In The Know: Top 5 Must-Read Cloud Stories, April 30

Talkin’ Cloud at the end of each day pulls out five must-read cloud computing stories from the news cycle for its readers to review in the morning. Today’s column features Verizon (VZ), Microsoft (MSFT) and RightScale.

Some of these stories have been gathered from Talkin’ Cloud’s article database, while others have been collected from elsewhere. If we missed something, feel free to leave a comment below. We might just add it into the mix.

Here’s today’s list of must-read cloud computing stories.

ResellerClub Presents HostingCon Europe Returns To Amsterdam. Bringing more than 400 IT professionals from all over the world to Amsterdam isn’t always the easiest thing to do, but Penton’s ResellerClub is up for the task — and this year it’s taking ResellerClub Presents HostingCon Europe back to the Netherlands.

Verizon Announces SDN Architecture. Verizon has announced that its customers soon will be able to reap the rewards of a software-defined networking (SDN) architecture. The telecommunications giant this week said it will launch an SDN architecture “to introduce new operational efficiencies and allow for the enablement of rapid and flexible service delivery to [its] customers.”

Microsoft Extends Big Data Platform On Azure. At the Microsoft Build 2015 conference, Microsoft unfurled a range of elastic database-as-a-service offerings designed to make multiple database implementations be addressable as a single logical entity. Renga Rengarajan, corporate vice president for the Microsoft Data Platform, says the Azure SQL Database elastic database simplifies running applications against hundreds of instances of Microsoft SQL databases running in the Azure cloud.

Top PaaS Offerings Used By CSPs. Which PaaS offerings are Talkin’ Cloud 100 honorees using? Here’s a closer look at the seven PaaS platforms and service providers that were most frequently leveraged by last year’s Talkin’ Cloud 100 companies.

Open Source History: Tracing the Origins of Hacker Culture and the Hacker Ethic. What inspires open source programmers, defines their culture and sets the open source world apart from that of proprietary software development? That’s an important question for understanding what drives the creation of monumental platforms such as Linux, OpenStack and Hadoop. It’s also one that can only be answered through a careful look at the history of what open source leaders have called “hacker culture” and the “hacker ethic.”

BONUS: 2015 TC 100 Survey Now Open. Welcome to the fifth annual Talkin’ Cloud 100 survey. Each year Talkin’ Cloud collects data on cloud services providers (CSPs) in the industry to provide channel partners with a ranking of CSPs dominating today’s market space. TC’s staff uses various metrics —  including annual recurring cloud revenues, seats under management, growth rates and more — to identify and rank the world’s top 100 CSPs.

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