Prakash Advani's Blog

GoGrid CEO John Keagy says if an organization wants to use a true open source database, like MongoDB, Basho’s Riak, Hadoop or Cassandra, Amazon is not the place to go.

“We want to be an open source alternative,” he says. “If you’re not worried about lock-in then use (AWS). If you’re an enterprise that wants to be able to scale indefinitely and have a flexible architecture then you should identify those needs early and embrace an open source architecture.”

Read More: http://www.computerworld.in/news/gogrid-wants-to-be-your-open-source-alternative-to-amazon’s-cloud-databases

Interesting tidbits:

Rubin recounted his first meeting with Samsung’s executives by saying “You and what army are going to go and create this? You have six people. Are you high?’ is basically what they said. They laughed me out of the boardroom. This happened two weeks before Google acquired us.”  Considering that there were actually eight people on the team for Android, it shows that they really did not care for the company at all.

Back to 2005.  Google CEO Larry Page agrees to meet with Rubin and loves the idea.  Google had been looking for an innovation to bring to the mobile industry, and they were afraid that another company, such as Microsoft with their massive resources, would beat them to it.  Page offered to purchase Android for $50 million and some various perks, and the whole original Android team was absorbed into Mountain View at Google HQ, and thus began the story of Android, and how it was not taken by Samsung but rather the innovative Google.

Never underestimate what a 6 people company can do 🙂

Read the complete article: http://www.androidheadlines.com/2014/02/andy-rubin-offered-android-to-samsung-first-and-they-laughed-just-two-weeks-before-google-snapped-android-up.html

The company has been advertising to hire an engineering director who will “lead GoDaddy’s internal infrastructure-as-a-service project by adopting and contributing to OpenStack,” according to an ad posted to LinkedIn and the OpenStack Foundation website.

The ad doesn’t offer much more detail and GoDaddy did not reply to a request for comment so it’s hard to know how extensively it plans to use OpenStack. But adopting OpenStack to run internal operations would be in line with recent comments made by the company’s CIO, who told a publication called Business Cloud News just last week that the company is planning a big internal shift to the cloud and will use open source software to execute this vision.

Read More:  http://www.itworld.com/cloud-computing/401451/godaddy-goes-openstack

PayPal has spoken publicly and regularly about its private OpenStack implementation and recently said that 20 percent of its infrastructure runs on OpenStack.

But it’s only a matter of time before PayPal starts running some of its operations on public clouds, said James Barrese, CTO of PayPal.

“We have a few small apps that aren’t financial related where we’re doing experiments on the public cloud,” he said. “We’re not using it in a way that’s a seamless hybrid because we’re a financial system and have very stringent security requirements.”

Read More: http://www.itworld.com/cloud-computing/400964/private-cloud-poster-child-paypal-experimenting-public-cloud

A friend of mine was looking for a budget phone with a lot of features. While there are bigger brands which are more expensive, I came across Xolo Q3000 which offers similar features at an affordable price.

Here is what I liked about it:

• 5.7″ IPS  full HD display – good if you like big displays
• 1,5 GHz Quad Core Processor
• 2 GB RAM – enough to run many applications
• 4000 mAh  battery – this is almost double than most phones, will give you a charge for days not hours!
• Dual SIM
• 13 MP Camera
• 16 GB built in Memory with MicroSD Slot
• Android 4.2
• Micro USB and USB on-the-go

Although I haven’t used a Xolo myself, I have also heard about some issues with Xolo’s service.

The competitions (namely Micromax and Intex) are about to launch Octo-core processors (8 cores), I don’t know how much better performance you will derive but for now this looks like a good phone.

Intel’s solution for next generation wearable technology is Intel’s Edison. SD card size computer is launched at CES.

Features: 

• Dual-core low-power 22nm 400MHz Intel Quark processor.
• Integrated Wi-Fi
• Bluetooth
• Runs Linux

Other countries should take a leaf from here, and not do the same mistake. Once you select a proprietary technology, you are stuck for life!

Some government decisions haunt the citizens of the country for a long time and the same is happening in South Korea right now. Thanks to a government decision made almost a decade ago, the South Koreans are stuck using Internet Explorer as their primary web browser.

All this goes back to 1990s, when Korea developed its own encryption technology, SEED, to secure e-commerce transactions. Consumers were supplied with a digital certificate, protected by a personal password, for any online transaction in order to prove their identity. For websites to be able to verify these certificates, the technology requires users to install a Microsoft ActiveX plug-in.

Imagine the irony, on one hand South Korea is supposedly one of technologically advanced countries, with the fastest Internet speeds, while on the other the citizens are forced to use a single web browser, and perhaps the worst one at that, when there are so many alternatives available.

Read More: http://gadgets.ndtv.com/internet/news/how-south-korea-became-slave-to-microsoft-internet-explorer-223429

Blueshift is the cool speakers that charges in 5 minutes and plays for 6 hours.

Sam Beck is the guy behind Blueshift, an open source sustainable electronics business that is all about building cool stuff. Helium speakers are the company’s first product to market and will be the world’s the first supercapacitor-powered portable speakers. Not to mention the design files are open source.

In this interview, Sam shares with me his unique business mindset and why he’s not afraid anyone will steal his thunder, even while they might have access to his design.

If we build stuff that’s cool enough, we’ll find a way to make money.

Read More: https://opensource.com/life/13/12/interview-blueshift-sam-beck

You gotta love it when one vendor helpfully announces what another vendor’s plans. That’s what apparently happened Monday when Rackspace Chairman and co-founder Graham Weston was quoted in the Wall Street Journal’s CIO blog  saying that Salesforce.com would start running OpenStack’s open-source cloud technology.

Read More: http://gigaom.com/2013/12/17/salesforce-com-will-adopt-openstack-says-rackspace/

According to a new Gartner report, around $3.9 billion will be spent on cloud services in India from 2013 through 2017, of which $1.7 billion will be spent on software-as-a-service (SaaS). The overall public cloud services market in India is also set to grow 33.6% this year to touch $404 million, an increase of $101 million from the 2012 revenue of $303 million, said the research firm.

Read More: http://www.cxotoday.com/story/india-to-spend-39-billion-on-cloud-services-by-2017/

Rubin began as a robot engineer at lens manufacturer Carl Zeiss and had a brief stint at Apple as a manufacturing engineer before devoting his working hours to developing computers instead. However, robotics remained a hobby, with Rubin both building his own and amassing a collection of robots from Japan. The Android operating system’s name was no accident: Rubin’s coworkers at Apple started calling him “Android” because of his love of robots, and he adopted the name for his own purposes years later.

Now, Google has allowed him to build those robots all day long. “I have a history of making my hobbies into a career,” Rubin told the Times. “This is the world’s greatest job. Being an engineer and a tinkerer, you start thinking about what you would want to build for yourself.”

Read More.

OpenStack, a non-profit organization promoting open source cloud computing software, wants to increase its presence in India.

The organization has formed a three -pronged strategy—launching new products and features, tapping organizations deploying cloud computing, and training the vast channel base of its alliance partners who have a strong presence in the country.

Mark Collier, COO, OpenStack, affirmed, “After the US, India and China are the most important countries for us. We will target the large organizations that are either in the process of deploying, or have a cloud computing strategy in place. And cloud computing requires a lot of business transformation because of the cultural shift and dramatic changes in processes.”

 

Read More: http://www.crn.in/news/software/2013/11/15/openstack-keen-on-indian-market

This was shared by my friend Sudhir Pai, found it very inspiring and thought of sharing:

What’s Most Important In My Life

Put simply, what is most important in my life is cultivating the ability to help people be happy, and to relieve them of the suffering they experience. My No. 1 aspiration in life is to leave each person I interact with at least a little bit better off than I found them.

Sometimes this means taking a lot of time to help someone. Many times it means simply making eye contact and smiling to others as they walk by.

This effort is so important to me because I have become acutely aware of how much pain I feel when I have done things that contribute to the suffering of other people, and how much joy I feel when I help someone to be happy and/or suffer less.

The ability to help people be happy and suffer less is what I call true love, which I think has three essential components: kindness, compassion, and equanimity.

– Matt Tenney

Read More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matt-tenney/most-important-your-life_b_3920338.html

• US Number 1 Country, India Number 2!
• Ubuntu No 1 OS.
• KVM Number 1 Hypervisor.

The administration of the Swiss canton of Bern has decided that, in principle, software developed by or for public administrations should be made freely available. Using open source software helps to reduce the canton’s dependence on software vendors and in the long-term will reduce ICT costs, the Bern administration writes on 23 October. It has accepted a similar motion submitted this summer by six council members.

Read More: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/osor/news/canton-bern-tax-funded-software-must-be-made-open-source

Couldn’t agree more. I wish all the countries should follow a similar strategy.

Nearly 9 of every 10 (89 percent) respondents in India believe that Cloud Computing, or ‘as-a-service’ approach, is relevant to their organization. Nearly 8 of every 10 (79 percent) respondents in India say they currently have a cloud-related initiative in place within the organization, or are planning to implement cloud, or ‘as-a-service’ approach, in the next 12 months, according to 4th annual VMware Cloud Index, a study that was conducted by Forrester Research across 12 Asia Pacific countries. –

See more at: http://www.computerworld.in/news/indian-businesses-seem-to-be-in-love-with-cloud#sthash.1Ly7KKUy.dpuf

Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich announced today that the world’s biggest chip manufacturer will collaborate with open-source hardware platform Arduino. Together, they will work to foster innovation in the “maker” and educational communities.

Krzanich, speaking at the Maker Faire in Rome, Italy, also introduced the Galileo development board that will become the foundation of open source hardware platforms. Intel is donating 50,000 of the Arduino-compatible Intel Galileo boards to more than 1,000 universities worldwide over the next 18 months. The exploding “maker” community is a do-it-yourself technology movement.

Read More: http://venturebeat.com/2013/10/03/intel-teams-up-with-arduino-to-promote-open-source-hardware-community/

Netflix has developed s Asgard, a web interface that lets engineers and developers manage their AWS infrastructure using a GUI rather than a command line.

Netflix Asgard is open source.

Paypal a big user of OpenStack has ported Asgard to OpenStack.

Read More: http://gigaom.com/2013/10/02/paypal-has-rebuilt-netflixs-cloud-management-system-for-openstack/

I have been thinking of why people should put their Disaster Recovery (DR) site in the cloud. This makes perfect sense, here is why.

Typically a DR site cost as much as the primary data centers. This is because organisations need to replicate every component of their data center. Match every server with the same specifications: CPU, memory and storage.

DR is necessary because you need business continuity when disaster strikes.

But you will invest all that in a DR and disaster may never strike. Is DR worth the investment then ?

Solution is to put the DR in the cloud. Advantages are as follows:

• You create exact replica of your setup in the cloud.
• You fire up the DR in the cloud, only when Disaster strikes. Which when there is no disaster you are only paying for the disk space usage.
• You only pay for the full cloud instances when disaster strikes.
• You not only save money but you are also more environment friendly because you are not unnecessarily keeping your servers running.
• The cloud providers also do their own DR, which means you even enhance your redundancy further.

Are you worried about putting your data in the public cloud? Then a few companies can get together and setup their own private cloud DR.

Indian enterprises are already adoption DR in the cloud.

Former Nokia employees have got together to start Newkia, a company which plans to do what Nokia missed — Build an Android phone.

Sounds like a great idea, since Nokia has very good engineers and one of the best hardware, what they lacked was good software.

Read More.