Rackspace fluffs .NET cloud support
'We were here first, Microsoft!'
Rackspace is making overtures to Microsoft users by broadening .NET support for its cloud and managed hosting, though these devs may be increasingly swayed by Azure.
The company announced a Cloud SDK for Microsoft.NET, and a PowerShell-based API client "PowerClient" for Rackspace public cloud services on Wednesday. The two tools …
Gaming app ENSLAVES punter PCs in Bitcoin mining ring
Some secret software to go with your deathmatch, sir?
A competitive gaming company has admitted that for two weeks in April its software client was hijacking league members' PCs to mine Bitcoins.
In an eyebrow-raising turn of events, the company, ESEA Gaming, admitted on Wednesday that its software client had been running Bitcoin-mining algorithms on customer PCs since April 14, …
VMware sells WaveMaker to Pramati
That didn't last long
VMware has got rid of WaveMaker, an open source tool that helps casual developers build Java apps, after spending two years trying to develop the technology
The deal sees Java-specialist Pramati acquire "certain assets" of WaveMaker, according to a statement issued by the company. These assets include WaveMaker's core …
Is it me or did cloud marketing suddenly get really weird?
Comment PR bods are going ga-ga on cloudy fumes
As cloud computing shakes up the IT industry, marketing departments are going into overdrive attempting to somehow – no, anyhow – gain what they call "traction." And it's starting to get weird.
We here at Vulture West appreciate that companies need to get the message out there, but everyone is prone to cock-ups, and the …
Amazon goes legit with cloud certification plan
'Enterprisey enough for ya?' bellow Bezos & Co.
Watch out Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Dell, and HP. There's a new reassuringly dull certificate in town, and it's coming for your devs.
Amazon Web Services has launched a global certfication program so that technologists can get something to stick on their CV and use as a lever to extract more cash from current and future employers …
MongoDB gets incremental restores ... for a price
10Gen cranks monetization handle to lift MongoDB into the cloud
MongoDB steward 10Gen is trying to squeeze money out of heavy users of the open source NoSQL database, and has set aside almost a petabyte of raw storage to deal with initial demand for a new backup-and-restore service.
Like other companies that shepherd an open source product (Canonical – Ubuntu, Basho – Riak, et cetera), 10Gen …
SoftLayer hoists Riak NoSQL datastore onto its cloud
Basho hopes to mine rich seam of cloudy dev gold
Open source NoSQL datastore specialist Basho has teamed up with SoftLayer to hoist the free and paid-for versions of Riak into the cloud.
The availability of Riak and Riak Enterprise on SoftLayer's mid-tier infrastructure cloud sees Basho try and open up another shaft to let it tap the seam of cash that it, like other open- …
AppFog PaaS drops Rackspace IaaS
Low demand leads to shutdown as PaaS runs to private clouds
Platform-as-a-service provider AppFog is evaporating its cloudy bridge to Rackspace due to poor customer demand, in yet another case of the fluffy industry coming to terms with hard business realities.
AppFog provides an application infrastructure automation service – otherwise known as a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) – that lets …
If you spend THIS much on cloud, perhaps you need a rethink
Cloud makers reveal tipping point from public to private
There's only so much you should spend on commodity cloud services before you consider other options like getting a discount, moving back to your own servers, or to a private managed cloud, according to cloud providers and customers.
If you're spending more than $10,000 (£6,500) a month or so, then it's probably worth considering …
Amazon's cloud on track for $2bn in revenue in 2013
Analysis AWSome cloud swells with cash, objects
Bezos & Co's cloud looks likely to turn over at least $2bn in 2013 and potentially much more – a fact sure to put the frighteners on traditional IT suppliers scrabbling to come up with their own as-a-service infrastructure products.
Amazon recorded revenues of $750m within its "Other" category in the first quarter of 2013, up $ …
Actian grabs Amazon Redshift's secret sauce
ParAccel for analysing 20TB and above data stores
Actian has acquired database specialist ParAccel, whose technology formed the guts of Amazon's RedShift.
The acquisition, whose financial terms were not disclosed, was announced by Actian on Thursday. Amazon licensed ParAccel's tech for its major AWS Redshift data warehousing service, and led funding for its series E round in …
The Germans are coming - Software AG borgs LongJump
Code-free app design? Sehr gut
Software AG has acquired LongJump, an enterprise-focused company that develops a platform-as-a-service which lets folk build applications without knowing how to code.
The acquisition, whose terms were not dislosed, was announced on Thursday. It will see the MySQL-based technology be knitted into other components of Software AG's …
Rackspace plugs event monitoring into its servers
Expands cloud monitoring tech with 'Virgo' agent project
Rackspace has broadened the capabilities of its cloud monitoring technology by letting admins put an agent on their servers to get a clearer idea of how apps are using hardware resources.
The upgrades to Cloud Monitoring include server monitoring, a graphing feature for viewing old data, PagerDuty integration, and multi-data …
Heroku PaaS floats over to Europe
Geo-redundancy for the trendy Ruby cloud
Heroku's platform-as-a-service cloud has come to Europe, giving local developers a chance to reduce the latency of applications they've stuck on top of the application automation technology.
The Salesforce-owned company announced on Thursday that brave devs can try serving their apps from Ireland rather than America, if they …
Pivotal takes guts of Google, sells to enterprises
Small team aims to clone Google-stack for enterprises
Pivotal wants to build and sell the systems that run Google, but though its ambition may be bold, its claims are as yet more visions than statements of fact.
At a packed press event in San Francisco on Wednesday Pivotal executives unveiled their plans for the company, which aims to bring the sorts of technologies and techniques …
General Electric pours $105 MEEELION into Pivotal Initiative
Skunkworks lab for the industrial internet
General Electric is pouring $105m into Pivotal, a skunkworks cloud and big data company spun-out of VMware and EMC.
The investment was announced on Wednesday, several hours before Pivotal held its coming out party first major press conference.
"It's no secret that the cloud and big data are driving dramatic business …
Facebook plans vast data center in Iowa
Plonks FarmVille into farm land
Facebook's fourth gigantic data center will be in Iowa, a state already favored by major infrastructure operators due to its renewable utility options.
The new data center in Altoona, Iowa, will be the company's fourth dedicated bit barn, along with facilities in Prineville, Oregon; Forest City, North Carolina; and Luleå, Sweden …
Salesforce: Internet of Things is 'third wave of computing'
Benioff & Co dive into social networks, connected devices
Salesforce is desperate for more of the world to get wired up with little sensors, so it can get at this data and hook it into its suite of technologies, then sell companies on the benefits of an increasingly data-led sales strategy.
This lust for an instrumented world was outlined by Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff in …
AMD pins future growth to embedded marketplace
G-Series SoCs to turn sliver of revenues into wedge
AMD has announced a new range chips for embedded devices, and said it hopes that 20 per cent of its revenues in Q4 2013 will come from that market, rather than the 5 per cent currently.
Embedded chips are one prong of AMD's new pitchfork of profitability along with servers and ultra-low power tablet chips. The chip giant is …
CA piles into API management with Layer 7 acquisition
If stuff is moving to the cloud, you might as well own the transfer point
CA Technologies has hopped into API management via the acquisition of Layer 7 technologies as the company continues to reinvent itself for the software-as-a-service era.
The acquisition follows a similar move by Intel to acquire Mashery last week, and API Management company Mulesoft's announcement it had trousered a further $37m …
Yahoo! Axes! Yet! More! Products!
Phoenix strategy still in flaming destruction mode
Yahoo! chief Marissa Mayer is taking her scythe to more product lines as she funnels resources into mobile in an attempt to take the beleaguered web giant into more profitable climes.
The company will axe its Yahoo! Deals, Yahoo! SMS Alerts, Yahoo! Kids, and the Yahoo! Mail and Messenger feature phone apps, executive platform …
Ants have careers; you don't want them
Jury out on whether as crushing as rat race, but it's close...
Ants don't have a career ladder, they have a career hole, and only the wiliest of the insects can avoid falling down it according to the latest research.
A particular genus of carpenter ants (Camponotus fellah) exist in a complex social structure, where their first jobs see them caring for the queen and her offspring, and as the …
Google shakes up US utility with green power tariff
Pays more on electricity to pay less on Greenpeace damage control
Google is using its giant pile of money to try and change how utility companies work, so that more businesses can buy their power from renewable sources.
As part of a $600m expansion of its North Carolina data center, Google's local utility provider Duke Energy has pledged to develop a renewable energy tariff for Google and …
Amazon's flash-backed database gets EVEN FASTER
Relational features for the non-relational DB
Amazon has tuned-up its flash-backed DynamoDB database so that more complex queries can be done in less time.
Amazon announced the upgrade on Thursday, which sees the cloud computing company add in a "Local Secondary Index" (LSI) feature that lets admins create five additional indexes across which to query, letting the DB do …
Amazon: S3 cloud contains two trillion objects
'We've doubled our big number in a year'
Amazon Web Services now has over two trillion objects within its S3 storage cloud, just one year after Bezos & Co. smashed through the one-trillion ceiling.
Each Amazon object, they say, can range from "range from zero to 5 TB in size," but Amazon does not disclose the size distribution of stored objects. An object consists of a …
Facebook launches data center ticker tape
Bit barn efficiency metrics on a minute-by-minute basis
Facebook has heaped pressure on major data center operators to be more transparent, publishing a dashboard that gives up-to-the-minute figures on the efficiency of the social network's gigantic bit barns.
The dashboards for the company's Prineville, Oregon, and Forest City, North Carolina, datacenters were made available on …
Intel grabs API management company Mashery
Chipzilla takes a slurp of cloud
With fewer PCs getting sold, little foothold in tablets or phones, and software is busily eating into the value of your terrifically complex server chips, getting into software must seem like a pretty smart move for a chipmaker like Intel.
Chipzilla is on a big software push, (as shown by Wednesday's switching announcement), and …
Microsoft joins the two-step verification party
Late convert to dual-protection club
Microsoft is bringing two-factor authentication to its users' accounts over the next couple of days.
"With this release you can choose to protect your entire account with two-step verification, regardless of what service (or device) you are using with your Microsoft account," Eric Doerr, group program manager for Microsoft …
Oracle slaps critical patch on insecure Java
Tries to educate users about potential dangers of in-browser Java apps
Oracle has issued a critical update patch for Java as the database giant works to shore up confidence in the widely used code.
The security update fixes 42 security flaws, 19 of which merit a 10 (most severe) rating acording to the CVVS metric the company uses to evaluate the software. Along with this, Oracle has also sought to …
Oracle critical patch plugs 128 security vulns
Database Server, MySQL, Siebel all affected
Oracle is issuing a hefty patch batch that seals 128 serious security vulnerabilities across the database company's vast product suite.
The Critical Patch Update for April 2013 is due to come out on Tuesday and "Oracle strongly recommends that customers apply Critical Patch Update fixes as soon as possible," the company warns. …
Microsoft: FINE! We'll match Amazon - by HIKING cloud prices
Reassuringly expensive Redmond ramps rivalry
What's the difference between Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services? Very little – or so says Microsoft, which has made a new commitment to match the web bazaar's pricing for basic cloud services.
The price-matching announcement was made by Microsoft on Tuesday, alongside news that Redmond thinks its infrastructure-as-a-service …
Xen hypervisor leaps into Linux Foundation
Amazon Web Services, Google to exert cloudy influence
The Linux Foundation is embracing the Xen hypervisor, giving major clouds such as Google and Amazon a greater influence in the development of the open source technology.
The announcement was made at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in San Francisco on Sunday, and sees the Xen project become a Linux Foundation …
Facebook Home gets SMACKDOWN from irate users
'Too much Facebook. One star"
Facebook's app that takes over mobile phones has been met with a flurry of negative reviews, as people complain at just how much Facebook Zuck & Co. have put into their phones.
The "Facebook Home" app became available to download on select Android devices on Friday, and at the time of writing had a rating of 2.4, with almost …
Amazon cloud gobbles Microsoft data
Storage Gateway sucks up Hyper-V info
Admins of data centers virtualized using Hyper-V can now mirror data up into the AWS cloud, making Bezos & Co.'s big yellow repository a more tempting proposition for Microsoft shops.
This new feature means that Amazon's "Storage Gateway" technology can now speak to Windows-virtualized systems as well as ones based on VMware's …
Amazon: We cut prices to scare ourselves into innovation
Bezos outlines thinking behind own-goal margin destruction
Amazon Web Services' campaign of price cuts and rapid product development is part of a customer-first strategy designed to prevent stagnation, the company's chief executive has said.
In the e-retailer's annual report released on Thursday, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos told investors that Amazon's customer-centric strategy should …
Google: 'We'll track EVERY task on EVERY data center server'
Chip-level performance tracking in thousand-server Googly clusters
Google has wired its worldwide fleet of servers up with monitoring technology that inspects every task running on every machine, and eventually hopes to use this data to selectively throttle or even kill processes that cause disruptions for other tasks running on the same CPU.
The search giant gave details on how it had …
Bitcoin gets a $100 haircut on rollercoaster trading run
Cointards perplexed as rampant speculation leads to crash
Virtual currency Bitcoin lost $100 in value relative to the US dollar on Wednesday due to panic selling by its devotees.
The currency began tumbling from a high of $260 on Wednesday after major Bitcoin exchange MtGox started getting hammered by many micro trading requests per second. This bout of high-frequency Bitcoin trading …
Windows 8 has put the world's PC market to sleep - IDC
Double-digit shipment fall 'both surprising and worrisome'
The global PC market is dwindling, and Windows 8 could be to blame, according to the beancounters at IDC.
The analyst firm released its rundown of global PC shipments on Tuesday, and the year-on-year double digit decline blows a cold wind for traditional PC makers like Dell and HP, and OS-slinger Microsoft.
"It seems clear that …
DropBox adds single sign-on
Amazon-dependent storage provider goes for the enterprise
DropBox has implemented single sign-on as the company strives to get inside enterprises before larger companies commodify its file storage technology.
Single sign-on (SSO) gives enterprise IT admins a way to manage use of DropBox by employees, the company announced on Tuesday. Alongside its introduction, DropBox has changed the …
Amazon lofts Hadoop into GovCloud
Regulation-approved problem solving
Amazon has flung its implementation of Hadoop, Amazon Elastic MapReduce, onto its "GovCloud" data center hub.
The launch of EMR atop GovCloud was announced by Amazon on Tuesday, and sees the Seattle-based infrastructure farmer give US government agencies an easy way to access Hadoop without breaking regulatory protocols.
EMR is …
Microsoft squashes 9 bugs with Patch Tuesday fixes
Plugs holes in IE10, locks down privilege escalation vulns
Microsoft has issued nine patches for vulnerabilities in its software on the computer-murk jamboree day that is Patch Tuesday.
The updates plug two "critical" vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer and Windows that allow for remote code execution, and seven "important" vulns that allow for privilege escalation, denial of service …
Amazon widens .NET to catch Windows cloud devs
Psst, hey you, Bezos has some cloud for you
Amazon has broadened the ways in which .NET users can fiddle with its platform-as-a-service cloud AWS Elastic Beanstalk.
The expansion of the technology was announced on Tuesday and sees Elastic Beanstalk for .NET now support Amazon's enterprise-focused Virtual Private Cloud technology. It follows an announcement by Amazon last …
Salesforce cuts app development steps
Customer-oriented company does something for its customers
When you're a company that produces the tech that salespeople, customer relationship managers, and general biz-types use, it'd be astonishing if you did not have a mobile device strategy. Therefore, Salesforce's announcement on Tuesday that it has a great big mobile toolkit did not surprise us.
The "Salesforce Platform Mobile …
Rackspace cosies up to mobile developers
Brews mobile gumbo from open source ingredients
Texan cloud prospector Rackspace hopes to strike gold by partnering up with mobile-focused companies to mine a rich vein of developer services.
The company announced on Tuesday a scheme that sees it offer free "mobile cloud stacks" service to developers, while partnering with mobile-specialist companies for additional services …
Microsoft hosts bar mitzvah for mature Azure
Little fellow is growing up, now ready to get a job
Windows Azure is growing up, and Redmond is telling the world that many components of it are now ready to be put to work in production environments.
The company made several announcements on Monday relating to Azure's maturation, including the shift of Azure Active Directory into general availability, the launch (in preview) of …
Google cofounder Brin sighted in Tesla batmobile
Photo Pink car a fine ride for King Google
Google's cyborg tzar Sergey Brin has been spotted tooling around Silicon Valley in a heavily-customized Tesla Model S, sending reverberations through the tech world at the ad-slingers auto ambitions.
Brin put peddle pedal to the metal on Friday, and took his customized e-car for a drive in a clear sign to this hack that – …
Amazon slashes Windows cloud pricing
Announces private yellow show at Microsoft Management Summit
Another day brings another Amazon Web Services price cut, yielding another frantic bout of spreadsheet-hammering among the Microsoft and Google accountants trying to work out just how low their companies' margins can go, we imagine.
Thursday's price cut sees Amazon go after Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud by reducing the cost of …
Bitcoin-mining malware ENSLAVES computers
All your CPU cycles belong to us, say the script kiddies
Dumb-as-a-post Bitcoin-mining malware has appeared – bringing further proof that the virtual currency's hyperbolic trajectory is attracting the sort of late-to-the-party shady speculator that telegraphs a jarring fall.
The malware is currently spreading through a wide-ranging link poisoning campaign being run on Skype, a …
Google inflates infrastructure cloud
Makes it easier to get on, trims prices
Google has taken another step toward opening up its Amazon-competitor Google Compute Engine to the general public.
The ad-slinger announced on Thursday that anyone who is paying the company $400 a month for "Gold" support for cloud services can now try out the GCE beta.
"Now you can sign up online for Google Compute Engine with …
Facebook skins Android with Facebook Home
Zuck on this, unless you care about privacy
Facebook has taken over Android with an application named Facebook Home that slaps a social façade on top of Google's operating system.
As expected, the app turns a phone's lock screen into a rolling news feed, implements a new form of social messaging named "chat heads", and sees an entire social-oriented user interface take …
