Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.

Here’s an open source IaaS platform to set up an on-demand, elastic cloud computing service. It enables utility computing services by allowing cloud service providers to offer self-service compute instances, storage volumes and networking configurations, and to set up a private cloud for internal use.

Apache CloudStack is an open source, multi-tenanted cloud orchestration platform, which is used to build private, public and hybrid IaaS clouds by pooling computing resources. It manages computing, networking and storage resources. CloudStack is hypervisor agnostic; it uses multiple virtualisation platforms such as KVM, vSphere and XenServer. It supports the Amazon Web Services API, apart from its own APIs.

Features and use cases
CloudStack supports Citrix XenServer, VMware vSphere and KVM on Ubuntu or CentOS. It can manage multiple geographically distributed data centres. The CloudStack API gives programmatic access to all managed resources and hence it is easier to create command line tools. Multi-node installation support and load balancing makes it highly available. In addition, MySQL replication is also useful for maintaining high availability.

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Do you know how much apps can drain on your phone? This website will help you find out.

Apps actually come at a greater cost than the price tag on the app store: drains to battery life and data plans, especially from resource-heavy programs, can ultimately be a total money suck. But a new database, assembled by mobile trade group CTIA, helps inform users about the data usage of mobile apps for iOS and Android, according to PC World.

Know My App is a database that archives the amount of data for apps on all platforms, but currently lists just the Top 50 Paid and Free apps. Each app is measured based on pre-defined “average” interactions. For example, Facebook’s data measurement is based on ”3 sessions of the following scenario: Posting 5 Comments, “Liking” 5 posts, viewing one embedded video, viewing 3 embedded photos, scroll through Timeline, 1 Check-In, Uploading 1 photo.” Average usage for Netflix, on the other hand, is defined as “2 sessions of the following scenario: Search for TV show, Watch TV show (for 9 minutes), Add TV show to favorites, pause video, turn on captions, rotate device, adjust volume, rewind/fast forward, view category.”

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CIO — When CIOs live in the IT house on the hill, they live well.

In our 13th annual State of the CIO survey, 25 percent of the 722 CIOs we surveyed report that the IT group is perceived by colleagues as a true business peer–or even a game-changer–that can create and launch new products and open new markets.

These first-class CIOs identify their top activities as driving business innovation, cultivating partnerships and developing business strategy. They control the majority–65 percent–of spending on IT. They have an excellent relationship with the CEO, reporting to him and sitting on the executive committee. They draw on deep bench strength in the IT group and focus on external activities, such as meeting with customers. And like the CEO and the rest of the C-suite, these CIOs enjoy extra pay when the company reaches sales and profit goals. That’s good stuff.

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CIO — In our 13 years of conducting our annual State of the CIO survey, we’ve never seen anything quite like this year’s results. Our profession has become a house divided, with traditional service-provider CIOs on one side and business-focused, digital-strategist CIOs on the other.

“As we plow through this period of digital disruption, where established rules for competing may no longer apply, some CIOs now question what they want for themselves,” Managing Editor Kim S. Nash writes in our cover story (“State of the CIO 2014: The Great Schism”). “The profession is changing fast in an atmosphere where colleagues sometimes look upon a traditional IT group as a hindrance to corporate success.”

Nearly half of the 722 CIOs and IT leaders responding to our global survey say their IT groups are viewed by business colleagues primarily as cost centers or service providers. That’s a deflating statistic to report after so many years of strategic business talk from CIOs everywhere.

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In December, Google announced its launch into the public cloud as a direct assault on Amazon, IBM and Microsoft, betting it can be the systems infrastructure for corporations. Businesses of all kinds will be built on top of such computing power and storage capacity. But how are SaaS (software as a service) and IaaS (infrastructure as a service) vendors (other than the giants) going to be capitalized and financed to enable the next leap in cloud computing?

Relative to the enterprise software sellers of the past, SaaS companies require less upfront dollars to build infrastructure (e.g., servers). By some estimates, the application company of the past required 10x to 100x the capital to realize the same enterprise value. But SaaS companies confront greater working capital challenges. Those challenges come from client acquisition and on-boarding.

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Amazon’s WorkSpaces — ostensibly a Desktop-as-a-Service offering — may end up being a lot more than that. It could bring a whole new class of customers into the Amazon Web Services fold.

On the surface, Amazon’s newly introduced Amazon WorkSpaces is Desktop as a Service. But it may represent a strategy that is actually much deeper than that, and one that could bring whole new customer segments into the Amazon Web Services Marketplace.

Today, in order for enterprise applications to move to the cloud, they have to achieve an “escape velocity” to break free from the company’s data center. Firms often use scorecards to rationalize which applications will escape to the public cloud and which remain in house. Even in firms where the CIO mandates “cloud first” deployment, entrenched corporate culture and fear of cloud often preserves the status quo and hinders a move to the cloud. That is not good news for AWS.

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2014 is being hailed by trends analysts as the year of the hybrid cloud. VMware has emerged as the leader of the hybrid cloud market. Reports from Gartner suggest that in 2015, nearly 70% of big corporations will implement the hybrid cloud in their environment. The move to hybrid is an eventual next step for businesses who have heavily invested in private cloud infrastructure. As large corporations become more comfortable using the public cloud to operate non-mission critical infrastructure, the hybrid cloud model will gain in popularity. Cost savings and efficiency will become the key drivers behind companies wanting to move into this direction.

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Fires. Floods. Power problems. Software updates gone bad. Thermal events. There was a wide range of causes for data center downtime in 2013. The year’s major outages covered the spectrum, affecting clouds, companies, payment networks and governments at the federal, state and local level.

Each incident caused pain for customers and end users, but also offered the opportunity to learn lessons that will make data centers and applications more reliable. Here’s a look at our list of the Top 10 outages of 2013:

1. The Healthcare.gov Disaster: Downtime doesn’t get much more epic than this. The federal government’s online insurance marketplace has become the poster child for an IT project gone wrong. It wasn’t just a matter of a single downtime incident, it was a series of hard outages and an ongoing soft outage in which the site was barely functional. They tried adding more hardware, but it wasn’t until the Obama administration’s “IT surge” addressed software and data bottlenecks that the site became usable in early December. Given the status of the Affordable Care Act as the signature legislation, and the accompanying political scrutiny, the web site’s performance amounted to a perfect storm of the many ways in which key systems can fail. If nothing else, Healthcare.gov transformed web site performance into front page news.

2. Major Outage for BlueHost, HostGator, HostMonster – The year’s most extensive web hosting downtime occurred Aug. 2, when a Utah data center supporting some of the industry’s best known brands suffered extended networking outage. The problems at a Provo, Utah facility operated by Endurance International Group led to downtime for customers of BlueHost, HostGator and HostMonster. Endurance attributed the incident to a hardware failure during routine server maintenance that “quickly cascaded throughout the network.”

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