on stage Verner Vogels, amazon.com CTO, in a keynote mostly focused on devs.

Two the key announcements:

• Amazon EC2 Container Service: riding the momentum for application containerization unleashed from Docker, Amazon releases its own container management service. Using ECS-enabled AMIs or installing the Docker daemon and the ECS Agent on a Linux AMI, customers will be able to create and manage clusters of containers and use the associated Scheduler to manage the resources. The service is already available as a preview and there are no extra charge in addition to the used resources.



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Yesterday at AWS re:Invent 2014 in Las Vegas, Andy Jassy (SVP, Amazon Web Services) announced, as expected, a set of new products and services that will be available to Amazon’s customers.

Two strong thematics emerged from this session, a renewed commitment towards specific needs of large enterprises and a the will to provide innovation through open source technologies.

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Puppet Labs has released version 3.7 of its Puppet Enterprise. Puppet Enterprise is a Configuration Management platform using a model based, declarative approach build on top of Puppet which is an open source IT automation solution. Puppet Enterprise is a suite of products combining Puppet , a web console, provisioning tools and support.

The Puppet Enterprise version 3.7 software bundle consists of the following tools:

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With Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), Gartner defines a cloud-based service that offers integration to, from and whitin an on premises counterpart.

With the announcement of OpenShift Enterprise 2.2 Red Hat aims to strengthen its xPaaS with the introduction of two new services provided as cartridges:

• JBoss Fuse for xPaaS, an open source ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) technology
• JBoss A-MQ for xPaaS, its related messaging service

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