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Google, Microsoft said to be creating new cloud services

Google and Microsoft are reportedly neck and neck to get an Infrastructure as a Service cloud computing offering off the ground in the near future.

According to tech news site GigaOM, sources say that while Google has been busy building a cloud service that will compete with Amazon's EC2 cloud, Microsoft has also been racing to get its own Infrastructure as a Service platform out. For now, it's looking like Microsoft may cross the finish line first.

GigaOM reports that Google's plan is set to debut a virtual renting service by the end of the year and … Read more

A field guide to the cloud

A gargantuan new GigaOm Pro report titled "A field guide to the cloud: current trends and future opportunities" (subscription only) was released today as part of the Structure 2011 conference in San Francisco.

The report examines the cloud-computing landscape with a focus on five specific areas: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), cloud storage, and private/internal clouds. And despite the relative newness of the cloud market, there is quite a bit going on.

According to the report, IaaS is driving the cloud-computing discussion but has yet to reach … Read more

Network, don't fail me now!

Everything in IT depends on the network.--and not just in an abstract, "need it occasionally" sort of way. The packets must flow for virtually every operation, every job, every transaction. Whenever packets drop, or links go down, we're disconnected and isolated. Information doesn't flow; apps don't work; users don't proceed. We need the network up and running, millisecond by millisecond, every millisecond of every day.

Our utter, urgent dependency won't lessen in the coming years. It will intensify--redoubling and redoubling again. Cisco calls its vision of the future "together." HP … Read more

'Cloud' means something important

"Cloud computing" is so overused and overhyped that it doesn't really mean anything anymore. It's has become kind of a vague "what comes next in IT" label, with no specific meaning, applied indiscriminately to whatever the latest vendor to stop by wants to sell us today.

I now hear this complaint with great regularity--but I don't entirely agree. Sure, every vendor is eagerly "cloud washing" whatever products or initiatives they have to fit in with the latest buzzhype. And the "cloud" term is thrown around with pretty reckless abandon. … Read more

Apps versus ops in the cloud

I'm often called on to explain cloud computing to people who aren't in the tech industry. It's hard. Sure there's some ambiguity in the term but that's not really my issue. It's also the case that some of the attributes associated with cloud computing like scalable, self-service, and so forth aren't necessarily that easy to put in layman's terms, at least without a lot of words and background. But that's not my core problem either.

Rather, I've come to think that my biggest stumbling block is this: When I talk … Read more

2010 will be a wild ride for IT

This year is going to be amazingly full of change in IT. "Ennnh, IT sees a lot of change every year," you say? Yes, fine and true. But not like this one. Not at this magnitude. Consider:

Virtualization is being taken up at such a pace that it's hard to find a metaphor to describe it. "Exploding" has a pieces-coming-apart-at-high-speed vibe, when in fact virtualization's pieces are all coming together. "Imploding" doesn't work either. We've had maybe five years of fast growth, but now it's mainstream and ready for … Read more