cloud

Red Hat's new chief executive, Jim Whitehurst, has his eyes on the sky.

The former Delta Airlines chief operating officer, who took the reins of the most established open-source software company from Matthew Szulik in January, names cloud computing as a top priority. Loosely speaking, the term refers to computing services available to anyone online rather than custom data centers isolated within corporate confines, but it also dovetails with the general idea of computing services running at massive scale on a more flexible infrastructure.

"The clouds will all run Linux," Whitehurst said in an interview.

Being Red … Read more

Search Cloud is a search engine that uses weighted keywords to determine relevancy in its results. When entering search terms you can change which words or phrases need priority over others by changing their size from one to five. More important keywords appear larger, and will be bolded in the results.

The application runs entirely in Adobe Flash, and while not nearly as fast as Google, is no slouch. I was able to find some highly targeted results with just three or four keywords which ended up being better than Google and Yahoo's in several cases. To open results … Read more

This post was updated at 10 a.m. PDT to include further comments from the companies.

Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Yahoo announced Tuesday that they've teamed up to create a "test bed" project for research in cloud computing, the umbrella term for outsourcing hardware and software capabilities rather than handling them locally.

With the rather dry name of The HP, Intel, and Yahoo Cloud Computing Test Bed, the open-source project will consist of data centers around the globe "to promote open collaboration among industry, academia, and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in … Read more

It used to be taken for granted that the web was and always would be open. That assumption has increasingly come under fire as cloud computing has set up walled gardens for data and services...much as the desktop has done.

Tim O'Reilly addressed the threat of closed clouds and closed mobile devices to access the web in his keynote at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention.

Tim seemed to have lost interest in open source over the past few years, his interest instead turning to Web 2.0 (though he continued to recognize the need for an upgrade to the way we think of open source in terms of licenses instead of services). But somehow, somewhere, Tim re-discovered the importance of open source, this time in keeping Web 2.0 from turning into Manacle 2.0.

I'm not sure that you ever truly left, Tim, but this call to arms is timely and welcome. In his keynote, Tim said:… Read more

Update 11:03 a.m. PDT: I added more comment from Zimbra. Update 9:25 a.m. PDT: I added more background and details about my hands-on test.

Any of the 263 million Yahoo Mail users who were antsy for change now have something they can sink their teeth into.

The first real fruits of Yahoo's $350 million acquisition of Zimbra are becoming apparent with the release Thursday of the Yahoo Zimbra Desktop. The e-mail software, available as a free download for Windows and Mac, works when the user is offline, and it offers options for basic online word … Read more

Peter Wayner at Infoworld published a good overview of Cloud offerings from Amazon, Google, AppNexus, and GoGrid. The main takeaway: Cloud Computing is as nebulous as it is cumulus.

The first surprise is that the services are wildly different. While many parts of Web hosting are pretty standard, the definition of "cloud computing" varies widely. Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud offers you full Linux machines with root access and the opportunity to run whatever apps you want. Google's App Engine will also let you run whatever program you want -- as long as you specify it in … Read more

Google programmers are adding support for the Perl programming language to its App Engine service for hosting Web applications, but so far it's not really an official project.

The work is the project of Google employee Brad Fitzpatrick, who disclosed the project on his blog Tuesday. But he's not a member of the App Engine team, and Google isn't promising Perl support, he said. By going public with the project, he hopes to intercept other Perl fans' work in the area.

"I (along with other Perl hackers here at Google) are now allowed to work on … Read more

Joyent's David Young has written an excellent treatise on why "clouds" (as in cloud computing) should be open and not proprietary. He details nine attributes of an open, "platform as a service" cloud.

My favorite? Young's contention that while an open cloud could lead to everyone "rolling" their own, the rationale behind doing so is, well, not so rational:

If you're writing an application, and you want to be able to achieve tremendous scale, the answer shouldn't be to move off the cloud onto your own "private" cloud of dedicated servers. Of course, if the cloud computer is open, as we've described, you can build your own cloud. It's also true (that) you can generate your own electricity from coal, if you want to bother. But why bother?

This is a fundamental tenet of open-source businesses. There's much that you could do to fork an open-source project and create your own splinter project, but generally, it's not worth the bother.

The Slashdot community piled on to comment on Young's post, with some insightful questions as to the viability of uploading a company's "crown jewels" to the cloud, "for all the world to see." Others suggest that "'cloud computing' is just the latest marketing promotion designed to move us to renting software."… Read more

Customers affected by Sunday's outage of Amazon's Simple Storage Service, an online data storage plan, won't have to do anything to get credit for the hours-long glitch.

"We'll be announcing on the developer forum momentarily that we'll be waiving our standard SLA (service-level agreement) process and applying the appropriate service credit to all affected customers for the July billing period," the company said Monday evening in a statement about the S3 outage. "Customers will not need to send us an e-mail to request their credits, as these will be automatically applied. This … Read more