Cloud Computing Company Services

The following are some interesting Cloud Computing companies:

• Zmanda - Cloud Backup.  Backup files to the cloud or backup objects in the cloud.  Uses Open Source such as Amanda (File systems as S3 Objects to Sun Storage) and WebDAV (for MySQL databases) to have a web UI to schedule/manage backups to/from the clouds.
• RightScale - a web-based management/monitoring tool for multiple cloud vendors to provision servers including common server apps  and easily deploy and scale up and down applications.
• GoodData - BI offered for your business hosted in the Cloud.

Sun Open Cloud Platform

The following notes about Sun’s Cloud offerings are taken from CommunityOne East Web Event.

Sun Cloud – First cloud offered by Sun is “Sun’s Public Cloud”.  This cloud for tinkering, for the Open Community, etc.   The cloud is available as Project Kenai.

At the lowest level (IaaS) Sun is offering

1. Compute Service – Virtual Machines, Networking, Storage
2. Storage Service – Storage Objects, WebDAV and S3.  Based on Open Storage (ZFS).  Open Office can save directly to this already under “Save to Cloud”.

To access and provision in their cloud, Sun is offering two methods:

1. Virtual Data Center – a GUI Driven provisioning system to provision Compute Services and Storage Services.  Drag and Drop GUI networking, servers, etc.
2. Open API (Sun Cloud API) – Public  RESTful API under Creative Commons license, open to all, to programmatically provision.  Starts with a single URL and all functionality discoverable under that.  Code libraries in  Java, Python,  Ruby and PHP.

Eucalyptus – Open Source Cloud Computing

Eucalyptus is an open source distribution to deploy your own Cloud Computing environment on whatever servers you might have lying around your basement…    Or if you are an enterprise, you can deploy your own internal cloud computing environment.

Eucalyptus was developed at UC Santa Barbara as part of their high performance computing work.

Eucalyptus currently supports the Amazon AWS APIs and Sun is working with them to add the Sun APIs.  Eucalyptus is/will be available in Ubuntu Jaunty/Jackalope release.

Enomaly sells service and extensions for enterprise customers for cloud computing and uses Eucalyptus as it’s base.

Twitter as a Job Search tool

The following article in BusinessWeek, “Is Twitter the Next Monster? “, is an interesting discussion (especially the comments) about how to mine Twitter for potential jobs.  For example, even just using the standard search capabilities of twitter – i.e. http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23jobs+boston – is something to consider.  There are already people building avenues to mine this for jobs easier, such as:

• http://www.tweetcruit.com/
• http://www.twithire.com/
• http://www.tweetmyjobs.com
• http://blellow.com/jobs

Companies are also setting up there own Twitter accounts, such as AT&T – @attjobs.