Seemingly every tech vendor seems to have a cloud strategy, with new products and services dubbed “cloud” coming out every week. But who are the real market leaders in this business? Gartner’s IaaS Magic Quadrant: a who’s who of cloud market article shows Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for IaaS. Research firm Gartner’s answer lies in its Magic Quadrant report for the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market.
It is interesting that missing from this quadrant figure are big-name companies that have invested a lot in the cloud, including Microsoft, HP, IBM and Google. The reason is that report only includes providers that had IaaS clouds in general availability as of June 2012 (Microsoft, HP and Google had clouds in beta at the time).
Gartner reinforces what many in the cloud industry believe: Amazon Web Services is the 800-pound gorilla. Gartner has also found one big minus on Amazon Web Services: AWS has a “weak, narrowly defined” service-level agreement (SLA), which requires customers to spread workloads across multiple availability zones. AWS was not the only provider where there was something negative to say on the service-level agreement (SLA) details.
Read the whole Gartner’s IaaS Magic Quadrant: a who’s who of cloud market article to see the Gartner’s view on clould market today.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft Cloud and Devices Momentum Highlights Second Quarter Results — Commercial cloud revenue grows triple-digits for the sixth consecutive quarter, reaching an annualized revenue run rate of $5.5 billion REDMOND, Wash. — January 26, 2015 — Microsoft Corp. today announced revenue …
http://www.microsoft.com/investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Earnings/PressReleaseAndWebcast/FY15/Q2/default.aspx
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s revenue was $ 26.6 billion, which is 8 percent more than the year before. The figure is also higher than analysts expected.
Especially sell well visited cloud services such as Azure and Office 365, with sales more than doubled from a year earlier.
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/kaikki_uutiset/nokia+oli+valopilkku+microsoftin+tuloksessa/a1045261
Tomi Engdahl says:
Touring Microsoft’s cloud data centers
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2015/01/tour-microsofts-cloud-datacenter.html
In the following recent Youtube video, Microsoft explains the global parameters of its cloud data center footprint, and provides a guided tour of several of the companies’ data center facilities. The company emphasizes that its global cloud networking infrastructure is comprised of “more than 100 data centers and 1 million servers, content distribution networks, edge computing nodes, and fiber-optic networks.”
“We deliver the core infrastructure and foundational technologies for Microsoft’s over 200 online businesses including Bing, MSN, Office 365, Xbox Live, Skype, OneDrive and the Windows Azure platform,”
Microsoft Datacenter Tour (long version)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uRR72b_qvc&x-yt-ts=1422327029&x-yt-cl=84838260
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft readies new free version of its Power BI business intelligence service
http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-readies-new-free-version-of-its-power-bi-business-intelligence-service/
Summary:Microsoft is planning to introduce a free version of its Power BI business-intelligence tools/service, and will cut prices on its new, fully featured Pro version.
Microsoft is teeing up a new free version of its Power BI set of business-intelligence tools for managing, visualizing and interacting with data, company officials said on January 27.
When Microsoft hits general availability of its updated Power BI version, which is currently available to test for free, it will introduce a new free version of the service, which it will call plain-old Power BI. It also will continue to offer a more feature-rich version it has christened “Power BI Pro” for $9.99 per user per month — which is 75 percent cheaper than the cost of the existing version of Power BI.
The free Power BI version has a data capacity limit of 1 GB/user; Pro will have a 10 GB/user limit.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jonathan Vanian / Gigaom:
Netflix is revamping its data architecture for streaming movies — Netflix is revamping the computing architecture that processes data for its streaming video service, according to a Netflix blog post that came out on Tuesday. — The Netflix engineering team wanted an architecture
Netflix is revamping its data architecture for streaming movies
https://gigaom.com/2015/01/27/netflix-is-revamping-its-data-architecture-for-streaming-movies/
The Netflix engineering team wanted an architecture that can handle three key areas the video-streaming giant believes greatly affects the user experience: knowing what titles a person has watched; knowing where in a given title did a person stop watching; and knowing what else is being watched on someone’s account, which is helpful for family members who may be sharing one account.
Although Netflix’s current architecture allows the company to handle all of these tasks, and the company built a distributed stateful system (meaning that the system keeps track of all user interaction and video watching and can react to any of those changes on the fly) to handle the activity, Netflix “ended up with a complex solution that was less robust than mature open source technologies” and wants something that’s more scalable.
There’s a viewing service that’s split up into a stateful tier that stores the data for active views in memory; Cassandra is used as the primary data store with the Memcached key-value store built on top for data caching. There’s also a stateless tier that acts as “a fallback mechanism when a stateful node was unreachable.”
This basically means that when an outage occurs, the data stored in the stateless tier can transfer over to the end user, even though that data may not be exactly as up-to-date or as relevant as the data held in the stateful tier.
In regard to caching, the Netflix team apparently finds Memcached helpful for the time being, but is looking for a different technology
Things got a bit more complex from an architecture perspective when Netflix “moved from a single AWS region to running in multiple AWS regions”
For Netflix’s upcoming architecture overhaul, the company is looking at a design that accommodates these three principles: availability over consistency; microservices; and polyglot persistence, which means having multiple data storage technologies to be used for different, specific purposes.
Netflix’s Viewing Data: How We Know Where You Are in House of Cards
http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/01/netflixs-viewing-data-how-we-know-where.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Reg’s virtualisation desk has been waiting for some time for VMware to offer a number of some sort to describe the performance of its vCloud Air cloud efforts. That number finally arrived today in the form of the mention that hybrid cloud and software-as-a-service accounted for five per cent of Q4 revenue, or about $85 million.
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/28/vmware_cracks_us6bn_for_the_year_says_saas_will_slow_growth/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ben Kepes / Forbes:
Amazon to introduce WorkMail, a cloud email and calendar service aimed at Microsoft Exchange’s market, in Q2 2015 — Amazon Changes The Game Again—AWS Introduces WorkMail — Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud computing business unit, continues to surprise industry commentators with both its growth and its incessant innovation.
Amazon Changes The Game Again–AWS Introduces WorkMail
http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkepes/2015/01/28/amazon-changes-the-game-again-aws-introduces-workmail/
Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud computing business unit, continues to surprise industry commentators with both its growth and its incessant innovation. Given that it owns the lion’s share of the public cloud computing market, you’d have thought AWS would be resting on its laurels. Nothing could be further from the truth and today’s announcement of the Amazon WorkMail service is a good example of this. Amazon WorkMail is a secure managed email and calendaring solution – a contemporary solution alongside Google Gmail and Calendar or Microsoft’s exchange products. It’s also a contemporary of Zimbra, an email product once owned by VMware and sold to Telligent – we’ll return to Zimbra a little later.
WorkMail can be seen as an extension of a couple of recent AWS products that have had much more of an “end user” feel than its usual cloud computing solutions. Amazon WorkSpaces, a Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solution and Amazon Zocalo, AWS’ file sharing and synchronization product aimed squarely at competing with Box or Dropbox, are both much more mass market than other AWS products. WorkMail takes these and extends them further.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Buzzword Guide on Cloud Computing
http://www.eeweb.com/news/buzzword-guide-on-cloud-computing
http://www.euautomation.com/assets/pdf/automated/industryguides/cloudcomputing.pdf
Tomi Engdahl says:
Who has the biggest cloud?
Amazon Has Over A Million Customers For Its Cloud Computing Service
http://uk.businessinsider.com/amazon-over-a-million-cloud-customers-2015-1?r=US#ixzz3QaJJjNui
There’s an arms race going on in the business tech world.
Companies are increasingly renting their tech from cloud computing suppliers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure or IBM’s SoftLayer, and not buying and installing it themselves.
And that means that there’s a land grab going on over customers.
Who’s got the biggest cloud? Hard to tell. All the tech companies claim that they’ve got game, using whatever metrics they care to share to prove it.
But Amazon just shared one metric that it’s hard to argue with. It now claims to have over 1 million ACTIVE customers for its cloud
Read more: http://uk.businessinsider.com/amazon-over-a-million-cloud-customers-2015-1?r=US#ixzz3QaJXhR4H
Tomi Engdahl says:
VMware’s hybrid cloud roadmap takes direction with vSphere 6, Nvidia collaboration
http://www.zdnet.com/article/vmware-hybrid-vcloud-update-vrealize/
Summary:VMware touted its OpenStack distribution will enable smaller IT departments with “little or no OpenStack or Linux experience” to deploy an OpenStack cloud within minutes.
Tomi Engdahl says:
F-Secure sells younited-cloud storage service – 60 million trade
F-Secure announces the sale of its cloud storage service-related business Synchronoss Technologies.
The divested business includes F-Secure younited service that offers consumers and businesses a way to securely store and share your photos, movies and other files online. The purchase price is $ 60 million, or about 53 million euros.
The transaction is expected to be completed in February.
F-Secure and Synchronoss are collaborating to sell the personal cloud and security services for mobile operators, broadband operators. Together, the two companies serve the major operators in North and South America as well as Europe, Asia and the Pacific
F-Secure announces that it will focus more closely to the new cloud-based data security and privacy protection services.
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/2015-02-04/F-Secure-hylk%C3%A4%C3%A4-younited-pilvitallennuspalvelunsa—60-miljoonan-kauppa-3215178.html
F-Secure announced that today the sale of its younited cloud storage services to the US Synchronoss.
CEO Christian Fredrikson promises that the change of ownership does not cause any changes in the Finnish data protection – at least in the early stages.
F-Secure service promised to keep the information of Finnish in Finland.
The interesting thing is that Synchronoss challenged by F-Secure in October for patent violations.
Fredrickson, the court does not relate to trade in any way.
According to him, especially American firms patent litigation is going almost constantly. Fredrikson keep the October challenge “as a mere sign of the game.”
“Everything affects everything. Both hit their own chips to the table. We too had our own cards on the table in the negotiations.”
F-Secure was pondering the fate of the cloud storage service for some time, and younitedista had tried to carve a profitable activity for the three co-round form. The revised strategy, the company wanted to focus on data security.
For Synchronoss this was the core, for F-Secure it was a runner.
“Information security is, however, for us it is the greatest thing, it is the company’s soul.”
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/2015-02-04/Jenkkiostaja-haastoi-F-Securen-oikeuteen-%E2%80%93-%E2%80%9DSuomalaisten-tiedot-turvassa—ainakin-alkuvaiheessa%E2%80%9D-3215213.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google shares its plan to nab 80% of Microsoft’s Office business
http://uk.businessinsider.com/google-plan-to-beat-microsoft-office-2015-2?r=US?r=US
Step 1: Make sure that the apps Google offers have “85-90% of the functionality” of Office.
“And in some cases new functionality ahead of the curve. I mean realtime collaboration in Docs”
Step 2: Don’t worry about the remaining 10-15% of the features required by power users, particularly Excel.
Step 3: Support Office documents as a “first-class citizen.”
Step 4 (and this is the brilliant part): Don’t try and convince enterprises to convert from Microsoft Office to Google Apps.
Instead, Google wants them to buy Apps in addition to the Office licenses they already have.
Step 5: Teach them to become power users.
Unlike regular software, which you pay for up front, with cloud software, a software vendor has to continuously keep its customers happy or they’ll end the subscription.
Step 6: Get new customers hooked on products other than Apps.
Step 7: Show them how Google’s cloud helps mobile workers.
“Consumers are mostly on their phones now. I think that will come to work,” he predicts, which is why his team is making sure that Android is “a first-class citizen, secure, manageable, etc.” for companies.
Although Microsoft offers plans for its cloud competitor, Office 365, that start at $8/user/month, the Google Apps fees are far lower than what an enterprise pays for traditional Office, when factoring the costs for computer servers, storage, Windows licenses, and so on.
This is pretty much what PriceWaterhouseCoopers did when it signed a landmark deal with Google to use Apps for 45,000 of its 180,000 people worldwide, and to sell it to their clients.
“I hope it’s more like 80%. And the other way to think about it: People already own their Office licenses. You don’t have to give them up. Let the users choose. Using Google products for sharing or storage, they are just easier,”
More than 5 million businesses use Google Apps, including regulated industries like finance (BBVA), healthcare (Roche), and aerospace/defense (Rockwell Collins), which means Google had to meet their stringent security and reliability standards.
More than 40 million students, teachers, and administrators use Google Apps for Education
Tomi Engdahl says:
File-Sharing Icon RapidShare Shuts Down
http://torrentfreak.com/file-sharing-icon-rapidshare-shuts-150210/
RapidShare, once the most popular file-hosting service in the Internet, has announced that it will shut down next month. The company doesn’t cite a reason for the surprising shutdown, but losing the majority of its users in recent years after the implementation of tough anti-piracy measures is likely to be connected.
Founded in 2002, Swiss-based RapidShare was one of the first and most popular one-click file-hosting services on the Internet.
Like most sites of this nature, RapidShare was frequently used by people to share copyright-infringing material. It was a relationship that got the company into trouble on various occasions.
Hoping to clear up its image the company made tremendous efforts to cooperate with copyright holders and limit copyright infringements.
The anti-piracy measures seemed to work, but as a result RapidShare’s visitor numbers plunged. The dwindling revenues eventually cost most of RapidShare’s employees their jobs.
“Kindly note that RapidShare will stop the active service on March 31st, 2015.”
The demise of RapidShare marks the end of an era. Half a decade ago RapidShare was listed among the 50 most-visited sites on the Internet, with hundreds of millions of page-views per month, but in a just a few weeks it will be gone.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica:
Box’s new Enterprise Key Management gives encryption keys to customers, thwarting third party requests for data
Box hands cloud encryption keys over to its customers
Key management system keeps data safer from intrusion—and government demands.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/02/box-hands-cloud-encryption-keys-over-to-its-customers/
Box has been talking for more than year about letting its customers manage their own encryption keys, allowing them to store data in the cloud while maintaining control over who gets to access it.
This isn’t a straightforward problem to solve, because Box’s whole business is built on making it easier to share data and collaborate. The strictest security controls could eliminate the reason 44,000 companies are paying Box.
Today, Box says it has a new product that gets the job done. Called “Enterprise Key Management (EKM),” the service puts encryption keys inside a customer’s own data center and in a special security module stored in an Amazon data center. The Box service still must access customer’s data in order to enable sharing and collaboration, but EKM makes sure that only happens when the customer wants it to, Box says.
When asked if the service would prevent Box from handing data over to the government, a company spokesperson said, “Unless the customer provides authorization to Box to provide the content that’s asked for, Box is prevented from sharing the content. When customers use Box EKM we are not able to provide decrypted content because we don’t have the encryption keys protecting the customer’s content.”
Box has 48 percent of the Fortune 500 as customers, with millions of individual users, but “there are still some customers that can’t adopt the cloud, super regulated businesses in financial services, some very large energy companies, some major insurance companies, obviously government agencies and departments,” Box cofounder and CEO Aaron Levie told Ars.
EKM relies on a Hardware Security Module (HSM) made by SafeNet, which is placed inside Amazon’s CloudHSM service. Unlike most Amazon cloud services, this one gives each customer dedicated hardware.
CloudHSM “allows you to protect your encryption keys within HSMs designed and validated to government standards for secure key management,” Amazon says. “You can securely generate, store, and manage the cryptographic keys used for data encryption such that they are accessible only by you.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
It’s not the cloud: The problem lies between the chair and the computer – Gartner
Nearly 100% of private clouds ‘fail’ ‘cos people just don’t ‘get it’
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/12/gartner_private_cloud_fail/
Nearly all private clouds customers build are failing – and the biggest problem isn’t the technology, it’s people.
That’s according to analyst Gartner, which reckons 95 per cent of the people it polled reported problems with their private clouds.
The single biggest problem is failure of organisations to change the way they work once they’ve got a cloud running.
That’s according to Thomas Bitten, vice president and distinguished engineer, who surveyed 140 attendees of Gartner’s Data Center Conference in December.
The single biggest trap private cloud-spinners have fallen into is failing to change their operational model.
Technology is one thing, but agile clouds need agile processes – and processes aren’t changing for the more on-demand, service-oriented world of cloud.
“People are your biggest supporters and your biggest roadblocks,” Bitten wrote last week.
The next biggest problem is “doing too little” followed by failure to changing the funding model
Problems Encountered by 95% of Private Clouds
http://blogs.gartner.com/thomas_bittman/2015/02/05/why-are-95-of-private-clouds-failing/
Focusing on the wrong benefits: Internal, bottom-line, or not putting the right metrics in place. (Usually, this is focusing on cost-savings, not agility).
Doing too little: Is this really cloud? Or just virtualization? And what about the stuff running inside the VMs?
Defending I&O — and doing too much: Optimizing for everything means optimizing for nothing.
Failure to change the operational model: Agile clouds need agile processes — and people are your biggest supporters, or your biggest roadblocks.
Failure to change the funding model: When you build a drive-thru service model, you better get paid first.
Using the wrong technologies: What’s tactically right might be strategically wrong.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Datameer rolls out Hadoop-as-a-service for impatient IT bods
Five nodes should tide you over
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/12/datameer_hadoop_as_a_service/
Big-data analytics startup Datameer is rolling out analytics-as-a-service running on Hadoop.
Called Datameer Professional, the service targets potential Hadoop users unable to build their own large-scale Hadoop clusters or unwilling to wait for an enterprise-wide rollout.
Datameer claims a number of big-name customers for its analytics on on-prem Hadoop clusters with thousands of nodes.
The scale is smaller than an enterprise-wide rollout – up to around five nodes, Datameer told The Reg.
The price is lower, too: $50,000, which works out at $400 for 12 months for up to 25 users and five nodes – half the price of Datameer’s enterprise version, priced at $100,000.
Datameer’s Hadoop-as-a-service is delivered via Altiscale in the US and as Altiscale Data Cloud and Bigstep in the EMEA. The latter’s service runs atop Cloudera’s Hadoop.
Matt Schumpert, director of product management, said in a statement that department heads are struggling to access IT data analytics on Hadoop.
“They didn’t want to wait for enterprise-wide deployment, which can take a very long time, and often there’s not the bandwidth or resources to do this,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP reorgs cloud biz as Marten Mickos cedes key responsibilities
https://gigaom.com/2015/02/23/hp-reorgs-cloud-biz-as-marten-mickos-cedes-key-responsibilities/
Marten Mickos, the former Eucalyptus CEO who became HP’s top cloud guy in September when HP bought Eucalyptus, is turning over key responsibilities to three other HP executives, according to an internal email message viewed by Gigaom.
This looks like the HP-ization of Eucalpytus, a company whose claim to fame was offering a private cloud that supported key Amazon Web Services APIs.
Given those roots, it remains unclear just how much HP Helion will carry over that AWS API support. Before buying Eucalyptus, HP said it was pulling that support from its public cloud.
Tomi Engdahl says:
If in doubt, blow $4bn: IBM says it will fatten up on cloud, mobile, Big Data cake by 2018
Ginni eyes $40bn-a-year sales
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/26/ibm_investor_meeting/
IBM is betting billions that it can claw its way back to growth by focusing on what it calls its “strategic imperatives,” including cloud, data analytics, mobility, social networking, and security.
During Big Blue’s annual meeting with financial analysts on Thursday, CFO Martin Schroeter said IBM plans to shift $4bn of spending toward these hot-button areas in 2015.
The goal of the investment, he said, is to grow the segments to $40bn in annual revenue by 2018.
Tomi Engdahl says:
It’s a Mega blast: PayPal drops Dotcom’s Mega
Free storage until alternative payment source found
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/02/paypal_dumps_mega/
PayPal has pulled support for Kim Dotcom’s Mega.
Dotcom claims the decision was made following pressure on Paypal from Visa and Mastercard.
“I like to thank Paypal for backing Mega for such a long time,” Dotcom says in a tweet.
“The pressure from Hollywood and the US Government was simply too much.
Dotcom thanked PayPal for providing a means for some of its 15 million users to buy its premium one-terabyte storage services.
Mega claims US Senator Patrick Leahy pressured PayPal after encountering a report lambasting the cyberlocker as a piracy haven.
Mega says it shared “extensive statistics” with PayPal in an attempt to show it is a legitimate business.
The Digital Citizens Alliance report (pdf) claims the lion’s share of content hosted on cyberlockers including Mega is pirated, based on analysis of 500 files referenced in public hyperlinks. That analysis appears flawed since excludes the unknown portion of the four billion files hosted on Mega servers, such as family photos, which users would not openly share.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Japanese took over 90, 000 square meters of German data centers
Japanese NTT Group to buy Germany’s largest data center company E-shelter for 840 million dollars.
This transaction makes NTT to the third largest data center operator in Europe.
NTT already has data centers in the UK, France, and Spain.
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/2015-03-03/Japanilaiset-valtasivat-90-000-neli%C3%B6metri%C3%A4-saksalaisia-konesaleja-3216619.html
NTT Communications to Acquire 86.7% Stake in e-shelter
Will become EU’s 3rd largest data center operator by leveraging
strong European presence of Germany’s top data center operator
https://www.e-shelter.de/sites/default/files/03-02-2015_e-shelter_ntt_englisch.pdf
Tomi Engdahl says:
Xen bug latest: Cloudpocalypse averted, says Amazon
No mass reboot needed after all, despite latest Xen vulns
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/02/aws_cloud_reboot_averted/
Amazon Web Services now says that despite the recent security vulnerabilities discovered in the Xen hypervisor, the vast majority of its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) customers won’t need to reboot their virtual machine instances after all.
Last week, AWS and Rackspace both said that customers should prepare for a mass reboot of their instances to address as-yet-unrevealed vulnerabilities in the Xen software that underlies both companies’ clouds.
But on Monday, AWS said that its engineers have been working “around-the-clock” to find ways to avoid restarting customers’ VMs, and that as a result of recent fixes, a reboot won’t actually be necessary in most cases.
“We’re happy to share that we’ll now be able to live-update the vast majority of our older hardware for this Xen Security Advisory,” the AWS team said in an update to its original security advisory. “This means that over 99.9 per cent of our total EC2 instances will receive the live-update and avoid a reboot.”
For those 0.1 per cent of instances that still need to be rebooted
Even prior to the latest patches, AWS said that fewer than 10 per cent of customer EC2 instances were affected by the Xen vulnerabilities.
Tomi Engdahl says:
GitLab Acquires Gitorious
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/03/04/002226/gitlab-acquires-gitorious
code repository GitLab has purchased rival service Gitorious. Gitorious users are now able to import their projects into GitLab. They must do so by the end of May, because Gitorious will shut down on June 1st.
Code collaboration platform GitLab acquires rival Gitorious, will shut it down on June 1
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/03/03/gitlab-acquires-rival-gitorious-will-shut-june-1/
Both GitLab and Gitorious are open-source code collaboration platforms based on Git repository management system, same that is used by their more commercialized competitors GitHub and Bitbucket. Users can host their projects using the platform’s servers or download GitLab for free and install it on their own hardware: the company is making money on additional services and support.
“Most people use GitLab on-premises, with more than 100,000 organizations using it we estimate there are millions of on-premise end users,”
As for Gitorious, it currently has a whopping 822,000 registered users with “only a portion” of them being active. Among the bigger projects using Gitorious are Qt, OpenSUSE and XBMC, which will join GitLab’s famous clients that include AT&T, Expedia, Stack Overflow and NASA.
The four employees at Powow, the company behind Gitorious, won’t be joining the team of GitLab
Tomi Engdahl says:
Alibaba Is Expanding Its Cloud Services To The U.S. To Give Amazon New Competition
http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/03/alibaba-us-cloud-services/
Alibaba, the Chinese commerce firm which held the largest IPO in history last year, is bringing its cloud computing services to the U.S. after announcing a data center in Silicon Valley.
The base — the location of which Alibaba isn’t revealing for security reasons — is the first for its Aliyun division outside of China, where it claims 1.4 million cloud services customers. The company has four data centers in China and one in Hong Kong, and it plans to expand that reach into Europe and Southeast Asia before the end of the year.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Microsoft are among the dominant cloud players in the U.S. and Aliyun will offer a number of similar services. That includes a virtual serve, load-balancing for companies running websites, and a data processing and storage cloud. There is also a data security service that guards against DDoS attacks — YunDun — while Aliyun will provide large-scale data storage in the future.
Aliyun has not revealed specific prices at this point, other than that its services will be “cost competitive”. It added that it will initially target Chinese companies with business interests in the U.S., but plans to ramp up its appeal to international companies in the second half of this year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Alibaba Is Now Competing on Amazon’s Home Turf in the Cloud
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/alibaba-us-cloud/
Chinese online shopping giant Alibaba may not be competing with Amazon for Americans’ retail dollars just yet. But it’s now stepping to its US rival in the cloud.
Today, Alibaba announced that its cloud-computing arm, Aliyun, has opened a data center in Silicon Valley. The expansion marks the first overseas foray for the company’s cloud business. Nevertheless, Alibaba’s initial goal appears to be serving the market with which it’s most familiar, though in a different place.
“Now Aliyun hopes to meet the needs of Chinese enterprises in the United States,” Aliyun Vice President Ethan Sicheng Yu said in a statement.
In China, the company says it offers cloud-computing services to more than 1.4 million customers via data centers in Hangzhou, Qingdao, Beijing, Shenzhen and Hong Kong.
The Power of Place
Nationality may seem like an odd factor to consider in the cloud business. Aliyun, like its popular US counterpart, Amazon Web Services, provides an array of online tools that both businesses and independent developers use to build and operate all kinds of software, from web sites to data analysis tools to email services. No matter where they are, at least in theory, these tools allow companies to offer or run all sorts of online services without having to purchase and set up their own hardware tools.
But technology is only part of the picture for businesses migrating huge chunks of their operations and data onto the cloud. The more complex a business, the more complex its computing needs. And those needs are shaped in part by where a business is based. For Alibaba, opening up a data center in Silicon Valley is a no-brainer.
Still, there’s a lot of cloud to go around. Some analysts putting the value of the cloud computing industry at more than $150 billion. In the US, according to a Forbes survey, 75 percent of companies said they used some form of on-demand online computing to operate their businesses. Amazon laid the groundwork with AWS a decade ago, but now it faces competition from Google, Microsoft and others. Alibaba now becomes the next name on that list.
One survey suggested AWS could touch as much as one percent of all internet traffic in North America.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Using Google Cloud Pub/Sub to Connect Applications and Data Streams
http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.fi/2015/03/using-Google-Cloud-pubsub-to-Connect-applications-and-data-streams.html
Many applications need to talk to other varied, and often, distributed systems reliably and in real-time. To make sure things aren’t lost in translation, you need a flexible communication model to get messages between multiple systems simultaneously.
That’s why we’re making the beta release of Google Cloud Pub/Sub available today, as a way to connect applications and services, whether they’re hosted on Google Cloud Platform or on-premises. The Google Cloud Pub/Sub API provides:
Scale: offering all customers, by default, up to 10,000 topics and 10,000 messages per second
Global deployment: dedicated resources in every Google Cloud Platform region enhance availability without increasing latency
Performance: sub-second notification even when tested at over 1 million messages per second
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft fluffs Azure cloud with search, data storage, faster compute
Cloud wars rage on as new offerings hit general availability
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/06/azure_search_documentdb_and_new_compute_instances/
Microsoft is rolling out multiple upgrades to its Azure cloud, including new search and data-storage services and cheaper compute-oriented virtual machine instances.
The two new services, Azure Search and DocumentDB, have been available as previews since August but are now making their way into general availability.
Azure Search is what it sounds like: a search-as-a-service feature that lets web devs easily add sophisticated searches of a variety of data to their sites.
The general-availability version of the service, which launched on Thursday, adds a number of previously unavailable features, including updated APIs, support for more languages, a new .Net SDK for use with Visual Studio, and new indexers that can import data from Azure SQL Database, SQL Server running in Azure virtual machine instances, and Azure DocumentDB.
About that last one. DocumentDB is a bit of a departure for Microsoft, in that it’s a schema-free NoSQL database service that Redmond says is designed to enable “new scenarios” on Azure – meaning quick-and-dirty storage for mobile and web apps.
DocumentDB doesn’t hit general availability until April 8, but when it does, Microsoft will be introducing “performance levels” for the service: the more performance you need, the more it will cost.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AWS Activate:
Startups, AWS Activate provides you with free Amazon Web Services training, virtual office hours, products and services. — The AWS Activate program gets your ideas and your business powered-up with AWS. Sign up today!
http://aws.amazon.com/activate/?sc_channel=BA&sc_campaign=awsactivateregistration_US&sc_publisher=techmeme&sc_medium=sponsored_post&sc_detail=activate_blog_position_5_headline&sc_category=activate&sc_country=US&trkcampaign=AWS_Activate_Self-Starter&trk=activate_sp_techmeme_position_5
Amazon Web Services provides startups with low cost, easy to use infrastructure needed to scale and grow any size business. Some of the world’s hottest startups, including Pinterest and Dropbox, have leveraged the power of AWS to easily get started and quickly scale.
AWS Activate is a program designed to provide startups with the resources needed to get started on AWS. Join some of the fastest-growing startups in the world and build your business using AWS.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rohit Khare / Google Cloud Platform Blog:
Google releases beta version of Cloud Pub/Sub, a messaging API for connecting applications and services in real-time
http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2015/03/using-Google-Cloud-pubsub-to-Connect-applications-and-data-streams.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google promises proper patch preparation after new cloud outage
Network egress issues hit Google Compute Engine for the second time in three weeks
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/09/google_promises_proper_patch_preparation_after_second_cloud_outage/
Google Compute Engine (GCE) users experienced a brownout over the weekend, after an incident that bears plenty of likeness to a worse outage that took down the service in February.
The February FAIL came about when “The internal software system which programs GCE’s virtual network for VM egress traffic stopped issuing updated routing information.”
This new outage, which started at 9:55 AM Saturday March 7th, Pacific Standard Time, was caused by “packet loss on egress network traffic” and meant users experienced symptoms ranging from “… no visible impact, to unusually slow responses, to timeouts attempting to contact the VM.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The software company is expanding around the world: “This is how German customers differ from the Finnish”
“Internationalisation is the most demanding sales and marketing. Even if we sell the software as a cloud service, few buy it online without any human contact. And the online ostaneistakin most of the purchasing decisions are made because someone contact is suggested solutions, “says CEO Olli LeadDeskin Nokso-Koivisto.
Lead Desk provides a cloud-based call center software, which are handled out and log calls and e-mails and web chats treatment.
“The customer wants one of the throat, which can strangle in the event that something goes wrong with the software,” he says.
Confidence in his view, be easily, without a local presence and service in your own language.
“When you sell software provided to companies, so can not be stressed too much local presence information and knowledge. Must have a local presence,
Germany is different than in Finland. German customer asks a lot of additional material before the first meeting has been agreed.
“Elsewhere, this could be a signal that the meeting does not occur. In Germany, the situation is different. The Germans read the received materials carefully; each and every page is read, and make it a really detailed questions, “he compares.
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/2015-03-10/Ohjelmistoyhti%C3%B6-laajentaa-maailmalla-N%C3%A4in-saksalaiset-asiakkaat-eroavat-suomalaisista-3217107.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Telstra operates at least four clouds, says you use too many clouds
Corporate ‘research’ is a fine thing because it always proves the commissioner is right
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/11/telstra_operates_at_least_four_clouds_says_you_use_too_many_clouds/
Telstra Global Services is the billion-a-year enterprise services arm of Australia’s dominant carrier, Telstra.
This turns into a press release proclaiming “Three’s A Crowd: Businesses working with too many cloud providers”.
Which sounds Very Important, until one lets reality intrude in three ways.
For starters, different clouds offer different qualities and many businesses will therefore find entirely sensible reasons for consuming services from multiple providers. The Reg regularly notices the same reference customers popping up at cloud gabfests: News Limited has put its name to case studies by Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, and has also gone on the record as a Google apps user. Plenty of other organisations will also be using multiple clouds for multiple reasons. It’s not hard to guess at their logic: some clouds are stronger in some areas than others; some offer features others can’t deliver; some may be present in useful and low-latency locations that others are not; and, working with multiple cloud providers could be a disaster recovery and/or resiliency strategy.
The second reality is Telstra’s own, because it offers at least four clouds of which The Reg is aware. The company is an enthusiastic operator of hosted Microsoft Exchange, will soon become the Australian arm of VMware’s vCloud Air, operates its own cloud (based in part on Cisco products) and is also known to offer servers-as-a-service powered by Parallels. It’s not clear if Telstra offers unified account management across all of those offerings.
Thirdly, surely what’s good for the goose is good for Telstra? If one cloud from one source is the right way to go, why the multiple products?
Even with Telstra’s overlaps out of the picture, arguing that one cloud fits all remains an easily-contestible and shallow argument.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Launches Cloud Storage Nearline, A Low-Cost Storage Service For Cold Data
http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/11/google-launches-cloud-storage-nearline-a-low-cost-storage-service-for-cold-data/
Google is launching a new cloud storage service today that has the potential to change how many companies, ranging from startups to enterprises, view online storage. With Google Cloud Storage Nearline, businesses can store the data they or their customers don’t frequently need to access (think backups, log files or older photos), for $0.01 per gigabyte at rest.
Cold storage isn’t a new concept. Unlike other cold storage services like Amazon’s Glacier, where it can take hours before your data is available again once it has been put on ice, Google promises to make your data in Nearline available again in about 3 seconds.
As Google director of product management for the Cloud Platform team Tom Kershaw told me earlier this week, he believes that the gap between the cost of online and offline storage has to decrease.
Online storage has always been relatively expensive, but if you run a large email service, for example, your customers expect to be able to search through all of their messages immediately. You can’t just put older messages into offline storage and then tell your users to come back in an hour once their batch job has finished.
With Nearline, Google wants to blur the line between standard online storage and cold storage so businesses don’t have to delete their data anymore or move their files to cold storage.
“We wanted to create a product that made it economical to never throw anything away,” Kershaw told me. “Google is pretty good at storing things, but every organization should be able to keep its data around.”
Google expects that many of its early customers will use the service primarily to store photos, videos and documents. Many companies pay a lot to keep these online, just in case a user ever needs them.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cisco, Microsoft target cloud vendors in expanded partnership
http://www.zdnet.com/article/cisco-microsoft-target-cloud-vendors-in-expanded-partnership/
Summary:The companies launched a new platform that combines the Microsoft Azure Pack with networking devices and servers from Cisco’s ACI.
The combined technology platform, officially named the Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud, will enable other cloud providers to reduce costs and simplify operations, according to the two companies. It combines the Microsoft Azure Pack with networking devices and servers from Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI).
The benefit of the combination, the companies said, is that it allows cloud vendors to deliver services like big data and disaster recovery at DevOps speed, while also shifting the focus away from systems integration.
Tomi Engdahl says:
On-prem storage peeps. Come here. It’s time for real talk. About Google
Wobbly web giant uses Veritas as another onramp
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/13/veritas_jumps_on_google_nearline_train/
Veritas, Symantec’s renamed and soon to be spun off storage biz, announced it’s supporting Google’s nearline cloud storage.
Its Veritas NetBackup 7.7, now in beta with general availability planned for the summer, can back up data to Google Cloud Storage Nearline. Here’s Veritas supporting cloud disks as an archival target alternative to tape.
It says its product, through its OST layer, can “monitor and manage all backup information, regardless of location – disk, tape or cloud.” It will manage when and how data is moved from on-premises disk to Goog’s cloud, saying “the hybrid cloud model is the new norm inside of the enterprise.”
Let’s put forward an extreme view: look people, don’t you realise? Google has absolutely no interest in the hybrid cloud. It has no skin in that game. You do. One way or another, every enterprise data storage systems and service provider has skin in the hybrid cloud/enterprise data centre and end-point storage game. Google does not. It is public cloud through and through.
Amazon is, too. Azure is Microsoft’s skin in the public cloud game. Redmond knew what it had to do to stay at the top table.
Public cloud service providers (CSPs) are modern-day Hoovers and Dysons, sucking up data and applications, and leaving nothing in their place but empty spaces and trashed on-premises-dependent business dreams.
Just as soon as high-speed data networks to the cloud get built and become affordable, and the CSPs adopt proper SLA religion, all on-premises data storage system businesses will look like dodos. They’re going to be as dead as on-premises power generation, as buggy whips, as any other abandoned tech when a new technology or business model overwhelmed it.
The public cloud is the biggest threat facing on-premises data storage.
Nah, nah, too extreme. Never gonna happen. Business doesn’t trust the cloud that much. Get real. The cloud is insecure, unreliable, costs too much in the long run. Talking out the back of your silly ignorant head. What do you know, mere scribe?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Blair Hanley Frank / GeekWire:
Adobe unveils Document Cloud service with electronic signature support, launching April, to cost up to $15/month
Adobe takes another swing at DocuSign with new Document Cloud
http://www.geekwire.com/2015/adobe-takes-another-swing-at-docusign-with-new-document-cloud/
Adobe’s work productivity business is getting a subscription overhaul with the announcement today of the company’s new Document Cloud. Much like the Creative Cloud and Marketing Cloud before it, the Document Cloud offerings are designed to give professionals a suite of tools for handling documents at the price of a single monthly subscription.
Unsurprisingly, it’s based around Acrobat, Adobe’s software for authoring and editing PDFs. The cloud will give users a single document-storage location that syncs between their computers and mobile devices. Adobe has also redesigned Acrobat from the ground up with an emphasis on touch-friendliness (for Windows tablet users), adding the ability to convert photos into PDFs and then edit them, and making it easier for users to access key tools within the app.
Much like the company’s Creative Cloud push last year, Adobe is also launching a set of apps for iOS and Android that extend the reach of the Document Cloud to mobile devices. That push is spearheaded by Adobe’s new Fill and Sign app, a free app that will let people snap a photo with their device’s camera, and get that translated into a document that they can then fill in with text and a digital signature before sending it off again.
People who want to do heavy-duty document editing can use the new Acrobat Mobile app, which brings many of the desktop app’s capabilities to the iPad and Android tablets.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Convenience trumps ‘open’ in clouds and data centers
Sorry OpenStack and Open Compute, we’re not all Facebook
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/17/openstack_open_compute_vs_proprietary/
Call it OpenStack. Call it Open Compute. Call it OpenAnything-you-want, but the reality is that the dominant cloud today is Amazon Web Services, with Microsoft Azure an increasingly potent runner-up.
Both decidedly closed.
Not that cloud-hungry companies care. While OpenStack parades a banner of “no lock in!” and Open Compute lets enterprises roll-their-own data centres, what enterprises really want is convenience, and public clouds offer that in spades. That’s driving Amazon Web Services to a reported $50bn valuation, and calling into question private cloud efforts.
For those enterprises looking to go cloud – but not too cloudy – OpenStack feels like a safe bet. It has a vibrant and growing community, lots of media hype, and brand names like HP and Red Hat backing it with considerable engineering resources.
No wonder it’s regularly voted the top open-source cloud.
The problem, however, is that “open” isn’t necessarily what people want from a cloud.
While there are indications that OpenStack is catching on (see this Red Hat-sponsored report from IDG), there are far clearer signs that OpenStack remains a mass of conflicting community-sponsored sub-projects that make the community darling far too complex.
As one would-be OpenStack user, David Laube, head of infrastructure at Packet, describes:
Over the course of a month, what became obvious was that a huge amount of the documentation I was consuming was either outdated or fully inaccurate.
This forced me to sift through an ever greater library of documents, wiki articles, irc logs and commit messages to find the ‘source of truth’.
After the basics, I needed significant python debug time just to prove various conflicting assertions of feature capability, for example ‘should X work?’. It was slow going.
While Laube remains committed to OpenStack, he still laments that “the amount of resources it was taking to understand and keep pace with each project was daunting”.
Open Compute may not compute
Nor is life much better over in Open Compute Land. While the Facebook project (which aims to open source Facebook’s datacentre designs) has the promise to create a world filled with hyper-efficient data centres, the reality is that most enterprises simply aren’t in a position to follow Facebook’s lead.
Back in 2012, Bechtel IT exec Christian Reilly lambasted Open Compute, declaring that: “Look how many enterprises have jumped on Open Compute. Oh, yes, none. That would be correct.”
While that’s not true – companies such as Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Fidelity have climbed aboard the Open Compute bandwagon – it’s still the case that few companies are in a position to capitalize on Facebook’s open designs.
This may change, of course. Companies such as HP are piling into the Open Compute community to make it easier, with HP building a new server line based on Open Compute designs, as but one example.
The new and the old
One of the biggest problems with the private cloud is the nature of the workloads enterprises are tempted to run within it.
As Bittman writes in separate research, while VMs running in private clouds have increased three-fold in the past few years, even as the overall number of VMs has tripled, the number of active VMs running in public clouds has expanded by a factor of 20.
This means that: “Public cloud IaaS now accounts for about 20 per cent of all VMs – and there are now roughly six times more active VMs in the public cloud than in on-premises private clouds.”
While a bit dated (2012), Forrester’s findings remain just as true today:
Asking IT to set up a hyper-efficient Facebook-like data centre isn’t the “fastest way to get [things] done”. Ditto cobbling together a homegrown OpenStack solution. In fact, private cloud is rarely going to be the right way to move fast.
Sure, there are other reasons, but the cloud that wins will be the cloud that is most convenient. Unless something drastic changes, that means public cloud will emerge triumphant.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Adobe sees solid Q1 with $1.11B in revenue, 517K new paying Creative Cloud subscribers
http://venturebeat.com/2015/03/17/adobe-sees-solid-q1-with-1-11b-in-revenue-just-517k-new-paying-creative-cloud-subscribers/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Optimizing Collaboration: Don’t Get Lost in the Cloud
http://services.ricoh.com/knowledge-center/blog/optimizing-collaboration-dont-get-lost-in-the-cloud/?utm_campaign=ContentSyndication&utm_medium=NativeAd&utm_source=Taboola&utm_content=&utm_term=optimizing+collaboration&utm_content=eslmedia-theindependent
Cloud infrastructure and applications have a number of potential business benefits, but one of the areas of greatest potential is their ability to revolutionize business collaboration. In a global survey of 532 business executives from a wide range of industries, 55 percent felt that “cloud-based solutions are no mere evolution, but rather represent a true revolution in collaborative effectiveness.”1
Better collaboration can increase productivity, get you closer to customers, make your products more innovative and your business more competitive, and help you attract and retain top talent. Clearly a fundamental component of growing your business, improved collaboration and cloud-based tools — from simple file-sharing to virtual meeting applications — have tremendous potential to extend your reach and foster productive connection.
But with so many opportunities to use cloud-based applications to improve collaboration in your business, where do you get started?
Collaboration Starts From Within
Reassessing and redesigning information processes is fundamental to creating a more successfully collaborative workspace, whether you’re employing a cloud-based application or not. Technology alone is not a solution, and focusing your efforts here alone is a surefire recipe for your collaboration goals to end up lost in the cloud. Instead, the key to improved workforce collaboration are in the underlying processes that enable your iWorkers to access more comprehensive, accurate and timely information.
Employee Disconnect
In a Forrester study commissioned by Ricoh, by a factor of more than 2 to 1 over their managers, customer-facing workers felt constrained by “older systems” that sometimes forced customers to communicate with the company in ways they didn’t want to. On the other hand, by a factor of nearly 3 to 1, managers thought their customer-facing workers communicated well with customers through both old and new channels. That’s a huge disconnect, and it’s hurting your business relationship with your customers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Guest post: Delivering on the true promise of hybrid cloud
http://vmwareemeablog.com/uk/guest-post-delivering-on-the-true-promise-of-hybrid-cloud/
Hybrid has been a hot topic for quite a few years now. Its functionality, architectural flexibility and superior security benefits when supporting workloads, data and applications have been championed as a way of transforming the enterprise IT environment and making the most of public and private clouds. Yet, it seems there is still work to be done if we want to deliver the true promise of hybrid cloud.
IT departments are struggling to keep pace with the demands from the wider business. They need to find a solution that makes the underlying IT infrastructure as agile and responsive as possible… as was the promise of hybrid. However, while we’ve seen some fantastic examples of businesses running critical workloads in a hybrid environment, many of these have been siloed deployments grounded in the realisation that hybrid has meant simply running public and private clouds together, with little or no compatibility between them. Applications need rewriting or plug-ins to move between the different clouds, and totally different tools (and often skills) are required to run them..
This isn’t what hybrid is about at all.
True hybrid has the power to completely transform the IT landscape over the next couple of years.
True hybrid creates an environment where workloads can be shifted about at will, using exactly the same tools IT teams are already familiar with. Critical applications can deliver the performance they need, while resources can be allocated and provisioned where required. This makes IT more responsive to businesses requests through the ability to instantly provision new infrastructure to cope with new projects, set up virtual servers to handle a new system across departments such as HR and marketing and more. And, of course, scale back just as easily when needed, given one of the key reasons hybrid hasn’t yet gained enough traction is the difficult – often impossibility – of taking workloads back out of the public cloud.
One of the most important concerns around any changes in IT environment is security; especially post NSA this sits high on CxOs’ priority lists. A true hybrid deployment can leverage existing IT policies to meet security, compliance, and control requirements.
Provisioning new infrastructure has become a much simpler process – if it needs to spin up any additional IT resource, it can do this immediately, at the push of a button, rather than needing to purchase, and then get the licensing for, physical servers, which could take a couple of days.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google drops a log into its cloud. A log analyser, that is
Chocolate Factory is catching up with cloudy confrères
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/20/google_drops_a_log_into_its_cloud_a_log_analyser_that_is/
Google’s decided its Compute Engine and App Engine users need to know if their cloudy rigs are full of … bugs, by dropping a log (analyser) into the cloud.
The new Google Cloud Logging beta collects Compute Engine and App Engine logs and lets users perform the following tricks:
Ingest and view the log data, so that you can see all your logs in one place
Search the log data in real-time, so that you can resolve operational issues
Analyze the log data in real-time, so that you can glean actionable insights
Archive logs data for longer periods, to meet backup and compliance requirements
Cloud Logging is free, but as usual in the cloud it also introduces the chance for users to pay for more stuff. In this case, Google says you’ll pay to store your logs in its cloud and if you chose to use BigQuery to analyse the logs there’ll be a bill for that too.
Google’s a bit behind on logging aggregation and analysis. AWS’ CloudTrail has been around for a while now and there are also numerous third party tools to do the job. Azure’s Event Hubs and other features, plus third-party tools, mean Microsoft is in the market too.
Tomi Engdahl says:
CLOUD-to-CLOUD backup: A chasm-Spanning leap
It’s gonna boom as public cloud use for apps grows
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/23/cloud_to_cloud_backup_a_chasm_crossing_leap_to_safety/
Cloud storage company Spanning’s story is simple enough; you back up your apps and on-premises data, don’t you? (everyone say “yes”…) You should back up your public cloud apps and their in-cloud data, shouldn’t you? (let me hear you say “yeah!”) Your existing backup software won’t work there, will it? (everyone look down and quietly say “no”). Ours will, and it runs in the cloud, too.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Feds release public analytics dashboard for .gov websites
http://fedscoop.com/federal-government-releases-public-analytics-dashboard-for-government-websites
Call it Google Analytics for the U.S. government: An open-source dashboard that allows the public to track and examine data traffic data from government websites.
Anyone in the world can now see how many people are visiting U.S. government websites.
Hosted at analytics.usa.gov, the Digital Analytics Dashboard will show how many people are using federal government websites, what websites are getting the most traffic over a select period of time and the ability to download data sets for deeper examination.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Backing up cloud applications is never easy but Asigra gets it done
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/23/review_asigra_saas_backup/
As the recent Code Spaces debacle has taught us, just because you use cloud computing doesn’t mean you can’t properly engineer your IT design.
A huge part of that is having proper backups that are set up on separate providers with different administrative credentials. Asigra is a data protection company that claims it can accomplish this so I have been investigating its offerings.
Asigra hails from Toronto and has been around since 1986, which makes it a firmly established player in an overcrowded market. Despite this it is probably not the first data protection company many storage guys think of, or perhaps even in the top five.
That is a shame, as its offerings are competitive with the big guys and it has some fiercely loyal clients.
Recently the firm moved into cloud to cloud backup – backing up data from SaaS-based app such as Google Apps and Office 365. Not only can it back things up to the cloud, it can back workloads and data that are in the cloud over to other clouds or back down to your premises.
For better or worse, Asigra now represents “the cloud backup guys”. It even has a Docker containers backup whatchamacallit all built in. What separates it from all the eleven squillion other cloud backup guys out there, however, is that thing of having been around since 1986.
Data protection is miserable and nearly every application in the space is a nightmare to use. This is at least in part because data protection applications have to deal with an ungodly number of different applications, data sources and destinations.
Undercover agent
Data protection is data protection. It is hard to make it sexy. It has one job: make copies of your workloads and their data and get those copies back where they belong when you need them. Despite this, the idea that all backup software is awful is as true today as it ever has been, and you can’t escape having to actually understand how it works.
Anyone who has dealt with data protection applications of any kind will have encountered the agent-versus-agentless debate.
Pretty much by definition, any proper cloud backup software is the agentless variety.
Cloud services have APIs. If you want to get data on and off cloud services you have to go through APIs. So that means no agents (yay!) but it also means you are at the mercy of the API restrictions (boo!).
This has some important real-world implications that need to be considered when talking about cloud-to-cloud or cloud-to-home backups.
As any data protection software should, Asigra’s software will let you choose the frequency and granularity of your backups. It lets you do this per data source
Those pesky APIs the cloud providers use? They have limits. This can seriously affect your backup and recovery plans.
It is clearly designed by backup geeks for backup geeks. It is nerd-centric and presumes the fellow driving the software has a high level of privilege.
I won’t say Asigra is a joy to use, but then, what data protection software is? What I can honestly say is that of the dozen or so applications I have tried out that have some ability to backup my cloudy apps, I hate Asigra the least.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Got a killer Microsoft or Oracle cloud deal? Start sweating
Big boys snare the unwary with too-good-to-be-true deals
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/23/microsoft_oracle_/
Analysis Feeling pressured? A sense you’re being rushed into something you’re not sure about? Or, perhaps, you have a nagging feeling about that free gift you accepted. That sensation is your IT supplier pushing you into their cloud.
Oracle and Microsoft, two of the biggest names in corporate IT, have been left standing by the success of Amazon AWS and Salesforce. They are now making up for lost time, puffing to catch up as they build cloud-based versions of their applications sold under new subscription-based licenses.
And they are coming at you with all kinds of fantastic offers to make up the sales gap.
It’s working: Oracle and Microsoft claim their cloud businesses are booming, or, at least, growing faster than their businesses. Well, growing.
As The Reg reported here, Oracle has primed its sales team to sell anything vaguely cloudy.
“Big vendors like Oracle want to show stake holders they are capable of going with that product so to stimulate the sales force more incentive is given to sales.”
“It’s all cloud services that Oracle has now… that will probably change next year once Oracle evaluates what it needs to sell.”
Microsoft has been countering that with the offer of bigger discounts on everything, on the understanding you accept some Office 365 in your final agreement. Many customers have been offered simply unbelievable pricing: $1.60-per-month bundle priced at $1.50, according to Microsoft licensing expert Paul DeGroot of Pica Communications.
You should beware the gold-rush philosophy infecting Oracle and Microsoft sales people: cloud deals contain booby traps that blow up in your face. First, on Office 365, paying below the lower-than-published price might seem like a steal – but paying anything could mean you’ve just been had by Microsoft.
Big customers with a volume Enterprise Agreement may have Software Assurance. This program entitles you to receive the next version of a specific product for free if it’s delivered in the two- or three-year life cycle of your SA. In other words, check the small print: you might already qualify for Office 365.
One trap Microsoft customers who take Office 365 fall into is to accept Redmond’s cloud service without needing it: they risk paying for something they don’t actually use. The Office 365 meter starts running the second a contract begins.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Xen shows off 35-piece cloudpocalypse collection
The latest fixing fashions for open-source hypervisors hit the catwalk
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/24/xen_shows_off_35piece_cloudpocalypse_collection/
The Xen Project has fixed 35 flaws, all rated critical, for versions 4.3 and 4.4 of its flagship hypervisor. The fixes appear to correspond to flaws identified after the late February 2014 cloudpocalypse, when major cloud providers feared they would once again need to reboot substantial parts of their server fleets to keep them secure.
The Xen Project suggests users upgrade to the new versions, without delay.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Microsoft Launches Azure App Services, A New Set Of Tools For Web And Mobile App Developers
http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/24/microsoft-launches-azure-app-services-a-new-set-of-tools-for-web-and-mobile-app-developers/
Microsoft is launching Azure App Service today, a new cloud-based service that gives developers a single service for building mobile and web apps, combined with tools for automating business processes across cloud services, and a new service for building and consuming APIs. All of these services revolve around Microsoft’s oft- (and over-) used mantra of “mobile first, cloud first.”
Not all of the tools that are part of this new package are new, though. Turns out, Microsoft built App Service on top of existing tools like Azure Websites, Mobile Services and Biztalk Services. Microsoft will migrate all existing Azure Websites users to the new package (for the same price).
Azure Mobile Services users will also migrate to the new service, but at a slower place because the move actually breaks a few existing API services (though Microsoft notes that it’ll be very easy for developers to make the necessary changes to port their applications over to the new service).
Azure App Service now integrates these features into a single service. “We believe that unifying this experience makes app development much simpler,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bloomberg Business:
Apple acquired UK-based data analytics company Acunu in late 2013 to expand its cloud-computing services
Apple’s FoundationDB Acquisition Builds on Earlier Database Buy
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-25/apple-s-foundationdb-acquisition-builds-on-earlier-database-buy
Apple Inc.’s acquisition of FoundationDB LLC gives it some top engineering talent, and follows another stealthy acquisition to bulk up data capabilities as it seeks to expand cloud-computing services.
The purchase of the Vienna, Virginia-based software maker follows a deal for closely held Acunu Ltd., a U.K.-based data analysis company, Apple said.
Both purchases show Apple is placing more emphasis on the development of solid data infrastructure to help provide services to its legions of global consumers beyond iPhones and iPads.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hedvig all set to Google-ise that enterprise storage
You want configurable virtual pools of distributed silos. Who doesn’t?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/26/hedvig_aims_to_googleise_enterprise_storage/
Start-up Hedvig aims to bring Google/Amazon cloud-style storage to enterprises, with a virtualised pool of storage aggregated from distributed silos.
It’s just won seed and A-round funding to the tune of $12.5m and has a Distributed Storage Platform technology that early customers – like Intuit, Dovilo, Van Dijk and Paul Hastings LLP – are trying out.
They are told that with it “cloud and data centre professionals can consolidate storage of any type or location into a virtualised pool, which drops the provisioning time and costs to small fractions of what it would take with traditional storage technologies today”.
It “enables complete protocol consolidation by collapsing several layers of the storage stack into a single software platform”.
The software runs on commodity servers and provides elastic storage.
Founder and CEO Avinash Lakshman says it “looks like the infrastructure that Google, Amazon and Facebook run internally, but packaged to bring that capability to any enterprise data centre”.
There seem to be similarities with Primary Data and Springpath
Tomi Engdahl says:
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Google Cloud Launcher Lets Developers Quickly Deploy Over 120 Popular Open-Source Packages — Google and Bitnami are launching a new feature for Google’s Cloud Platform today that makes it easier for developers to deploy over 120 popular open-source applications to its Cloud Platform.
Google Cloud Launcher Lets Developers Quickly Deploy Over 120 Popular Open-Source Packages
http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/26/google-cloud-launcher-lets-developers-quickly-deploy-over-120-popular-open-source-packages/
Google and Bitnami are launching a new feature for Google’s Cloud Platform today that makes it easier for developers to deploy over 120 popular open-source applications to its Cloud Platform. In total, Google and Bitnami have packed up over 120 applications, including the likes of WordPress, Drupal, Redis, MongoDB, Gitlab and Django, as well as infrastructure stacks for Ruby, LAMP apps, Puppet and others.
As Google argues, setting up a VM-based solution often means you have to spend quite a bit of time configuring the different components of your service. Using Cloud Launcher, developers simply pick the application or service they want to run and everything is up and running after a few clicks.
“Developers should spend most of their time on design and writing code,” Google product manager Varun Talwar writes in today’s announcement. “Time spent finding and deploying libraries, fixing dependencies, resolving versioning issues and configuring tooling is time away from that work.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Paul Sawers / VentureBeat:
Amazon Cloud Drive goes unlimited: $11.99/year for photos and $59.99/year for everything
http://venturebeat.com/2015/03/26/amazon-launches-two-new-cloud-drive-unlimited-plans-11-99year-for-photos-and-59-99year-for-everything/