ReadWriteCloud

Microsoft's Azure just got a little more competition from Amazon. The cloud giant announced yesterday that it was adding support for SQL Server to its Relational Database Service (RDS) and added .Net support to the Elastic Beanstalk cloud app deployment and management service.

Ask yourself this: Would you install ReadWriteWeb as an app? You might, if you were convinced that it did something useful for you, and if you didn't have to pay much (or anything) for it. You may already have installed Dropbox, and services like Pinterest and LinkedIn are now smartphone apps. Can you foresee a time when you won't need a browser to do the things you do online? And if so, would you miss it much?

Server-side virtualization is a modern-day fact of life. Today's data centers pool their processing, storage and even network resources to create macrocosmic virtual-machine entities that transcend the boundaries of hardware. We call that "the cloud."

With Windows 8, Microsoft extends its server-class hypervisor platform to the desktop. And no, it's not just a play for enthusiasts and testers: There's a solid reason for Hyper-V to become the backbone of future Windows versions.

If you've wondered why so many companies are eager to control data storage, the answer can be summed up in a simple term: data gravity. Ultimately, where data is determines where the money is. Services and applications are nothing without it.

IDC says that spending for cloud storage will triple by 2015. It had better, because the roster of companies with their hands out for some of those storage dollars keeps growing. The latest contender is Inktank, a service and support company formed by the creators of the Ceph open source storage project.

We've already established that members of Congress are pretty bad at informing the public via their websites. The good news is that you can find a number of excellent sites for keeping an eye on the U.S. government. Not surprisingly, most of these are provided by third parties, rather than the government itself. To help ReadWriteWeb readers as the election season approaches, we've pulled together a list of the best sites for seeing just how the sausage is made. Just remember: What's been seen can't be unseen.

It's hard to pay attention to the business of journalism without hearing about data journalism or data-driven journalism. But despite all the discussion of the topic, there's precious little documentation to guide practicing and future journalists in becoming proficient in it. The Data Journalism Handbook aims to fix that, albeit at a high level.

Last month, Netcraft recorded nearly 677 million websites in its April Web Server Survey. May is a different story, though. This time, Netcraft found a drop of 14 million hostnames, the first decline in nearly two years. Despite the decline, things are still looking very good for the Nginx web server and its continued foothold in the Web's most-used sites.

Google is moving the goalpost significantly in the market for big data tools, at least for organizations that can work with its canned tools and are willing to trust the search giant with their data. After some time in a limited preview, Google has unveiled Google BigQuery for public consumption. Google is giving developers the ability to query up to 100GB of data per month for free, or up to 2TB of data stored without having to contact sales at all, which provides a very low bar for working with big data.

There are two competing approaches to the emerging field of cloud-oriented data management. One is tied to the field of “big data,” and is based on the theory that unique data from disparate sources can be unified through a single repository or warehouse - this is the IBM ideal that is making advances this week at the company's Impact 2012 conference in Las Vegas.

The other may seem just as wild: Every enterprise will have a unique repertoire of data sources, some of which will need to be paired. Informatica’s theory is that IT departments will discover the ways to integrate these disparate data sources on their own, and then once they attain a solution, will be willing to share their discoveries with the rest of the world through a kind of apps store. It’s the basis behind the Informatica Cloud platform, to which ReadWriteWeb introduced you last November (Informatica's Integration Cloud Bridges SAP, Salesforce, Others), and which today took the next critical step: the launch of a Developer Edition of the tool kit Informatica customers will use to create these integration apps.