5 must-read cloud stories for March 24

Coca-Cola takes a sip of software virtualization

Coca-Cola Co. is one of the many companies betting on virtualization to boost security. The Wall Street Journal reports that the soft drink company is experimenting with what it calls software defined perimeter.

Traditionally the network perimeter was defended by firewalls. A software defined perimeter focuses on the “fluid edge” of the network such as mobile devices, the cloud, and Internet-connected objects such as vending machines.

“The perimeter has been dead for years but nobody has really acknowledged it,” according to Alan Boehme, chief enterprise architect, of Coca-Cola.

Read more here

OpenStack and Cloud Foundry based private cloud from HP

Hewlett-Packard wants to help organizations avoid months of designing, developing and deploying by offering a pre-configured, pre-tuned and pre-tested private cloud solution.

The company’s Helion Rack is based on OpenStack and Cloud Foundry technologies integrated with HP server hardware.

HP says Helion Rack provides a complete private cloud, with infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service capabilities that support native cloud applications. Find out more here

Square and Jobber working together

Canadian mobile payment solutions vendor Square Inc. has integrated its platform with cloud-based platform and mobile app company Jobber.

The integration will enable Jobber customers to connect their accounts with Square. This will allow them to collect payments in the field and online rather than having to use a separate system for payment processing and transferring data into Jobber.

More here

Pivotal Cloud Foundry bundles Amazon capacity

In order to boost uptake of the Pivotal Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service, the company is bundling managed Amazon Web Services capacity free with Cloud Foundry subscriptions.

This will simplify the use of Pivotal Cloud Foundry, according to James Watters, Pivotal cloud platform group vice-president.

“…now you just subscribe to the software and you can, if you’re a line-of-business developer and your department or IT has a subscription to the software to use on-prem or on Amazon, you can also immediately start consuming our public cloud for free” he said. Read more here

Tips on making fast Linux installations

One of the basic tenets of the Linux philosophy, according to Linux and open source advocate David Booth, is to “use software leverage.” It’s important to remember to “automate everything.”

In this article, he provides expert guidance on how to carry out fast, repeatable Linux installations.

Find out how