Last week’s cloud computing news was highlighted — if that’s the right word — by major outages affecting Amazon Web Services on Monday and Tuesday and other snafus with Google App Engine, Dropbox and Tumblr on Friday. Amazon released a post-mortem late Friday attributing its problem to a memory leak. Google said its problems originated when traffic exceeded the capacity its routing capacity. (Cedexis posted its look at the GAE snafu here.)
But there was other news in cloud computing. Here’s a taste.
OpenNebula gets better VMware, KVM support:
Ignacio Llorente, Project Director, Co-Founder and CEO, OpenNebula C12G Labs Structure Europe 2012 JULIADEBOER PHOTOGRAPHY www.juliadeboer.com
The new OpenNebula 3.8.0, released this week, offers deeper integration with VMware ESX and KVM hypervisors which are already used in many OpenNebula clouds. For example, the new release supports VMware’s Virtual Machine File System, both locally or remotely over iSCSI. That’s a big request from existing customers who already run SAN storage exported via iSCSI in production data centers, said Ignacio Llorente, director of OpenNebula via email.
Yottabyte pitches new “cloud OS”
In other cloud news, Bloomfield, MI-based startup Yottabyte emerged from stealth to launch its cloud operating sytem that it said will enable companies to build virtual data centers from commodity server, storage, and networking gear and software.
Yottabyte’s software, which has been in beta for months, competes with Nimbula, which joined the OpenStack consortium at the recent OpenStack Summit.
AWS earnings remain a mystery
For its third quarter, Amazon, the big book reseller and leader in public cloud infrastructure, on Thursday reported a loss of $ 274 million of $ 0.60 per share compared to net income of $ 63 million ($ 0.14 a share) for the year-ago period. The company doesn’t break out how much of its revenue relates to its web services business but Technology Business Research took a stab at it, estimating that AWS revenue grew 65 percent year over year to $ 413 million for the quarter.
TBR analyst Jill Mirandi said these outages could hurt AWS especially as more public cloud options from the OpenStack crowd and others come online. With new enterprise clouds coming online from Verizon, Rackspace, IBM, and HP, Amazon isn’t the only game in town anymore and will see “slower net-new customer adoption in coming quarters.”
She wrote:
Major vendors who run their entire businesses on AWS, such as Netflix, Foursquare, Pinterest and Salesforce.com’s Heroku platform, were affected by the outage in October. If major companies such as these continue to experience outages, they will be tempted to move services onto competing IaaS products.
