Next Generation IT by Ian McDonald

Amazon have announced today Elastic Beanstalk. I have been wondering how long until Amazon do PaaS in depth and now they have. As a techie, I like their approach too. You can either leave it just as a service that runs your applications e.g. Java or you can tune each individual component. Amazon are continuing to go up the stack and this is probably enough to convince more people to use them now.

I continue to be impressed by the direction that Rackspace is taking at the moment in regards to the cloud. Today they announced that they are working with Akamai on distributing content through the cloud as reported through The Register here . On paper this seems to jump past the AWS from Amazon and their CloudFront service. CloudFront doesn't push anywhere near as deep into the network as what Akamai do. Of course I'm not going to write off Amazon though as they are innovating very quickly also. The other big (huge??) thing that they are behind is OpenStack . I believe that the project has the ability to really tidy up in cloud management, and as a bonus it is open source. If it's  good enough  for NASA then perhaps it is good enough for others also. They worked with Rackspace to get OpenStack started because of dissatisfaction with open core model on another product (I could start a whole rant on open core here and how some people are using some real deception at th