Five years of Amazon Web Services

By tim, on April 6th, 2011 Follow tim on Twitter

Amazon introduced its Simple Storage Service in March 2006. S3 was not the first of the Amazon Web Services (AWS); they were originally developed for affiliates who needed programmatic access to the Amazon retail store in order to use its data on third-party web sites. That said, there is a profound difference between a

…continue reading Five years of Amazon Web Services

What will it take to get developers to try Windows Azure? Microsoft improves its trial offer

By tim, on February 23rd, 2011 Follow tim on Twitter

Microsoft has announced an improved introductory trial for Windows Azure. You can now get:

750 hours of an Extra Small Compute Instance 25 hours of a Small Compute Instance 500MB storage 10,000 storage transactions 500MB in / 500MB out data transfer 1G Web Edition SQL Azure database

The offer lasts until the end of

…continue reading What will it take to get developers to try Windows Azure? Microsoft improves its trial offer

Using HTML 5 to mitigate locked-down platforms like Apple iOS

By tim, on February 2nd, 2011 Follow tim on Twitter

Apple has created a beautiful mobile platform; but it has some drawbacks. One was highlighted yesterday, when Apple rejected an app from Sony for reading and purchasing digital books on the device.

According to Apple’s Trudy Miller, as quoted in the New York Times:

We are now requiring that if an app offers

…continue reading Using HTML 5 to mitigate locked-down platforms like Apple iOS

How is Windows Azure doing? Few mission critical apps says Microsoft

By tim, on January 25th, 2011 Follow tim on Twitter

I attended an online briefing given by Azure marketing man Prashant Ketkar. He said that Microsoft is planning to migrate its own internal systems to Azure, “causing re-architecture of apps,” and spoke of the high efficiency of the platform. There are thousands of servers being managed by very few people he said – if

…continue reading How is Windows Azure doing? Few mission critical apps says Microsoft

Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk auto-scales your cloud application

By tim, on January 19th, 2011 Follow tim on Twitter

Amazon has announced Elastic Beanstalk, which lets you deploy an application to Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and have it scale up or down, by launching or terminating server instances, according to demand. There is no additional cost for using Elastic Beanstalk; you are charged for the instances you use.

Here is a dialog

…continue reading Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk auto-scales your cloud application

Database.com extends the salesforce.com platform

By tim, on December 8th, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

At Dreamforce today Salesforce.com announced its latest platform venture: Database.com. Salesforce.com is built on an Oracle database with various custom optimizations; and database.com now exposes this as a generic cloud database which can be accessed from a variety of languages – Java, .NET, Ruby and PHP – and accessed from applications running on almost

…continue reading Database.com extends the salesforce.com platform

Now you can rent GPU computing from Amazon

By tim, on November 15th, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

I wrote back in September about why programming the GPU is going mainstream. That’s even more the case today, with Amazon’s announcement of a Cluster GPU instance for the Elastic Compute Cloud. It is also a vote of confidence for NVIDIA’s CUDA architecture. Each Cluster GPU instance has two NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs installed

…continue reading Now you can rent GPU computing from Amazon

Stats that matter: Android grows in mobile, IE stops declining, eBooks take off

By tim, on August 3rd, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

This should be three blog posts; but you’ve read this news elsewhere. Still, I can’t resist a brief comment on three recent trends.

Browsers

The first is that usage of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has levelled off after a long period of decline. Microsoft says it is increasing but the numbers are too small to

…continue reading Stats that matter: Android grows in mobile, IE stops declining, eBooks take off

New Amazon Kindle with WebKit browser and free 3G internet

By tim, on July 29th, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

Never mind the books. Amazon’s new Kindle reader is offering as an “experimental feature” a web browser based on WebKit – the same engine as Apple Safari and Google Chrome – that is free to use over 3G networks:

New WebKit-Based Browser Kindle’s new web browser is based on WebKit to provide a better

…continue reading New Amazon Kindle with WebKit browser and free 3G internet

OpenStack takes on Amazon with open source cloud computing

By tim, on July 19th, 2010 Follow tim on Twitter

Today’s big open source announcement is OpenStack, an open source cloud platform that aims to be an non-proprietary alternative to Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3).

There are nearly 30 companies currently signed up to support OpenStack, including NASA, Citrix, Dell, Intel, AMD and Right Scale, but the big mover

…continue reading OpenStack takes on Amazon with open source cloud computing

Tim Anderson’s ITWriting

Recent Comments

Blogroll

Archives