News

• Amazon upgrades Elastic Beanstalk for .Net applications

  Amazon Web Services' Elastic Beanstalk for .Net applications now supports configuration files to simplify cloud setup and integration with Amazon's private cloud and relational database.

• Apache helps free CloudStack from Citrix fetters

  The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has approved CloudStack as a top-level project (TLP), helping the open-source cloud software effort further establish its independence from Citrix, which acquired the program's codebase in its 2011 purchase of Cloud.com.

• Google BigQuery update aims for enticing Hadoop users

  Hoping to lure more Apache Hadoop users to its own data analysis services, Google has outfitted BigQuery with the ability to query multiple data tables.

• Engine Yard revamps user interface

  Paving the way for more flexible use of its platform as a service (PaaS), Engine Yard has revamped its user interface and underlying infrastructure, which should provide customers with more ways to configure and run their workloads.

• Google adds fee-based support services for cloud platform customers

  Google has launched fee-based support services for customers of its cloud platform and infrastructure products, like App Engine, Compute Engine, Cloud Storage and Big Query.

• Salesforce.com's Heroku responds to scalability complaint

  Insufficient documentation on how to performance-tune a legacy Ruby on Rails stack led to a highly publicized complaint from one of the largest customers of Salesforce.com's Heroku PaaS (platform-as-a-service), Heroku has acknowledged.

• HP launches converged Cloud business unit

  Banking on the trend toward Cloud computing, Hewlett-Packard has created a stand-alone organization to oversee the company's hosted computing services and software offerings.

• Google lets more users host App Engine applications in Europe

  Google is letting more App Engine users choose to run their applications in a European data center, in order to improve performance for local users or to meet compliance demands.

• Amazon connects node.js to AWS services

  Amazon is providing a way for one of the most popular JavaScript extensions, node.js, to easily access the Amazon Web Service collection of cloud computing capabilities.

• Gartner: Platform-as-a-Service market to see sharp growth

  The PaaS (platform as a service) market will grow to US$1.2 billion this year, up from last year's $900 million take, as vendors and customers seek easier ways to create new applications and customize existing ones, according analyst firm Gartner.

• Google to issue credits for App Engine outage

  Google will give refunds to paid subscribers of App Engine, its Web application development and hosting service, which suffered a partial outage on Friday.

• Microsoft Azure hosts Hadoop, other open-source apps

  Making good on an announcement made earlier this year, Microsoft has installed a version of Apache Hadoop on its Azure cloud service. The company now offers a limited preview version of the open-source data analysis platform, often used for big data-style analysis.

• InfoWorld review: Engine Yard Cloud

  Although code deployment might not be as easy with Engine Yard as with Heroku, the Engine Yard platform is dramatically more tunable. In fact, in many ways, Engine Yard is closer to an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) than a platform as a service (PaaS). Engine Yard provides a base infrastructure tuned to run Ruby applications, but the rest is up to you. Engine Yard does offer Git integration; however, deployment is not executed via a push, as in Heroku, but rather via Engine Yard's suite of tools and its extensive dashboard, which can sync with a Git repository.

• Red Hat adds app lifecycle tools to PaaS preview

  Red Hat has outfitted its OpenShift hosted application platform with a set of application development lifecycle tools to simplify deployment on the PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service), the company announced Tuesday.

• IBM open sources messaging client for embedded devices

  In a move to bring network connectivity to a wider range of devices, sensors and appliances, IBM has donated the source code of its machine-to-machine messaging software to the Eclipse Foundation, the company announced Thursday.