ReadWriteCloud

This week two cloud-based services opened their doors. (Can a cloud open? Whatever.) One, myERP.com, purports to replace the likes of Quickbooks and Salesforce. The other, EazyBI.com, offers low cost analytics on a wide variety of metrics. Both are worthy of further study and are based on freemium models.

OpenStack release manager Thierry Carrez examines OpenStack Nova's current privilege model and how it's being improved with the root_helper option.

Right now, OpenStack uses sudo to escalate privileges when it needs to run a root command. The problem with this, says Thierry, is that sudo doesn't provide a way to efficiently filter commands, which could be used to exploit systems.

Remember when you were doing math problems in school, and the teacher required you to show your work? Didn't you hate that? Yeah, me too. But when geeks show their work in solving tough, real-world problems? I love that. And there's a lot to love in this post by Netflix's Adrian Cockcroft and Denis Sheahan.

Netflix is deploying Apache Cassandra as a data store for production use. While setting it up, Netflix has created benchmarks to stress-test Cassandra running on AWS, and they've shared a lot of results.

The prospects for virtual desktop technologies include the ability for office workers to utilize their business assets from just about anyplace, including their tablets, without transporting those assets directly into mobile devices and exposing them to security dangers. Already, businesses are saving millions by reducing the number of servers they would have deployed to host operating systems. And cloud-based developer platforms are helping businesses deploy new and dynamic applications with less overhead and reduced time to maturity.

At least that's what the mimeograph machine has been repeating up to now, and that's the message that's been repeated here and elsewhere. But yesterday's Q4 Forrester TechRadar status report for cloud computing paints a darker picture for VDI and PaaS, claiming vendors are attempting new business models for these technologies that prospective customers may be rejecting.

We last wrote about CopperEgg's RevealCloud real-time server monitoring service earlier this summer. Today they announced a major expansion of their program to include various Windows, Mac and FreeBSD servers on top of the Linux/Unix ones that they came out of the gate with.

If you are looking for a way to move your .NET app into the cloud, then you probably have heard of Apprenda by now. We covered their launch earlier this year, and today they have v3 available.

New features included in Apprenda 3.0 are support for nearly any .NET web or SOA application by way of its software layer that enterprises can use quickly and easily. Apprenda has beefed up its APIs and included ones for distributed caching, publish/subscribe systems, message brokering, and application metering. All to make building more complex apps easier.

When you are as large as CA Technologies, you typically announce a bunch of new products (as we covered this past July) and especially around its annual CA World conference that is being held in Vegas this week. Today CA announced two new identity and access management cloud security services IdentifyMinder and FedMinder; the Cloud 360 process for cloud management; and Cloud Commons Marketplace and Developer Studio for buying and selling cloud-based development projects. Let's look at each one in more detail.

Some of our ReadWriteWeb staff in Oregon may have noticed their lights slightly dimmer this morning than yesterday. Okay, we're kidding. Amazon's has thrown the switch on its second set of Western U.S. cloud computing clusters, alleviating some of the burden on its large and growing cache of customers in Silicon Valley.

The new Oregon cluster is Amazon's latest, fully operational example of its incredible cloud-in-a-box - quite literally a set of refurbished shipping containers retrofitted with compact cooling equipment.

When the Simpsons started out back in 1987 as animated shorts for the Tracey Ullman show no one knew they would become this powerhouse and continue to this very day. Given that cloud computing is now a higher priority than overall security (at least according to this E&Y report), it is time to think more creatively about cloud deployments. How can we learn from this cartoon's success in our own enterprise IT departments as we get ready to deploy cloud computing? Here are a few ideas, and feel free to share your own thoughts in the comments.

After writing last year about cloud computing can help SMBs move out of the recession, the folks at Glowhost put together a nice infographic that summarizes some of our key points and provides a nice checklist for what they should demand from their cloud providers.