Top DevOps stories for this week

New OpenStack Activity Board (view)

With the release of the new OpenStack Activity Board, you can view commit, bug fix, and bug assignment activity across OpenStack projects, contributors, and organizations. The tool will be useful to those who are interested in tracking the activity of OpenStack community contributors.

OpenStack Activity Board

Free AWS services and how to make the most of them (view)

A helpful guide that highlights exactly what you do (and don’t) get with Amazon’s free usage tiers, and what you can do with them. Describes what is included with the free tiers for EC2, EBS, S3, and RDS and what some of the limitations are (no dedicated IP, limited Windows support, etc.). Also cautions customers to watch key metrics (esp. I/O, to avoid surprises.

Top 10 women in the Cloud (view)

Provides a concise list of women in key roles related to cloud computing, including:

Vanessa Alvarez, Director Product Marketing, Gridstore
Cara Beston, Partner, PwC, National Cloud Assurance Leader
Margaret Dawson, VP Product Marketing & Cloud Evangelist, HP Cloud Services
Lydia Leong, Vice President of Research, Gartner
Rhonda MacLean, Founder, MacLean Risk Partners
Lori MacVittie, Senior Technology Marketing Manager, F5 Networks
Michelle Munson, Co-Founder & President, Aspera
Becky Swain, Cloud Assurance Director, PwC Risk Assurance Practice
Manjula Talreja, VP Global Cloud Business Development, Cisco
Susan Wu, Founder, Persona Equity

For what it’s worth would have included Teresa Carlson (who runs the Public Sector business for Amazon Web Services) and Lauren States (who is responsible for Cloud Strategy at IBM).

Pingdom launches real user monitoring, move closer to New Relic (view)

Pingdom announced the general availability of its Real User Monitoring (RUM) service, which complements its current service which is based on synthetic transactions rather than those of “real users”. Using the RUM interface, Pingdom customers can quickly identify load time trends, understand how load times differ across locations and browsers, and pinpoint the contributions of underlying components (network, frontend, backend, DNS, render, etc.). It will be interesting to see whether this widely-adopted service collides with New Relic over time.

Making Cloud Computing Pay (view)

A recent Rackspace-commissioned survey highlighted the fact that customers are focused on using the cloud more to drive agility and innovation than reduce cost. While not reported in the editorial, the data also suggests that executives and finance people are less enthusiastic about cloud computing in general versus their counterparts in other departments (esp. marketing):