DZone Research Cloud News Update (April 7)

A lot has happened in the cloud industry since the release of our 2014 Cloud Platform Research Report in early March, which is why we are providing monthly industry news updates to keep our community truly updated. Here are the major happenings up through April 7th:

Cloud Foundry Declares Independence Under New Non-Profit Organization

• Pivotal, the longtime stewards of the open source PaaS Cloud Foundry, recently announced that a new non-profit foundation would be formed to handle the oversight of this popular platform.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Cloud Foundry Overlords

• Phil Whelan, a technologist at ActiveState, provides his optimistic outlook for the new Cloud Foundry Foundation.  It’s a major event for companies like ActiveState and IBM, who have based their PaaS products on Cloud Foundry.  For IBM, this is a new initiative and a big gamble.  Details on IBM’s new Cloud Foundry-based BlueMix are further down the page.

New Pricing Model and Developer Tools for Google Cloud Platform

• Google announced a drastic reduction to the pricing model for their cloud services, with prices dropping anywhere from 30-85%. The new pricing came alongside developer tools meant to streamline virtual machines, expand operating engine support, and make developers generally more productive.

Amazon Has a Permanent Fire Sale – Cuts Compute Services by 51%

• In response to Google’s recent cloud pricing cuts, Amazon is cutting prices to an all time low.  Starting April 1st, they’ll be selling Glacier, EC2, S3, and other services at prices that’ll make you think they’re going out of business.

Microsoft Jumps on the Price Reduction Bandwagon

• The trend in price drops has made its way up the chain to Microsoft, who announced competitive pricing to match Amazon’s commodity services reevaluation. With up to 35% off of compute services and 65% off storage, the economic obstacle to cloud services is being heavily reevaluated.

The Ultimate Cloud Speed Tests: Amazon vs. Google vs. Windows Azure

• This series of Java benchmark performance tests from InfoWorld go into a lot of detail about the tradeoffs on price, performance, and scaling for many different providers, but the simple takeaway was this: Google is fastest, Windows Azure is slowest, and Amazon is priciest (keep in mind this was before the massive price war in March).

IBM Places Billion Dollar Bet on BlueMix PaaS Cloud

• IBM is opening its middleware stack to itsSoftLayer Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud. The combination is called BlueMix and makes use of CloudFoundry.

Why IBM's Cloudant Acquisition is a Big Deal and Who it Threatens

• Big data and cloud technologies are an exciting new technological frontier. If existing giants like IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft fail to get on board, though, they may not survive. IBM’s Cloudant acquisition shows that they don’t intend to be left behind.

Red Hat Adds .NET and SQL Server Support to OpenShift

• Open source forever! In early March, Red Hat updated its OpenShift PaaS to include .NET support and SQL Server as an available database.

Node.js for cloudControl has Arrived!

• It was already possible to run Node.js applications on cloudControl through a third-party buildpack, but now it’s official.

Visualizing the Post-Virtualization Model of Cloud Providers

• Noah Slater, one of the original developers for Orchestra, the PHP PaaS acquired by Engine Yard in 2011, talks about how virtualization has impacted the platform model for most cloud service providers. He utilizes a very interesting analogy to compare pre-virtualization resources as pets that need to be nurtured, and post-virtualization models as cattle that can be easily replaced.

ProfitBricks Allows BIOS Access for IaaS

• ProfitBricks is moving forward in letting users have more control over the personal preferences and environment of their platform by allowing IaaS users BIOS-level access. This move more closely resembles a cloud experience on a bare metal machine.

Stackato 3.2 Release Strengthens Security and Availability

• The newest release of ActiveState Stackato was made available in March, and it adds a bunch of great new features affecting agility and governance while also increasing access to deployment and monitoring tools. This of course includes the latest stable code from Cloud Foundry.        

ActiveState Stackato 3.2 Bolsters Application Security and Availability

• ActiveState has released Stackato 3.2. The new version provides enhancements and new features ranging from auto-scaling to improved SSO capabilities and security controls.

Announcing Apache CloudStack 4.3.0

• The 4.3.0 version of Apache’s integrated IaaS platform, CloudStack, has been released. New features include Palo Alto Firewall integration, Remote access VPN for VPC networks, Site to Site VPN between VRs, and more.

CloudBees Cloud App Development Platform Available on Verizon Cloud

• You can now use the CloudBees PaaS on the new Verizon Cloud, as part of Verizon’s promise focus on enterprise-level services. This is an interesting development for the still relatively new Verizon Cloud, which is still in public beta, and was only announced last October.

Kii Now Offers A/B Testing

• All Kii accounts (even free ones) now include built-in mobile A/B testing functionality, allowing developers to experiment more easily without having to make commitments.

Upcoming Name Change for Windows Azure

• Part of Microsoft’s increasing focus on Windows Azure includes a name change: As of April 3rd, Windows Azure is Microsoft Azure.

Cisco Joins Cloud Computing Race with $1 Billion Plan

• In order to compete with Amazon in the cloud services market, Cisco has pledged $1 billion to build new data centers to help run Cisco Cloud Services.

To read more about the state of the cloud industry, download the 2014 Cloud Platform Research Report and get your knowledge base updated!