Cloud Computing Product Guide

SOASTA Announces CloudTest(TM) Global Platform – Review

Mulah Johnson — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 12:17:59 +0000

SOASTA has announced its CloudTest Global Platform for load and performance testing Web applications and networks. The new CloudTest Global Platform, which is commercially available today, enables companies of all sizes to simulate Web traffic and conditions by leveraging the elasticity and power of Cloud Computing. This platform enables cross-cloud testing on today’s leading cloud platforms such as Amazon EC2, Rackspace, 3Tera AppLogic, and Enomaly — delivering the most comprehensive, real world global testing environment available today at an affordable price.

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Heroku ruby on rails online IDE – Review

Mulah Johnson — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:24:03 +0000

Heroku is an online deployment system for Ruby on Rails apps. It’s a completely hosted development environment, so with Heroku your app will be live instantaneously. You can develop Rails apps without getting stymied by the complications of installing dev tools. Sign up today to try it out for yourself. Heroku simplifies Ruby development, fulfilling a much needed niche. Developers can focus on making cool new tools for the public without having to worry about development. It bridges the creation of an idea to its execution.

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Nehalem servers to anchor Intel cloud computing

Mulah Johnson — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 11:32:11 +0000

Intel’s announced that its cloud-computing efforts this year will be centered on a new server that uses upcoming Nehalem technology. Nehalem is Intel’s new chip architecture currently used only in its Core i7 desktop processors. Mega data centers potentially mean mega-growth. The world’s largest chipmaker sees between 20 percent and 25 percent of server shipments going to mega data centers by 2012. Intel’s goal is to optimize this massive mesh of server hardware. Other technologies that Intel will roll out with Nehalem server chips include Virtual Machine Device Queues.

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Programming Amazon Web Services book – Review

Mulah Johnson — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 12:04:21 +0000

Programming Amazon Web Services book is informative and useful in developing my understanding of AWS. Reviewer liked the organization of the material and the order in which the topics were laid out. The code examples were provided in Ruby, which was an extremely great decision on behalf of O’Reilly. Granted, everything the author wrote at the time the book was published was true about AWS. But several of his complaints have since been handled quite well by Amazon, and they are no longer problems.

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Amazon EC2 Mini Review

Mulah Johnson — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 10:48:17 +0000

Amazon elastic compute cloud is what you run your computers on top of. Think of it as an enormously large computer where you can run an infinite number of virtual machines. Running your computers here lets you scale the number of machines active at any given time up or down without ever having to own or care about any physical hardware. Never again will you have to think about maintaining BGP sessions, or that hard disk in server 235 that just failed. Best of all, is the EC2 API.

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Xdrive – Editor’s Review

Mulah Johnson — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 05:32:10 +0000

AOL’s Xdrive is one of the best online storage services on the web as far as features and security go and receives the “TopTenREVIEWS Bronze Award.” You are able to view your photos and listen to your music directly from the interface. Xdrive has an intuitive interface that is easy to navigate. There are four main storage areas: Xdrive, Photos, Music and Bookmarks. Within each section, you are able to create and manage your files. The upload, download, new folder and move buttons make organizing your files quick and easy.

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Review: Microsoft SkyDrive

Mulah Johnson — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 08:28:32 +0000

Microsoft SkyDrive is a free, Web-based service that is loosely integrated with some Office applications. It lacks control features that even a small business would seek to keep tabs on sensitive data. There are no central management capabilities. Collaboration and Interoperability are the two areas where SkyDrive is impressive. Bottom line, not only does the Test Center decline to recommend SkyDrive, it might actually be advisable for VARs to suggest their clients block network access to SkyDrive through content filters.

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Google Apps Premier Edition

Mulah Johnson — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 10:57:10 +0000

Signing up to Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE) is simple but integrating it into your corporate computing environment is less so. One of the major drawbacks to Google Docs has to be that you need an internet connection, and a reasonably fast one at that, in order to do anything. If your requirements are relatively rudimentary then Google Apps could be right for your company – but if not – there are other, far better, solutions out there.

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Review: Windows Azure Services Platform

Mulah Johnson — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 06:18:29 +0000

Microsoft Corp. intends its new Windows Azure Services Platform to be a serious cloud computing platform for a broad range of developers and scenarios. There’s a tremendous amount of capability being presented in the Azure CTP (Community Technology Preview), and there’s more to come. It goes beyond simple Web hosting to a flexible architecture designed to automatically enlist additional resources in response to demand. It currently looks a lot like an ASP.Net application, although it has some restrictions and additional features.

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Amazon S3 Product Reviews

Mulah Johnson — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 10:26:46 +0000

Amazon S3 is dirt cheap. User can transfer files between machines using his/her Amazon S3. There is no limit to the number of computers you can back up using Amazon S3. Amazon S3 may take a little bit of effort to set up, since you have to sign up for an account and find your keys, but the savings is worth the extra few steps. And you’ll never have to worry about data loss on your machines again. Bottom line: recommended.
Read the full review here