As we've reported several times, Mirantis, which is well-known to numerous technology titans as a consulting firm that knows its way around the OpenStack cloud computing platform, is gaining prominence in the cloud computing world. Now, Mirantis has open sourced its own library of configuration and deployment tools for OpenStack under an Apache 2.0 license. The library is called Fuel, and should be of interest to many people doing cloud deployments. According to Miranits: "Fuel is the Ultimate Do-it-Yourself Kit for OpenStack. Purpose built to assimilate the hard-won experience of our services team, it contains the...

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 open source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache CloudStack has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles. 

Although the CIA is certainly not going to confirm or deny on the topic, there has been a lot of buzz this week about a report in Federal Computer Weekly that says that the CIA has approached Amazon about building a private cloud infrastructure for it. While there is no confirmation, the idea makes sense. The CIA has contracted with numerous technology companies for private platforms before, and as all things move toward the cloud, the CIA is probably heading there as well. If the report is true, it's more evidence of how much clout the cloud has taken on in a very short period of time. If the CIA is contracting with Amazon for a private cloud, the first thing to consider is that few organizations on the planet care more about information security than the...

Business and IT leaders are bombarded with cloud computing hype and promotion. Yet very little is said about how the cloud affects the evolution of the IT organization itself. Enterprise cloud adoption is a transformative shift where the greatest implementation challenges are often more about people and process than technology integration. Agents of change, especially in large enterprises, must overcome various forms of resistance.