Weekly Roundup: Major Updates to PaaS including Windows Azure, Stackato and More

Here’s a quick summary of cloud happenings over the last week.

Beginning with the IaaS leader, Amazon has introduced a new High Memory Cluster Eight Extra Large instance for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Which is designed for memory-intensive applications, like in-memory analytics, databases, caching, and scientific computing. One of the new IaaS players, HP Cloud has showcased its Application Workload Migration services. They have presented a live demo on how quickly the Enterprise Applications can be migrated from a traditional data centre to the HP Public Cloud. Also, they have proved the efficiency by migrating a multi-tier web application from a dedicated server to the public cloud in just 12 minutes.

One of the major PaaS players, Windows Azure, has announced the general availability (GA) release of Windows Azure Media Services, which provides extremely scalable, end-to-end media solutions for streaming on-demand video to consumers on any device. There was another release of its new capability Notification Hubs that provides a highly scalable, cross-platform, push notification infrastructure that enables the developer to efficiently route push notification messages to millions of mobile users and devices. In addition, Azure introduced a new functionality SQL Server Native Backup functionality, which simplifies the backup and restore capability of an on-premises SQL Server database to Windows Azure. Furthermore, its final announcement of the week was about offering lots of new add-ons and data services at Windows Azure Store.

Google has released code samples and tools for cloud services such as App Engine and BigQuery on the online repository GitHub. This is the first time that Google has moved away from code.google.com to github.com. Cloud Foundry has provided guidance on deploying and managing real-time applications on Cloud Foundry using common Node.js examples and Redis key-value store capabilities.

Some of the backend providers have also made some new releases. StackMob has released iOS SDK v.1.2.0 that enhances the performance of the SDK as well as a new interface for working with Core Data. This release also includes a caching system for fetching without needing to make network calls. ActiveState has announced about their support for Java 7. The latest Stackato release (2.6.7) includes Java 7 in its list of core runtimes, easily selectable at deploy time.

Cloudera, the Big Data platform provider has released the Cloudera Impala Beta (version 0.4) and Cloudera Manager 4.1.3 with some key enhancements. Hortonworks, another Big Data player has announced the availability of the Hortonworks Sandbox, easy-to-use, flexible and comprehensive learning environment that provides a rapid on-ramp to learn and explore enterprise Apache Hadoop.

More news to follow. Stay tuned!

- Janakiram MSV, Chief Editor, CloudStory.in