The Android mobile powerhouse is cruising to new heights with 100 million activated devices, 4.5 billion applications downloaded from the Android Market, and 450,000 developers building tools for Android phones and tablets, Google said Tuesday as it kicked off the fourth annual Google I/O developers conference.
Thousands of developers will descend upon San Francisco next week to hear the latest pronouncements from Google, with one of the world's hottest technology companies set to discuss the future of <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/110910-google-android-useful-resources-smartphones.html">Android</a>, Chrome, Google Apps and more.
Microsoft and VMware are the enemies of interoperability, and only open source software can prevent cloud lock-in.
Despite concerns that Oracle would be unfriendly to open source projects acquired through the merger with Sun, former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos says the MySQL code base is in fantastic condition.
Apple's iOS, the mobile operating system that powers the iPad and iPhone, has more than doubled its share of the worldwide operating system market over the past 10 months.
VMware's attempt to recover from an outage in its brand-new cloud computing service inadvertently caused a second outage the next day, the company said.
VMware's new Cloud Foundry service - which is still in beta - suffered downtime over the course of two days last week, not long after the more highly publicized outage that hit Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud.
Cloud Foundry, a platform-as-a-service offering for developers to build and host Web applications, was announced April 12 and suffered "service interruptions" on April 25 and April 26.
The first downtime incident was caused by a power outage in the supply for a storage cabinet. Applications remained online but developers weren't able to perform basic tasks, like logging in or creating new applications. The outage lasted nearly 10 hours and was fixed by the afternoon.
But the next day, VMware officials accidentally caused a second outage while developing an early detection plan to prevent the kind of problem that hit the service the previous day.
VMware official Dekel Tankel explained that the April 25 power outage is "something that can and will happen from time to time," and that VMware has to ensure that its software, monitoring systems and operational practices are robust enough to prevent power outages from taking customer systems offline.
With that in mind, VMware began developing "a full operational playbook for early detection, prevention and restoration" the very next day.
"At 8am [April 26] this effort was kicked off with explicit instructions to develop the playbook with a formal review by our operations and engineering team scheduled for noon," Tankel wrote. "This was to be a paper only, hands off the keyboards exercise until the playbook was reviewed. Unfortunately, at 10:15am PDT, one of the operations engineers developing the playbook touched the keyboard. This resulted in a full outage of the network infrastructure sitting in front of Cloud Foundry. This took out all load balancers, routers, and firewalls; caused a partial outage of portions of our internal DNS infrastructure; and resulted in a complete external loss of connectivity to Cloud Foundry."
The second-day outage was the more serious of the two.
"This was our first total outage, which is an event where we need to put up a maintenance page," Tankel continued. "During this outage, all applications and system components continued to run. However, with the front-end network down, we were the only ones that knew that the system was up. By 11:30 a.m. PDT the front end network was fully operational."
VMware's second-day problem illustrated the element of human error in cloud networks, just as the root-cause analysis of Amazon's cloud outage did. In the case of Amazon, a mistake made during a system upgrade led to trouble that took several days to fully correct. (See also: "Amazon: Bad execution during planned upgrade caused outage")
VMware, which is best known for its server virtualization technology, is a new player in offering a publicly available cloud service. Previously, VMware sold technology to help customers and service providers build their own clouds.
Because Cloud Foundry is so new the customer impact was not as severe as the one caused by Amazon, whose outage forced offline numerous websites that rely on Amazon infrastructure. But VMware is getting a taste of what it's like to be a service provider when things go wrong.
It took about a week, but Amazon has fully recovered from its <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/73232">most serious outage</a> in the five-year-history of the Elastic Compute <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2009/ndc3/051809-cloud-faq.html">Cloud</a>, offered an explanation of what went wrong and revealed a new roadmap for preventing future problems.
As Apple prepares a cloud-based music service to complement iTunes, one thing we don't know is what it will be called. But a variety of tech sites are speculating that Apple will go with "iCloud," based on the rumored purchase of the iCloud.com domain name.
As Apple prepares a cloud-based music service to complement iTunes, what it will be called remains a mystery. But a variety of tech sites are speculating that Apple will go with "iCloud," based on the rumored purchase of the iCloud.com domain name.
GigaOm founder Om Malik reports based on an anonymous source that Apple has purchased iCloud.com from the Swedish company Xcerion for $4.5 million.
The Whois domain name lookup service still shows Xcerion as the owner of iCloud.com, but may simply not have been updated yet. Malik reports that Xcerion was willing to part with iCloud.com because it is rebranding its own service to "CloudMe." The Whois database does show that CloudMe.com is now owned by Xcerion.
Directing a Web browser to iCloud.com currently redirects you to the CloudMe site, an online file-sharing service.
Apple is reportedly building a cloud-based music storage service, on the heels of Amazon releasing a music storage and streaming service for Web browsers and Android devices.
Apple may be late to the game, but given the wide user base of iTunes, iPods, iPhones and iPads, a cloud music service from Apple could quickly eclipse the competition.
This is all still just rumor, but "If the speculation is true, and Apple has chosen a name for its new service, then we may be seeing Apple's rumored online music storage service soon," PC World writes. "Perhaps as early as June during the company's annual Worldwide Developers Conference, as current rumors suggest."
If you're looking for biting, absurd and hilarious social commentary, "South Park" should be one of your first stops. The cartoon was quick to jump on Apple's location tracking controversy in an episode Wednesday that portrays Steve Jobs as a megalomaniac seeking control over the entire human race. (Warning: spoiler alerts.)
Microsoft's Windows accounted for 78.6 per cent of worldwide operating system revenue in 2010, up nearly a full percentage point, despite growth in Linux servers and Mac desktops, according to Gartner.
Google is shedding some of the secrecy around its data center practices, with a new video that shows extensive security measures and the destruction of old hard drives to prevent leakage of customer data.
IBM says it will support servers running Microsoft Windows on one of its mainframe platforms by the end of this year.
Rackspace's cloud computing division is offering a load-balancing service to help customers distribute workloads across multiple servers, providing applications with higher availability.
Office 365, the cloud-based versions of Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and other products, became available in a public beta Monday with Microsoft promising general availability later this year. So far, 100,000 organizations have signed up to test Office 365, which will replace and expand upon Microsoft's current cloud-based productivity service, the Business Productivity Online Suite.