Around the end of last year, I had a little play around with a new Infrastructure as a Service beta from Brightbox, a UK based Ruby on Rails specialist host. Fast-forward a year, and the Brightbox Cloud is now running as a commercial service with all sorts of useful features like IP addresses you can map to a different server immediately, load balancers, and the ability to easily load your own machine images instead of run off a prebuilt one.

Now they’re actually taken things a step further than Amazon in the field of network security, launching their Cloud Firewall service. This policy driven service lets you control network traffic to and from your servers, and works on both IPv4 and IPv6.

You could definitely do this using iptables running on each Linux host (which is what I’ve done up to now), but bringing this service up to the IaaS management layer is a great step, and makes it much less likely that you’ll end up forgetting 1 host in your deployment, leaving a vulnerable spot in your infrastructure. Plus, who likes managing IPTables anyway?

I don’t know what else Brightbox are working on, but it definitely looks like they are building a cloud service that isn’t willing to play second fiddle to the US giants of Amazon and Rackspace, and are definitely worth keeping an eye on.

With the launch of Google Plus, and the deep integration of Plus with other Google products like the +1 button, and now Google Reader, it’s becoming obvious that Google are changing, and not in a good way.

Google’s mission is to “Organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, but when a user can only share what they’re reading in Reader via other, closed, Google services like Plus, it’s clear that Google’s new strategy is along the lines of “Collect the world’s information, control it’s flow, and track access to it”.

While Google are still on track with the organize part of their mission, I think they’re very far from making it universally accessible when you have to be a Google Plus user to read it.

Simon Wardley has an interesting piece on the potential failure (and bankruptcy) of Apple by 2017, with yesterday’s iPhone launch as a supporting act. I can’t see Apple in chapter 11 by 2017, but last nights iPhone event was definitely very interesting for the negative reactions from spectators.

There was no breakthrough hardware, and all the comparison slides I saw from Apple actually listed existing devices from Android-based competitors saying “Look, we now have a marginal edge” or “We now have parity”, something far away from Apple’s more common dominant position.

Certainly in terms of individual components, the competitors to Apple now have equivalent technology available to them, and it’s just a case of whether companies can package them well enough. The equivalence of technology should surprise no one, given Samsung’s position as a major Apple supplier, along with being the major Android manufacturer. Right now, with the Galaxy S2, Samsung have got a great package, which Apple obviously recognise. Hence the lawsuits between Apple and Samsung – if you can’t beat them with technology, beat them with patents…

The only area Apple still has a differentiator is in the software, and the launch of Siri was definitely a step forward from Apple that nobody else has made yet. But if you don’t think that Google are working on the same things (see Google Voice Search, integrated into most Android phones), then I think you’re being a little naive.

Perhaps the final indicator of Apple’s slide towards mediocrity is the timing of their event – before the Google Nexus Prime launch, rumoured to launch in a couple of weeks with the newest version of Android. A confident, strutting Apple would have delayed their release until within a day or 2 of the Nexus Prime, knowing that the Apple announcement would have stolen most of the coverage of the upstart Android.

Instead, Google now have a disappointed group of people waiting for something interesting, the question now is can they deliver where Apple didn’t?