In the 2018 Magic Quadrant for infrastructure as a service, Gartner narrowed the field dramatically to six vendors: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba Cloud, Oracle and IBM.

In the 2018 Magic Quadrant for infrastructure as a service, Gartner narrowed the field dramatically to six vendors: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba Cloud, Oracle and IBM.

In the 2018 Magic Quadrant for infrastructure as a service, Gartner narrowed the field dramatically to six vendors: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba Cloud, Oracle and IBM.

The past year saw some of the biggest data center deals on record. From Digital Realty’s acquisition of DuPont Fabros for $7.6 billion, to Equinix’s purchase of 29 data centers from Verizon, a plethora of facilities changed ownership. As a result, major merger and acquisition transactions involving data center operators reached a total of $20 billion in 2017,

Synergy: Data center mergers, acquisitions totaled $20bn in 2017
http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/content-tracks/design-build/synergy-data-center-mergers-acquisitions-totaled-20bn-in-2017/99532.article

Digital Realty and Equinix are the big spenders

Past year saw some of the biggest data center deals on record: from Digital Realty’s acquisition of DuPont Fabros for $7.6 billion to Equinix’s purchase of 29 data centers from Verizon, plenty of facilities changed ownership.

As a result, major merger and acquisition transactions involving data center operators reached a total of $20 billion in 2017, according to Synergy Research. The number is higher than the total for both 2015 and 2016 combined.

Researchers state that on average through 2017, there was almost one significant M&A deal closed every week.

“That shift is driving huge growth in outsourcing, whether it is via cloud services, or use of colocation facilities, or sale and leaseback of data centers.”

2017 was a big year for open source cloud computing tools. Here’s a look back at some of the most important things you may have missed.

AWS showed no signs of slowing down in 2017
Posted 20 hours ago by Ron Miller (@ron_miller)

AWS had a successful year by any measure. The company continued to behave like a startup with the kind of energy and momentum to invest in new areas not usually seen in an incumbent with a significant marketshare lead.

How good a year was it? According to numbers from Synergy Research, the company remains the category leader by far with around 35 percent marketshare. Microsoft sits well behind in second place with around 11 percent. Yet AWS showed growth every quarter with an overall growth rate of over 40 percent, fairly remarkable when you consider that it is operating from a large marketshare position

The enterprise no longer is at the center of the IT universe. An extreme economic shift has chipmakers focused on hyperscale clouds.

Enterprise data centers increasingly will look and behave more like slimmed-down versions of hyperscale data centers as chipmakers and other suppliers adapt systems developed for their biggest customers to in-house IT faciilities.

The new chips and infrastructure that will serve as building blocks in these facilities will be more power-efficient, make better use of space and generate less heat. They also will be capable of managing enormous and unpredictable data streams, and they will integrate more easily with cloud platforms that have become part of nearly every organization’s extended IT infrastructure.

Google announced last March, for example, that it had spent $30 billion during the previous three years to expand its network of data centers beyond the 15 it already built to support its consumer-services business. Microsoft and Amazon each spend more than $10 billion per year on data center infrastructure, as well.

That’s not all bad, however. Cloud infrastructure, whether private or public, is viewed as the best approach for dealing with huge and growing amounts of data, as well as fluctuations and inconsistencies in that volume.

“The increasing dominance of hyperscale players continues to play out, with all four leading companies having cause to celebrate,” Synergy analyst John Dinsdale wrote in a July report. That report detailed dramatic ongoing growth and an increasing concentration of market share among the cloud leaders.

Looked at from another angle, spending on traditional data center infrastructure dropped 18% between 2015 and 2017, while spending on infrastructure products for the public cloud rose 35%, according to a September report from Synergy Research Group.
Announcing the New AWS Secret Region
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/announcing-the-new-aws-secret-region/

We are pleased to announce the new AWS Secret Region. The AWS Secret Region can operate workloads up to the Secret U.S. security classification level. The AWS Secret Region is readily available to the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) through the IC’s Commercial Cloud Services (C2S) contract with AWS. The AWS Secret Region also will be available to non-IC U.S. Government customers with appropriate Secret-level network access and their own contract vehicles for use of the AWS Secret Region. These contract vehicles will not be part of the IC’s C2S contract.

With the launch of this new Secret Region, AWS becomes the first and only commercial cloud provider to offer regions to serve government workloads across the full range of data classifications, including Unclassified, Sensitive, Secret, and Top Secret. By using the cloud, the U.S. Government is better able to deliver necessary information and data to mission stakeholders.

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AWS has a post re:Invent surprise as it enters the single sign-on market
Posted 12 minutes ago by Ron Miller (@ron_miller)

Steve Jobs used to famously end his keynotes with “there is one more thing…” AWS decided to wait a week after their re:Invent conference ended to announce their more thing when it quietly released a single sign on product for the AWS cloud yesterday.

While the announcement was pretty thin on details, it appears to be focused solely on providing single sign on for the AWS family of products. “With AWS SSO, you can easily manage SSO access and user permissions to all of your accounts in AWS Organizations centrally,” AWS explained in the announcement. That’s very different from what other single sign on products like Okta or OneLogin are doing.

To give you a sense of the breadth of coverage, we had 25 stories on TechCrunch this week just related to this event — and we didn’t cover everything by any means. It certainly shows that in spite of its commanding lead in the infrastructure market, AWS has no intention of sitting still and waiting for the competition to catch up.

As the Seattle Times put it, Amazon unveils new cloud services at the pace of a startup

Amazon’s AWS cloud computing division today announced a new database service that will make it easier and cheaper to quickly launch relational databases that don’t need to process data continuously. Aurora Serverless, which, unsurprisingly, was built on top of AWS’s existing Aurora database system, is basically the database equivalent of a serverless, event-driven compute platform.