AWS ready to rumble for banking! Dutch banking regulator approves use of AWS public cloud in the financial sector.

Everything will end up on Appliances, Clusters or Cloud. The refactoring of everything

First cross-provider IaaS market, great stuff! Deutsche Boerse to launch Cloud Exchange to trade computing power

Time for a reverse takeover. It’s the Data, Stupid. What’s next in Cloud and Apps? IBM, SoftLayer, Joyent, Riak, 10Gen

GCE explained quick and dirty: The Google Cloud Platform Q&A:

While the bulk of the attention at Google I/O last week, at least in terms of keynote airtime, was devoted to improvements to user-facing projects like Android and Chrome, the Cloud team had announcements of their own. Most obviously, the fact that the Google Compute Engine (GCE) had graduated to general availability. Both because it’s Google and because the stakes in the market for cloud services are high, there are many questions being asked concerning Google’s official entrance to the market. To address these, let’s turn to the Q&A.

Plus An Introduction to the Google Cloud Platform from an Insider:

At RightScale Compute last month, Evan Anderson, a technical lead on the Google Compute Engine (GCE) team, gave an introduction to the Google Cloud Platform, the company’s flagship cloud computing offering, and talked about how the RightScale cloud management platform complements GCE’s functionality. Anderson focused on two of the core components of Google Cloud Platform: Compute and Storage. The Compute component includes GCE, which is an IaaS platform, and App Engine, a platform for developing and hosting web applications. The Storage offering includes Cloud Storage and Cloud SQL.

Ignore the RightScale marketing…

Roll Your Own Hardware and The Disruption of the Enterprise Server Market:

In December of 2004, Adam Bosworth wrote a seminal essay entitled “Where have all the good databases gone.

Now it’s time to think about the servers… because the cloud businesses cannot sustain the high margins of Dell, HP, Oracle & Co.

Exclusive: Buyout firms team up to take BMC Software private – sources:

Private equity firms are joining forces in the auction of BMC Software Inc, four people familiar with the matter said on Thursday, making it more likely that the business software maker will be taken private in a deal that will top $6 billion. […] Activist investor Elliott Management argued last year that management was neglecting a huge opportunity to use their large installed base to expand into Internet-based business software, a market then dominated by the likes of Salesforce.com Inc. The world’s largest providers of software for enterprises, including Oracle, SAP and Microsoft, had already begun investing heavily in that market.BMC needed a board with a fresh approach in order to keep up, Elliott argued. The investment firm also pointed out significant scope to trim headcount and create a more efficient business.

What if they combined forces with the private Dell?

If the developers can’t self-service everything they need programmatically through an API, it’s not a private cloud.

IBM Makes a Big Bet on OpenStack In the Cloud:

The open source software for running cloud computing installations just got a big new name in its camp: IBM. Big Blue announced today that all of its cloud services and software will be based on an open cloud architecture.

Do we have a winner yet in the Open Source cloud stack camp?

Cloud’s risks spur ‘notorious nine’ threats for 2013:

The top three threats this year are data breaches, data loss and account hijacking. In 2010, the top three were abuse of cloud services, insecure interfaces and APIs, and malicious insiders. Those three are still on the list but have fallen (7, 4, 6, respectively) in 2013.

All IT threats except #8 Insufficient due diligence!