Gartner has published a new magic quadrant for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) – the results should not be surprising to anybody. Consider this posting as update to my previous cloud market posting few years back. Here is reporting on newest cloud market trends from two sources:
Gartner puts AWS, Microsoft Azure top of its Magic Quadrant for IaaS | ZDNet
Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure dominate the infrastructure-as-a-service field, according to Gartner, which released its IaaS Magic Quadrant.
However, Google Cloud is emerging as a key challenger.
Gartner confirms what we all know: AWS and Microsoft are the cloud leaders, by a fair way
Paranormal parallelogram for IaaS has Google on the same lap, IBM and Oracle trailing
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Tomi Engdahl says:
‘Biggest Data Center’ To Be Built in Arctic
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/08/15/1726209/biggest-data-center-to-be-built-in-arctic
A small town in the remote north of the Arctic Circle is set to be home to the world’s largest data center. From a report:
The firm behind the project, Kolos, says the chilled air and abundant hydropower available locally would help it keep its energy costs down. The area, however, suffers the country’s highest rate of sick leave from work, which may be related to its past as a mining community. The US-Norwegian company says it has already raised “several million dollars” for the project from Norwegian private investors. However, it is still working with a US investment bank to secure the remaining necessary funds.
Record-sized data centre planned inside Arctic Circle
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40922048
Plans to build the world’s “largest” data centre are being made public.
The facility is set to be created at the Norwegian town of Ballangen, which is located inside the Arctic Circle.
The firm behind the project, Kolos, says the chilled air and abundant hydropower available locally would help it keep its energy costs down.
The area, however, suffers the country’s highest rate of sick leave from work, which may be related to its past as a mining community.
The US-Norwegian company says it has already raised “several million dollars” for the project from Norwegian private investors.
However, it is still working with a US investment bank to secure the remaining necessary funds.
Cheap energy
Tech consultancy Gartner says this has meant private endeavours have needed to seek scale of their own in order to keep their prices competitive.
“There’s always a danger with this kind of thing that providers rush to build capacity that outstrips what the market requires,” added David Groombridge, research director at tech consultancy Gartner.
“But in terms of data centres, it’s hard to see consumer-driven demands dropping off and there’s the promise of the internet-of-things, with millions of sensors generating information that will need to be processed.
“So, unless there are radical new technologies that come along very quickly to help compress data, we will need the resources that these kind of facilities provide.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Norway gets the world’s largest data center
The beginner data center entrepreneur Kolos starts right away with full steam. The Norwegian company builds Narvik near Ballangeni the world’s largest data center. When all servers are in use, the center needs gigawatts of power.
Gigawatt is a shocking power requirement. For example, Google’s Hamina Center is a 72-megawatt facility and Facebook’s center in Sweden consumes 120 megawatts.
According to Kolos, the northern data center starts with 70 megawatts of consumption. All the energy used in the plant comes from renewable sources. Norway has a lot of hydropower.
Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php/13-news/6677-norjaan-tulee-maailman-suurin-datakeskus
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft launches Azure Event Grid, a fully managed event routing service
https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/16/microsoft-launches-azure-event-grid-a-fully-managed-event-routing-service/
Microsoft announced a new product in its Azure line-up in preview today that will make it easier for developers to build event-based applications.
The Azure Event Grid makes events (like uploading a picture or video, clicking a button, updating a database, etc.) first-class Azure objects. Event Grid complements Azure Functions and Azure Logic Apps, Microsoft’s existing serverless offerings, and gives developers access to a fully managed event routing service. This new service gives them the flexibility to ingest and react to virtually any event — whether that’s happening inside Azure or on a third-party service or in an existing application.
Developers can use Event Grid to route events to specific endpoints (or even multiple endpoints) and filter them as necessary.
“Serverless” has always been a misnomer, given that even the most serverless of serverless applications still needs to run on servers. Still, the basic idea behind serverless platforms is that you can use this model to build event-driven applications without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure.
Indeed, Microsoft director of Azure Compute Corey Sanders told me that Event Grid actually sits on top of Service Fabric, Microsoft’s platform for building microservices.
Event Grid takes the ideas of Azure Functions and Logic Apps a bit further, though, thanks to its built-in ability to take inputs from any application with the help of webhook endpoints
Out of the box, Event Grid also supports Azure Blog Storage, Resource Manager, Application Topics, Event Hubs, Azure Functions, Azure Automation and Logic Apps, with support for other Azure-based services, including the new CosmosDB database service and IoT Hub, coming later this year. Given that IoT applications are a logical fit for this service, it’s actually a bit of a surprise that support for IoT Hub isn’t part of this initial release.
Pricing for Event Grid is based on the number of operations you process. The first 100,00 operations are free; after that, you pay $0.60 per million operations
Operations are defined as any ingress, advanced match, delivery attempt or management call.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Five characteristics of cloud computing
http://www.controleng.com/single-article/five-characteristics-of-cloud-computing/d3d1cbc797f4149ba98d082e466f08f3.html
Cloud computing’s characteristics and benefits include on-demand self-service, broad network access, and being very elastic and scalable.
As cloud computing services mature both commercially and technologically, it will be easier for companies to maximize the potential benefits. Knowing what cloud computing is and what it does, however, is just as important. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines cloud computing as it is known today through five particular characteristics.
1. On-demand self-service
2. Broad network access
3. Multi-tenancy and resource pooling
4. Rapid elasticity and scalability
5. Measured service
Cloud computing resources usage is metered and manufacturing organizations pay accordingly for what they have used. Resource utilization can be optimized by leveraging charge-per-use capabilities. This means that cloud resource usage—whether virtual server instances that are running or storage in the cloud—gets monitored, measured and reported by the cloud service provider.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jon Fingas / Engadget:
Code42 says it will end its cloud backup service Crashplan for Home on Oct 23, 2018 and focus instead on its business services — If you rely on Crashplan as a remote backup for your computer, you’re going to have to find an alternative in short order. Code42 is phasing out its Crashplan …
Crashplan drops its cloud backup service for home users
You’ll have to find an alternative to safeguard your files online.
https://www.engadget.com/2017/08/22/crashplan-drops-cloud-backups-for-home-users/
If you rely on Crashplan as a remote backup for your computer, you’re going to have to find an alternative in short order. Code42 is phasing out its Crashplan for Home service as it switches its focus to business users. The company has stopped offering new or renewed Home subscriptions as of August 22nd, and the service will shut down entirely on October 23rd, 2018. If you haven’t moved your files elsewhere by then, you’re out of luck. The team is trying to make the transition as gentle as possible, at least. It’s extending all Home subscriptions by 60 days to give people time to find alternatives, and it’s offering discounts for both its own Small Business tier and a preferred alternative, Carbonite.
You don’t have to go to either of those options, of course. Alternatives like Backblaze exist if you need to safeguard absolutely everything, and you can use free or low-cost services like Google Drive if you’re just interested in protecting a limited number of can’t-lose files.
The move isn’t entirely shocking, especially in an era where ISP data caps make it impractical to upload the entire contents of your PC. Businesses are more likely to need that absolute protection, and their tendency to subscribe in bulk makes them tempting targets.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Salvador Rodriguez / Reuters:
Google says it will announce specs for Titan, a security chip that scans cloud hardware for evidence of tampering, on Thursday
Google touts Titan security chip to market cloud services
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-titan-idUSKCN1B22D6
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google this week will disclose technical details of its new Titan computer chip, an elaborate security feature for its cloud computing network that the company hopes will enable it to steal a march on Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) and Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O).
Titan is the size of a tiny stud earring that Google has installed in each of the many thousands of computer servers and network cards that populate its massive data centers that power Google’s cloud services.
Google is hoping Titan will help it carve out a bigger piece of the worldwide cloud computing market, which is forecast by Gartner to be worth nearly $50 billion.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tom Krazit / GeekWire:
Google Cloud Platform launches cheaper Standard Tier traffic networking option that uses public internet, not its fiber
Google unveils a new, cheaper networking option for cloud customers: the public internet
https://www.geekwire.com/2017/google-unveils-new-cheaper-networking-option-cloud-customers-public-internet/
Google Cloud Platform customers will have a new option when selecting the type of network used to deliver their traffic to their users: they can keep using Google’s network, or they can save some money with the new option of using public transit networks.
Google has long argued that one of the best reasons to use its public cloud service is the strength of its fiber network, developed and enhanced for more than a decade to support the global data centers powering its search engine. But there are some applications that don’t require that level of performance, and so Google is now offering a cheaper networking service that uses the transit networks that deliver the bulk of traffic to internet service providers, said Prajakta Joshi, product manager for cloud networking at Google.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Unveils a New, Cheaper Networking Option For Cloud Customers: the Public Internet
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/08/23/1910252/google-unveils-a-new-cheaper-networking-option-for-cloud-customers-the-public-internet?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
Google has long argued that one of the best reasons to use its public cloud service is the strength of its fiber network, developed and enhanced for more than a decade to support the global data centers powering its search engine. But there are some applications that don’t require that level of performance, and so Google is now offering a cheaper networking service — costing between 24 percent to 33 percent less — that uses the transit networks that deliver the bulk of traffic to internet service providers,
Google unveils a new, cheaper networking option for cloud customers: the public internet
https://www.geekwire.com/2017/google-unveils-new-cheaper-networking-option-cloud-customers-public-internet/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Paul Sawers / VentureBeat:
Google adds a firewall to its App Engine platform, letting developers restrict apps to certain users or regions, available in beta
Google launches App Engine firewall so developers can easily restrict specific IP addresses
https://venturebeat.com/2017/08/24/google-launches-app-engine-firewall-to-make-it-easier-for-developers-to-restrict-access-from-specific-ip-addresses/
Google has announced a new firewall feature that allows developers and administrators using App Engine to easily restrict access from specific traffic sources.
Google App Engine (GAE), a managed platform within the broader Google Cloud suite of services that compete with the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, is a web framework and platform for developing and scaling apps hosted on Google’s cloud.
Whether during testing or for other reasons entirely, developers may wish to open up new apps to just a few specific groups of users or perhaps prevent certain regions from accessing them. It is already possible to restrict access based on IP address, but this requires implementing access controls within the code, and even then the requests are still allowed in the door, which not only consumes resources but can also cost companies money for traffic they don’t need or want. With the new Google App Engine firewall, launching today in beta, developers provide a set of rules through the App Engine Admin API, Google Cloud Console, or gcloud command-line tool and specify the IP addresses to block or allow. And that’s about it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
VMware has cracking Q2, explains how it will beat Azure Stack
vSphere sales forecast changed from long-term-decline to long-term-flat
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/25/vmware_q2_2018/
Tomi Engdahl says:
VMware Cloud is now live on AWS — and IT pros just did a little happy dance
https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/28/vmware-cloud-is-now-live-on-aws-and-it-pros-just-did-a-little-happy-dance/?utm_source=tcfbpage&sr_share=facebook
When VMware announced it was partnering with AWS last fall, it turned more than a few enterprise heads. After all, we’re talking about one company that dominates virtual machines on-prem, and the other in the public cloud. Together, the two companies make a powerful combination
Tomi Engdahl says:
Synergy Research Group:
SRG: enterprise SaaS market up 31% YoY in quarterly revenue to almost $15B; Microsoft still market leader, followed by Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle, SAP
Microsoft Leads in SaaS Market; Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle and SAP Follow
https://www.srgresearch.com/articles/microsoft-leads-saas-market-salesforce-adobe-oracle-and-sap-follow
New Q2 data from Synergy Research Group shows that the enterprise SaaS market grew 31% year on year to reach almost $15 billion in quarterly revenues, with collaboration being the highest growth segment. Microsoft remains the clear leader in overall enterprise SaaS revenues, having overtaken long-time market leader Salesforce a year ago. Microsoft was already rapidly growing its SaaS revenues, but in Q2 its acquisition of LinkedIn gave its SaaS business a further boost. In terms of overall SaaS market rankings, Microsoft and Salesforce are followed by Adobe, Oracle and SAP, with other leading companies including ADP, IBM, Workday, Intuit, Cisco, Google and ServiceNow. It’s notable that the market remains quite fragmented, with different vendors leading each of the main market segments. Among the major SaaS vendors those with the highest overall growth rates are Oracle, Microsoft and Google.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Synergy Research Group:
SRG: enterprise SaaS market up 31% YoY in quarterly revenue to almost $15B; Microsoft still market leader, followed by Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle, SAP
Microsoft Leads in SaaS Market; Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle and SAP Follow
https://www.srgresearch.com/articles/microsoft-leads-saas-market-salesforce-adobe-oracle-and-sap-follow
Tomi Engdahl says:
Barb Darrow / Fortune:
HPE plans to acquire Boston-based Cloud Technology Partners, which helps clients deploy cloud computing on multiple vendors, to be HPE’s 5th acquisition in 2017 — Hewlett-Packard Enterprise said Monday that it will acquire Cloud Technology Partners, a Boston-based company …
HPE Shopping Spree Continues With Purchase of This Cloud Specialist
http://fortune.com/2017/09/05/hpe-buys-cloud-technology/
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise said Tuesday that it will acquire Cloud Technology Partners, a Boston-based company that helps business customers plan and build cloud computing capabilities.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Seven-year-old CTP works with businesses to determine which cloud technology—be it from Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Google, or the non-vendor aligned OpenStack—is best for the customer’s needs. It then helps corporate customers plan out how they will run their information technology on that cloud (or clouds, if spread out across multiple vendors).
Tomi Engdahl says:
VMware and AWS launch VMware Cloud on AWS hybrid service
http://www.lightwaveonline.com/articles/2017/09/vmware-and-aws-launch-vmware-cloud-on-aws-hybrid-service.html?cmpid=enl_lightwave_lightwave_datacom_2017-09-05
VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) and Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), have announced availability of VMware Cloud on AWS. The integrated hybrid offering, the outcome of a strategic alliance VMware and AWS announced in October 2016, will provide VMware’s software-defined data center (SDDC) to the AWS Cloud. Customers will be able to run applications across operationally consistent VMware vSphere-based private, public, and hybrid cloud environments, with optimized access to AWS services, the companies say.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft, Adobe advance partnership with new cross-cloud productivity integrations
http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-adobe-advance-partnership-with-new-cross-cloud-productivity-integrations/
Microsoft and Adobe are continuing to integrate more of their cloud services — such as Microsoft Teams and Adobe’s Sign e-signature service — across each other’s portfolios.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jordan Novet / CNBC:
AWS says that beginning October 2, it will start charging EC2 customers by the second, not hour; competitors Azure and Google Cloud charge by the minute
Amazon Web Services will now charge by the second, its biggest pricing change in years
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/18/aws-starts-charging-for-ec2-by-the-second.html
The move comes four years after Google outdid AWS with per-minute pricing.
Historically AWS has charged by the hour for its EC2 cloud computing service
The move is historically significant. Since AWS became available in 2006, it has charged by the hour. Then, in 2013, Alphabet’s Google, which had introduced its direct competitor to AWS a year earlier, said it would start charging by the minute, after a 10-minute minimum. Microsoft’s Azure followed suit shortly thereafter.
Now Amazon is hitting back by becoming even more granular when it comes to making people pay only for the computing resources they use, with a one-minute minimum.
The price change is only applicable for Linux virtual machines, AWS’ chief evangelist, Jeff Barr, wrote in a blog post.
While the per-second pricing could mean companies will end up paying less money for certain workloads, the change might also lead companies to be more experimental with their use of EC2 instances for certain types of computing.
New – Per-Second Billing for EC2 Instances and EBS Volumes
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-per-second-billing-for-ec2-instances-and-ebs-volumes/
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM packs 120TB into a carry-on bag, for snow-balling cloud uploads
Whither the rapid file transfer app Aspera that Big Blue acquired in 2014?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/19/ibm_cloud_mass_data_migration_appliance/
IBM’s decided to join AW and Google in the appliances-to-haul-data-into-the-cloud market, by launching an appliance called “IBM Cloud Mass Data Migration”.
Readers familiar with AWS’ Snowball or the Google Transfer Appliance already know what this box is all about: there’s 120TB of disk inside, a couple of Ethernet ports and the plan is you’ll hire one from Big Blue and full it fill of your stuff.
The appliance uses AES 256 encryption and RAID-6 data protection, so your data should survive the overnight UPS trip from your premises to IBM’s nearest cloud data centre. Once it arrives, Big Blue will upload it all into the cloud rather faster than would be possible if you tried to upload it over your internet connection.
At US$395 per hire, it will also likely be rather cheaper than wide-area-over-the-wire transfer. It’s a US-only offer for now, but IBM promises “regional and global expansion coming soon in the EU.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Oracle promises SLAs that halve Amazon’s cloud costs
Larry Ellison also pledges ‘Autonomous Database’ to cut the cost of – gulp – the people who run databases
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/20/oracle_cloud_pricing/
Oracle chair and chief technology officer has pledged to undercut Amazon Web Services pricing by 50 per cent for infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service, in part by increasing use of automation.
Big Red staged a Cloud event on Tuesday, at which Ellison said that the primary cost of running platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is labour and opined that human involvement in running databases or middleware is best avoided.
“The way we want to compete in PaaS is to deliver a high degree of automation to our customers,” he said. “By automating a lot of those services, we reduce the amount of labour a customer would need to expend to run the DB database or run the middleware and also reduce the amount of human error associated with that labour.”
“How expensive could an error be?” Ellison asked, then answered by saying “I don’t know … if you don’t patch the database at Equifax, that could be expensive.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Brian Jackson / IT World Canada:
Manifold, which enables developers to find, buy, and manage several cloud services without being locked into a single cloud platform, announces $15M Series A
Jevon MacDonald returns with new startup, Manifold, ‘by developers for developers’
https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/jevon-macdonald-returns-with-new-startup-manifold-by-developers-for-developers/396751
As public cloud infrastructure providers have become more popular, on-premises vendors like to joke that they are like Hotel California for your data: you can never leave. Today, a startup that is co-headquartered in Halifax and San Francisco is launching with a solution to that problem.
Manifold provides a way for developers to find, buy, and manage services across multiple cloud providers through a single interface. At the helm of the new startup is Canadian entrepreneur Jevon MacDonald, who previously launched GoInstant.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Manifold Makes Managing Cloud Developer Services Easy
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/manifold-makes-managing-cloud-developer-services-easy?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+linuxjournalcom+%28Linux+Journal+-+The+Original+Magazine+of+the+Linux+Community%29
We love it here when superheroes drop their cloak of invisibility, emerge from stealth mode and reveal themselves to the world. Of course we do—it’s the geek in us! Manifold has just done exactly that, emerged from stealth mode and is claiming to be the easiest way to find, buy and manage essential developer services.
Manifold, cloud-agnostic, is working to redefine the developer services ecosystem with a platform that allows developers to find, buy and manage their favorite services easily—from email to logging—without being locked in to any single cloud platform. With Manifold, developers no longer are restricted by the confines of any particular cloud. Instead, they can create stacks tailored specifically for their project needs.
“The modern development stack is complex. Until now, there has been no easy way for developers to discover and manage the mix of services needed to create modern applications without resorting to the one-size-fits-all offerings of the monoclouds”,
Tomi Engdahl says:
Following AWS, Google Compute Engine also moves to per-second billing
https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/26/following-aws-google-compute-engine-also-moves-to-per-second-billing/?ncid=rss&utm_source=tcfbpage&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=FaceBook&sr_share=facebook
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dell EMC, Veeam eagerly clamber onto Microsoft’s Azure Stack: I love it more, no, I love it more
Azure Stack and Hyper-V support ignition for MS
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/28/dell_emc_and_veeam_azure_stack/
Orlando’s Microsoft Ignite conference saw Dell EMC and Veeam worshipping at the cloudy on-premises Azure Stack shrine with protection support offerings and more.
Dell EMC already supports Microsoft’s Azure Stack with Dell servers and networking and EMC storage running Microsoft’s public cloud in an on-premises incarnation. That’s sold by its own sales force.
It has now laid three extra offerings at the feet of the Azure Stack gods:
XC Series support for Hyper-V and Azure Stack,
channel can sell Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack, and
Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Microsoft SQL Server.
The XC Series are hyper-converged systems OEM’d from Nutanix and sold by Dell EMC alongside its in-house VxRail and Rack hyperconverged systems, which are vSphere-centric.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Oracle promises ‘highly automated’ security in self-driving database
Larry Ellison is keen on ‘Anything we can possibly do to reduce human intervention’
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/02/oracle_openworld_2017_larry_ellison_keynote_day_one/
OPENWORLD 2017 Oracle has kicked off its annual OpenWorld conference with a pledge to automate in the company’s “autonomous” database, plus plenty of snark directed at Amazon Web Services.
Jeans-toting CTO Larry Ellison kicked off Big Red’s four-day San Franciscan extravaganza with a not-so-slick presentation that had no real big surprises.
The main item on the agenda was the firm’s upcoming autonomous database, with Ellison offering up a smidge more detail than he did when teasing it during a recent announcement on cloud pricing.
“If you eliminate human behaviour, you eliminate human error,” the CTO said. “My autopilot flies my plan a lot better than I do,” he added, in a bid to make sure we all know he has a jet.
The planned cyber security offering – details of which attendees were told will emerge on Tuesday – will see the database use machine learning technologies to detect when it is being attacked.
It will then automatically patch itself, rather than waiting for a human to schedule downtime.
“It’s our computer versus their computers in cyber warfare, and we have to have a lot better computers, and more automation if we’re going to defend our data,” Ellison said.
In a dig at the recent Equifax scandal, Ellison said: “The worst data thefts in history have occurred after a patch was available to prevent the theft. The patches just weren’t applied; how is that possible.”
He later said that in that situation, “someone lost their job”, before adding that it wasn’t just the CEO in the firing line: “Nobody is safe.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
5 obstacles holding your hybrid cloud strategy back
http://www.cloudpro.co.uk/cloud-essentials/hybrid-cloud/7074/5-obstacles-holding-your-hybrid-cloud-strategy-back
Overcoming these challenges is key to a successful cloud migration strategy
e taken into account, aside from the well-known concerns about security. Planning to overcome these issues should be an essential part of a cloud migration strategy.
Complexity: With the explosion of web services, mobile devices and new technologies, managing the complexity of an expanding data centre environment across a hybrid cloud is a significant challenge. Choosing the right service offerings at the right service levels on different data management frameworks across a blend of cloud resources can be daunting.
IT agility: IT service delivery is about meeting the needs of the business. As those needs change, IT must adapt and respond quickly. For years, IT organisations have been working towards developing agility within the data centre.
Data control: Businesses building their own data centres and private clouds can retain control of their data. Extending that environment to the public cloud necessitates giving up some control of infrastructure and applications, but the responsibility to control business data must remain firmly with the organisation.
Skills: If a skills gap exists in an organisation, that shouldn’t be seen as an obstacle to moving to a hybrid cloud model. Selecting the right consulting services partner
Vendor lock-in: Although choosing a cloud service provider to complement a set of IT services is a means to deliver a flexible, dynamic environment, it doesn’t necessarily mean ongoing flexibility among different cloud providers. For many organisations, cloud provider lock-in can be a significant hurdle
Tomi Engdahl says:
Data Centre Arrow Cloud
Mainframes are hip now! Compuware fires its dev environment into cloud
But analysts say good luck convincing newcomers
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/02/compuware_shows_off_shiny_new_mainframe_cloud_ide_toy/
In an attempt to entice new blood to those dinosaur systems of record known as mainframes, Detroit software firm Compuware has moved its development environment to the cloud.
The company’s flagship mainframe Agile/DevOps product Topaz is now available on Amazon Web Services.
As Compuware and competitors such as IBM and Micro Focus have realised, in addition to convincing firms to take on high licensing usage fees, there’s a mainframe developer shortage. Industry has struggled to convince students to learn ancient programming languages such as COBOL.
Compuware Introduces Cloud Access to Mainframe Development
Topaz Availability on AWS is Industry-first, Transforming Enterprises’ Ability to Quickly Modernize COBOL
https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2017/10/02/1138589/0/en/Compuware-Introduces-Cloud-Access-to-Mainframe-Development.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hierarchical Storage Management is back. And this time it’s cloudy
KompriseCloud can now shunt data between different cloud storage operators
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/03/komprise_supports_colder_public_cloud_tiers_for_older_data/
Data management software vendor Komprise has added extra cold cloud tiers to its data lifecycle manager, which moves data to slower access storage tiers without affecting its accessibility.
The company has also introduced analytics to its metadata library, data confinement and ONTAP 9 support.
Komprise’s software moves data between tiers without leaving stubs*. It instead uses dynamic links, making search, management and access easier than before.
With this announcement the Komprise Intelligent Data Management (KIDM) product moves to v2.6. It already supports AWS S3 and Google Nearline as public cloud tiers and adds colder data tiers behind them; S3 Infrequent Access and Glacier from Amazon, and Coldline for Google, calling this cross-cloud tiering.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google backs up Firebase with a second realtime NoSQL silo
Cloud Firestore aspires to scale better
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/04/google_backs_up_firebase_with_a_second_realtime_data_store/
Google’s twin fetish manifested itself in its Firebase platform-as-a-service offering on Tuesday through the introduction of a second realtime NoSQL database.
Firebase has been growing in popularity among mobile and web developers thanks in part to the Firebase Realtime Database, which provides a way to synchronize data across multiple clients more or less instantaneously.
This turns out to be a quite useful for games or social apps, where you want everyone to be on the same page, and isn’t particularly easy to do when users may be located all over the world.
Realm offers something similar called the Realm Mobile Database.
And now Google has something similar too, Cloud Firestore, a doppelgänger with distinctions.
Google exhibits double vision fairly often. It backs up products they way people back up data. It has two cloud platforms (Google Cloud Platform and the mobile-oriented Firebase). It maintains two operating system (Android and ChromeOS, not to mention the nascent Fuchsia), two email services (Gmail and Inbox, incestuous though they may be), and two chat applications (Allo and Hangouts). It developed two programming languages (Go and Dart). And for a time, Google Video co-existed with YouTube.
Cloud Firestore has been designed to address the shortcomings of Firebase Realtime Database: data structuring, querying, and scaling.
Toward that end, it’s more structured. Where Firebase stores data in a single JSON tree, Cloud Firestore relies on a hierarchical document model. Data gets stored as key-value pairs in objects called documents that are organized into collections, which can contain subcollections.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Oracle Announces New Cloud Security Services
http://www.securityweek.com/oracle-announces-new-cloud-security-services
Oracle announced this week at the company’s OpenWorld convention the launch of new cloud security services and improvements to existing products.
One of the new offerings is the Oracle Identity Security Operations Center (SOC), a context-aware intelligence and automation solution designed to help organizations detect and respond to sophisticated threats targeting users, applications, data and cloud workloads.
The Identity SOC leverages the newly released Oracle Security Monitoring and Analytics Cloud Service, which provides security incident and event management (SIEM) and user and entity behavioral analytics (UEBA) capabilities.
Two other major components of the Identity SOC are the Oracle CASB (Cloud Access Security Broker) Cloud Service, which enables organizations to protect business-critical cloud infrastructure and data, and the Oracle Identity Cloud Service, described by the company as a “next-generation comprehensive security and identity platform.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Say Hi to Subutai
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/say-hi-subutai
What Is Subutai?
Subutai is an open-source project and platform that lets anyone share, barter or rent computer resources to create clouds from the edge rather than centralized locations. Available devices can attach to these clouds hovering on the edge. We started calling it Social Cloud Computing, but technically, Subutai is a dynamic p2p multi-cloud made possible thanks to Lightweight Linux Containers and software-defined networking. Think Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud, but running on your computers and the computers of social contacts who share their computer resources with you. Or, think AirBnB on computers for the people’s cloud.
Subutai partners with the Digital Life Collective, a member co-operative that researches, develops, funds and supports what we call “tech we trust”—those technologies that put the individual’s autonomy, privacy and dignity first, or that support those technologies that do. Our tech, not their tech.
How Does It Work?
You set how much of your computers’ resources you’re willing to share with others. Rules and quotas are used to share with contacts from your social-media accounts. Once your network of friends, family and colleagues share with you, the stage is set to create clouds across shared computer resources.
When someone creates a cloud, peer computers authorized to share resources with the cloud’s owner swarm together (like bees) to form an n-way virtual private network (VPN). A peer is a group of computers with resources that can be shared with others. A peer can be a rack of computers or a single virtual machine running on your laptop.
Peers contribute resources into the VPN as Linux container hosts. Whatever the underlying hardware, operating system or virtualization technology, resources are presented canonically to environments as containers. The VPN provides secure connectivity between these containers across the internet.
Template containers can be fired up based on Docker images to install infrastructure rapidly.
Subutai is ready and mature.
There’s a lot more to Subutai than just software. We’ve designed a broadband modem that is also a turnkey Subutai Appliance and can be used for IoT applications. We call it the Liquid Router because we made it the Swiss army knife of IoT gateways: it has Raspberry Pi, Arduino and PMod headers. Yeah, we’re f’ing crazy, but the cloud router/IoT gateway will soon do something no other broadband router can do: it will effortlessly allow average broadband users to mine for Subutai’s cryptocurrency while sharing, bartering or renting computer resources. Hence, it’s obviously also a physical cryptocurrency wallet.
Conquer The Cloud
https://subutai.io/
Your next personal computer won’t be just another laptop, tablet, or wearable device: it will be EVERYTHING surrounding you, connected fluidly by adaptive peer-to-peer clouds driven by social interaction!
The Subutai platform lets you easily mine for cryptocurrency and share, barter, or rent computing resources without having to be a programming expert.
Subutai helps connect individuals from all over the globe so they may share resources to create secure cloud environments across their peers. Just as a cloud can float down onto land and is thus called fog, IoT devices attach when available and needed to your cloud as it floats around with you.
Tomi Engdahl says:
10 years on, Amazon CTO reflects on DynamoDB launch
Vogels recounts how Dynamo paper became AWS NoSQL giant
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/06/10_years_on_amazons_cloud_chief_reflects_on_dynamodb_launch/
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels this week marked the 10th anniversary of his Project Dynamo whitepaper, the blueprint for what would become the DynamoDB platform.
The paper [PDF], presented in October 2007 at the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, describes an Amazon-designed backend system to overcome the weaknesses of its Oracle database.
“We prioritized focusing on requirements that would support high-scale, mission-critical services like Amazon’s shopping cart, and questioned assumptions traditionally held by relational databases such as the requirement for strong consistency,” Vogels explained.
“Our goal was to build a database that would have the unbounded scalability, consistent performance and the high availability to support the needs of our rapidly growing business.”
http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-sosp2007.pdf
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon, Azure, Google will eat all the IT. Google, let us be your cake fork, pleads Nutanix
3 IT giants – just 1 on-prem/hybrid stack partner opening…
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/06/nutanix_google_amazon_azure/
Analysis An IT trio of giants will soon dominate the market – and there appears to be one on-premises/hybrid stack partner opening, Nutanix told us.
A conversation with Sudheesh Nair, Nutanix’s president, revealed the firm’s mindset: it envisages three great beasts in the IT jungle – Amazon, Azure and Google – each with their public cloud platforms and easy-to-provision, scale and pay data centre services.
These are moving to providing operational functions as an abstraction layer on top of operational components, such as databases and servers, and, underneath them, raw compute and various tiers of storage.
Enterprises have increasingly looked at the public cloud with fondness, and hybrid on-premises and public cloud IT is the new normal.
On-premises IT isn’t going away, but its boundaries are blurring as hybrid IT suppliers try to make the cloud on-premises-like in some ways, and the on-premises world cloud-like, offering cloud-style provisioning, payment, scaling and relative simplicity.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon beams: We’re best cloud buds with General Electric
Hey, but aren’t you forgetting *cough* Azure? *cough*
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/06/amazon_brags_it_is_general_electrics_preferred_cloud_provider/
Amazon boasts that it is the “preferred” cloud provider for General Electric, but, in this multi-cloud world, that’s not quite the case.
GE began moving its applications to the cloud in 2014, with AWS taking the bulk of the dollars. The company has migrated “more than 2,000 applications”, we’re told.
The thing Amazon left out of its marketing materials is that GE is also working with Microsoft. In July, Redmond announced the energy firm was making its industrial applications development platform, Predix, available on Azure.
A GE spokesperson told The Register: “GE is migrating its IT applications to AWS, which allows us to focus on building strong internal apps, instead of running our own data centers. The Predix platform already runs on AWS.
“For the Predix platform, our partnership with Microsoft continues as planned. By bringing Predix to Azure, we are helping our mutual customers connect their IT and OT systems to drive actionable intelligence from data. With Microsoft, we have also integrated with tools such as Power BI (which we demonstrated at our Minds + Machines event last year) and have a roadmap for further technical collaboration and integration with additional Microsoft services that we will share later this month.”
According to Gartner research, the Infrastructure-as-a-Service market grew from $16.8bn in 2015 to $22.1bn in 2016, up 31 per cent. Amazon had revenues of about $9.8bn of IaaS public cloud revenues in 2016 and controlled 44.2 per cent of market share, while Microsoft took in about $1.6bn and held a market share of 7.1 per cent.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The public cloud and SaaS are growing at a rapid pace
The market for public cloud services will grow this year by 18.5 per cent. According to Gartner, software sold specifically as a service, SaaS services are now growing faster than expected.
SaaS services are sold this year by $ 58.6 billion. Hard demand also raises the cloud market faster than previously believed.
The biggest cloud computing providers are already distinguished by Microsoft, Amazon and Alibaba in China. These names will not come as a surprise to anyone.
According to Gartner, the public cloud market will grow next year to $ 305.8 billion, next year to over $ 355 billion and in 2020 to $ 411 billion. It is expected that after a few years, the cloud market will already grow larger than the semiconductor market.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6993&via=n&datum=2017-10-12_14:49:00&mottagare=30929
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel to Battle in FPGA-as-a-Service Race
https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332454
The cloud service is changing practically everyone’s business.
Often, it forces hardware vendors’ hands, and nudges them to offer their products — at drastically reduced rates — “as a service,” rather than selling customers the hardware as a tangible product.
Car-as-a-service (“CaaS”) is one example. The concept of “miles used per vehicle” fundamentally alters carmakers’ “unit-based sales” model. It represents both a threat and an opportunity that the automotive industry can no longer afford to ignore.
The chip business could be next. “FPGA as a service” is emerging as a cloud application in data centers. If it starts to take off, how will FPGA vendors like Intel or Xilix respond?
Just last week, Intel announced that its FPGAs are powering the Acceleration-as-a-Service of Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The public cloud and SaaS are growing at a rapid pace
The market for public cloud services will grow this year by 18.5 per cent. According to Gartner, software sold specifically as a service, SaaS services are now growing faster than expected.
SaaS services are sold this year by $ 58.6 billion. Hard demand also raises the cloud market faster than previously believed.
The biggest cloud computing providers are already distinguished by Microsoft, Amazon and Alibaba in China.
According to Gartner, the public cloud market will grow next year to $ 305.8 billion, next year to over $ 355 billion and in 2020 to $ 411 billion. It is expected that after a few years, the cloud market will already grow larger than the semiconductor market.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6993&via=n&datum=2017-10-12_14:49:00&mottagare=31202
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google and Cisco announce hybrid cloud partnership
https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/25/google-and-cisco-announce-hybrid-cloud-partnership/?ncid=rss&utm_source=tcfbpage&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=FaceBook&sr_share=facebook
Google and Cisco today announced a new partnership around helping their customers build more efficient hybrid cloud solutions. Unsurprisingly, given Google’s recent focus, this partnership centers around the Google-incubated Kubernetes container orchestration tool, as well as the Istio service mesh for connecting and securing microservices across clouds.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ari Levy / CNBC:
Google and Cisco to jointly develop a hybrid product for cloud and on-premise data center use, slated for release in the first half of 2018
Google and Cisco team up in the cloud wars against Amazon
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/25/google-cisco-cloud-deal-diane-greene-chuck-robbins-interview.html
Google and Cisco will jointly develop products for use in the cloud and in on-premise data centers.
Early customers will have access to the products in the first half of 2018.
Google is racing to catch Amazon in cloud infrastructure.
On Wednesday, Cisco and Google announced a partnership that will combine Google’s expertise in building massive data centers and open source software with Cisco’s global salesforce, customer support and security.
Cloud infrastructure, the technology that allows businesses to offload their computing and storage needs and access their data from anywhere, has become a huge and fast growing market — and Amazon dominates it. The company’s AWS business got started in 2006 and is now generating over $4 billion in sales a quarter.
AWS controls 34 percent of the market, according to Synergy Research Group. Google is a distant fourth with around 5 percent of the market, behind AWS, Microsoft, and IBM.
But the cloud is maturing, creating new openings for competitors.
In particular, big companies with thousands of employees and legacy servers aren’t dumping all of their data into AWS. Instead, they often do new projects in the cloud and let developers test and build apps there, while leaving core data in their own data centers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cisco, Google, sitting in a tree, C-L-O-U-D-I-N-G
HyperFlex learns to talk Kubernetes for consistent hybrid cloud merriment
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/26/cisco_google_cloud_partnership/
Cisco and Google have struck a partnership to stretch Kubernetes from on-prem to the cloud and back again.
The partnership will see the Chocolate Factory’s Kubernetes container orchestrator and Istio microservices manger integrated with Switchzilla’s hyperconverged HyperFlex platform.
Kubernetes has all-but become the de facto standard for container-wrangling and cloud-native application dev, as even Docker now supports it. Google’s made sure its own cloud cloud runs it very well.
Like other hyperconverged products, HyperFlex makes a virtue of behaving a lot like a public cloud, albeit with a smaller pool of physical resources. Extending to the G-cloud adds scalability and the chance to stretch applications from one’s own premises into the cloud without having to re-tool anything.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tom Krazit / GeekWire:
Amazon Web Services reports Q3 revenue of $4.6B, up 42% YoY, as operating profit reaches $1.2B
Amazon Web Services crosses $1B in operating profit as revenue jumps 41 percent to $4.6B
https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-web-services-crosses-1b-operating-profit-revenue-jumps-41-percent-4-6b/
Amazon Web Services continues to grow quite strongly despite its size, and it crossed an interesting milestone during the third quarter: it contributed $1 billion in operating profit to the overall corporation.
Revenue from the public cloud leader rose 41 percent to $4.6 billion during the quarter, a tad less than the 42 percent growth posted last quarter, but they’ll probably take it. AWS continues to defend its turf despite renewed competition from the likes of Microsoft, which also reported earnings Thursday showing Azure revenue grew 90 percent in its first fiscal quarter.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft easily beats the street as its cloud run rate passes $20B a year early
https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/26/microsoft-easily-beats-the-street-as-its-cloud-run-rate-passes-20b-a-year-early/?ncid=rss&utm_source=tcfbpage&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&sr_share=facebook
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Microsoft easily beats the street as its cloud run rate passes $20B a year early
Posted 5 minutes ago by Frederic Lardinois (@fredericl)
Microsoft today announced its quarterly earnings for its first financial quarter of 2018 (yes, I know it’s early, but that’s how Microsoft’s financial quarters work). Wall Street’s crack team of financial analysts expected the company to report revenue of about $23.56 billion and earnings per share of $0.72.
The actual numbers the company reported today were $24.5 billion in GAAP revenue and $0.84 in non-GAAP earnings per share. In the year-ago-quarter, Microsoft reported earnings per share of $0.76 on revenue of $22.33 billion.
Ahead of today’s earnings, Microsoft’s stock hit record highs. The stock is up a bit in after-hours trading now, though it hasn’t moved much.
As in previous quarters, the numbers most of us pundits are going to focus on revolve around Microsoft’s cloud efforts. Here, the company reported revenues of 6.9 billion for its Intelligent Cloud business units, which include server products and cloud services.
While the Azure cloud platform is included in this number, Microsoft sadly doesn’t break out Azure revenue numbers. The company, however, has long said that it wanted Azure to reach an annual run rate of $20 billion by the end of its 2018 fiscal year. In the previous quarter, Microsoft said its run rate exceeded $18.9 billion and that Azure revenue growth was 97 percent.
“This quarter we exceeded $20 billion in commercial cloud ARR, outpacing the goal we set just over two years ago,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cisco, Google, sitting in a tree, C-L-O-U-D-I-N-G
HyperFlex learns to talk Kubernetes for consistent hybrid cloud merriment
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/26/cisco_google_cloud_partnership/
Cisco and Google have struck a partnership to stretch Kubernetes from on-prem to the cloud and back again.
The partnership will see the Chocolate Factory’s Kubernetes container orchestrator and Istio microservices manger integrated with Switchzilla’s hyperconverged HyperFlex platform.
Kubernetes has all-but become the de facto standard for container-wrangling and cloud-native application dev, as even Docker now supports it. Google’s made sure its own cloud cloud runs it very well.
Like other hyperconverged products, HyperFlex makes a virtue of behaving a lot like a public cloud, albeit with a smaller pool of physical resources. Extending to the G-cloud adds scalability and the chance to stretch applications from one’s own premises into the cloud without having to re-tool anything.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM Cloud Private brings cloud native computing to your data center
https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/31/ibm-cloud-private-brings-cloud-native-computing-to-your-data-center/?utm_source=tcfbpage&sr_share=facebook
As companies search for ways to modernize their technology stacks, they struggle with managing the legacy software (and hardware) inside their own data centers. IBM introduced a new private cloud product today that is supposed to ease the transition to cloud computing and containerization and place those legacy applications in a more modern IT management context.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Docs Is Randomly Flagging Files for Violating Its Terms of Service
Let this serve as a reminder that you have less control over your stuff online than it often appears.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/zmz3yw/why-is-my-google-doc-locked-terms-of-service-bug
A Google spokesperson reached out via email with the following statement saying that the bug has been fixed: “This morning, we made a code push that incorrectly flagged a small percentage of Google Docs as abusive, which caused those documents to be automatically blocked. A fix is in place and all users should have full access to their docs. Protecting users from viruses, malware, and other abusive content is central to user safety. We apologize for the disruption and will put processes in place to prevent this from happening again.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
http://downdetector.com/
About Downdetector
We like to see Downdetector as the weatherman for the digital world: we detect when technology fails. Just like the weather, service interruptions and outages can’t be predicted, and just like a weatherman, we can tell you what is going on.
More concretely, Downdetector offers a realtime overview of status information and outages for all kinds of services. We aim to track any service that its users consider vital to their everyday lives, including (but not limited to) internet providers, mobile providers, airlines, public transport and online services.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Larry Dignan / ZDNet:
IBM launches Cloud Private platform to bring cloud native apps to on-premises data centers; it works with multiple clouds, hardware, and existing infrastructure — IBM is betting that its Cloud Private platform can be the middleware and platform architecture connecting data center hardware of all stripes with a cloud operating model.
IBM Cloud Private launches with bet open architecture wins hybrid cloud scrum
http://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-cloud-private-launches-with-bet-open-architecture-wins-hybrid-cloud-scrum/
IBM is betting that its Cloud Private platform can be the middleware and platform architecture connecting data center hardware of all stripes with a cloud operating model.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM kills Bluemix, a year after killing SoftLayer
It’s all just ‘IBM cloud’ now. But IBM’s actual new cloud is still months off
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/02/ibm_renames_bluemix_ibm_cloud/
The last change of stationery was on October 25th, 2016, when IBM decided to replace the “SoftLayer” name and replace it with Bluemix.
On Tuesday this week the company changed it again, announcing that “Bluemix is now IBM Cloud”.
The company’s rationale is that “we are merging the Bluemix brand with IBM Cloud brand since they’ve grown to be synonymous.”
Everything IBM does in the cloud comes under the new brand: Watson, PaaS, SaaS – the works.
There’s not much more to the change than branding: the company promises all the stuff currently labelled “Bluemix” will keep running.
Tomi Engdahl says:
‘Lambda and serverless is one of the worst forms of proprietary lock-in we’ve ever seen in the history of humanity’
CoreOS on AWS, Kubernetes, and more
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/06/coreos_kubernetes_v_world/
Toward the end of this month, CoreOS CEO Alex Polvi expects Amazon will introduce a managed Kubernetes service at its AWS re:Invent event.
If so – CoreOS CTO Brandon Philips cites some Kubernetes bug reports from Amazon as evidence – it will be an admission of what most people focused on software containers already know: that Kubernetes has become the industry standard for container orchestration.
After Docker’s announcement last month that it will support Kubernetes in its enterprise product, Amazon is the largest major cloud vendor that hasn’t yet made a serious commitment to the Google-spawned open-source project. It did however tip its hand by joining the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which oversees Kubernetes, in August.
“Kubernetes has clearly won the space,” said Polvi during lunch with The Register and other tech press at its San Francisco, California, headquarters.
Polvi and Philips anticipate a Kubernetes colonization race, as enterprise vendors scramble to create the management layer for running containerized IT infrastructure.
CoreOS is already on its way, with its Tectonic enterprise Kubernetes platform. So is Red Hat, with OpenShift. Google has GKE. Microsoft has AKS. IBM is offering its Bluemix, er, Cloud Container Service. Pivotal has PKS. Oracle has teamed with CoreOS. Cloud Foundry has Cloud Foundry Container Runtime. Cisco too has thrown its hat into the ring through a Google partnership. And the list goes on
“What Kubernetes really solves is how do you run a ton of different applications with a consistent model,” said Polvi. “That consistency is what allows a company with 20,000 applications to have a small operations team running it all. Essentially you have software running these applications instead of humans doing it.”
Polvi said the plan for CoreOS is to offer a path toward more automated IT operations on Kubernetes.
“When the value of the software we’re selling you is the automated operations instead of the functionality of the code itself, like the traditional proprietary IP side of things, it means we’re aligned with open source,” Polvi said. “It means we can take upstream Prometheus and we want that to be as big and popular as possible, so that drives more demand for our code that runs your code.”
Cannibalized by containers
That may sound a bit like automation offered by the likes of configuration management toolmakers Puppet and Chef, but Polvi and Philips see those tools operating at a lower level: deploying apps. And containerization, they contend, is replacing that.
“In the past, people hooked up Puppet or Chef to the CI/CD pipelines of their app and now they’re hooking up the Kubernetes APIs for the CI/CD pipelines to deploy a new version or for testing,” said Philips.
Polvi described Puppet and Chef as languages to tell a computer how to run infrastructure. They have advantages for some operations teams and there’s no reason people can’t keep using them, he said. “But I think those companies need to keep a close eye on this [container-focused] world because a lot of the functionality is being replaced,” he added.
That’s a better state of affair that the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) market. “I think PaaS is dead,” said Polvi. “That’s why you see OpenShift and Cloud Foundry and everyone pivoting to Kubernetes. What’s going to happen is PaaS will be reborn as serverless on the other side of the Kubernetes transition.”
“Serverless is going on its own right now but the enterprise application of serverless will happen in the post-Kubernetes deployment phase of things,” he said.
The problem with PaaS, as Polvi put it, is that it’s too restrictive and not broad enough. “It was never the entire way the company did business,” he said. “Kubernetes fixes that.”
That doesn’t mean Polvi is a fan. “Lambda and serverless is one of the worst forms of proprietary lock-in that we’ve ever seen in the history of humanity,” said Polvi, only partly in jest, referring to the most widely used serverless offering, AWS Lambda. “It’s seriously as bad as it gets.”
He elaborated: “It’s code that tied not just to hardware – which we’ve seen before – but to a data center, you can’t even get the hardware yourself. And that hardware is now custom fabbed for the cloud providers with dark fiber that runs all around the world, just for them. So literally the application you write will never get the performance or responsiveness or the ability to be ported somewhere else without having the deployment footprint of Amazon.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Who’s that cuddling up in the container… *squints* Wow you’re getting along well
All’s fair in war and cloud
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/07/cloud_nativ_computing_foundation/
The cloud is a highly competitive arena, where cloud providers jostle for market share. We know of Microsoft’s long haul against Amazon’s AWS, but of late Oracle has cranked up the noise against Jeff Bezos’ market leader while trying to break past Google and IBM.
And yet, what we imagine to be bitter rivals team up – as when virtualisation giant and aspiring private-cloud provider VMware tamed up with public-cloud leader AWS a year back.
Rivals have also been buddying up in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which counts all the above – and more – as members.
The CNCF landscape can look cluttered but the situation got even more complex this year when AWS joined the Foundation with proprietary heavyweight Oracle also pitching in.
AWS cloud isn’t exactly open source, even though it does run open-source code.
Deepak Singh, general manager of AWS Container Services, flatly rejects the suggestion that there’s anything contradictory about the company joining the foundation. “It’s a myth that AWS is completely closed source,” he said. “We view open source as a companion to AWS’s business model. We use open source and have built most AWS services on top of open source technology, like MySQL, Linux, Apache Hadoop and Apache Tomcat.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
‘Lambda and serverless is one of the worst forms of proprietary lock-in we’ve ever seen in the history of humanity’
CoreOS on AWS, Kubernetes, and more
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/06/coreos_kubernetes_v_world/