Posted on November 22, 2013, by Goran Čandrlić | 6 minute read
Stephen Fry, a comedian (yes, you may know him from QI or similar shows), is a narrator in a video sponsored by Databarracks that explores changes to computer thinking, in what is mainly - cloud computing, and all it takes is 5 minutes. Paradigm changes in thinking throughout history, as well as gas, water, and electricity becoming a utility, have all conspired to bring today's main change in business and web performance - with computing, also becoming a utility. It is a resource that can be now switched on and off. "Users pay for how much is needed, when it is needed. This is the essence of cloud computing," it is explained in the video.
Computing as utility enables businesses to exactly align technology expenditure with requirements, bursting instantly from 1 to ten thousands of users. Before, businesses had to "buy more" just to be sure. Today, any business has access to security, compliance, transparency, reliable system and scalability that until now has only been affordable to the largest companies of the planet. This is all empowered by the revolution that is cloud computing. Watch the animation below to learn more.
On November 20th, Rackspace announced Rackspace Auto Scale—a new tool that empowers you to grow or shrink your cloud dynamically. The product is offered for free to Rackspace customers. Auto Scale is driven by schedule-based policies such as a holiday season boost on an e-commerce site, or a major sales promotion, and on event-based policies such as individual server load or queue length. To accomplish event-based scaling up or down, Auto Scale generates a webhook (capability URL) which can be used to invoke a specific scale-up or scale-down policy for a group of servers.
In an article for The Guardian, Vogels looks back at the year that has seen tremendous innovation, and says that the year 2014 will astound us even more. He picks four trends that will become big:
Read the full article here.
"Salesforce.com has purchased cloudconnect, a startup founded by Heroku and Salesforce.com alum Adam Gross who is now, I guess, back in the fold," reports Barb Darrow at GigaOM. Increased emphasis on mobile application is what will seem to become a trend with the Salesforce company. "In that scenario, it looks like cloudconnect is a smart buy," says Darrow.
Only recently, Dreamforce 2013, the 11th iteration of Salesforce’s annual user and developer conference, has finished.
You can watch the videos from the conference here.
For an article by Barb Darrow, go here.
The rise of the digital service economy is driving the growth of data centers. Diane Bryant, senior vice president in charge of Intel's data center business, said in analysis that data centers are growing so fast, in response to the growing number of smartphone devices. One Intel-based server has to be deployed to support 400 smartphones, she said. "That means that a high-performance server has to do the processing required to handle data services and serve web pages to those smartphones," reports VentureBeat. This is driving 20% of annual data center revenues at Intel. Bryant also said that one server is required for every 40 connected factory tools. One server is required for every 100 wearable medical devices, and one server is required for every 20 digital signs, which serve high-definition images and videos to retail stores.
Read the full article here.
