ReadWriteCloud

One of my New Year's Resolutions for 2012 is to move away from depending on Google services for my business. Last year's Gmail redesign, and the pseudonym battles have convinced me that Google is not quite the right home for services I depend on professionally. The first service to go is Gmail. I spent part of my weekend moving email for my personal domains to another service. The experience has already had a few ups and downs, but on balance I think that moving away from Gmail is the right choice.

The presumed "elasticity" of cloud technology tends to fall apart whenever the bindings change. That is, when a virtual machine or virtualized application relies upon the specific configuration of the hardware providing its infrastructure, it isn't exactly cloud-like when you have to migrate that element to a new host. You often find yourself rewriting some configuration file or maybe even engineering some one-time script. You don't have to write an instruction manual every time you stretch a rubber band.

In rethinking its approach to making it easier for you to rewrite and reconfigure components that are said to be elastic, VMware has decided to engineer an administrative system that dispenses with the notion altogether. Call it a "zero-step process." In its place, the company's vFabric Application Director, which VMware We introduced you to vFabric App Directorannounced last October and is generally releasing this morning, substitutes this process for application deployment with a procedure that's reminiscent of drawing an org chart in Visio.

Here's the proposition: If your business fronts a marketing Web site, perhaps with a digital storefront and probably with additional content on Facebook, Salesforce.com is now offering a service - not a software package, but a cloud-based system - for you to compose the entire site, including layout template and content, and host the site including the database on the Force.com platform, for a flat fee of $1,500 per month.

It is exactly the type of business model that Salesforce is aiming directly at another huge competitor with dominant market share: this time, WordPress. Salesforce is betting that businesses give WordPress its 50-plus-percent market share in the content management system category because it's the most convenient product to adopt, not because it's best suited to the task. And just like before, Salesforce is doubling down all its chips on a simple domain name: this time, Site.com.

"When you give the power to the users, sometimes this can cause a lot of problems." This from Check Point Software Technologies security evangelist Tomer Teller, in a recent interview with ReadWriteWeb. Check Point is the current distributor of the ZoneAlarm firewall for Windows, which set new standards a decade ago for the way it delivered security information in a straightforward way to its users.

This is somewhat of a change of heart for Check Point. It's also an observation in the wake of the rapid transformation of the information landscape. Flanked now by mobile devices poking their way in from inside, and cloud technologies seeping in from outside, enterprises are faced with the situation of employees adding new, unanticipated, and sometimes haphazard components to the network.

Here's the problem: Data has already gotten too big for its britches. There are increasing corporate mergers and takeovers, greater pressure among businesses in both private and public sectors to consolidate resources, and to boot, federal regulations mandating privacy restrictions and security policies. Especially in the healthcare industry, the first "big data" technologies to emerge from the former Yahoo project that became Hadoop, have been a godsend.

Hadoop breaks simple data stores free from the bounds of single volumes, enabling them to be distributed in shards across multiple storage devices. Normally a database system hasn't had to deal with encryption. If you encrypt the volume it's stored on, that should be good enough - at least, that's what the U.S. Dept. of Commerce's NIST agency said in 2007 (PDF available here). But that was before the big data problem was even identified, and years before the first Yahoo teams went to work on it.

Earlier this week, Amazon announced that they'd (finally) added an SSH client to the AWS console. Based on the MindTerm Java-based SSH client, the AWS client is looking pretty good.

Now, I said "finally" because I've been able to pop open a console from my browser for my Linode instance for quite some time. I was actually surprised that Amazon didn't have a similar feature.

This should be fun. Just a few days after Amazon announced its 19th price cut, Microsoft is announcing its own price cuts for Azure Storage and Compute. If you're looking at running a smaller instance with a 100MB database, you can now get one for less than $20 a month. If you're doing heavy computing, though, Azure still seems a bit behind AWS.

The cuts are 12% to Azure Storage (now $0.125 per GB), and the extra small compute instance for Azure has been dropped by 50% to $0.02 per hour. If you're buying the six month plans, Microsoft has reduced storage prices by "up to 14%."

According to Amazon's blog today, the company is now on their 19th price cut since AWS debuted, but who's counting? Well, they are, apparently. The company is lowering pricing on EC2 instances, ElastiCache, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon Elastic Map Reduce are all dropping significantly. Significantly, Amazon is heavily emphasizing its price cuts on Reserved Instances.

The EC2 pricing is dropping by up to 10% for on-demand instances. If you're consuming Reserved Instances, Amazon is dropping prices up to 37%.

Google announced today that it's dropping its pricing on Google Cloud Storage and its integration with several enterprise storage offerings. Google's updated pricing scheme puts it roughly in line with Amazon's S3, but what else does Google have to offer except a new pricing scheme?

I spoke to Google's product manager for Cloud Storage, Navneet Joneja on Monday about the pricing change and how Google stands out in storage.

You no doubt are somewhat cynical about service level agreements (SLAs), those little-reviewed documents that promise the level of service from your hosting provider. Little-read that is, until something goes awry. Enter SingleHop, a Chicago-based provider that is trying to make a name for itself by actually delivering a solid "Bill of Rights" for customers and promising to pay when they don't meet their SLA. It is an interesting idea.