Tom Krazit / GeekWire:
AWS now fully supports Kubernetes with the general release of Amazon EKS, following other cloud vendors, after announcing the service last year at AWS re:Invent — Amazon Web Services was the last of the major cloud vendors to go all-in with the Kubernetes container-orchestration project …
Ron Miller / TechCrunch:
SAP unveils SAP C/4HANA, a suite of cloud-based business products combining tech from its Hybris, Gigya, and CallidusCloud acquisitions into one CRM platform — Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a mature market with a clear market leader in Salesforce.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a mature market with a clear market leader in Salesforce. It has a bunch other enterprise players like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP vying for position. SAP decided to take another shot today when it released a new business products suite called SAP C/4HANA. (Ya, catchy I know.)
“The legacy CRM systems are all about sales; SAP C/4HANA is all about the consumer. We recognize that every part of a business needs to be focused on a single view of the consumer. When you connect all SAP applications together in an intelligent cloud suite, the demand chain directly fuels the behaviors of the supply chain,” CEO Bill McDermott said in a statement.
With security breaches on the rise, compliance with regulations keeps a tight leash on enterprises.
In 2017, recorded U.S. data breaches hit a new all-time high of 1,579, up almost 50 percent over the previous year, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center. This should come as no surprise, considering that also last year, data has taken the place of oil as the world’s most valuable resource.
For data centers, privacy and physical security of servers and switches have always been a critical priority, but increased migration toward remote edge compute sites and multitenant data centers (MTDC) has made remote management and access control of the data center cabinet more complex and challenging.
Furthermore, growing data privacy regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), and the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are driving the need for more-stringent cybersecurity measures, including closely controlled access to cabinets where servers and switches reside.
Regulations and physical security compliance
Certain segments of the industry—particularly healthcare and financials—look at cabinet access control more strictly, requiring a detailed report of who, when and why the cabinet was accessed. Generally though, all regulations simply require physical access control measures to be in place, but it is up to enterprises to decide which specific method or technology to use.
OneNeck IT Solutions (Madison, WI) announced that it has successfully completed the ISO/IEC 27001:2013 Surveillance Review. The review centered on OneNeck’s Information Security Management System (ISMS) supporting their colocation services and operations of their top-tier data centers in Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Oregon and Wisconsin as well as the company’s office in Scottsdale, Arizona.
ISO/IEC 27001:2013 is the best-known standard when it comes to establishing and recognizing global requirements for the industry’s ISMS.
“Achieving ISO/IEC 27001:2013 demonstrates our commitment to ensuring we are compliant with the most widely accepted security management parameters in the industry,” said Dave Flynn, SVP of Operations and Engineering at OneNeck. “On behalf of our customers, we proactively seek out this type of intense scrutiny. It’s just one of the ways we can reassure them our solutions ensure confidentiality, integrity and availability of all sensitive information assets.”
Code hosting service GitLab has seen a massive traffic spike after news broke over the weekend that Microsoft has agreed to acquire GitHub, the world’s largest code repository.
According to Grafana, GitLab’s statistics portal, thousands of projects and code repositories are being imported every hour. These numbers are only expected to grow as Monday comes around and most developers get back to work.
VMware’s recognised that running its stuff on Amazon Web Services costs a bomb, so has reduced prices for your initial forays.
Running VMware on AWS requires you to spin up a four-host cluster at an on-demand cost of US$8.37/host/hour, or more than $24,000 a month.
At a time when numerous cloud providers let have servers to play with for free, that’s quite a sum.
Hence a change to the VMware-on-AWS service in a June upgrade that allows single-host implementations. VMware’s only offering these as test rigs as they’ll wipe themselves after thirty days, but the intent is clear – getting users to at least try VMware-on-AWS by reducing the price.
And reducing it quite a lot – prices start at $5.60 an hour, less than a single host. Which is still more than $4k a month, a fair sum even if it does include vSphere, VSAN and NSX.
The price is also indicative of the fact that whatever you do on the single host inside 30 days can be moved to a full four-node cluster.
Google Hosts Its Annual I/O Developers Conference
One of the characteristics of cloud computing is that when you launch a virtual machine, it gets distributed wherever it makes the most sense for the cloud provider. That usually means sharing servers with other customers in what is known as a multi-tenant environment. But what about times when you want a physical server dedicated just to you?
To help meet those kinds of demands, Google announced the Beta of Google Compute Engine Sole-tenant nodes, which have been designed for use cases such a regulatory or compliance where you require full control of the underlying physical machine, and sharing is not desirable.
One of the biggest trends in application development today is the use of APIs to power the backend technologies supporting a product. Increasingly, the way mobile, IoT, web applications, or internal services talk to each other and to application frontends is using some API interface.
Alongside this trend of building API-powered applications is the move to a microservices application design pattern. A larger application is represented by many smaller application components, also typically communicating via API.
Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of Amazon API Gateway private endpoints. This has been one of the most heavily requested features for this service. We believe this is going to make creating and managing private APIs even easier.
Earlier this year, Amazon introduced “Alexa Blueprints” – a way for anyone to create their own customized Alexa skills for personal use, without needing to know how to code. Today, the company will allow those skills to be shared with others, including through text messages, email, messaging apps like WhatsApp, or social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
As we enter the 20th year of Salesforce, there’s an interesting opportunity to reflect back on the change that Marc Benioff created with the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model for enterprise software with his launch of Salesforce.com.
This model has been validated by the annual revenue stream of SaaS companies, which is fast approaching $100 billion by most estimates, and it will likely continue to transform many slower-moving industries for years to come.
According to Synergy Research Group, public cloud provider spending on infrastructure hardware and software continues to grow, rising 32% from the first quarter of 2017 after an untraditionally strong start to 2018.
The market research firm says this is the highest growth figure observed in nine quarters, during which time year-on-year growth was usually in the 10% to 20% range. Although the first quarter usually experiences a dramatic drop after a strong fourth quarter, 2018 first quarter spending was only down 2% from the fourth quarter.
Combined, ODMs continue to dominate the market in vendor market share terms, presently accounting for nearly 30% of total revenues. ODMs are followed by Dell EMC, Cisco, and HPE, each of which has a 5% to 10% market share. Microsoft, Huawei, and VMware are the next highest ranked vendors in the first quarter, Synergy Research states.
MongoDB‘s Atlas service has been giving companies a managed database service in the cloud for some time. Mongo deals with all the heavy lifting behind the scenes, relieving the developer of creating it all themselves. Today the company announced it was taking that a step further by allowing customers to have granular control over where the data lives, with a new feature called Global Clusters.
This allows companies to choose a cloud provider, then move to any location in the world data from a MongoDB database running in Atlas.
On Wednesday, June 27, 2018, Amazon Web Services released SQS triggers for Lambda functions. Those of you who have been building serverless applications with AWS Lambda probably know how big of a deal this is. Until now, the AWS Simple Queue Service (SQS) was generally a pain to deal with for serverless applications.
It’s a common architecture design pattern to attach consumers to message brokers in distributed applications. This becomes even more important with microservices
Setting up an SQS trigger in Lambda is simple through the AWS Console.
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Why GitLab Is Moving From Azure to Google Cloud Platform http://www.itprotoday.com/containers/why-gitlab-moving-azure-google-cloud-platform
Gitlab was already in the process of migrating from Azure to Google Cloud Platform long before this week.
Sonm provides cloud services based on distributed customer level hardware including PCs, mining equipment, and servers. You can either rent out your hardware or use someone’s computing power for your needs
Thomas Seal / Bloomberg:
Alibaba in talks with UK’s BT about cloud services partnership; source: may echo 2016 Vodafone agreement in Germany where Alibaba built its first EU data center
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is in talks with BT Group Plc about a cloud services partnership as the Chinese internet giant challenges Amazon.com Inc.’s dominance in Europe.
An agreement between Alibaba and the IT consulting unit of Britain’s former phone monopoly could be similar to Alibaba’s existing arrangement with Vodafone Group Plc in Germany, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified as the talks are private.
Microsoft is launching a few new networking features today that will make it easier for businesses to use the company’s Azure cloud to securely connect their own offices and infrastructure using Azure and its global network.
The first of these is the Azure Virtual WAN service, which allows businesses to connect their various branches to and through Azure. This basically works like an airline hub and spoke model, where Azure becomes the central hub through which all data between branches flows.
ile serverless computing isn’t new, it has reached an interesting place in its development. As developers begin to see the value of serverless architecture, a whole new startup ecosystem could begin to develop around it.
Serverless isn’t exactly serverless at all, but it does enable a developer to set event triggers and leave the infrastructure requirements completely to the cloud provider. The vendor delivers exactly the right amount of compute, storage and memory and the developer doesn’t even have to think about it (or code for it).
Once a seemingly unstoppable retail juggernaut, Walmart’s been scrambling to define its digitally in this Amazon-defined era. This morning, the company announced that it’s struck a five-year deal with Microsoft, Amazon’s chief cloud competitor.
These sorts of partnerships are a regular occurrence for AWS
Of course, neither Walmart nor Microsoft can be framed as an underdog in any respect, but Amazon’s stranglehold on online retail also can’t be understated. Not even a massive outage at the height of Prime Day could do much to ruffle the company’s feathers.
It’s a big day for Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service today. Not only can you now run EC2 inside a Snowball Edge device, but the company also announced a bunch of new EC2 instance types in the cloud. Thanks to these new instance types, developers now have access to a new instance type (Z1d) with custom Xeon processors that can run at up to 4.0 GHz, as well as new memory-optimized instances (R5) that run at up to 3.1 GHz and that feature up to 50 percent more CPU power and 60 percent more memory than their predecessors. There also are some bare metal variants of these instances, as well as an R5d version that features local NVMe storage.
AWS’s Snowball Edge devices aren’t new, but they are getting a new feature today that’ll make them infinitely more interesting than before. Until now, you could use the device to move lots of data and perform some computing tasks on them, courtesy of the AWS Greengrass service and Lambda that run on the device. But AWS is stepping it up and you can now run a local version of EC2, the canonical AWS compute service, right on a Snowball Edge.
Amazon’s web services AWS continue to be the highlight of the company’s balance sheet, one again showing the kind of growth Amazon is looking for in a new business for the second quarter — especially one that has dramatically better margins than its core retail business.
Despite now running a grocery chain, the company’s AWS division — which has an operating margin over 25% compared to its tiny margins on retail — grew 49% year-over-year
amazon’s retail operations generated nearly $47 billion with a net income of just over $1.3 billion (unaudited). Amazon’s AWS generated $1.6 billion in operating income on its $6.1 billion in revenue.
So, in short, Amazon’s dramatically more efficient AWS business is its biggest contributor to its actual net income.
The cloud continues to grow in leaps and bounds, but it’s still AWS’s world
Ron Miller
@ron_miller / Jul 27, 2018
Amazon Holds News Conference
With the big cloud companies reporting recently, we can be sure of a couple of things: the market continues to expand rapidly and AWS is going to be hard to catch. Depending on whose numbers you look at, the market grew around 50 percent as it continues its unprecedented expansion.
Let’s start with market leader, Amazon Web Services. Canalys has them with 31 percent of the market while Synergy Research puts them at 34 percent. That’s close enough to be considered a dead heat. As Synergy’s John Dinsdale points out, AWS is so dominant that in spite of mega growth numbers from other vendors, it is still bigger than the next four competitors combined, even after all these years.
Data Centre Arrow Storage
Whoa, AWS, don’t slip off your cloudy perch. Google and Microsoft are coming up to help
While Alibaba dips a tentative toe in the challenger pool
By Chris Mellor 3 Aug 2018 at 22:22
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Man with hiking equipment standing on rock’s edge
Gartner’s magic quadrant rating public cloud storage suppliers has suggested Amazon is losing ground while Google and Microsoft make gains.
The analyst pointed out that Google has consistently higher availability and markedly better network performance when compared to its main competitors for its multi-regional object storage service.
Google has made progress over the past 12 months among Gartner’s enterprise clients in terms of both awareness and winning business.
Oracle was lauded for offering “high performance at a compelling price with respect to its bare-metal block storage service, which is enabled by its implementation of nonvolatile memory express (NVMe) and SSD-based storage.
Data sovereignty is on the rise across the world. Laws and regulations increasingly require that citizen data be stored in local data centers, and often restricts movement of that data outside of a country’s borders. The European Union’s GDPR policy is one example, although it’s relatively porous. China’s relatively new cloud computing law is much more strict, and forced Apple to turn over its Chinese-citizen iCloud data to local providers and Amazon to sell off data center assets in the country.
Now, it appears that India will join this policy movement. According to Aditya Kalra in Reuters, an influential cloud policy panel has recommended that India mandate data localization in the country, for investigative and national security reasons
It’s that last line that is increasingly the objective of governments around the world. While privacy and security are certainly top priorities, governments now recognize that the economics of data are going to be crucial for future innovation and growth. Maintaining local control of data — through whatever means necessary — ensures that cloud providers and other services have to spend locally, even in a global digital economy.
Oracle launches autonomous database for online transaction processing
Ron Miller
@ron_miller / 11 hours ago
Key Speakers At The Oracle OpenWorld 2017 Conference
Oracle executive chairman and CTO, Larry Ellison, first introduced the company’s autonomous database at Oracle Open World last year. The company later launched an autonomous data warehouse. Today, it announced the next step with the launch of the Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP) service.
This latest autonomous database tool promises the same level of autonomy — self-repairing, automated updates and security patches and minutes or less of downtime a month.
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Oracle launches autonomous database for online transaction processing
Ron Miller
@ron_miller / 11 hours ago
Key Speakers At The Oracle OpenWorld 2017 Conference
Oracle executive chairman and CTO, Larry Ellison, first introduced the company’s autonomous database at Oracle Open World last year. The company later launched an autonomous data warehouse. Today, it announced the next step with the launch of the Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP) service.
This latest autonomous database tool promises the same level of autonomy — self-repairing, automated updates and security patches and minutes or less of downtime a month. Juan Loaiza SVP for Oracle Systems at the database giant says the ATP cloud service is a modernized extension of the online transaction processing databases (OLTP) they have been creating for decades. It has machine learning and automation underpinnings, but it should feel familiar to customers, he says.
“Most of the major companies in the world are running thousands of Oracle databases today. So one simple differentiation for us is that you can just pick up your on-premises database that you’ve had for however many years, and you can easily move it to an autonomous database in the cloud,” Loaiza told TechCrunch.
He says that companies already running OLTP databases are ones like airlines, big banks and financial services companies, online retailers and other mega companies who can’t afford even a half hour of downtime a month. He claims that with Oracle’s autonomous database, the high end of downtime is 2.5 minutes per month and the goal is to get much lower, basically nothing.
New connector and cable technologies deliver higher data rates, higher signal integrity, and higher density for next-generation data centers
Our civilization depends on data. Almost all technology and devices connected to the internet of things depend on storing data in the cloud. The massive demand for digital storage has led to an equally massive increase in demand. Every year, data storage requirements increase by 40%. As the need for reliable and powerful data storage centers increases, so does the technology. Recently, new technologies have been developed to handle the expected 40 zettabytes of information that will need to be stored by 2020.
Several factors are contributing to the growing need for data storage. Cloud storage has become widespread in recent years with more and more people storing information online rather than on their devices. Artificial intelligence (AI) is another contributor as it requires massive amounts of memory to operate. Deep-learning and machine-learning computing systems also require extensive storage to operate.
An Uptime Institute survey finds the power usage effectiveness of data centers is better than ever. However, power outages have increased significantly.
A survey from the Uptime Institute found that while data centers are getting better at managing power than ever before,
It found that the power usage effectiveness (PUE) of data centers has hit an all-time low of 1.58. By way of contrast, the average PUE in 2007 was 2.5, then dropped to 1.98 in 2011, and to 1.65 in the 2013 survey.
A PUE of 1.5 means for every watt into the IT systems, a half of a watt is needed for cooling. So, lowering PUE is something of an obsession among data center operators.
However, Uptime also found a negative trend: The number of infrastructure outages and “severe service degradation” incidents increased to 31 percent of those surveyed, that’s up 6 percentage points over last year’s 25 percent. Over the past three years, nearly half had experienced an outage at their own site or a service provider’s site.
This begs the question: Is one causing the other? Is the obsession with lower PUE somehow causing more and bigger outages? Rhonda Ascierto, vice president of research with the Uptime Institute, says no.
“We can’t determine that,”
Most downtime incidents lasted one to four hours.
Half of those who did make an estimate put the cost were less than $100,000, but 3 percent said costs were over $10 million.
What causes data center outages?
The leading causes of data center outages are power outages (33 percent), network failures (30 percent), IT staff or software errors (28 percent), on-premises non-power failure (12 percent), and third-party service provider outages (31 percent).
To err is human, and this survey showed it. Nearly 80 percent said their most recent outage could have been prevented. And that human error extends to management decisions, Ascierto said.
“Oftentimes, people talk about human error being the cause of outages, but it can include management errors, like poorly maintained or derated equipment that may not match runtime requirements,” she said. “The human error comes down to management responsibility.”
Uptime found 24 percent of those surveyed said they were impacted by outages across multiple data centers.
We have long known that the price of cloud storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive have been getting cheaper over time. Yesterday’s launch of Google One in the U.S. dropped the price for Google storage even further, cutting the cost per terabyte per month in half, driving this point home even more clearly.
As Frederic Lardinois pointed out in his post, 2 terabytes of storage now costs $9.99 a month.
Google One’s shift to 2 TB for $9.99 a month puts it in line with Apple’s pricing, which surprisingly had given you the most storage bang for your buck out of these four companies before Google One came along. Who would have thought that Apple was giving its users the best price on anything? Of course, you get access to Office 365, including Word and PowerPoint, with your terabyte of Microsoft OneDrive storage, which is going to add a fair bit of value for many users over and above the pure storage being offered.
Firebase is now Google’s default platform for app developers, and over the course of the last four years since it was acquired, the service has greatly expanded its feature set and integrations with Google services. Today, it’s rolling out yet another batch of updates that bring new features, deeper integrations and a few design updates to the service.
The highlight of this release is the launch of in-app messaging, which will allow developers to send targeted and contextual messages to users as they use the app.
Perhaps the biggest take-away from the report could be that the end of SaaS as we’ve known could be coming if modern tools make it easier for companies to build software themselves.
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Work-Bench enterprise report predicts end of SaaS could be coming
Ron Miller
@ron_miller / Yesterday
Businessman analyzing contrasting financial figures
Work-Bench, a New York City venture capital firm that spends a lot of time around Fortune 1000 companies, has put together The Work-Bench Enterprise Almanac: 2018 Edition, which you could think of as a State of the Enterprise report. It’s somewhat like Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends report, but with a focus on the tools and technologies that will be having a major impact on the enterprise in the coming year.
Perhaps the biggest take-away from the report could be that the end of SaaS as we’ve known could be coming if modern tools make it easier for companies to build software themselves. More on this later.
While the report writers state that their findings are based at least partly on anecdotal evidence, it is clearly an educated set of observations and predictions related to the company’s work with enterprise startups and the large companies they tend to target.
As they wrote in their Medium post launching the report, “Our primary aim is to help founders see the forest from the trees. For Fortune 1000 executives and other players in the ecosystem, it will help cut through the noise and marketing hype to see what really matters.” Whether that’s the case will be in the eye of the reader, but it’s a comprehensive attempt to document the state of the enterprise as they see it, and there are not too many who have done that.
The big picture
The report points out the broader landscape in which enterprise companies — startups and established players alike — are operating today. You have traditional tech companies like Cisco and HP, the mega cloud companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google, the Growth Guard with companies like Snowflake, DataDog and Sumo Logic and the New Guard, those early stage enterprise companies gunning for the more established players.
As the report states, the mega cloud players are having a huge impact on the industry by providing the infrastructure services for startups to launch and grow without worrying about building their own data centers or scaling to meet increasing demand as a company develops.
The mega clouders also scoop up a fair number of startups. Yet they don’t devote quite the level of revenue to M&A as you might think based on how acquisitive the likes of Salesforce, Microsoft and Oracle have tended to be over the years. In fact, in spite of all the action and multi-billion deals we’ve seen, Work-Bench sees room for even more.
It’s worth pointing out that Work-Bench predicts Salesforce itself could become a target for mega cloud M&A action. They are predicting that either Amazon or Microsoft could buy the CRM giant.
The report dives into 4 main areas of coverage
Machine Learning
Cloud
Security
SaaS
While all of these are really interconnected as SaaS is part of the cloud and all need security and will be (if they aren’t already) taking advantage of machine learning. Work-Bench is not seeing it in such simple terms, of course, diving into each area in detail.
The biggest take-away is perhaps that infrastructure could end up devouring SaaS in the long run.
The cloud-mobile connection is well documented and allowed companies like Uber and Airbnb, as just a couple of examples, to flourish by providing scalable infrastructure and a computer in our pockets to access their services whenever we needed them. These companies could never have existed without the combination of cloud-based infrastructure and mobile devices.
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Work-Bench enterprise report predicts end of SaaS could be coming
Ron Miller
@ron_miller / Yesterday
Businessman analyzing contrasting financial figures
Work-Bench, a New York City venture capital firm that spends a lot of time around Fortune 1000 companies, has put together The Work-Bench Enterprise Almanac: 2018 Edition, which you could think of as a State of the Enterprise report. It’s somewhat like Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends report, but with a focus on the tools and technologies that will be having a major impact on the enterprise in the coming year.
Perhaps the biggest take-away from the report could be that the end of SaaS as we’ve known could be coming if modern tools make it easier for companies to build software themselves. More on this later.
While the report writers state that their findings are based at least partly on anecdotal evidence, it is clearly an educated set of observations and predictions related to the company’s work with enterprise startups and the large companies they tend to target.
As they wrote in their Medium post launching the report, “Our primary aim is to help founders see the forest from the trees. For Fortune 1000 executives and other players in the ecosystem, it will help cut through the noise and marketing hype to see what really matters.” Whether that’s the case will be in the eye of the reader, but it’s a comprehensive attempt to document the state of the enterprise as they see it, and there are not too many who have done that.
The big picture
The report points out the broader landscape in which enterprise companies — startups and established players alike — are operating today. You have traditional tech companies like Cisco and HP, the mega cloud companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google, the Growth Guard with companies like Snowflake, DataDog and Sumo Logic and the New Guard, those early stage enterprise companies gunning for the more established players.
As the report states, the mega cloud players are having a huge impact on the industry by providing the infrastructure services for startups to launch and grow without worrying about building their own data centers or scaling to meet increasing demand as a company develops.
The mega clouders also scoop up a fair number of startups. Yet they don’t devote quite the level of revenue to M&A as you might think based on how acquisitive the likes of Salesforce, Microsoft and Oracle have tended to be over the years. In fact, in spite of all the action and multi-billion deals we’ve seen, Work-Bench sees room for even more.
It’s worth pointing out that Work-Bench predicts Salesforce itself could become a target for mega cloud M&A action. They are predicting that either Amazon or Microsoft could buy the CRM giant. We saw such speculation several years ago and it turned out that Salesforce was too rich for even these company’s blood. While they may have more cash to spend, the price has probably only gone up as Salesforce acquires more and more companies and its revenue has surpassed $10 billion.
About those mega trends
The report dives into 4 main areas of coverage, none of which are likely to surprise you if you read about the enterprise regularly in this or other publications:
Machine Learning
Cloud
Security
SaaS
While all of these are really interconnected as SaaS is part of the cloud and all need security and will be (if they aren’t already) taking advantage of machine learning. Work-Bench is not seeing it in such simple terms, of course, diving into each area in detail.
The biggest take-away is perhaps that infrastructure could end up devouring SaaS in the long run. Software as a Service grew out of couple of earlier trends, the first being the rise of the Web as a way to deliver software, then the rise of mobile to move it beyond the desktop. The cloud-mobile connection is well documented and allowed companies like Uber and Airbnb, as just a couple of examples, to flourish by providing scalable infrastructure and a computer in our pockets to access their services whenever we needed them. These companies could never have existed without the combination of cloud-based infrastructure and mobile devices.
End of SaaS dominance?
But today, Work-Bench is saying that we are seeing some other trends that could be tipping the scales back to infrastructure. That includes containers and microservices, serverless, Database as a Service and React for building front ends. Work-Bench argues that if every company is truly a software company, these tools could make it easier for companies to build these kind of services cheaply and easily, and possibly bypass the SaaS vendors.
When Alibaba reported its earnings yesterday, the cloud data got a bit buried in other stories, but it’s worth pointing out that its cloud business grew 93 percent in the most recent quarter to $710 million.
Alibaba couldn’t sustain triple digit growth for long.
“Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform have recently seen similar reductions in growth rates, and if you go back far enough in time, AWS did too. The key thing is that the market for cloud infrastructure services is now very big, yet is still growing by 50% per year — and the leading players are either maintaining or growing their market share,” he said.
For a company to support Linux, they have to consider supporting: Multiple file systems, multiple distributions, multiple desktops, multiple init systems, multiple kernels. If you’re an open source developer, focusing on a single distribution, that’s not a problem. If you’re a company that produces a product (and you stake your living on that product), those multiple points of entry do become a problem. Let’s consider Adobe (and Photoshop). If Adobe wanted to port their industry-leading product to Linux, how do they do that? Do they spend the time developing support for ext4, btrfs, Ubuntu, Fedora, GNOME, Mate, KDE, systemd? You see how that might look from the eyes of any given company?
Tom Krazit / GeekWire:
Microsoft services, including Office 365 and Azure Active Directory, suffer extended downtime after problems at its South Central US data center due to weather — Some Microsoft Azure customers with workloads running in its South Central US data center are having big problems coming …
Some Microsoft Azure customers with workloads running in its South Central US data center are having big problems coming back from the holiday weekend Tuesday, after shutdown procedures were initiated following a spike in temperature inside one of its facilities.
Around 230am Pacific Time, Microsoft identified problems with the cooling systems in one part of its Texas data center complex, which caused a spike in temperature and forced it to shut down equipment in order to prevent a more catastrophic failure, according to the Azure status page. These issues have also caused cascading effects for some Microsoft Office 365 users as well as those who rely on Microsoft Active Directory to log into their accounts.
Martin Giles / MIT Technology Review:
Rigetti says its Quantum Cloud Services will let users run a hybrid of quantum and normal algorithms in the cloud, vastly reducing latency and increasing speed
Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat:
Microsoft announces Azure DevOps, which will succeed Visual Studio Team Services, and Azure DevOps Server, the successor of Team Foundation Server — Microsoft today announced Azure DevOps, the successor of Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS, formerly Visual Studio Online) and Azure DevOps Server …
Emil Protalinski@EPro September 10, 2018 8:00 AM
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Microsoft today announced Azure DevOps, the successor of Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS, formerly Visual Studio Online) and Azure DevOps Server, the successor of Team Foundation Server (TFS). The included services “span the breadth of the development lifecycle to help developers ship software faster and with higher quality,” the company promises.
Mark Wycislik-Wilson / BetaNews:
Continuous integration and delivery service Azure Pipelines arrives in the GitHub Marketplace and will be free for open source repositories
Microsoft today announced the successor to Visual Studio Team Services, Azure DevOps, as well as Azure DevOps Server, replacing Team Foundation Server. As part of this, the company also launched a new CI/CD service called Azure Pipelines which gives developers the chance to build, test and deploy to any platform.
Azure Pipelines has been launched in the GitHub Marketplace, and it is completely free for open source repositories.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Tom Krazit / GeekWire:
AWS now fully supports Kubernetes with the general release of Amazon EKS, following other cloud vendors, after announcing the service last year at AWS re:Invent — Amazon Web Services was the last of the major cloud vendors to go all-in with the Kubernetes container-orchestration project …
Amazon Web Services now fully supports Kubernetes with the general release of Amazon EKS
https://www.geekwire.com/2018/amazon-web-services-now-fully-supports-kubernetes-general-release-amazon-eks/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ron Miller / TechCrunch:
SAP unveils SAP C/4HANA, a suite of cloud-based business products combining tech from its Hybris, Gigya, and CallidusCloud acquisitions into one CRM platform — Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a mature market with a clear market leader in Salesforce.
SAP gives CRM another shot with new cloud-based suite
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/05/sap-gives-crm-another-shot-with-with-new-cloud-based-suite/
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a mature market with a clear market leader in Salesforce. It has a bunch other enterprise players like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP vying for position. SAP decided to take another shot today when it released a new business products suite called SAP C/4HANA. (Ya, catchy I know.)
“The legacy CRM systems are all about sales; SAP C/4HANA is all about the consumer. We recognize that every part of a business needs to be focused on a single view of the consumer. When you connect all SAP applications together in an intelligent cloud suite, the demand chain directly fuels the behaviors of the supply chain,” CEO Bill McDermott said in a statement.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Understanding data security concerns in remote data centers
https://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/print/volume-26/issue-5/features/data-center/understanding-data-security-concerns-in-remote-data-centers.html?cmpid=enl_cim_cim_data_center_newsletter_2018-06-05&pwhid=6b9badc08db25d04d04ee00b499089ffc280910702f8ef99951bdbdad3175f54dcae8b7ad9fa2c1f5697ffa19d05535df56b8dc1e6f75b7b6f6f8c7461ce0b24&eid=289644432&bid=2127371
With security breaches on the rise, compliance with regulations keeps a tight leash on enterprises.
In 2017, recorded U.S. data breaches hit a new all-time high of 1,579, up almost 50 percent over the previous year, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center. This should come as no surprise, considering that also last year, data has taken the place of oil as the world’s most valuable resource.
For data centers, privacy and physical security of servers and switches have always been a critical priority, but increased migration toward remote edge compute sites and multitenant data centers (MTDC) has made remote management and access control of the data center cabinet more complex and challenging.
Furthermore, growing data privacy regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), and the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are driving the need for more-stringent cybersecurity measures, including closely controlled access to cabinets where servers and switches reside.
Regulations and physical security compliance
Certain segments of the industry—particularly healthcare and financials—look at cabinet access control more strictly, requiring a detailed report of who, when and why the cabinet was accessed. Generally though, all regulations simply require physical access control measures to be in place, but it is up to enterprises to decide which specific method or technology to use.
Tomi Engdahl says:
OneNeck IT Solutions validates ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certification for top tier data center services
https://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/pt/2018/05/oneneck-it-solutions-validates-iso-iec-27001-2013-certification-for-top-tier-data-center-services.html?cmpid=enl_cim_cim_data_center_newsletter_2018-06-05&pwhid=6b9badc08db25d04d04ee00b499089ffc280910702f8ef99951bdbdad3175f54dcae8b7ad9fa2c1f5697ffa19d05535df56b8dc1e6f75b7b6f6f8c7461ce0b24&eid=289644432&bid=2127371
OneNeck IT Solutions (Madison, WI) announced that it has successfully completed the ISO/IEC 27001:2013 Surveillance Review. The review centered on OneNeck’s Information Security Management System (ISMS) supporting their colocation services and operations of their top-tier data centers in Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Oregon and Wisconsin as well as the company’s office in Scottsdale, Arizona.
ISO/IEC 27001:2013 is the best-known standard when it comes to establishing and recognizing global requirements for the industry’s ISMS.
“Achieving ISO/IEC 27001:2013 demonstrates our commitment to ensuring we are compliant with the most widely accepted security management parameters in the industry,” said Dave Flynn, SVP of Operations and Engineering at OneNeck. “On behalf of our customers, we proactively seek out this type of intense scrutiny. It’s just one of the ways we can reassure them our solutions ensure confidentiality, integrity and availability of all sensitive information assets.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
GitLab Sees Huge Traffic Spike After News of Microsoft Buying GitHub
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/gitlab-sees-huge-traffic-spike-after-news-of-microsoft-buying-github/
Code hosting service GitLab has seen a massive traffic spike after news broke over the weekend that Microsoft has agreed to acquire GitHub, the world’s largest code repository.
According to Grafana, GitLab’s statistics portal, thousands of projects and code repositories are being imported every hour. These numbers are only expected to grow as Monday comes around and most developers get back to work.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Most clouds are free to test. VMware’s cut its price to $4k/month
Single-host systems with 30-day self-destruct switch should make for an easier on-ramp
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/08/vmwareonaws_shrinks_to_fit_toedippers_budgets/
VMware’s recognised that running its stuff on Amazon Web Services costs a bomb, so has reduced prices for your initial forays.
Running VMware on AWS requires you to spin up a four-host cluster at an on-demand cost of US$8.37/host/hour, or more than $24,000 a month.
At a time when numerous cloud providers let have servers to play with for free, that’s quite a sum.
Hence a change to the VMware-on-AWS service in a June upgrade that allows single-host implementations. VMware’s only offering these as test rigs as they’ll wipe themselves after thirty days, but the intent is clear – getting users to at least try VMware-on-AWS by reducing the price.
And reducing it quite a lot – prices start at $5.60 an hour, less than a single host. Which is still more than $4k a month, a fair sum even if it does include vSphere, VSAN and NSX.
The price is also indicative of the fact that whatever you do on the single host inside 30 days can be moved to a full four-node cluster.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Cloud announces the Beta of single tenant instances
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/07/google-cloud-announces-the-beta-of-single-tenant-instances/?sr_share=facebook&utm_source=tcfbpage
Google Hosts Its Annual I/O Developers Conference
One of the characteristics of cloud computing is that when you launch a virtual machine, it gets distributed wherever it makes the most sense for the cloud provider. That usually means sharing servers with other customers in what is known as a multi-tenant environment. But what about times when you want a physical server dedicated just to you?
To help meet those kinds of demands, Google announced the Beta of Google Compute Engine Sole-tenant nodes, which have been designed for use cases such a regulatory or compliance where you require full control of the underlying physical machine, and sharing is not desirable.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Red Hat Summit 2018 Burr Sutter Demo – Multi-cloud
https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2018/05/10/red-hat-summit-2018-burr-sutter-demo/?sc_cid=7016000000127ECAAY
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/04/rookout-releases-serveless-debugging-tool-for-aws-lambda/?utm_source=tcfbpage&sr_share=facebook
Tomi Engdahl says:
Get alerted periodically whenever your Amazon AWS billing amount has increased by $10 – never be surprised by a huge bill!
https://clouden.net/apps/billing-alerts-for-aws/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Introducing Amazon API Gateway Private Endpoints
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/introducing-amazon-api-gateway-private-endpoints/
One of the biggest trends in application development today is the use of APIs to power the backend technologies supporting a product. Increasingly, the way mobile, IoT, web applications, or internal services talk to each other and to application frontends is using some API interface.
Alongside this trend of building API-powered applications is the move to a microservices application design pattern. A larger application is represented by many smaller application components, also typically communicating via API.
Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of Amazon API Gateway private endpoints. This has been one of the most heavily requested features for this service. We believe this is going to make creating and managing private APIs even easier.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon now lets you share your custom skills made with Alexa Blueprints
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/13/amazon-now-lets-you-share-your-custom-skills-made-with-alexa-blueprints/?sr_share=facebook&utm_source=tcfbpage
Earlier this year, Amazon introduced “Alexa Blueprints” – a way for anyone to create their own customized Alexa skills for personal use, without needing to know how to code. Today, the company will allow those skills to be shared with others, including through text messages, email, messaging apps like WhatsApp, or social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/google-myy-nyt-suomi-pilvea-hyvin-merkittavaa-6730389
Tomi Engdahl says:
http://services.google.com/fh/files/blogs/finland_region_blog_translation.pdf
Tomi Engdahl says:
After twenty years of Salesforce, what Marc Benioff got right and wrong about the cloud
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/17/after-twenty-years-of-salesforce-what-marc-benioff-got-right-and-wrong-about-the-cloud/?utm_source=tcfbpage&sr_share=facebook
As we enter the 20th year of Salesforce, there’s an interesting opportunity to reflect back on the change that Marc Benioff created with the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model for enterprise software with his launch of Salesforce.com.
This model has been validated by the annual revenue stream of SaaS companies, which is fast approaching $100 billion by most estimates, and it will likely continue to transform many slower-moving industries for years to come.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cloud provider spending rises from 1Q17: Synergy Research
https://www.lightwaveonline.com/articles/2018/06/cloud-provider-spending-rises-from-1q17-synergy-research.html?cmpid=enl_lightwave_lightwave_friday_5_2018-06-22&pwhid=6b9badc08db25d04d04ee00b499089ffc280910702f8ef99951bdbdad3175f54dcae8b7ad9fa2c1f5697ffa19d05535df56b8dc1e6f75b7b6f6f8c7461ce0b24&eid=289644432&bid=2150702
According to Synergy Research Group, public cloud provider spending on infrastructure hardware and software continues to grow, rising 32% from the first quarter of 2017 after an untraditionally strong start to 2018.
The market research firm says this is the highest growth figure observed in nine quarters, during which time year-on-year growth was usually in the 10% to 20% range. Although the first quarter usually experiences a dramatic drop after a strong fourth quarter, 2018 first quarter spending was only down 2% from the fourth quarter.
Combined, ODMs continue to dominate the market in vendor market share terms, presently accounting for nearly 30% of total revenues. ODMs are followed by Dell EMC, Cisco, and HPE, each of which has a 5% to 10% market share. Microsoft, Huawei, and VMware are the next highest ranked vendors in the first quarter, Synergy Research states.
Tomi Engdahl says:
MongoDB launches Global Clusters to put geographic data control within reach of anyone
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/27/mongodb-launches-global-clusters-to-put-geographic-data-control-within-reach-of-anyone/?sr_share=facebook&utm_source=tcfbpage
MongoDB‘s Atlas service has been giving companies a managed database service in the cloud for some time. Mongo deals with all the heavy lifting behind the scenes, relieving the developer of creating it all themselves. Today the company announced it was taking that a step further by allowing customers to have granular control over where the data lives, with a new feature called Global Clusters.
This allows companies to choose a cloud provider, then move to any location in the world data from a MongoDB database running in Atlas.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Serverless Consumers with Lambda and SQS Triggers
https://www.jeremydaly.com/serverless-consumers-with-lambda-and-sqs-triggers/
On Wednesday, June 27, 2018, Amazon Web Services released SQS triggers for Lambda functions. Those of you who have been building serverless applications with AWS Lambda probably know how big of a deal this is. Until now, the AWS Simple Queue Service (SQS) was generally a pain to deal with for serverless applications.
It’s a common architecture design pattern to attach consumers to message brokers in distributed applications. This becomes even more important with microservices
Setting up an SQS trigger in Lambda is simple through the AWS Console.
Tomi Engdahl says:
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Why GitLab Is Moving From Azure to Google Cloud Platform
http://www.itprotoday.com/containers/why-gitlab-moving-azure-google-cloud-platform
Gitlab was already in the process of migrating from Azure to Google Cloud Platform long before this week.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How to rapidly develop applications on Amazon Cloud Directory with Managed Schema
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/rapidly-develop-applications-on-amazon-cloud-directory-with-managed-schema/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Decentralized Fog Computing Platform
https://sonm.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Facebook_Livenet
Sonm provides cloud services based on distributed customer level hardware including PCs, mining equipment, and servers. You can either rent out your hardware or use someone’s computing power for your needs
Tomi Engdahl says:
Thomas Seal / Bloomberg:
Alibaba in talks with UK’s BT about cloud services partnership; source: may echo 2016 Vodafone agreement in Germany where Alibaba built its first EU data center
Alibaba in Talks With BT for Cloud Partnership in Europe Push
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-09/alibaba-in-talks-with-bt-for-cloud-partnership-in-europe-push
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is in talks with BT Group Plc about a cloud services partnership as the Chinese internet giant challenges Amazon.com Inc.’s dominance in Europe.
An agreement between Alibaba and the IT consulting unit of Britain’s former phone monopoly could be similar to Alibaba’s existing arrangement with Vodafone Group Plc in Germany, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified as the talks are private.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft launches new wide-area networking options for Azure
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/12/microsoft-launches-new-wide-area-networking-options-for-azure/?utm_source=tcfbpage&sr_share=facebook
Microsoft is launching a few new networking features today that will make it easier for businesses to use the company’s Azure cloud to securely connect their own offices and infrastructure using Azure and its global network.
The first of these is the Azure Virtual WAN service, which allows businesses to connect their various branches to and through Azure. This basically works like an airline hub and spoke model, where Azure becomes the central hub through which all data between branches flows.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Serverless computing could unleash a new startup ecosystem
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/08/serverless-computing-could-unleash-a-new-startup-ecosystem/
ile serverless computing isn’t new, it has reached an interesting place in its development. As developers begin to see the value of serverless architecture, a whole new startup ecosystem could begin to develop around it.
Serverless isn’t exactly serverless at all, but it does enable a developer to set event triggers and leave the infrastructure requirements completely to the cloud provider. The vendor delivers exactly the right amount of compute, storage and memory and the developer doesn’t even have to think about it (or code for it).
Tomi Engdahl says:
What are cloud-native applications?
https://opensource.com/article/18/7/what-are-cloud-native-apps?sc_cid=7016000000127ECAAY
A decade or so into the cloud revolution, we finally have some solid ideas about the best ways to take full advantage of new types of infrastructure.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://cloud.google.com/filestore/
High-performance, fully managed file storage
Tomi Engdahl says:
Walmart enlists Microsoft cloud in battle against Amazon
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/walmart-enlists-microsoft-cloud-in-battle-against-amazon/?sr_share=facebook&utm_source=tcfbpage
Once a seemingly unstoppable retail juggernaut, Walmart’s been scrambling to define its digitally in this Amazon-defined era. This morning, the company announced that it’s struck a five-year deal with Microsoft, Amazon’s chief cloud competitor.
These sorts of partnerships are a regular occurrence for AWS
Of course, neither Walmart nor Microsoft can be framed as an underdog in any respect, but Amazon’s stranglehold on online retail also can’t be understated. Not even a massive outage at the height of Prime Day could do much to ruffle the company’s feathers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google builds its own subsea cable from the US to France
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/google-builds-its-own-subsea-cable-from-the-us-to-france/?sr_share=facebook&utm_source=tcfbpage
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon’s EC2 gets faster processors, new high-memory instances
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/amazons-ec2-gets-faster-processors-new-high-memory-instances/?sr_share=facebook&utm_source=tcfbpage
It’s a big day for Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service today. Not only can you now run EC2 inside a Snowball Edge device, but the company also announced a bunch of new EC2 instance types in the cloud. Thanks to these new instance types, developers now have access to a new instance type (Z1d) with custom Xeon processors that can run at up to 4.0 GHz, as well as new memory-optimized instances (R5) that run at up to 3.1 GHz and that feature up to 50 percent more CPU power and 60 percent more memory than their predecessors. There also are some bare metal variants of these instances, as well as an R5d version that features local NVMe storage.
Tomi Engdahl says:
With its Snowball Edge, AWS now lets you run EC2 on your factory floor
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/with-its-snowball-edge-aws-now-lets-you-run-ec2-on-your-factory-floor/?sr_share=facebook&utm_source=tcfbpage
AWS’s Snowball Edge devices aren’t new, but they are getting a new feature today that’ll make them infinitely more interesting than before. Until now, you could use the device to move lots of data and perform some computing tasks on them, courtesy of the AWS Greengrass service and Lambda that run on the device. But AWS is stepping it up and you can now run a local version of EC2, the canonical AWS compute service, right on a Snowball Edge.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why moving all your workloads to the cloud is a bad idea
https://opensource.com/article/18/7/why-you-cant-move-everything-cloud?sc_cid=7016000000127ECAAY
In the third installment in this series on common pitfalls of moving to the cloud, learn how to figure out which applications you shouldn’t migrate.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon’s AWS continues to lead its performance highlights
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/26/amazons-aws-continues-to-lead-its-performance-highlights/?utm_source=tcfbpage&sr_share=facebook
Amazon’s web services AWS continue to be the highlight of the company’s balance sheet, one again showing the kind of growth Amazon is looking for in a new business for the second quarter — especially one that has dramatically better margins than its core retail business.
Despite now running a grocery chain, the company’s AWS division — which has an operating margin over 25% compared to its tiny margins on retail — grew 49% year-over-year
amazon’s retail operations generated nearly $47 billion with a net income of just over $1.3 billion (unaudited). Amazon’s AWS generated $1.6 billion in operating income on its $6.1 billion in revenue.
So, in short, Amazon’s dramatically more efficient AWS business is its biggest contributor to its actual net income.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The cloud continues to grow in leaps and bounds, but it’s still AWS’s world
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/27/the-cloud-continues-to-grow-in-leaps-and-bounds-but-its-still-awss-world/?sr_share=facebook&utm_source=tcfbpage
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The cloud continues to grow in leaps and bounds, but it’s still AWS’s world
Ron Miller
@ron_miller / Jul 27, 2018
Amazon Holds News Conference
With the big cloud companies reporting recently, we can be sure of a couple of things: the market continues to expand rapidly and AWS is going to be hard to catch. Depending on whose numbers you look at, the market grew around 50 percent as it continues its unprecedented expansion.
Let’s start with market leader, Amazon Web Services. Canalys has them with 31 percent of the market while Synergy Research puts them at 34 percent. That’s close enough to be considered a dead heat. As Synergy’s John Dinsdale points out, AWS is so dominant that in spite of mega growth numbers from other vendors, it is still bigger than the next four competitors combined, even after all these years.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Smart Plant IoT
https://www.hackster.io/Nyceane/smart-plant-iot-59cbc3
Auto watering the plant and tracking plant’s health through Helium and Microsoft Azure IoT.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Whoa, AWS, don’t slip off your cloudy perch. Google and Microsoft are coming up to help
While Alibaba dips a tentative toe in the challenger pool
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/03/gartner_cloud_storage_magic_quadrant/
Data Centre Arrow Storage
Whoa, AWS, don’t slip off your cloudy perch. Google and Microsoft are coming up to help
While Alibaba dips a tentative toe in the challenger pool
By Chris Mellor 3 Aug 2018 at 22:22
11 Reg comments SHARE ▼
Man with hiking equipment standing on rock’s edge
Gartner’s magic quadrant rating public cloud storage suppliers has suggested Amazon is losing ground while Google and Microsoft make gains.
The analyst pointed out that Google has consistently higher availability and markedly better network performance when compared to its main competitors for its multi-regional object storage service.
Google has made progress over the past 12 months among Gartner’s enterprise clients in terms of both awareness and winning business.
Oracle was lauded for offering “high performance at a compelling price with respect to its bare-metal block storage service, which is enabled by its implementation of nonvolatile memory express (NVMe) and SSD-based storage.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A View to the Cloud
https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/a-view-to-the-cloud
Tomi Engdahl says:
What data is too risky for the cloud?
https://opensource.com/article/18/8/data-risky-cloud?sc_cid=7016000000127ECAAY
In the final article in this series on hybrid multi-cloud pitfalls, learn how to devise a low-risk cloud migration strategy.
Tomi Engdahl says:
http://www.etn.fi/index.php/13-news/8246-pilvi-kasvaa-ja-kannattaa-amazon-selkea-ykkonen
Tomi Engdahl says:
India may become next restricted market for U.S. cloud providers
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/04/india-may-become-next-restricted-market-for-u-s-cloud-providers/?utm_source=tcfbpage&sr_share=facebook
Data sovereignty is on the rise across the world. Laws and regulations increasingly require that citizen data be stored in local data centers, and often restricts movement of that data outside of a country’s borders. The European Union’s GDPR policy is one example, although it’s relatively porous. China’s relatively new cloud computing law is much more strict, and forced Apple to turn over its Chinese-citizen iCloud data to local providers and Amazon to sell off data center assets in the country.
Now, it appears that India will join this policy movement. According to Aditya Kalra in Reuters, an influential cloud policy panel has recommended that India mandate data localization in the country, for investigative and national security reasons
It’s that last line that is increasingly the objective of governments around the world. While privacy and security are certainly top priorities, governments now recognize that the economics of data are going to be crucial for future innovation and growth. Maintaining local control of data — through whatever means necessary — ensures that cloud providers and other services have to spend locally, even in a global digital economy.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Oracle launches autonomous database for online transaction processing
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/07/oracle-launches-autonomous-transaction-processing-cloud-service/?utm_source=tcfbpage&sr_share=facebook
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Oracle launches autonomous database for online transaction processing
Ron Miller
@ron_miller / 11 hours ago
Key Speakers At The Oracle OpenWorld 2017 Conference
Oracle executive chairman and CTO, Larry Ellison, first introduced the company’s autonomous database at Oracle Open World last year. The company later launched an autonomous data warehouse. Today, it announced the next step with the launch of the Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP) service.
This latest autonomous database tool promises the same level of autonomy — self-repairing, automated updates and security patches and minutes or less of downtime a month.
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Oracle launches autonomous database for online transaction processing
Ron Miller
@ron_miller / 11 hours ago
Key Speakers At The Oracle OpenWorld 2017 Conference
Oracle executive chairman and CTO, Larry Ellison, first introduced the company’s autonomous database at Oracle Open World last year. The company later launched an autonomous data warehouse. Today, it announced the next step with the launch of the Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP) service.
This latest autonomous database tool promises the same level of autonomy — self-repairing, automated updates and security patches and minutes or less of downtime a month. Juan Loaiza SVP for Oracle Systems at the database giant says the ATP cloud service is a modernized extension of the online transaction processing databases (OLTP) they have been creating for decades. It has machine learning and automation underpinnings, but it should feel familiar to customers, he says.
“Most of the major companies in the world are running thousands of Oracle databases today. So one simple differentiation for us is that you can just pick up your on-premises database that you’ve had for however many years, and you can easily move it to an autonomous database in the cloud,” Loaiza told TechCrunch.
He says that companies already running OLTP databases are ones like airlines, big banks and financial services companies, online retailers and other mega companies who can’t afford even a half hour of downtime a month. He claims that with Oracle’s autonomous database, the high end of downtime is 2.5 minutes per month and the goal is to get much lower, basically nothing.
Tomi Engdahl says:
New interconnect technologies tackle higher data storage demands
https://www.electronicproducts.com/Interconnections/Connectors/New_interconnect_technologies_tackle_higher_data_storage_demands.aspx?utm_source=Aspencore&utm_medium=EDN
New connector and cable technologies deliver higher data rates, higher signal integrity, and higher density for next-generation data centers
Our civilization depends on data. Almost all technology and devices connected to the internet of things depend on storing data in the cloud. The massive demand for digital storage has led to an equally massive increase in demand. Every year, data storage requirements increase by 40%. As the need for reliable and powerful data storage centers increases, so does the technology. Recently, new technologies have been developed to handle the expected 40 zettabytes of information that will need to be stored by 2020.
Several factors are contributing to the growing need for data storage. Cloud storage has become widespread in recent years with more and more people storing information online rather than on their devices. Artificial intelligence (AI) is another contributor as it requires massive amounts of memory to operate. Deep-learning and machine-learning computing systems also require extensive storage to operate.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Data center power efficiency increases, but so do power outages
https://www.networkworld.com/article/3297745/data-center/data-center-power-efficiency-increases-but-so-do-power-outages.html
An Uptime Institute survey finds the power usage effectiveness of data centers is better than ever. However, power outages have increased significantly.
A survey from the Uptime Institute found that while data centers are getting better at managing power than ever before,
It found that the power usage effectiveness (PUE) of data centers has hit an all-time low of 1.58. By way of contrast, the average PUE in 2007 was 2.5, then dropped to 1.98 in 2011, and to 1.65 in the 2013 survey.
A PUE of 1.5 means for every watt into the IT systems, a half of a watt is needed for cooling. So, lowering PUE is something of an obsession among data center operators.
However, Uptime also found a negative trend: The number of infrastructure outages and “severe service degradation” incidents increased to 31 percent of those surveyed, that’s up 6 percentage points over last year’s 25 percent. Over the past three years, nearly half had experienced an outage at their own site or a service provider’s site.
This begs the question: Is one causing the other? Is the obsession with lower PUE somehow causing more and bigger outages? Rhonda Ascierto, vice president of research with the Uptime Institute, says no.
“We can’t determine that,”
Most downtime incidents lasted one to four hours.
Half of those who did make an estimate put the cost were less than $100,000, but 3 percent said costs were over $10 million.
What causes data center outages?
The leading causes of data center outages are power outages (33 percent), network failures (30 percent), IT staff or software errors (28 percent), on-premises non-power failure (12 percent), and third-party service provider outages (31 percent).
To err is human, and this survey showed it. Nearly 80 percent said their most recent outage could have been prevented. And that human error extends to management decisions, Ascierto said.
“Oftentimes, people talk about human error being the cause of outages, but it can include management errors, like poorly maintained or derated equipment that may not match runtime requirements,” she said. “The human error comes down to management responsibility.”
Uptime found 24 percent of those surveyed said they were impacted by outages across multiple data centers.
2018 Data Center Industry Survey Results
https://uptimeinstitute.com/2018-data-center-industry-survey-results
Tomi Engdahl says:
Price has dropped to $5 per terabyte per month.
Google One is more proof of commoditization of consumer cloud storage
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/16/google-one-is-more-proof-of-commoditization-of-consumer-cloud-storage/?utm_source=tcfbpage&sr_share=facebook
We have long known that the price of cloud storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive have been getting cheaper over time. Yesterday’s launch of Google One in the U.S. dropped the price for Google storage even further, cutting the cost per terabyte per month in half, driving this point home even more clearly.
As Frederic Lardinois pointed out in his post, 2 terabytes of storage now costs $9.99 a month.
Google One’s shift to 2 TB for $9.99 a month puts it in line with Apple’s pricing, which surprisingly had given you the most storage bang for your buck out of these four companies before Google One came along. Who would have thought that Apple was giving its users the best price on anything? Of course, you get access to Office 365, including Word and PowerPoint, with your terabyte of Microsoft OneDrive storage, which is going to add a fair bit of value for many users over and above the pure storage being offered.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Firebase adds in-app messaging, JIRA integration, new reports and more
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/16/google-firebase-adds-in-app-messaging-jira-integration-new-reports-and-more/?sr_share=facebook&utm_source=tcfbpage
Firebase is now Google’s default platform for app developers, and over the course of the last four years since it was acquired, the service has greatly expanded its feature set and integrations with Google services. Today, it’s rolling out yet another batch of updates that bring new features, deeper integrations and a few design updates to the service.
The highlight of this release is the launch of in-app messaging, which will allow developers to send targeted and contextual messages to users as they use the app.
https://firebase.google.com
Tomi Engdahl says:
Work-Bench enterprise report predicts end of SaaS could be coming
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/16/work-bench-enterprise-report-predicts-end-of-saas-could-be-coming/?sr_share=facebook&utm_source=tcfbpage
Perhaps the biggest take-away from the report could be that the end of SaaS as we’ve known could be coming if modern tools make it easier for companies to build software themselves.
AdChoices
Work-Bench enterprise report predicts end of SaaS could be coming
Ron Miller
@ron_miller / Yesterday
Businessman analyzing contrasting financial figures
Work-Bench, a New York City venture capital firm that spends a lot of time around Fortune 1000 companies, has put together The Work-Bench Enterprise Almanac: 2018 Edition, which you could think of as a State of the Enterprise report. It’s somewhat like Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends report, but with a focus on the tools and technologies that will be having a major impact on the enterprise in the coming year.
Perhaps the biggest take-away from the report could be that the end of SaaS as we’ve known could be coming if modern tools make it easier for companies to build software themselves. More on this later.
While the report writers state that their findings are based at least partly on anecdotal evidence, it is clearly an educated set of observations and predictions related to the company’s work with enterprise startups and the large companies they tend to target.
As they wrote in their Medium post launching the report, “Our primary aim is to help founders see the forest from the trees. For Fortune 1000 executives and other players in the ecosystem, it will help cut through the noise and marketing hype to see what really matters.” Whether that’s the case will be in the eye of the reader, but it’s a comprehensive attempt to document the state of the enterprise as they see it, and there are not too many who have done that.
The big picture
The report points out the broader landscape in which enterprise companies — startups and established players alike — are operating today. You have traditional tech companies like Cisco and HP, the mega cloud companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google, the Growth Guard with companies like Snowflake, DataDog and Sumo Logic and the New Guard, those early stage enterprise companies gunning for the more established players.
As the report states, the mega cloud players are having a huge impact on the industry by providing the infrastructure services for startups to launch and grow without worrying about building their own data centers or scaling to meet increasing demand as a company develops.
The mega clouders also scoop up a fair number of startups. Yet they don’t devote quite the level of revenue to M&A as you might think based on how acquisitive the likes of Salesforce, Microsoft and Oracle have tended to be over the years. In fact, in spite of all the action and multi-billion deals we’ve seen, Work-Bench sees room for even more.
It’s worth pointing out that Work-Bench predicts Salesforce itself could become a target for mega cloud M&A action. They are predicting that either Amazon or Microsoft could buy the CRM giant.
The report dives into 4 main areas of coverage
Machine Learning
Cloud
Security
SaaS
While all of these are really interconnected as SaaS is part of the cloud and all need security and will be (if they aren’t already) taking advantage of machine learning. Work-Bench is not seeing it in such simple terms, of course, diving into each area in detail.
The biggest take-away is perhaps that infrastructure could end up devouring SaaS in the long run.
The cloud-mobile connection is well documented and allowed companies like Uber and Airbnb, as just a couple of examples, to flourish by providing scalable infrastructure and a computer in our pockets to access their services whenever we needed them. These companies could never have existed without the combination of cloud-based infrastructure and mobile devices.
AdChoices
Work-Bench enterprise report predicts end of SaaS could be coming
Ron Miller
@ron_miller / Yesterday
Businessman analyzing contrasting financial figures
Work-Bench, a New York City venture capital firm that spends a lot of time around Fortune 1000 companies, has put together The Work-Bench Enterprise Almanac: 2018 Edition, which you could think of as a State of the Enterprise report. It’s somewhat like Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends report, but with a focus on the tools and technologies that will be having a major impact on the enterprise in the coming year.
Perhaps the biggest take-away from the report could be that the end of SaaS as we’ve known could be coming if modern tools make it easier for companies to build software themselves. More on this later.
While the report writers state that their findings are based at least partly on anecdotal evidence, it is clearly an educated set of observations and predictions related to the company’s work with enterprise startups and the large companies they tend to target.
As they wrote in their Medium post launching the report, “Our primary aim is to help founders see the forest from the trees. For Fortune 1000 executives and other players in the ecosystem, it will help cut through the noise and marketing hype to see what really matters.” Whether that’s the case will be in the eye of the reader, but it’s a comprehensive attempt to document the state of the enterprise as they see it, and there are not too many who have done that.
The big picture
The report points out the broader landscape in which enterprise companies — startups and established players alike — are operating today. You have traditional tech companies like Cisco and HP, the mega cloud companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google, the Growth Guard with companies like Snowflake, DataDog and Sumo Logic and the New Guard, those early stage enterprise companies gunning for the more established players.
As the report states, the mega cloud players are having a huge impact on the industry by providing the infrastructure services for startups to launch and grow without worrying about building their own data centers or scaling to meet increasing demand as a company develops.
The mega clouders also scoop up a fair number of startups. Yet they don’t devote quite the level of revenue to M&A as you might think based on how acquisitive the likes of Salesforce, Microsoft and Oracle have tended to be over the years. In fact, in spite of all the action and multi-billion deals we’ve seen, Work-Bench sees room for even more.
It’s worth pointing out that Work-Bench predicts Salesforce itself could become a target for mega cloud M&A action. They are predicting that either Amazon or Microsoft could buy the CRM giant. We saw such speculation several years ago and it turned out that Salesforce was too rich for even these company’s blood. While they may have more cash to spend, the price has probably only gone up as Salesforce acquires more and more companies and its revenue has surpassed $10 billion.
About those mega trends
The report dives into 4 main areas of coverage, none of which are likely to surprise you if you read about the enterprise regularly in this or other publications:
Machine Learning
Cloud
Security
SaaS
While all of these are really interconnected as SaaS is part of the cloud and all need security and will be (if they aren’t already) taking advantage of machine learning. Work-Bench is not seeing it in such simple terms, of course, diving into each area in detail.
The biggest take-away is perhaps that infrastructure could end up devouring SaaS in the long run. Software as a Service grew out of couple of earlier trends, the first being the rise of the Web as a way to deliver software, then the rise of mobile to move it beyond the desktop. The cloud-mobile connection is well documented and allowed companies like Uber and Airbnb, as just a couple of examples, to flourish by providing scalable infrastructure and a computer in our pockets to access their services whenever we needed them. These companies could never have existed without the combination of cloud-based infrastructure and mobile devices.
End of SaaS dominance?
But today, Work-Bench is saying that we are seeing some other trends that could be tipping the scales back to infrastructure. That includes containers and microservices, serverless, Database as a Service and React for building front ends. Work-Bench argues that if every company is truly a software company, these tools could make it easier for companies to build these kind of services cheaply and easily, and possibly bypass the SaaS vendors.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Alibaba continues to gain cloud momentum
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/24/alibaba-continues-to-gain-cloud-momentum/?utm_source=tcfbpage&sr_share=facebook
When Alibaba reported its earnings yesterday, the cloud data got a bit buried in other stories, but it’s worth pointing out that its cloud business grew 93 percent in the most recent quarter to $710 million.
Alibaba couldn’t sustain triple digit growth for long.
“Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform have recently seen similar reductions in growth rates, and if you go back far enough in time, AWS did too. The key thing is that the market for cloud infrastructure services is now very big, yet is still growing by 50% per year — and the leading players are either maintaining or growing their market share,” he said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
What Dropbox Dropping Linux Support Says
https://linux.slashdot.org/story/18/08/29/0949228/what-dropbox-dropping-linux-support-says?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
For a company to support Linux, they have to consider supporting: Multiple file systems, multiple distributions, multiple desktops, multiple init systems, multiple kernels. If you’re an open source developer, focusing on a single distribution, that’s not a problem. If you’re a company that produces a product (and you stake your living on that product), those multiple points of entry do become a problem. Let’s consider Adobe (and Photoshop). If Adobe wanted to port their industry-leading product to Linux, how do they do that? Do they spend the time developing support for ext4, btrfs, Ubuntu, Fedora, GNOME, Mate, KDE, systemd? You see how that might look from the eyes of any given company?
What Dropbox dropping Linux support says
Jack Wallen makes a —possibly unpopular —case for Dropbox dropping Linux support.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/what-dropbox-dropping-linux-support-says/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tom Krazit / GeekWire:
Microsoft services, including Office 365 and Azure Active Directory, suffer extended downtime after problems at its South Central US data center due to weather — Some Microsoft Azure customers with workloads running in its South Central US data center are having big problems coming …
Updated: Microsoft Azure’s southern U.S. data center goes down for hours, impacting Office365 and Active Directory customers
https://www.geekwire.com/2018/microsoft-azures-southern-u-s-data-center-goes-hours-impacting-office365-active-directory-customers/
Some Microsoft Azure customers with workloads running in its South Central US data center are having big problems coming back from the holiday weekend Tuesday, after shutdown procedures were initiated following a spike in temperature inside one of its facilities.
Around 230am Pacific Time, Microsoft identified problems with the cooling systems in one part of its Texas data center complex, which caused a spike in temperature and forced it to shut down equipment in order to prevent a more catastrophic failure, according to the Azure status page. These issues have also caused cascading effects for some Microsoft Office 365 users as well as those who rely on Microsoft Active Directory to log into their accounts.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/status/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Martin Giles / MIT Technology Review:
Rigetti says its Quantum Cloud Services will let users run a hybrid of quantum and normal algorithms in the cloud, vastly reducing latency and increasing speed
Running quantum algorithms in the cloud just got a lot faster
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611962/faster-quantum-computing-in-the-cloud/
A startup called Rigetti Computing is linking quantum computers with classical ones in a new cloud service
Tomi Engdahl says:
Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat:
Microsoft announces Azure DevOps, which will succeed Visual Studio Team Services, and Azure DevOps Server, the successor of Team Foundation Server — Microsoft today announced Azure DevOps, the successor of Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS, formerly Visual Studio Online) and Azure DevOps Server …
Microsoft announces Azure DevOps, will succeed Visual Studio Team Services
https://venturebeat.com/2018/09/10/microsoft-announces-azure-devops-will-succeed-visual-studio-team-services/
Emil Protalinski@EPro September 10, 2018 8:00 AM
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BLUEPRINT: Oct. 9 – 11
VB Summit 2018: The best in AI. An invite-only executive event. Oct. 22 – 23
Microsoft today announced Azure DevOps, the successor of Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS, formerly Visual Studio Online) and Azure DevOps Server, the successor of Team Foundation Server (TFS). The included services “span the breadth of the development lifecycle to help developers ship software faster and with higher quality,” the company promises.
Mark Wycislik-Wilson / BetaNews:
Continuous integration and delivery service Azure Pipelines arrives in the GitHub Marketplace and will be free for open source repositories
Azure Pipelines CI/CD service arrives in the GitHub Marketplace
https://betanews.com/2018/09/10/microsoft-azure-pipelines-github-marketplace/
Microsoft today announced the successor to Visual Studio Team Services, Azure DevOps, as well as Azure DevOps Server, replacing Team Foundation Server. As part of this, the company also launched a new CI/CD service called Azure Pipelines which gives developers the chance to build, test and deploy to any platform.
Azure Pipelines has been launched in the GitHub Marketplace, and it is completely free for open source repositories.