Microsoft Azure Stack is ready to order from Dell EMC, HPE, and Lenovo
http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-azure-stack-is-ready-to-order-from-dell-emc-hpe-and-lenovo/

Microsoft’s first three server partners are starting to take orders for Microsoft’s hybrid-computing Azure Stack appliances.

Microsoft’s original three server partners for its Azure Stack hybrid computing appliance are officially taking orders as of today, July 10.
azurestackordernow.jpg

Microsoft hasn’t yet made the final Azure Stack code available to Dell EMC, HPE, and Lenovo, but the three are expecting to start shipping their first Azure Stack servers to customers within the next couple of months.

Update: A Microsoft spokesperson said today, July 10, that its partners are now “in validation mode based on the code shipped in the Azure Stack Development Kits (ASDK).” The Azure Stack servers should begin shipping to customers starting in September 2017.

Microsoft officials recently made public a downloadable Azure Stack pricing and licensing datasheet, signaling the product’s imminent availability.

Microsoft is describing Azure Stack as “an extension of Azure.” After the initial purchase of Azure Stack, customers will only pay for Azure services that they use from general availability, forward (“pay-as-you-use” pricing). The current one-node offering meant for dev/test will continue to be free after general availability.

Microsoft is touting Azure Stack as a truly consistent hybrid-cloud platform. It will allow users to use Azure public cloud services against data stored in Azure Stack on premises, and deploy the same Azure-services-based applications on both the public Azure cloud and Azure Stack.

https://t.co/5oUnU5hC3m

Google Cloud Platform, Nutanix forge hybrid cloud strategic pact
http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-cloud-platform-nutanix-forge-hybrid-cloud-strategic-pact/

Google Cloud and ​Nutanix joint customers will be able to manage on-premises and public cloud infrastructure as one unified service.

Microsoft confirms Cloudyn acquisition, sources say price is between $50M and $70M
https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/29/microsoft-finally-pulls-trigger-on-cloudyn-deal/

Back in April, we began hearing that Microsoft was in the process of buying Israeli cloud startup Cloudyn, a company that helps customers manage their cloud billing across multiple clouds. It’s taken a while to work through the terms, but today Microsoft finally made it official.

Sources tell TechCrunch the price was between $50 million and $70 million.

In a company blog post today, Microsoft’s Jeremy Winter wrote, “I am pleased to announce that Microsoft has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Cloudyn, an innovative company that helps enterprises and managed service providers optimize their investments in cloud services.”

As companies continue to pursue a multi-cloud strategy, this gives Microsoft a cloud billing and management solution that provides it with an advantage over competitors, particularly AWS and Google Cloud Platform.

Google Drive will soon back up your entire computer
https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/14/15802200/google-backup-and-sync-app-announced-drive-feature

Google is turning Drive into a much more robust backup tool. Soon, instead of files having to live inside of the Drive folder, Google will be able to monitor and backup files inside of any folder you point it to. That can include your desktop, your entire documents folder, or other more specific locations.

The backup feature will come out later this month, on June 28th, in the form of a new app called Backup and Sync. It sounds like the Backup and Sync app will replace both the standard Google Drive app and the Google Photos Backup app, at least in some cases. Google is recommending that regular consumers download the new app once it’s out, but it says that business users should stick with the existing Drive app for now.

Backup and Sync from Google available soon
https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2017/06/backup-and-sync-from-google-available.html

On June 28th, 2017, we will launch Backup and Sync from Google, a tool intended to help everyday users back up files and photos from their computers, so they’re safe and accessible from anywhere. Backup and Sync is the latest version of Google Drive for Mac/PC, which is now integrated with the Google Photos desktop uploader. As such, it will respect any current Drive for Mac/PC settings in the Admin console.

Microsoft Joins Hot Open Source PaaS Project Cloud Foundry
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2017/06/13/microsoft-joins-hot-open-source-paas-project-cloud-foundry/

The Cloud Foundry Summit Silicon Valley opened in Santa Clara, California, today with announcements by the Cloud Foundry Foundation of a new certification for developers as well as a new member, Microsoft.

Several years ago, news of Redmond shelling out bucks to become a card carrying member of an open source project would’ve been heresy. After all, this is a company that spent the better part of two decades doing its best to wipe open source — along with its flagship operating system Linux — off the face of the earth. Times have changed. Now the company openly professes its “love” for all things open. So much so that last year it pledged $500 million yearly to became a top tier Platinum member of the Linux Foundation.

The change of heart was caused by the advent of the cloud, which moved “free” Linux and open source from being a major competitor to becoming products contributing greatly to the company’s bottom line. With Azure, the company sells — or more precisely rents — Linux as a service (which I’ll refrain from calling “LaaS”), along with OpenStack, Hadoop, Docker, Kubernetes, MongoDB and all of the other open source applications that are essential to enterprise IT.

That list would include Cloud Foundry, a PaaS platform used in both private data centers and in the public cloud to quickly deploy network apps or services. The Cloud Foundry Foundation, which oversees the application’s development, is an independent not-for-profit Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.

Microsoft joins the organization as a second-tier gold member, which will cost it $100,000 a year

Abby Kearns, the Cloud Foundry’s executive director, indicated she thinks Redmond will be a good fit. “Microsoft is widely recognized as one of the most important enterprise technology and cloud providers in the world,” she said. “Cloud Foundry is the most widely deployed cloud application platform in the enterprise, and is used by most Fortune 500 organizations. We share both a tremendous number of users and a common approach to the enterprise cloud.”

According to foundation figures, there are currently 250,000 job openings for software developers in the U.S., 500,000 unfilled positions requiring tech skills, and expected growth of more than one million in the next decade.

Oracle’s cloud has been judged too risky, too expensive and not up to scratch by Specsavers, which is aiming to complete an AWS and Azure combo next year.

And, in another plus for Microsoft, Specsavers (the British optical retail chain) is adopting Office 365 over Google Docs, saying Microsoft is cheaper.

The move comes as the 33-year-old retailer has cut its IT infrastructure and network of 200 legacy suppliers to just 25 in a modernisation project.

Specsavers ditched a tapestry of accounts payable systems in favour of Oracle ERP – but Oracle failed to make the grade on cloud, meaning it will float on the enemy: AWS.

Spinnaker, an open-source project for continuous delivery, hits the 1.0 milestone
https://www.geekwire.com/2017/spinnaker-open-source-project-continuous-delivery-hits-1-0-milestone/

Spinnaker, an open-source project that lets companies improve the speed and stability of their application deployment processes, reached the 1.0 release milestone Tuesday.

Google announced the 1.0 release of Spinnaker, which was originally developed inside Netflix and enhanced by Google and a few other companies. The software is used by companies like Target and Cloudera to enable continuous delivery, a modern software development concept that holds application updates should be delivered when they are ready, instead of on a fixed schedule.

Spinnaker is just another one of the open-source projects that are at the heart of modern cloud computing

Spinnaker is probably still best for early adopters, but continuous delivery in general is one of the many advances in software development enabled by cloud computing that will likely be an industry best practice in a few years.

In an interesting move, Google took pains to highlight the cross-platform nature of Spinnaker, noting that will run across several different cloud providers and application development environments. Google is chasing cloud workloads that tend to go to Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, and noted “whether you’re releasing to multiple clouds or preventing vendor lock-in, Spinnaker helps you deploy your application based on what’s best for your business.”

As HPE Discover 2017 opens in Las Vegas, the tech giant is looking to win over customers to its Gen10 suite of hybrid cloud solutions.

The servers and storage arm of the now-split HP is standing by the argument that the majority of businesses are approaching their hybrid cloud infrastructure strategies in the wrong way.

According to a report from The Register, Ric Lewis, SVP and general manager at HPE’s software-defined and cloud unit claims that most private clouds are simply virtual machine (VM) farms – ‘It is not really a private cloud that seems like the public cloud where you have available services and you are maximizing on that.’

HPE: You’re rubbish at hybrid cloud – so we’ll cook a NüStack to fix it
Spinning up VMs is so 2010. What you need now are services
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/06/hpe_youre_all_terrible_at_hybrid_it_and_were_the_only_ones_that_can_help/

HPE Discover 2017 HPE is looking to win customers for its Gen10 suite of hybrid cloud enterprise IT platform by first offering them some tough love.

The servers and storage half of the broken-up HP says most enterprises simply aren’t doing hybrid cloud infrastructure right.

“If you look at the state of most private clouds, they are just VM farms,” said Ric Lewis, SVP and general manager of HPE’s software defined and cloud group.

“It is not really a private cloud that seems like the public cloud where you have available services and you are maximizing on that.”

The UK Data Center Interest Group, a not-for-profit organization focused on data center technologies, best practices and policy, has announced the formation of the Data Center Incident Reporting Network (DCIRN).

The incident reporting network will be a resource for operators to share information about data center failures confidentially so that the industry as a whole can learn from the failures that have occurred. The goal of the DCIRN is to improve the reliability of data centers worldwide by collecting and analyzing information related to failures.

In this article I compare the costs of network bandwidth transferred out of Amazon EC2, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Lightsail.

Bandwidth costs are one of the most ridiculously expensive components of cloud computing, and there are some serious inconsistencies in the industry

Conclusion

Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure and Google Gloud Platform are all seriously screwing their customers over when it comes to bandwidth charges.

Every one of the big three has massive buying power yet between them their average bandwidth price is 3.4x higher than colocation facilities.

If you move a significant amount of data you should think twice before moving to the cloud

Want to disrupt the cloud computing industry? Give bandwidth away at cost.

For the record “I LOVE AMAZON AWS!” It’s super flexible and awesome – I just don’t like their bandwidth pricing