Simmer down, Net neutrality doomsayers. We will expect carriers to experiment with traffic impairment, but we are able to also expect them to fail. It was just a matter of time. The simmer surrounding the hyped “death of Net neutrality” escalated to a boil Wednesday when a blogger who works for a cloud startup claimed that Verizon is now using the chance to “wage war against Netflix” and other content providers. The blog writer, David Raphael, claimed that traffic to and from his Amazon Web Services infrastructure was much slower on his Verizon connection than it was on another carrier’s connection. Raphael said he measured performance in numerous other ways, and that through the use of the time honored rule-in/rule-out methodology, established that Verizon was the matter. Raphael said he had a talk with a Verizon customer support rep (he posted a screenshot of that chat on his blog) by which he asked point blank: “Is Verizon now limiting bandwidth to cloud providers like AWS?”... Read More »

Federal agencies are shifting clear of the 2010 Cloud-First mandate and setting foundations for using the cloud for business and mission objectives. It’s been nearly four years because the federal government launched its first public information service, Recovery.gov, within the cloud. The rapid deployment of this highly visible system in a public cloud helped kick-start the vision for the way the cloud could accelerate federal government initiatives. It also brought credibility to former Federal CIO Vivek Kundra’s Cloud-First policy to assist modernize Federal IT. Since then, many agencies, including Department of the Treasury, GSA, and the u. s. Navy, have adopted and operated public cloud-based services. These kind of initiatives have involved the migration of public-facing websites and enterprise email systems to the cloud. However, that’s starting to change. Federal agencies are shifting clear of the 2010 Cloud-First mandate, which directed agencies to adopt cloud computing in some capacity, and getting enthusiastic about using the cloud to support their business and mission objectives. [Some IT... Read More »

Oracle Cloud subscription revenue increases 25% and hardware rebounds, but Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce.com, and Workday threats loom large. Oracle put the correct face on third-quarter gains in cloud computing and hardware sales reported late Tuesday, however the increases weren’t quite enough to maintain pace with fast-growing competitors or Wall Street expectations. Oracle reported total revenues of $9.31 billion for the third quarter ended February 28, up 4% from the prior-year quarter. Profits totaled 68 cents per share. The entire performance was nearly according to the $9.36 billion in revenues and 70 cents-per-share expected by financial analysts, but shares fell in after-hours trading. The most positive news at the quarter was a 25% increase in cloud software subscription revenues and an 8% increase in hardware revenues. It was the primary growth seen in Oracle’s hardware business because it acquired Sun Microsystems nearly four years ago. Oracle executives tied the cloud gains partially to “tripple-digit” Oracle Fusion Cloud growth while the hardware rebound was attributed to a... Read More »

Open source developer adds container certification for Enterprise Linux apps, aims to enhance workload portability and simplicity maintenance burden. Red Hat has announced a service that tests whether Enterprise Linux applications are correctly formatted to run in a containerized form. Linux containers are a favored new mechanism for developers to package and move applications and their middleware. The self-contained units will be run without reconfiguration, so long as the host environment is container aware and container ready. Developers anticipate that they’ll allow workloads to head easily between different cloud services. Containers provide many of the attributes of virtualization, but without the hypervisor. The applying runs in an outlined and isolated space at the server and might run alongside several other containerized applications. As well as lacking a hypervisor, multiple containerized applications share one operating system at the host. With virtual machines, compared, each workload provides its own operating system and wishes a hypervisor to pass the application’s service calls through to the hardware. Containers offer... Read More »

From innovations for athletes to unprecedented surveillance tools for authorities, examine the technologies to be able to shape the Sochi Olympics. The 2014 Winter Olympics, scheduled to start out Feb. 7 in Sochi, Russia, will test both athletes and technology. For the competitors, the character of the contest remains much because it always have been: an extreme physical and mental challenge. However the athletes’ tools could be different, because of ongoing research and new approaches to many of the winter sports on the games. Competitors might be trying to their equipment for a performance edge. Uniforms and other gear were designed and engineered to lessen friction and aerodynamic drag. And efforts to maintain athletes healthy and to fix their injuries are pushing the bounds of medical technology. For Olympic officials, their Russian hosts, security personnel, representatives of media organizations, and individuals attending the games, technology may even shape the development. Sochi 2014 would be the surveillance Olympics. Attendees “will face many of the most invasive... Read More »