Amazon Web Services will cut Elastic Block Store prices by as much as 50% and straightforward Storage Service by a regular of 14%, plus add two new M3 virtual servers. Amazon will cut prices on its Elastic Block Store (EBS) by as much as 50% and on its Simple Storage Service (S3) by a standard of 14% beginning Feb. 1. It is also introducing two new M3 server instance types. Amazon Web Services’s cloud evangelist Jeff Barr announced the worth changes in a blog Tuesday. EBS is where an Amazon customer saves a replica of its running system and its data. Without EBS, the customer’s system and knowledge would vanish with out a trace once the virtual machine is shut down. EBS price cuts will vary by region, in line with Barr. For instance, using EBS service for a month in AWS’s most efficient datacenter, US-East, costs 10 cents per GB, but starting Feb. 1 it will become 5 cents per GB monthly. Likewise,... Read More »

John Engates went to the White House Monday to get a better examine what went wrong with HealthCare.gov. Unlike actor Jimmy Stewart’s Mr. Smith, Engates came far from Washington saying this problem may be fixed. Rackspace CTO John Engates went to the White House Monday to get a more in-depth look into what went wrong with HealthCare.gov. What he saw convinced him that giant Government doesn’t operate the way in which enterprises do — and perhaps it’s going to. Engates was among the few technology industry spokespersons to leap forward when the talk over HealthCare.gov broke out. He was quoted, among other places, on front page of USA Today, commenting that the location appeared to not have government repositories that may stay alongside of its needs. Engates doesn’t fit the stereotype of a business-oriented government critic. “i used to be very proud and excited to be invited,” he said in an interview after returning to his home base in San Antonio, Texas. Concurrently, he hasn’t... Read More »

Private clouds are moving rapidly from concept to production as fears about expertise and integration wane, in accordance with our new survey. It’s been 20 months since our last InformationWeek Private Cloud Survey, and boy have things changed. In that point, the proportion of enterprises reporting functional private clouds greater than doubled, from 21% to 47%. What’s equally amazing is that, in April 2012, 30% of survey respondents were only starting cloud projects. A 26-percentage-point increase in shops with functional clouds implies that most of these plans that were at the strategy planning stage two years ago made it into production. We almost never see organizations move so fast on a brand new technology. If private cloud technology ever went through Gartner’s “trough of disillusionment,” it was short-lived. Rather, the celebrities were aligned for strong growth. The OpenStack Foundation was incorporated six months after our 2012 survey, and CloudStack, an open-source private cloud suite that’s been battling it out with Eucalyptus and OpenStack, was released... Read More »

Microsoft lets federal agencies take its newly operational Azure for presidency for a “shakedown cruise.” (Click image for larger view.) Slideshow: Top 20 Government Cloud Service Providers. Microsoft has begun giving a select group of federal customers the likelihood to lay Microsoft’s new government-only cloud service through a sequence of personal tests. “The processes, people, technology, and infrastructure are all in place. We wish real-world test loads,” for a shakedown cruise, said Greg Myers, VP of federal sales, in announcing the scoop Tuesday at Microsoft’s US Public Sector Federal Executive Forum in Washington.  Although Microsoft’s commercial Azure cloud offering has received authority to function under the FedRAMP program for cloud services, the recent government platform — announced last fall and called Azure for presidency — has not yet been certified. [Who’s seeking FedRAMP approval? Check the net portal. Read FedRAMP Cloud Security Approval: Look Who Applied.] The government-only offering is housed in two specially constructed datacenters located within the America and isolated physically and logically... Read More »

Yahoo drops third-party logins, will soon require Yahoo IDs. 10 Famous Facebook Flops (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) If you utilize your Google or Facebook credentials to sign into Yahoo services, you will soon be out of luck: The corporate said it’ll end this process and require everyone to apply a Yahoo ID instead. “Yahoo is consistently engaged on improving the user experience,” a Yahoo spokesperson said in a press release. “This new process, which now asks users to register with a Yahoo username, will let us offer one of the best personalized experience to everyone.” Yahoo will make the change gradually, and has already begun with Yahoo Sports Tourney Pick ‘Em, a service for school basketball fans, just in time for March Madness. Other popular Yahoo services on deck include photo-sharing site Flickr and Fantasy Sports. Yahoo didn’t provide a timetable for when these and its other Web properties would make the switch. [Some Yahoo users got greater than they bargained for.... Read More »