Zenny's Cloud Links #46 - Interoperability, Crowbar, Open Cloud, zCloud

Every Friday we like to highlight some of our favorite posts on IT Operations, Cloud Computing, DevOps, Big Data and anything else that grabbed our attention over the week. Here are some great articles from the week of February 13th that are worth taking a look at. Enjoy and have a fantastic weekend!

Forget public cloud or private cloud, it's all about hyper-hybrid by Thor Olavsrud

Cloud computing has gone from being a promising technology to a reality that brings a unique set of challenges along with benefits. To fully leverage the disruptive potential of cloud without getting trapped in a web of integration complexity, CIOs and their IT organizations need to focus on what it means to rethink their business as a collection of services.

'Linux for cloud' floats anti-Amazon cloud taster by Gavin Clarke

How does a cloud project solve a problem like Amazon? The once genteel etailer of toasters, books and CDs has now become a byword for "cloud". People just can't stop stuffing more of their data into Amazon's EC2 service. The number of objects held in EC2's S3 storage service grew by nearly 200 per cent in 2011 to 762 billion, compared to 156 per cent growth in the year before.

Dell Crowbar – Delivering DevOps for Open Source Installations by Stephen Spector

In my discussion with DevOps guru John Willis we discussed the importance of automation and repeatability as cornerstones in running a world class datacenter or cloud facility. Many IT organizations, including Dell, are adopting the DevOps guidelines with significant success. In fact, Dell has even created a unique open source project called Crowbar; a modular, open source framework that accelerates multi-node deployments, simplifies maintenance, and streamlines ongoing updates.

Cloudscaling’s New Strategy: Open Cloud infrastructure by Randy Bias

Over the past two years, I’ve talked at length about the emerging success gap between ‘enterprise cloud’ and the AWS model. In the past, I’ve asserted that these two different approaches to cloud service very different kinds of applications: legacy apps vs. greenfield apps. Or more appropriately: enterprise applications vs. cloud-ready applications. Even before this, I argued that private clouds *can* be real, if built in the model of successful public AWS-style clouds.

Red Hat pushes cloud computing interoperability by Daniel Robinson

Red Hat has announced key steps towards more open and interoperable cloud computing with the promotion of its Deltacloud API to a top-level Apache project and an extension of its partnership with Amazon Web Services that enables hybrid cloud operation of Red Hat Enterprise MRG Grid.

Tumblr Architecture - 15 Billion Page Views a Month and Harder to Scale than Twitter by Todd Hoff

Growing at over 30% a month has not been without challenges. Some reliability problems among them. It helps to realize that Tumblr operates at surprisingly huge scales: 500 million page views a day, a peak rate of ~40k requests per second, ~3TB of new data to store a day, all running on 1000+ servers.

Zynga’s hybrid zCloud lets it get rid of two out of every three servers by Dean Takahashi

Social game maker Zynga has shifted 80 percent of  its game traffic to its own private data center servers, known as the zCloud, the company revealed yesterday in its earnings call. But it didn’t mention one of the prime benefits of that shift. For every three servers that it used to have on Amazon Web Services, it can now get away with just one on the zCloud.

Cloud Software Consolidation - Is it all good by Brian Sommer

How do you look at the recent cloud application software acquisitions. Are you a bit skeptical about what these deals mean to you?

How Big Data From Connected Machines Gets Used

by Marshall Kirkpatrick

"Big Data" is a hot topic these days, but there hasn't been a lot of discussion about the specifics of what will most likely be one of the biggest sources of data: newly web-connected devices in the home and workplace.

How big data can tackle commercial building energy by Bennett Fisher

There’s a tremendous opportunity to reduce energy consumption in commercial buildings, which currently account for more than 40 percent of the nation’s total energy use. According to Pike Research, energy efficiency projects could eventually save $40 billion in annual commercial building energy spending each year. However, at present investment rates, only a small part of that value will be captured.

Corporate Espionage in the Cloud Era by Matt Richards

Wow!! That was our reaction when we saw this story about cloud file sync and share that was allegedly used in a case of theft at a law firm. Well, wow and DUH of course this was bound to happen.

Here’s Hopin’ For Open by Hoff

This is NOT going to be a rant about the core definition of “Open,” (that’s for Twitter) nor is this going to be one of those 40 pagers where I deconstruct an entire blog.  It would be fun, easy and rather useful, but I won’t.

And a few more notable pieces...

• End of an era: NASA shuts down its last mainframe by Stephen Shankland
• Seven Leadership Practices for Meeting Mission-Critical Challenges Despite Declining Budgets by ITBusinessEdge.com
• Cloud Infographic: The Evolution Of Web Hosting by CloudTweaks