Rhm2ktmi's List: Cloud - Data Platform aaS

• With Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service - all with zero administration.

• Rackspace has expanded its managed cloud services, adding two open source variants of the MySQL database along with plans to add another database to its support list by mid-August.

   

  MariaDB and Pecona Server are being added to Rackspace’s list of supported databases in response to requests from application developers as these open source databases gain in popularity.

• Now, Stata is trying his hand at the Hadoop startup game, launching a new startup called Altiscale that recently closed a $12 million Series A round from Sequoia Capital and General Catalyst Partners, as well as Accel Partners, Jerry Yang’s AME Ventures and a few individual investors.
• And unlike many other Hadoop services, Altiscale isn’t immediately going after developers who want to try their hand at big data or deal with data through a wizbang interface. Rather, its initial audience is current Hadoop users — companies and data scientists — who know how the technology works but just want a better way to consume it.
• Stata acknowledges it won’t be easy trying to win customer away from established Hadoop vendors such as Cloudera, MapR and Hortonworks (which many of Stata’s former Yahoo comrades founded), but, he told me a few months ago, he thinks its very doable.

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• IBM helped propel SQL, Linux and Java into the mainstream, and now it’s looking to do the same for MongoDB. The company said it’s working with MongoDB creator 10gen on a new standard that will let mobile apps built atop the NoSQL database connect with data stored in business-critical systems.
• the new standard — which encompasses the MongoDB API, data representation (BSON), query language and wire protocol — appears to be all about establishing a way for mobile and other next-generation applications to connect with enterprise database systems such as IBM’s popular DB2 database and its WebSphere eXtreme Scale data grid.
• MongoDB is already immensely popular among web and mobile developers who must deal with semi- and unstructured data, but its lack of transactional integrity (among other things) means MongoDB isn’t often deployed for “mission-critical” applications that require ACID compliance and consistent performance.
• IBM’s stable of enterprise developers might not be deploying mobile apps on Parse or Google any time soon, but they will look for alternative platforms if IBM doesn’t at least try to keep up with a changing landscape.
• If IBM is still an IT kingmaker, that bodes very well for MongoDB, as well as for the OpenStack cloud computing platform that IBM is also backing.

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• SAP took a big step into the cloud computing market on Tuesday with the announcement that it would run corporate applications for its customers in its own data centres.
• The push signals a potential sea-change in the German software company’s business model and puts it into direct competition with a wider range of technology companies, such as Amazon and IBM. It also points to the threat to traditional software providers like SAP from a new generation of cloud-based services that give office workers easier and cheaper access to applications.
• SAP has already dipped its toe into cloud computing with the acquisition of SuccessFactors, a so-called software-as-a-service company that was designed from the ground up to deliver its technology over the internet. However, big companies have been wary of moving their most important applications to remote data centres run by others, fearing loss of control over their data.

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• One of the ongoing challenges that continues to frustrate businesses of all sizes is data integration, and that issue has only become more complicated with the advent of the cloud. And, in the brave new world of the cloud, data integration must morph into a broader set of data management capabilities to satisfy the escalating needs of today’s business.

   

  Numerous market research surveys have found that data integration is among the top concerns facing IT and corporate decision makers as they consider the rapidly expanding assortment of cloud alternatives at their disposal. A recent survey conducted by THINKstrategies and MuleSoft reaffirmed feedback we received a year ago that software vendors are also being stymied by data integration issues just as much as their customers.

   

  Approximately 90 percent of our survey respondents said integration is important in their ability to win new customers. Eighty-four percent of the survey respondents reported that integration has become a time-consuming task that is getting in the way of selling and delivering their software solutions. Despite the time they’re putting into integration, a quarter of the respondents said they’ve still lost customers because of integration issues.

   

• A simple framework for building web applications on top of great web services.

• Seabourne uses APIs and a unique set of information processing tools to attract new users and customers, speed time-to-market, and spur innovation.
• API management

• WAN optimization vendor Silver Peak last week announced a service that it proclaims speeds data transfers into Amazon's cloud by 100 times compared to not using Silver Peak's deduplication  system. 

   

  That sounds pretty good, but while the system could potentially create triple-digit efficiency gains for data transfers, at  least one analyst says that level of performance efficiency is not likely in all uploads using Silver Peak's services. "That  may be a little bit of a marketing stretch," says Jim Frey, who tracks the WAN optimization market for Enterprise Management  Associates. "Your actual mileage will vary." 

    

• The free Developer Suite provides a fully featured SDK with an Eclipse IDE plugin, pre-built Dataset patterns to make data modeling and manipulation easy. Bundled with a single-node edition of the Continuuity AppFabric, it includes developer tools to simplify and accelerate application creation for local testing.
• With the release of Developer Suite and Developer Sandbox, Continuuity abstracts away infrastructure and helps make developers into Big Data developers via access to higher level APIs, sample libraries and a flexible runtime.
• These closed-loop applications require real-time ingestion of user or machine signals that are then processed and turned into actionable business insights and data.
• Other use cases center around analytics processing, machine-to-machine networks, anomaly detection and streaming analytics.

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• f your organization has moved past all the excuses to use the public cloud, congratulations! But did you think through your data-integration strategy before deployment? If not, you'll find it difficult to maintain your corporate data in a public cloud.

• Like many architectural issues that need some face time when you move to the public cloud (such as security, governance, and performance), data integration requires upfront thinking and planning. Here's what you need to consider:

  • The amount of data to be placed in the public cloud
  • The kind of data moving between the enterprise and the cloud provider and the frequency of that transmission
  • The content and structure changes required for cloud storage, including encryption and other security requirements
  • The logging and auditing requirements
  • The exception-handling needs

• Garantia Data, the provider of advanced in-memory NoSQL cloud services, today announced the pricing and general availability of its Redis Cloud and Memcached Cloud database hosting services.

• ObjectRocket is the latest startup to see an opportunity to build a business around the MongoDB open source document database. Rather than simply spinning up hosted instances on an existing cloud, ObjectRocket has built its own, based on solid-state disk and a purpose-built server configuration
• ObjectRocket has announced the official launch of its MongoDB database-as-a-service offering. The company was founded in early 2012 by CEO Chris Lalonde, CTO Erik Beebe and chief architect Kenny Gorman. All three were previously involved with eBay and its PayPal subsidiary, as well as the Quigo Technologies ad-targeting network.

• For the past year or so, I have been advocating the need to rethink PaaS offerings in order to fully take advantage of the big data paradigm.
• Vendors like Continuuity are trying to attack this problem
• VMware’s CloudFoundry spinoff seems to be heading in this direction.

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• NuoDB has announced the first generally available release of its eponymous distributed relational database, hoping to define a new database segment: the cloud data management system. NuoDB is an ACID (atomic, consistent, isolated, durable)-compliant SQL database that is designed to be deployed across decentralized environments, whether on-premises or in the cloud, and to support both existing and new distributed transactional applications
• There are a variety of database-as-a-service offerings that run on cloud platforms
• Amazon's Relational Database Service
• Google's Cloud SQL
• NuoDB is differentiated by positioning itself as the database layer for the next-generation cloud platforms
• As such, it is more likely to compete, at a mindshare level at least, with distributed NoSQL databases that are being adopted to create next-generation data management platforms
• Apache Cassandra, supported by DataStax and Acunu
• Couchbase
• Basho Technologies' Riak
• TransLattice
• Other vendors attempting to deliver distributed SQL databases
• GenieDB

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