I always knew there was a connection between tech guys and car guys (or gals), but now it’s been confirmed. An article this week in BusinessWeek links Amazon’s “cloud computing guru” with his past passion of fixing Lamborghinis. We don’t have any Lamborghinis here at ScienceLogic (yet), but we do have a few car enthusiasts. The car (or, “batmobile” as it’s known around the office) pictured to the left belongs to one of our professional services engineers. It makes sense if you think about it. Cars and problem solving, getting under the hood to see what’s going on. It goes along perfectly with dissecting and assessing tech gear. Find me a kid who loves to pull things apart and discover how things work, and I’ll show you a future engineer. As for Amazon’s domination in cloud computing? The numbers speak for themselves.
Revenue from the kinds of cloud services offered by Amazon is likely to surge to $56 billion in 2014, from more than $16 billion in 2009, according to research firm IDC. Amazon’s Web services brought in about $500 million in revenue in the past year, according to estimates from Barclays Capital and Lazard Capital Markets, or about 1.5 percent of Amazon’s $34.2 billion in sales.
We all know that the government cloud is here to stay, but what of government cloud computing standards? CNET’s Gordon Haff brings up the idea of cloud governance, and lists consistency and portability as top concerns that federal agencies should have when moving to the cloud. Haff notes that while processes and security are important to consider, consistency and portability are two of the most important pillars supporting well-governed cloud architectures whether on-premise, public, or a hybrid architecture.
And a few other stories of interest:
- Wondering what federal agencies are in the cloud? GCN has you covered.
- Imagine this… cloud computing has been the buzzword for the past year or so, but what if we had never heard the term? What parts of the cloud as we know it now would change, and how would that effect the overall business value of the cloud? Find out how PaaS, SaaS and IaaS are impacting IT infrastructure as we know it.
- Another buzzword? Environmentally friendly. Everyone wants to be green, even the cloud.
- Apparently some CIOs are still asking “what is cloud computing?” A good snapshot can be found on CIO.com of end users and analyst, who all define it a bit differently.
- What does cloud computing mean for the rest of us? Is “to the cloud!” for all? Keir Thomas bridges this topic by asking what the impact is to the “lowly end-user”.
- A recent report from IDC states that public cloud revenue is set to rise over 20% by 2014. As if we couldn’t see that coming. The main areas that will employ cloud computing are professional services, communications and media, and discrete and process manufacturing markets.
- Thinking about the relationship between service level monitoring and the cloud? You’ll want to read this post by Elias Khnaser in Virtualization Review on automated workload shifts and configuration. One of the most appealing ideas behind building a private cloud is the ability to automatically and dynamically shift workloads to achieve target SLAs. Private clouds are highly virtualized environments, which allows allocation of the necessary storage I/O, network I/O and compute resources to meet SLAs.
- Did you know “blob” was a technical term? Kind of. Can ‘encrypted blobs’ help with secure cloud computing? Maybe.
- Network World’s Beth Schultz tells you how to get a job. Really. How to get started with cloud computing and ten cloud career skills you need to be effective when working with the ever turbulent cloud.