DZone Research Cloud News Update (June 16)

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 June 16th:

Docker Support Integrated into Stackato

• "A solution that reduces the proportion of the server’s overall processing capacity devoted to running operating systems would be extremely valuable. Docker is that solution -- it requires only one operating system per server and uses containers to provide the segregated execution environment that individual virtual machines previously provided."
  

Clever Cloud Lowers Prices on Scalers and Database Support 

• In May, Clever Cloud lowered there prices again from the February drop, making their scaler service event more affordable with linear pricing, and doubling the RAM for one size of scaler. They also now offer MySQL and PostgreSQL database service at a very low price.

cloudControl Improves Performance for Instances and Build Process with New Generation SSDs 

• "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 the website, the latter improved from taking up to 100 seconds to taking around 60-70 seconds. They hope the faster CPUs and SSD storage help speed up applications, and the improved build process makes day to day work with the cloudControl platform even better."

Chef 10 and Encrypted Data Bags Introduced to Engine Yard 

• "With the release of our stable-v4 stack, we introduced Chef 10 to the platform, and with it came data bags. Now with the 3.0 release of the engineyard gem, we can officially support data bags and encrypted data bags. You may be wondering what data bags are, how data bags work or how to implement data bags. This blog post will walk you through the entire process."

Google Cloud Platform Update Includes Container Support for Docker

• "Everything at Google, from Search to Gmail, is packaged and run in a Linux container. Each week we launch more than 2 billion container instances across our global data centers, and the power of containers has enabled both more reliable services and higher, more-efficient scalability. Now we’re taking another step toward making those capabilities available to developers everywhere."

Heroku Makes HTTP API Toolchain Open Source

• "Today we’re open sourcing the toolchain Heroku uses to design, document, and consume our HTTP APIs. We hope this shows how Heroku thinks about APIs and gives you new tools to create your own. Here’s some more information about these things, how we use them at Heroku, and an explanation of how you can try them yourself."

Jelastic Launches V2.2 with Enchanted Ruby Support

• "Today, we announced the general availability of Platform-as-Infrastructure (PaI) 2.2. The new version broadens Jelastic’s enterprise cloud and multi-language PaaS capabilities by adding the industry’s most comprehensive Ruby support, a new API combined with the industry’s only GUI for improved simplicity for developers, and a one-click app marketplace. Ruby architects and developers can deploy new or legacy applications to the cloud without any code changes, providing them with a scalable, highly-available and secure environment in seconds."

Joyent Increases Availability and Performance on Business-Critial Cloud Applications With ScaleArc Collaboration

• "As most DevOps and database administrators quickly discover, poor database performance is typically the root cause of application slowdowns and failures, often resulting in a slow interface or even worse – loss of revenue. And databases are generally regarded as a source of downtime, either planned (e.g., database maintenance/patching) or unplanned. By adding ScaleArc’s database traffic management software to their monthly cloud service, Joyent customers can alleviate database performance and availability issues by taking advantage of our database traffic management features as well our offload capabilities."

Kii Releases New Unity SDK with Web Player Support

• "We’ve been working hard to extend the availability of the Kii Unity SDK to more Unity build platforms. In our latest version available for download at developer.kii.com/#sdks we’re even more integrated with the Unity system. First of all we’re now using Unity underlying network communications to talk to our back-end so now the limitations imposed by Web Player are not an issue! Second, we’re firing the async API calls from the UI thread so you can access Unity objects from callback code, and that's not all."

Pivotal CF Version 1.2 Available with VMware Hybrid Cloud Support

• "VMware Hybrid Cloud Service (vCHS) and vCloud Director (vCD) are now supported platforms for Pivotal CF, the leading commercial distribution for Cloud Foundry. Multi-cloud portability is a key design tenant that differentiates Cloud Foundry. The platform directly interfaces with the IaaS layer to provide a high degree of automation and 4 layers of high availability not possible with traditional middleware. Pivotal CF on vCHS provides a platform that works the same way in VMware’s public cloud offering as it does for on-premises deployments on vSphere. When using vCHS, the IaaS is provided as-a-Service in VMware operated data centers making it ideal for additional compute and disaster recovery scenarios."     

Progress Acquires Modulus Node.js and MongoDB Cloud Platform

• "The Modulus Node.js and MongoDB cloud platform allows users to create real-time mobile, SaaS, social and Big Data apps that run across distributed devices and can seamlessly handle floods of data requests with built-in performance monitoring and analytics. With the addition of the Modulus platform to our technology lineup, we will now have the capabilities to support both the productivity and control language segments of the platform-as-a-service market."