Zenny's Cloud Links #59 - Stack Wars, Merging IaaS+PaaS, Cloud Channel Roles

Every Friday we like to highlight some of our favorite posts on IT Operations, Cloud Computing, DevOps, Virtualization and anything else that grabbed our attention over the week. Here are some great articles from the week of May 28th that are worth taking a look at. Enjoy and have a fantastic weekend!

Revealed: The jobs that will be wiped out by cloud computing By Nick Heath | The Tech Republic

As businesses switch to cloud computing demand for some traditional IT roles will plummet - but new, different jobs will be created instead. Tech industry experts are predicting that demand for certain tech roles will dramatically decline over the next decade as organisations switch to cloud computing.

Microsoft Preps for Public Embrace of Linux By Cade Metz | Wired Enterprise

Yes, Microsoft will soon embrace Linux on its Windows Azure cloud, reaching another milestone in its ongoing efforts to reinvent itself as a friend of open source software… the raw virtual machines offered by Microsoft are not persistent — though there are other means of running long-term applications on Azure.

The Decline of the Public Cloud (and the Rise of the Private Cloud) By Greg Ness | Archimedius

There was consensus from the panel on the rise of the private cloud and the eventual decline of the public cloud (IaaS).  According to one panelist, “the private cloud is cheaper than the public cloud (for many enterprise environments).”  While the public cloud will thrive for SMBs (because it reduces the expense threshold for technology services); private clouds will thrive for IT infrastructures above 500 kW.

Five channel roles in Cloud Computing By Stephen Ennis | Channel Pro

With Gartner predicting Cloud Computing services will become a £95.7bn ($150bn) market by 2014, it’s clear that resellers need to act now to seize a slice of this opportunity. However, it’s not as simple as it sounds as there’s been plenty of confusion surrounding what is reality and what is hype where the Cloud is concerned.

Cloud computing investment 'to hit $1b' By Tuo Yannan | China Daily USA

China spent $286 million on cloud-computing infrastructure last year, and the amount will increase to more than $1 billion in 2016, the research company IDC said on Tuesday.

Amazon lets you barf VMs out of EC2 By Timothy Prickett Morgan | The Register

If you want to be the public cloud of choice, as Amazon Web Services most certainly does, then you need to have a rich set of tools that allows companies to take virtual server instances running inside their data centers and suck them onto the EC2 cloud and link them into S3 or EBS storage.

PaaS Market Will Be Next Cloud Battleground By Darryl K. Taft | eWeek.com

Frost & Sullivan, an IT analysis and consulting firm, predicts that the platform as a service market will be the next area of keen competition for cloud innovators, as the infrastructure- and software-as-a-service spaces have been commoditized.

Building a Private Cloud Lab Environment By Bob Hunt | Slashdot

One question that often comes up when speaking with IT pros: “What are the necessary components (i.e. hardware, software, virtualization, etc.) needed to build a relevant lab environment to test out and evaluate a private cloud architecture for my company?”

The Stack Wars: OpenStack vs. CloudStack By Joe Onisick | Network Computing

The industry is moving up the stack. We're migrating from a focus on Layer 1, physical, to Layer 7, applications. Software is king in the future of IT--applications and services are what matter. Cloud is what we've termed it for now, and when discussing cloud, open and standard are key discussions.

Amazon AWS is the Cloud (for now anyway) By Ofir Nachmani | CloudAve

Every day I talk, write and comment about the “Cloud”. Every time I mention the cloud I try to make sure that I add the name of the relevant cloud operator, “Rackspace Cloud, “MS Cloud” (Azure) or “HP Cloud”. Somehow all of these cloud titles don’t right to me – it seems the only title that really works for me is the “Amazon Cloud”. In this post, I will elaborate about the competition in the IaaS market and I will explain further why I think this is so.

Data Security Concerns in the Cloud By Rahul Banker | SkotGat

Since we are all under constant threats of losing data from our phones, it only makes sense that so many of us have started opting for cloud based consumer services. It itself reduces the headaches of having to constantly depend on a single device to get at our most important information. But data security does not end there, unfortunately.

A few more noteworthy pieces...

• Cloud Migration – The Pain And The Opportunity By Ben Kepes | CloudAve
• Welcome to the DC data center By Katie Fehrenbacher | Gigaom
• Oracle launching cloud computing suite next week By Seattle PI
• IaaS and PaaS Are Merging - Thoughts on CloudFoundry, Microsoft, Amazon By Xath Cruz | CloudTimes