Cloud technology is evolving so quickly that it’s near impossible to keep up with all of its developments.\u00a0 We’re not even going to try ourselves.\u00a0 Let’s instead do a brief news summary of some of the biggest recent advances in this field.<\/p>\n
China flies further into the cloud<\/strong><\/p>\n Hewlett-Packard (HP) announced this week<\/a> that they will be building a 7,500 square meter cloud data center facility for Range Technology Development, a Chinese cloud provider.\u00a0 The press release stated that this is a reaction to expanding customer needs, both private and governmental.\u00a0 It further stated that the data center will be designed to fit \u201ccarbon emission reduction plans<\/a>\u201d in the country.<\/p>\n Here’s why this is a very interesting development.\u00a0 While this isn’t the first introduction of the cloud to China, this is a technology that may soon run the risk of running afoul of Great Firewall standards.\u00a0 While crafty users have always found a way around China’s notorious censorship, now, more than ever, the country will need to provide to businesses a more sanction method of getting outside of it in order to remain competitive.<\/p>\n Cloud technologies are becoming increasingly distributed.\u00a0 The trend of advancements in this field is for farmed out bits of the web to become smaller and smaller.\u00a0 This is going to make it all but impossible for state agencies to keep a lid on what kind of data goes in and out.\u00a0 How they will deal with this problem once they realize the breadth of it is an open question.<\/p>\n Cloud9 goes dark but stays on<\/strong><\/p>\n The unexpected state-wide blackout that hit California in early September had one positive benefit: it wound up being an effective test run for how well the cloud would handle disaster-level situations.\u00a0 While the news article detailing how well Cloud9 dealt with it very much reads like a company-written press release, there’s no reason not to believe that it’s accurate.\u00a0 If that’s the case, the answer to this is \u201cblazingly well.\u201d\u00a0 The article states that not a single customer was affected by the outage.<\/p>\n Let us remember that this was the whole point behind the design of the internet in the first place: to make a network so robust that even a nuclear strike couldn’t disable it.\u00a0 In that sense, cloud technology is one of the developments that is looking to further realize this original idea.\u00a0 We could very well be entering an era in which downtime seriously starts to become a thing of the past.<\/p>\n WeVideo introduces cloud-based video editing<\/strong><\/p>\n This is a simple concept, but one that has the potential to seriously take off.\u00a0 WeVideo has launched the first cloud-based collaborative video editing web site.\u00a0 It’s difficult to say for certain from a glance, but it looks like they thought of all of the basics.\u00a0 The site seems easy to use while still containing enough editing options to create high-quality videos.\u00a0 It’s already set to work well with different types of smart phones and tablets, and to make sharing on social networks easy.<\/p>\n Nevertheless it’s the underlying idea that’s exciting.\u00a0 Even for the experienced user, video editing can be hard, laborious work.\u00a0 Using the cloud to allow editing by multiple users seems like the kind of idea whose time has come.\u00a0 We’ll keep a close eye on it and see if it is.<\/p>\n CloudLinux doubles in size<\/strong><\/p>\n CloudLinux Inc. announced recently that its operating system, CloudLinux OS, is now being run on more than 5,000 servers, double the amount of just six months ago.\u00a0 CloudLinux bills its product as the only commercially supported shared hosting Linux OS.\u00a0 It has the notable feature that each user account is put into its own Lightweight Virtual Environment.\u00a0 This allows the administrator to put up safeguards that prevent a single bad user from impacting the entire server, the most common problem on shared hosting servers.\u00a0 In that way it’s much like virtual private servers, and is designed to work with them, but without the level of virtualization that makes it appear like you are the only user on that machine.<\/p>\n With simple shared hosting starting to get squeezed out by all of the other hosting services providing more reliability at not much more cost, this is a development worth watching.\u00a0 If this OS succeeds, expect to see others start to adopt some of CloudLinux’s tricks.<\/p>\n