At today’s Meet Windows Azure webcast, Microsoft Corporate Vice President Scott Guthrie expanded significantly on yesterday’s major Windows Azure platform improvements, including persistent virtual machine support – and while the technical details are definitely interesting, the real news is Microsoft’s newfound dedication to eliminating cloud vendor lock-in and platform dependence as it promotes openness and ...

Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) providers AppFog and Apprenda are teaming up with Microsoft to bridge on-premise .NET applications with the Windows Azure cloud platform. It’s all part of Microsoft’s master plan to win the hearts and minds of cloud application developers with an increased friendliness towards open source. But the benefits go beyond language selection. AppFog and ...

Microsoft is spoiling its own party. Even though Microsoft was expected to deliver updates to its increasingly popular Windows Azure cloud platform at a webcast event tomorrow, the wizards at Redmond decided to steal some of Oracle’s thunder by breaking the news early that it’s adding real, honest-to-goodness virtual machine support to the offering,  bringing ...

In a blog post, Tom Moor – co-founder and chief hacker at social media post scheduling app Buffer – describes how his company uses the NoSQL database MongoDB to gain real-time insight into internal analytics without noticably affecting front-end performance…and without MapReduce. While Buffer uses common solutions like Kissmetrics and Google Analytics for many metrics, ...

Google’s never been one to shy away from acquisitions – yesterday, it was social conversational tool Meebo, and today, the search giant’s opening its wallet for an undisclosed sum to snap up Quickoffice, developer of the eponymous mobile productivity suite. Quickoffice, for the uninitiated, provides what’s essentially a version of Microsoft Office for Apple iOS, Google Android ...

Oracle is keeping the acquisition train rolling with the purchase of Collective Intelligence, a social analytics firm that provides similar cloud-based services to Radian6, which Salesforce.com purchased last year. And if you think that’s a coincidence, I have a multi-tenant, highly scalable bridge to sell you. The rivalry between Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Oracle ...

SAP knows that pound-for-pound, it can’t compete with Oracle and IBM in the cloud on its own, and so it’s been using a partnership with Amazon Web Services to great effect rather than build something itself. That strategy expands into the SMB today with the announcement that SAP Business All-in-One is available for Linux and ...

In a talk at the Atlassian Summit 2012 in San Francisco, DevOps Days founder (and current Atlassian contractor) Patrick Debois gave a talk called “DevOps Is A Verb,” giving the best context on the history, position, and role of DevOps I’ve heard to date – while hinting that DevOps is simultaneously game-changing and a passing trend. ...

I stopped by Kontagent Konnect yesterday, the up-and-coming data analytics service provider‘s inaugural user conference. And while most of the event’s content may have focused on Kontagent’s core social/mobile/gaming app verticals, a presentation on the so-called 7 Deadly Sins of Data Science by President and Chief Science Officer Josh Williams had solid advice on common ...

MySQL familiarity or NoSQL scalability seems like a binary choice. But Google’s F1 –  the new relational database management system (RDBMS) underpinning several of Google’s customer-facing, business-critical advertising services – lays claim to combining the best of both worlds. The F1 system is detailed in a paper/presentation entitled “F1 – The Fault-Tolerant Distributed RDBMS Supporting ...