Cloud News: Amazon, EU Cloud, Internap

Here’s a roundup of  some of this week’s headlines from the cloud computing industry:

Amazon Elastic Beanstalk.  Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the Elastic Beanstalk beta, a way to automatically handle the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring. There is no charge for Beanstalk and it is initially meant for those familiar with the Apache Tomcat software stack. Elastic Beanstalk developers retain full control over the AWS resources powering their application and can access the underlying resources at any time. Using the AWS Management Console or an integrated development environment (IDE) such as Eclipse to upload your application Beanstalk deploy your application in minutes  without any infrastructure or resource configuration required.  See this page for AWS service pricing on EC2 instances, S3, SimpleDB or Amazon RDS.

European Union Cloud Report.  The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) has launched a new report on Governmental Cloud Computing.  The report is for senior managers of public bodies and is meant to advise them on risk based decisions regarding security of data, resilience of service and legal compliance on their way to the cloud.  The Agency concludes that private and community clouds appear to be the solutions that best fit the needs of public administrations if they need to achieve the highest level of data governance. "Public cloud offers a very high level of service availability, and is the most cost effective. Yet, currently its adoption should be limited to non-sensitive or non critical applications, in the context of a well-defined cloud adaptation strategy with a clear exit strategy," said Prof. Udo Helmbrecht, Executive Director at ENISA. The full report can be viewed here.

Internap offers cloud storage.  Internap Network Services (INAP) announced the launch of Internap XIPCloud Storage, a new public cloud storage service in its beta stage.  XIPCloud Storage extends the range of outsourced IT services offered by Internap and is complimented with their Performance IP technology for a high-availability solution.  This service is their first using OpenStack and will utilize the OpenStack Object Storage software.  "Internap XIPCloud Storage takes our performance offering to the next level. We can now deliver reliable, scalable storage that can be provisioned in an instant, operating at the speed of business," said Scott Hrastar, senior vice president of technology at Internap. "Our public cloud storage service will leverage the proven benefits of the OpenStack platform combined with our own global footprint and high-performance connectivity."  Information about the beta offering can be found here.