DZone Research Cloud News Update (May 12)

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 May 12th:

HP Drops $1bn, Two-Year OpenStack Cash Bomb

• "Hewlett-Packard is has unveiled a $1bn, two-year campaign promoting its open-source cloud, now rebranded as Helion. The PC maker says it will be spending on R&D, the development of cloud products and hiring “hundreds” of experts in a new OpenStack professional services practice."

Progress Introduces RAD Capabilities to Progress Rollbase

• "The new mobile features in Progress Rollbase, the RAD component of the Pacific platform, include innovative, standards-based capabilities that address major mobility challenges that ISVs and businesses continue to struggle with as they move business applications to the cloud. These include easily creating customized mobile and desktop apps from a unified platform with minimal coding, efficiently and securely integrating with backend infrastructure, and fast, easy cloud deployment."

Parse Gains Offline Capabilities With Parse Local Datastore

• "Parse Local Datastore is a new feature in the Parse Android SDK that lets you to take your app offline with just a few simple lines of code. ParseObject#pin() adds ParseObjects to the Local Datastore and ParseObject#unpin() removes them. Once pinned, you can access them anytime with a normal ParseQuery."

ActiveState to Sponsor Growing Foundation Set to Govern Cloud Foundry Open Source Project 

• "ActiveState announces its ongoing support as a founding Gold-level sponsor for the non-profit organization known as the Cloud Foundry foundation and applauds the expanding community. The foundation is dedicated to the evolution and growth of the Cloud Foundry open source project as well as the ecosystem and community around it."

Lunacloud Expands Cloud Operations to Russia

• "Lunacloud was launched in the UK and Portugal in June 2012 and has expanded to France and Spain in 2013. Russia is an important market for Lunacloud because it is one of the fastest growing economies in the world and at the same time faces less competition by other cloud providers than other major markets. The launch of its operation in Russia will allow Lunacloud to continue the implementation of its strategy of international expansion."

New Java Buildpacks on cloudControl: Grails, Scala, and More

• "The availability of new buildpacks for Java means that you can now run different kinds of JVM-based applications on cloudControl: Pure Java, Grails-based, Scala, and Play! framework applications. By officially supporting these new buildpacks, we make sure that the code is safe, functional, and up-to-date."

Annoucing Apache CloudStack 4.3.0

• "The newest release of the much-loved open source Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) came at the end of March. New features include Palo Alto Firewall integration, Remote access VPN for VPC networks, Site to Site VPN between VRs, and more."

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."

Kinvey Launches Dedicated Backend-as-a-Service Platform for Global Enterprise Customers

• "Kinvey announced the public launch of its Dedicated BaaS solution. With this announcement, Kinvey is extending its existing capabilities of providing enterprise IT departments a secure, standardized platform for accessing enterprise data, authentication services, and mobile backend features, by offering a dedicated deployment option for organizations that prefer this model."

Introducing the OpenStack SDK for PHP

• "This is a proposed OpenStack project that is designed to improve the experience of OpenStack end-users who are using the PHP programming language by providing them with everything they need to develop applications against OpenStack. The primary target for this package is application developers who develop against OpenStack. This does not include those who develop OpenStack itself or operate it. These are developers looking to consume a feature-rich OpenStack Cloud with its many services. These Developers require a consistent, single namespace API ("Application Programming Interface") that allows them to build and deploy their application with minimal dependencies."     

The JBoss Cloud Guide to All Things xPaaS

• "Whether your business applications are based on Java EE 6, PHP, or Ruby, cloud environments are turning out to be perfect for business development. There are plenty of cloud and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) options to choose from, but where do you start?"

Parse Cloud Pricing is Now Cheaper and Simpler

• "New customers will begin using this model today. If you’re an existing customer, you have six months to opt-in. We expect folks to move over quickly as we’re confident that this is a better model for everyone. At 30 requests/sec, an app can send us 77.76 million API requests in a month before needing to pay a dime. That’s over 70X what we offered before!"

Cloud Expert Bernard Golden Joins ActiveState as Vice President of Strategy

• "ActiveState announced that Bernard Golden, one of the world’s leading experts in cloud computing, has joined the company as Vice President of Strategy. Named in Wired.com as one of the ten most influential people in cloud computing, Bernard has extensive experience working with organizations to help them adopt and integrate cloud computing effectively. He will help ActiveState customers apply best practices and meet their goals as they leverage the cloud with ActiveState’s Stackato solution."

Announcing New Generation SSD Backed Instances and Improved Build Process Performance

• "While the build process improvements primarily helped the dependency cache handling, the faster instances help with both the cloudControl specific part of the build process and also the language and framework related tasks, e.g. the asset precompilation. For our website, the latter improved from taking up to 100 seconds to taking around 60-70 seconds. We hope the faster CPUs and SSD storage help speed up your applications, and the improved build process makes day to day work with the cloudControl platform even better."

Kinvey Releases Web and Hybrid SDKs to Support Enterprise HTML5-Based App Development

• "Kinvey announced new comprehensive libraries for mobile web development including the full range of JavaScript, Backbone.js, Ember.js and Angular.js frameworks in addition to enhancements to its PhoneGap and Appcelerator Titanium modules. These new capabilities give enterprise customers the flexibility to deliver mobile applications for employees, partners and customers on any device."

Parse Updates Their Data Analystics Capacity

• "Today, we’re pleased to announce the next steps in our journey: the new 'Audience' and 'Retention' tabs in your Analytics dashboard. After you’ve built your mobile app, the next step is to build, grow, and retain your user base. Loyal users are key to an app’s long-term success, and with these new growth-centric insights, you’ll be able to keep track of your users better than ever before."

cloudControl Reduces Pricing for PostgreSQLd and MySQLd Add-ons

• "We’re happy to announce that we’re cutting the price on our MySQLd and PostgreSQLd Add-on plans, effective as of April, 1st, 2014. The price drop is a consequence of recent price drops by Amazon Web Services. All plans except “micro” are affected and the average price cut is 25%. If you subscribe to any of the plans ranging from “small” to “4x Large HM”, your monthly invoice will be lower, starting from the invoice for April 2014."

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