Recently, I was featured in VM Blog and Data Center Knowledge offering my predictions for cloud computing in 2012. One theme, in particular, resonated throughout both articles: flexibility. According to Gartner, the worldwide cloud IaaS market will grow from an estimated $3.7 billion in 2011 to $10.5 billion by 2014. In order for this tremendous growth to be sustained, however, …
Money and a mission
American poker legend Doyle Brunson once said, “A man with money is no match against a man on a mission.” Logically, then, one with money and a mission should be unstoppable! With today’s funding announcement, at CloudSigma, we are effectively fueling our mission to provide the most flexible, user-centric public cloud in today’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market. The investment comes on …
Live from Cloud Expo West, Announcing Innovation
This week, we’re at the 2011 Cloud Computing Expo in Santa Clara, California, experiencing a touch of nostalgia mixed with anticipation. For it seems like only yesterday that the idea of cloud computing was just becoming a reality, yet, here we stand, already experiencing the benefits of much more tangible cloud platforms and on the brink of some substantial advancements. …
Why? Solaris Support Added
Greek philosopher Heraclitus is accredited with saying, “The only constant is change.” But, what if you don’t want to change? What then? Many public cloud providers may follow Heraclitus’ philosophy as they impose restrictions on software and operating system deployments in their cloud infrastructure, forcing companies to change, but this is not CloudSigma’s strategy. Why should enterprises have to change …
Technology Strategy interview with our CEO by Techworld
Jan Hedström of Techworld (www.techworld.se) recently interviewed CloudSigma CEO Patrick Baillie about our company’s technology strategy and choices. A full transcript of the interview is included below. You use KVM virtualisation, while some other providers have chosen Xen. What factors were important when you made the decision to use KVM? KVM forms part of the mainstream Linux kernel and for …
The Cloud and Outages: Five Key Lessons
This week a location for the EC2 product of Amazon Web Services suffered a major extended outage. Predictably there has been a lot of hand wringing, proclamations that the cloud is unreliable etc. Actually this event should focus everyone’s minds on what problems a move to the cloud solves and those that it doesn’t. The cloud does solve many problems …
Cloud Affiliate Program: How to Make Money with CloudSigma Part 1
A couple of weeks ago CloudSigma launched its Cloud Affiliate Program. Now you are able to join the success of CloudSigma and create for yourself a significant source of revenue by promoting CloudSigma through the Affiliate Channel. You can earn up to 20% lifetime provision out of every sale which is referred through your affiliate link. Alternatively you earn up …
Death of the Pure IaaS Cloud: Part 2
In part 1 we saw how the changing strategy of many public IaaS clouds has been to increasingly offer PaaS style services on top of their core product offering. It is easy to see why public IaaS cloud vendors might wish to do this in order to increase their revenues but is it in customers’ real interests? One impact is …
Death of the Pure IaaS Cloud: Part 1
Over the last few months it has become clear that many of the largest Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) public clouds are increasingly morphing into more like Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) operators. In other words, these clouds are moving from providing pure computing resources to providing services running on top of those computing resources. That may seem like a pretty innocuous change but as I’ll …
An IaaS Cloud with Customers in the Driving Seat
I’ve aimed to outline over the previous three security posts to show how to secure your Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing and how we as a vendor approach the various aspects to deliver our part of that solution. In this the final part I outline how we feel IaaS should be approached. And how that has profound implications for the concerns …
Cloud Utilisation Management is Key to Performance
One of the greatest challenges in running an Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud is how to deliver performance at a cost-effective rate. The key metric behind this is the utilisation management of hardware used in the cloud; too high and performance suffers, too low and prices inevitably rise. How can a cloud provider deliver performance and value for money in this case? An …
Security in a Public IaaS Cloud Part 3: Data Storage
So far we’ve looked at securing the network and securing access to cloud infrastructure. In part 3 we look at how to ensure your data storage is robust, secure and kept private in IaaS clouds. Keeping data private and secure is a key concern of many looking to move to a public cloud. Its important to separate real dangers and …