Seemingly every tech vendor seems to have a cloud strategy, with new products and services dubbed “cloud” coming out every week. But who are the real market leaders in this business? Gartner’s IaaS Magic Quadrant: a who’s who of cloud market article shows Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for IaaS. Research firm Gartner’s answer lies in its Magic Quadrant report for the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market.
It is interesting that missing from this quadrant figure are big-name companies that have invested a lot in the cloud, including Microsoft, HP, IBM and Google. The reason is that report only includes providers that had IaaS clouds in general availability as of June 2012 (Microsoft, HP and Google had clouds in beta at the time).
Gartner reinforces what many in the cloud industry believe: Amazon Web Services is the 800-pound gorilla. Gartner has also found one big minus on Amazon Web Services: AWS has a “weak, narrowly defined” service-level agreement (SLA), which requires customers to spread workloads across multiple availability zones. AWS was not the only provider where there was something negative to say on the service-level agreement (SLA) details.
Read the whole Gartner’s IaaS Magic Quadrant: a who’s who of cloud market article to see the Gartner’s view on clould market today.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
GitLab-Digital Ocean partnership to provide free hosting for continuous online code testing
http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/19/gitlab-digital-ocean-partnership-to-provide-free-hosting-for-continuous-online-code-testing/
GitLab.com users have always had free access to the Gitlab programmer’s toolset including GitLab Runner. Today it announced a new feature called Gitlab Runner Autoscale that allows continuous code testing at scale, and to make that even more palatable, the company teamed up with cloud infrastructure provider DigitalOcean to provide free hosting for testing that code.
Yes, it’s really free.
“We are introducing Gitlab runner Autoscale [and we are teaming with DigitalOcean] to provision more servers as you need them. We will make sure there are enough machines to run your code,” Sytse ‘”Sid” Sijbrandij, CEO of GitLab told TechCrunch.
“Companies can go from zero if nobody is pushing code to hundreds of runners if everyone is submitting code. They can hook into a DigitalOcean account and provision as many servers as they need. Because it’s fast, they never start in a queue. It’s secure because you deprecate the server when you’re done testing. And it’s cost-effective because you don’t have to run the servers the entire time,” Sijbrandij explained.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google teams with Iron Mountain for LTO-to-cloud migration
Tape still not dead: it will die in the year N where N is this year plus 1
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/21/google_cloud_lto_to_cloud_migration/
Google and Iron Mountain are trying to hasten the never-quite-imminent death of tape as a storage medium with an LTO-to-cloud migration collaboration.
LTO – linear tap open for those among you not enamoured of rusty ribbons – is a standard tape format that counts IBM, HP and Quantum among its backers. A single seventh-generation LTO cartridge can store 15 terabytes and the standard plans a tenth-generation cartridge packing 120 terabytes.
Google, however, operates a service called Cloud Storage Nearline that starts at US$0.01 per gigabyte per month and promises three-second restore times. That’s rather faster than even a high-end tape library will achieve.
There’s just one problem with Nearline and that’s the loooong time needed to move a terabyte of data from tape to the cloud. Google’s addressed that problem with “cloud seeding”, the practice of finding partners with fat pipes to its bit barns and the kit to arrange uploads. One such partner, Iron Mountain, has just announced it’s increased the bandwidth from its bit barns to Google’s by a factor of ten. That increase, Google says, means “moving 50TB of data over the expanded link takes less than a day.”
Google gives away 100 PETABYTES of storage to irritate AWS
Nearline service goes live, creates nightmare for tape vendors
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/24/google_gives_away_100_petabytes_of_storage_to_irritate_aws
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft lures IT pros with breadcrumb trail of candy to its cloud
We didn’t build all this for you to goof off on AWS
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/20/microsoft_cloud_rains_gifts/
Microsoft has offered up a grab bag of goodies for IT administrators looking to add cloud skills to their resume, including free trials of Azure and Office 365, plus support and training credits, along with some career advice.
“We are in the middle of the cloud technology transition, and IT professionals are not always leading this transition,” said Mike Neil, Redmond’s veep of enterprise cloud.
“To capture this opportunity, IT professionals need to rapidly familiarize themselves with cloud technologies, and evolve their skills.”
In other words, we’ve been building out all these cloud services and now we need to make sure enough people use them. To tempt techies over to its systems, Microsoft has set up a certification program, dubbed IT Pro Cloud Essentials, and is offering a year’s free subscription.
The package includes $100 of free Azure credits per month for the first three months if you sign up before September 30, and a long-term lower price for access to the cloud network.
It’s a reasonable package for an admin aspiring to pick up some cloud skills, and Microsoft has told The Reg that it doesn’t expect to charge for the package next year and the same freebies should apply.
Tomi Engdahl says:
PC World’s cloudy backup failed when exposed to ransomware
30-day backup promise wasn’t, says aggrieved customer
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/22/pc_world_knowhow_shortcomings/
The shortcomings of consumer-grade backup services in protecting against the scourge of ransomware have been exposed by the experiences of a UK businesswoman.
Amy W, who runs a small business in the Newbury, Berkshire area, was convinced that the KnowHow cloud was the only backup technology she’d ever need1 when she bought a laptop from PC World.
Eight months later, however, in the aftermath of a ransomware infection, Amy discovered that the KnowHow cloud backed up all her newly encrypted files and didn’t keep any revisions, leaving her unable to restore files from a historic clean backup.
PC World suggested that Amy’s machine might have been infected with the ransomware for weeks before she discovered the problem, a suggestion she strongly denied.
“It was Cryptowall,” Amy said. “It came through as an invoice. It wanted me to pay £1000 to get a key to unlock files and the price doubled every 14 days.”
Chris Boyd, a senior malware intelligence analyst at Malwarebytes, said that the case illustrates the wider potential shortcomings of cloud-based backups as a defence against ransomware.
“In general, cloud backup is another useful tool to help ward off the threat of ransomware, but isn’t applicable in all situations,” Boyd told El Reg. “Individuals and businesses may rightly balk at uploading potentially sensitive documents into the cloud where they suddenly have no control over it, and should look into file encryption of their own to ensure nothing valuable leaks.”
“Offline backups would be the best way to go, especially as you have full control over the data at all times. Not all cloud backup hosts offer the ability to roll back to specific dates, which is a disaster in situations where malware butts heads with an automatic upload. Off-the-shelf backup solutions are fine for most things, but should go hand in hand with a layered approach which could include AV [anti-virus], anti-malware and exploit protection,” he added.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft:
Earnings release FY16 Q3: commercial cloud annualized revenue run rate exceeds $10B
Earnings Release FY16 Q3
Microsoft Cloud Strength Highlights Third Quarter Results
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2016-Q3/press-release-webcast
“Organizations using digital technology to transform and drive new growth increasingly choose Microsoft as a partner,” said Satya Nadella, chief executive officer at Microsoft. “As these organizations turn to us, we’re seeing momentum across Microsoft’s cloud services and with Windows 10.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
SAP HANA enterprise cloud might even turn a profit in 2017
Rolling, two-year expansion planned for HEC
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/25/sap_enterprise_cloud_money_maker/
SAP’s private cloud business, HANA Enterprise Cloud, will roll out of start-up mode – and stop being a loss-maker – this year.
The German software giant’s private managed cloud will break even in 2017 as existing investments on features and infrastructure pay off, it said.
SAP also plans new features for HEC in the next two years that drive “significant expansion” so SAP finally makes more money from cloud than from sales of new licenses for its trademark on-premesis software.
SAP’s EMA chief operating officer Gonzalo Benedit told The Register: “Where we’ve had negative margin last year was on private cloud. We expect to break even this year based on investments we made. We continue to spend on investment to support massive bookings and growth.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google discovers you assume clouds just work
Curtails warnings of live cloud VM migrations, which you mostly found confusing
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/26/google_discovers_you_assume_clouds_just_work/
Google’s proved to itself that when users take workloads to the cloud they just assume cloud operators will be takin’ care of business.
Last year, the cloud challenger announced it had introduced non-disruptive live migration of virtual machines, so that it could patch VMs without asking users to endure an interruption or restart.
A year on, the company has found that for most users even knowing about a live migration is TMI – too much information – so it’s going to clam up. Google Cloud’s practice of sending a 60-second warning about an imminent migration will therefore be discontinued. If you point your VM at Google’s server metadata resources, you’ll still get the warning. Otherwise you’ll be assumed to be assuming that the Google cloud just keeps ticking over.
The exception to Google’s new rules is VMs that are configured to terminate, rather than fail over. Owners of such VMs will get more detailed and earlier warnings.
Google’s also decided the time is right to “use live migration for all instance virtualization software stack updates, replacing in-place upgrades.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jordan Novet / VentureBeat:
Dropbox previews Project Infinite, which will show files locally but store them remotely; no launch timeline or pricing set — Dropbox’s Project Infinite shows all company files locally but stores them remotely — Cloud file syncing and sharing software company Dropbox today is announcing …
Dropbox’s Project Infinite shows all company files locally but stores them remotely
Jordan Novet April 26, 2016 3:30 AM
http://venturebeat.com/2016/04/26/dropboxs-project-infinite-shows-all-company-files-locally-but-stores-them-remotely/
Cloud file syncing and sharing software company Dropbox today is announcing the launch of Project Infinite, a new capability that will allow users to see all files that they have quick access permission for on their desktop — but that will keep everything stored on Dropbox’s cloud infrastructure, so as not to take up precious local storage.
“Everything in the company’s Dropbox that you’re given access to, whether it’s stored locally or in the cloud, will show up in Dropbox on your desktop. If it’s synced locally, you’ll see the familiar green checkmark, while everything else will have a new cloud icon,” Dropbox product manager Genevieve Sheehan wrote in a blog post.
Dropbox said last month that it had 500 million users; in November the company said it had 150,000 paying business customers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jordan Novet / VentureBeat:
Amazon Web Services generated $604M operating income, revenue up 63% YoY to $2.56B in Q1 2016
Amazon Web Services grabs $2.5 billion in revenue in Q1 2016, up 63% over last year
http://venturebeat.com/2016/04/28/amazon-web-services-grabs-2-5-billion-in-revenue-in-q1-2016-up-63-over-last-year/
Amazon today released its earnings statement for the first quarter of the year, and things are looking up, as usual, for its Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud division. AWS fetched $2.56 billion in revenue for the quarter.
Operating income for the business unit came in at $604 million — more than half of the operating income for all of Amazon this quarter! — as a result of $1.85 billion in operating expenses. The AWS operating income is down sequentially from $687 million.
Altogether AWS produced a year-to-year growth rate of 63.8 percent
AWS leads the market for public cloud infrastructure, which comprises compute, storage, networking, and database resources that developers can use to build, test, and run applications on hardware infrastructure that they don’t have to maintain.
In the past four quarters, AWS has brought Amazon a total of $8.88 billion in revenue. Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos recently said AWS is “reaching” $10 billion in revenue this year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft joins the 1c/GB/month cloud storage caper
‘Cool Blobs’ restore ASAP, 99 per cent of the time
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/29/microsoft_joins_the_1cgbmonth_cloud_storage_caper/
Microsoft’s joined the market for cold storage at a cent a gigabyte a month, with something called “Azure Cool Blobs”.
“Blob storage” is Redmond’s special term for object storage and Azure’s offered it for a while now. Now the bright blue cloud that Bill built has added a “cool” tier to the service that reaches the US$0.01/GB/month price once you store 100 terabytes in certain Azure regions.
The service is notable because it gets Microsoft into competition with Amazon’s Glacier cold storage and Google’s Nearline, both of which already offer $0.01/GB/month plans.
Microsoft’s variation is that it’s offering object storage and suggesting it is “cool” rather than “cold”. Azure’s definition of “cool” is data that’s accessed about once a month. The Register understands that choice of words deliberately leaves the door open to a service more akin to Glacier in future.
Glacier’s sold as super-redundant, but with gentle restore times that can run to hours.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM raises its blockchain game with secure cloud services and Docker integration
http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/29/ibm-blockchain/
Bitcoin may still be the most famous application of blockchain technology, but the distributed, encrypted database architecture is now being applied to a range of other services, from different kinds of (non Bitcoin) financial transactions to anything else that requires secure tracking. And today, IBM laid out its claim for some of that new business: the IT giant announced a new set of blockchain services running on IBM Cloud and Docker, along with standards to run those services to meet security and regulatory compliance.
The advances come two months after IBM made its first waves with blockchain technology. First, it emerged that IBM is now investing in startups building blockchain-based services — coming in on a $60 million round for Digital Asset Holdings.
Then weeks later, IBM announced its intentions to work with blockchain technology itself, committing to launch a “blockchain-as-a-service” across its “IBM Garage” network of developer centers (now in New York, Tokyo, London and Singapore); and donating 44,000 lines of code to the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Project, effectively giving it a place at the heart of how it will be built.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AWS outgrows its own resource numbering scheme
Seventeen-character identifiers mean cloud can scale for ‘new AWS regions launching in 2016′
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/02/aws_outgrows_its_own_resource_numbering_scheme/
Amazon Web Services has extended use of a a new resource numbering scheme, after last year warning that without a new scheme it would “start to run low on IDs for certain EC2 and EBS resources within a year or so.”
Every AWS resource gets a unique identifier. For most of the service’s history those were eight characters in length. But the outfit has now clearly reached a size at which it’s outgrown its own scheme, hence the shift from eight-character identifiers to a new seventeen-character arrangement.
AWS already flicked the switch to optional longer resource identifiers for its EC2 servers-for-rent service back in March 2016. Now it’s done the same thing for the elastic block storage (EBS) service and its storage gateways.
Your correspondent lacks the mathematical skill to figure out the combinations afforded by the lower-case letters and numbers 0 to 9 that Amazon allows as part of an identifier.
For now, the longer identifiers are optional, but by year’s end AWS will insist on them. Adopting the new and longer numbers shouldn’t break anything.
Tomi Engdahl says:
BitTorrent Inc.’s Sync
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/bittorrent-incs-sync
The Sync application from BitTorrent Inc. is simple yet powerful, offering the ability to move large amounts of data directly between devices. The updated Sync 2.3 provides new features to support power users seeking to unlock Sync’s full potential. BitTorrent says that Sync is simple to use in combination with a cloud provider’s storage space or NAS to ensure data redundancy for backup.
Of course, having data stored anywhere on third-party infrastructure is a serious concern. The new Encrypted Folder feature in Sync 2.3 solves this issue by providing the ability to encrypt data at rest on any designated location. Encrypted Folders can be shared to read-only nodes to provide an off-site snapshot of data without providing direct access, or users can deploy multiple Encrypted Folders to increase the reliability of a peer swarm.
The Original
BitTorrent Client
http://www.bittorrent.com/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Oracle buys cloud-based SaaS vendor Opower for $532 million
http://www.zdnet.com/article/oracle-buys-cloud-based-saas-vendor-opower-for-532-million/
With this deal, the enterprise software giant has now spent roughly $1.2 billion in three business days on cloud acquisitions
Tomi Engdahl says:
Natalie Gagliordi / ZDNet:
Rackspace reports Q1 net income of $49M, up 77% YoY, and $518M in revenue, up 8% YoY
Rackspace delivers solid Q1, net income up 77 percent
http://www.zdnet.com/article/rackspace-delivers-solid-q1-net-income-up-77-percent/
Rackspace CEO and president Taylor Rhodes noted that the company’s OpenStack private cloud, which is powered by Red Hat, is “scaling rapidly.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
TechCrunch:
Slack launches “Sign in with Slack”, the work chat platform’s answer to Facebook Connect, with partners including Quip, Figma, Office Vibes, Smooz, Slackline — May 10, 2016, 10:01 amMay 10, 2016, 1:02 pm — Slack is pushing to become the identity layer for all enterprise apps.
Slack debuts ‘Sign in with Slack,’ the work chat platform’s answer to Facebook Connect
http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/10/slack-debuts-sign-in-with-slack-the-collaboration-platforms-answer-to-facebook-connect/
Tomi Engdahl says:
John Ribeiro / PCWorld:
Salesforce continues to face outage in many parts of US for over 12 hours, due to database failure in its NA14 instance
Salesforce outage continues in some parts of the US
CEO Marc Benioff took to Twitter to apologize to users
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3068699/salesforce-outage-continues-in-some-parts-of-the-us.html
Salesforce.com was having an outage in some locations on Tuesday, prompting the company’s CEO to apologize to users on Twitter.
The cloud applications company said on its website that the over 12 hours disruption was the result of a database failure on the NA14 instance, which introduced a file integrity issue in the NA14 database.
The outage had not been apparently resolved by late evening.
Salesforce customers are grouped together in instances, which typically consist of servers and other infrastructure that provide the company’s service to a set of the company’s customers.The NA14 instance is in North America by most accounts.
The database failure happened after “a successful site switch” of the NA14 instance “to resolve a service disruption that occurred between 00:47 to 02:39 UTC on May 10, 2016 due to a failure in the power distribution in the primary data center,” the company said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
GitHub changes pricing: Unlimited private repos cost $7 per month for personal accounts, $9 per user per month for organizations
http://venturebeat.com/2016/05/11/github-changes-pricing-unlimited-private-repos-cost-7-per-month-for-personal-accounts-9-per-user-per-month-for-organizations/
Collaborative source code repository software company GitHub today is announcing changes to its pricing structure. The company is now starting to let paying users maintain an unlimited number of private repositories that are blocked off from public visibility.
Effective immediately, GitHub has just two options for customers: accounts for personal users that cost $7 per month, and accounts for organizations that cost $9 per user per month, or $25 per month for the first five users. That’s very different from the way GitHub has previously structured its pricing, which involved paying more to get more private repos, for both personal accounts and organizations.
“The idea is you can create a new project without asking anybody for permission,” GitHub director of product management Tim Clem told VentureBeat in an interview. “You don’t have to go to your admin. You literally just create a repo and start working. We’ve had that dynamic in the public space. There are 35 million projects and counting on GitHub — it’s working really well. We’re bringing the same dynamics into the private collaboration space.”
This is what users have wanted, and this is what users are getting. Theoretically, this will lead to more revenue for GitHub, which carries a reported $2 billion valuation.
When people can set up as many new repos as they want, they can conceivably end up keeping more code on the site altogether.
Introducing unlimited private repositories
https://github.com/blog/2164-introducing-unlimited-private-repositories
If you’re using GitHub for private projects, now there’s just one paid plan—unlimited private repositories for $7/month. No matter what you were paying before, your plan now includes as many repositories as you need to work on projects in private—you can even invite collaborators.
Can there be collaborators on private repositories for personal plan?
Yes. A paid personal account allows you to invite collaborators directly to your private repositories. If you need more granular permissions beyond full access, an organization plan is recommended.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Salesforce deleted four hours of its customers’ data
http://nordic.businessinsider.com/salesforce-lost-4-hours-of-customer-data-2016-5
Salesforce is now mostly up and available to its customers, the company says, after a mega outage of one of its major data centers took it down for a whole day.
The outage lasted from 13:31 UTC time Tuesday until 09:30 UTC Wednesday, or about 6:30 a.m. pacific Tuesday until 2:30 p.m. pacific on Wednesday.
A cloud outage that long is almost unheard of these days, and one Salesforce customer we talked to, who has been using Salesforce for over five years, told us he’s never experienced that kind of disruption from the company before.
The service disruption was caused by a database failure on the NA14 instance, which introduced a file integrity issue in the NA14 database. The issue was resolved by restoring NA14 from a prior backup, which was not impacted by the file integrity issues
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cloudy desktops are as mature as cloudy servers … from 2008!
It’s not a DaaS-aster, but not better or cheaper than VDI, yet
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/17/cloudy_desktops_are_as_mature_as_cloudy_servers_from_2008/
Desktop-as-a-service in 2016 is about as mature as infrastructure-as-a-service was in 2008, so waiting until it matures is more sensible than diving in now.
So says Garter for Technical Professionals’ analyst Mark Lockwood, who The Register’s virtualisation desk beheld yesterday at the firm’s Infrastructure Operations & Data Centre Summit in Sydney.
Lockwood said DaaS currently lags desktop virtualisation (VDI) in many ways, especially on cost. Best-practice VDI costs about US$300/seat/year. DaaS costs more. VDI doesn’t have latency problems. DaaS does and those problems only get worse if your desktops have to come in over the WAN to reach data inside the firewall, pipe that data into the cloudy desktop and then send it to users over the WAN again.
Current DaaS offerings are also a little unrealistic – the base configuration of a single CPU with 2GB of RAM is not useful for most applications. More realistically-specced machines cost about US$50/month. Suppliers are also thin on the ground. Today only Amazon Web Services and VMware provide a single-throat-to-choke experience. Other providers can split bills so you pay for VDI licences and for the cloudy desktops.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft explains which cloud security problems are your problem
And reveals that for really bad problems, Microsoft will break Azure to fix it
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/15/cloud_problems_are_no_problem_when_you_know_your_problems_and_microsofts_problems/
Microsoft has issued guidelines about Azure security that spell out when a problem is your problem and when a problem is Microsoft’s problem.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Barb Darrow / Fortune:
Salesforce to spend $400M on Amazon Web Services over next four years according to 10Q statement and sources
Salesforce Inks Major Deal With Amazon Web Services
http://fortune.com/2016/05/25/salesforce-inks-major-aws-deal/
We knew Salesforce and Amazon Web Services were getting cozy, ever since Salesforce’s recent earnings call when its chief executive, Marc Benioff, effusively praised Amazon’s cloud unit. Now we know just how cozy.
The public statements sent out by both companies say that Amazon Web Services is now officially Salesforce’s “preferred public cloud infrastructure provider.”
That’s pretty fluffy. More newsworthy is that Salesforce will spend $400 million on AWS services over the next four years. That tidbit was found on Salesforce’s 10Q statement, although the name of the “third-party provider” was not mentioned. Sources close to both companies confirmed that the the provider is AWS.
A public cloud or public cloud infrastructure a la AWS or Microsoft Azure is a massive set of computing, storage and networking resources that are rented out to customers who don’t want to expand or run their own data centers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The hybrid cloud wants your data
Work in development, analytics, data science? – this is for you
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/26/the_hybrid_cloud_wants_your_data/
A coding competition is coming soon, brought to you by The Register in partnership with IBM. For now all we can tell you is that IBM’s Cloudant platform will play a part in the proceedings.
So let’s get the ball rolling with this call to developers, data science professionals and IT analytic architects to sign up now for a free IBM Cloudant fully managed cloud services trial.
So what is Cloudant?
In 2016, it’s difficult to have a conversation about data without discussing analytics. The pressure is on to massage data and ask it questions rather than simply using it for transactions. That’s all well and good, but many companies don’t have the tools or the computing muscle.
Cloudant is a NoSQL database that goes beyond the traditional relational SQL-based store that you’ll find in legacy relational database management system tools. Instead of maintaining data in tables that have to be rigidly joined together, it stores documents in a variety of formats, including plain text and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON).
More: http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=99493179&iu=/6978
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ansible adds .1 to Ansible 2.0, de-betas networking
Also covers MS and Docker bases
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/27/ansible_revs_core_platform/
Ansible has pushed out version 2.1 of its eponymous automation platform, with a large part of the update consisting of peeling off beta stickers on features it announced earlier this year.
The vendor unveiled a foray into networking back in February at its London AnsibleFest. That technical preview has now been formalised as a “first order feature set”, director of Ansible Core Jason McKerr wrote in a blog post today, with support for Cisco, HP Enterprise, Juniper, Arista and Cumulus.
“Ansible’s agentless model works particularly well in the network management space,” McKerr wrote, “and with a lot of help and support from the vendors, we are very pleased to have our first major release with support for these features.”
That London event also saw the platform jack up its Windows support, and according to McKerr, “We significantly upped our game for both Windows and Azure Cloud. We’re happy to take the beta tag off of our Windows support, and make it a fully supported part of the Ansible automation platform.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Don’t buy Azure in US dollars – it’s cheaper in many other currencies
Microsoft’s exchange rates for discounted Azure can work in your favour
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/31/dont_buy_azure_in_us_dollars_its_cheaper_in_many_other_currencies/
Microsoft is offering unintentional discounts to Azure users.
The discounts are available if you pre-pay for a year of Azure. If you do so, Microsoft kindly trims your bill by five per cent once you spend a certain amount. If you’re billed in US Dollars, that threshold spend is US$6,000.
If you choose another currency, however, the threshold can be lower once translated into US dollars.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jonathan Cheng / Wall Street Journal:
Samsung Electronics to acquire US cloud services firm Joyent; Joyent to retain name and top management, will be integrated into Samsung’s mobile division
Samsung to Buy U.S. Cloud Services Firm
Acquisition of Joyent shows device maker is pushing to beef up software and services
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/samsung-to-buy-u-s-cloud-services-firm-1466046014-lMyQjAxMTI2NDE0NjcxMzYwWj
Samsung Electronics Co. said Thursday that it would buy U.S. cloud services company Joyent Inc. for an undisclosed sum, underscoring its willingness to snap up outside companies as it beefs up the software and services around its core mobile-phone business.
Samsung’s acquisition of San Francisco-based Joyent signals the South Korean technology giant’s burgeoning interest in “big data,” part of a broader effort to use powerful remote computers to bolster its data analysis and the computing capabilities of its devices.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jay Greene / Wall Street Journal:
Oracle posts revenue of $10.59B, beating estimates, with total cloud revenue up 49% YoY to $859M while profit rose to $2.81B
Oracle Earnings Rise on Growth in Cloud Business
Rising cloud operations offset continuing declines in conventional software business
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/oracle-earnings-rise-on-growth-in-cloud-business-1466108293-lMyQjAxMTA2MTEzNjAxMTYxWj
Oracle Corp. posted better-than-expected gains for the fiscal fourth quarter in its cloud-computing business, which sells subscriptions to web-based, on-demand programs, data storage and other services.
Oracle’s cloud business consists mainly of selling access to applications, known as software as a service, and selling access to tools to program and manage apps as well as analyze data, called platform as a service. Those two segments added more than 1,600 and 2,000 customers, respectively, in the quarter.
Oracle urgently needs to build that business. Some of the company’s biggest rivals, including Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc., have built massive businesses moving their customers’ computing operations to the cloud.
Oracle urgently needs to build that business. Some of the company’s biggest rivals, including Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc., have built massive businesses moving their customers’ computing operations to the cloud.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft: Nearly one in three Azure virtual machines now are running Linux
http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-nearly-one-in-three-azure-virtual-machines-now-are-running-linux/
Over the past year, Microsoft has seen customers use Linux in a third of its Azure virtual machines, up from 25 percent.
Microsoft’s self-professed Linux love is helping the company in the cloud.
linuxonazureupdate.jpg
During his keynote at DockerCon 2016 in Seattle today, Azure Chief Technology Officer Mark Russinovich showed off some of the new and upcoming ways Microsoft is adding more container support to its cloud and server products. He also revealed a couple of new interesting datapoints.
In the past year, Russinovich said, Microsoft has gone from one in four of its Azure virtual machines running Linux to nearly one in three. The other two thirds of Azure customers are running Windows Server in their virtual machines.
ACS allows developers to orchestrate applications using Apache Mesos or Docker Swarm. ACS also enables users to migrate container workloads to and from Azure without code changes, according to Microsoft.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet:
Microsoft readies July preview of Azure Information Protection rights-management service, which classifies, labels, and protects data across storage types
Microsoft readies public preview of new Azure Information Protection rights-management service
http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-readies-public-preview-of-new-azure-information-protection-rights-management-service/
Microsoft will launch a public preview in July of its Azure Information Protection service, which builds on technology from its November 2015 Secure Islands acquisition.
Microsoft officials said that the coming Azure Information Protection service is an example of Microsoft’s “identity-driven approach to security,” as is its Enterprise Mobility Suite.
The new service will classify, label and protect data at the time of creation or modificiation via policies, according to Microsoft’s blog post. Those classifications will travel with data, regardless of where (cloud or on-premises) or on what kind of mobile device it’s stored. The new service also will include rights-management capabilities for Office and other “common” applications.
Based on that wording, I’d say it seems that Microsoft plans to replace Azure RMS with Azure Information Protection, once the new service is generally available, but a Microsoft spokesperson would not confirm whether that’s the case.
Tomi Engdahl says:
MongoDB launches Atlas to manage deployments: Taking the Ops out of DevOps
‘The most interesting thing we’ve done as a company since day one,’ says exec
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/28/mongodb_launches_atlas_to_manage_deployments_taking_the_ops_out_of_devops/
MongoDB is launching Atlas, the company’s first DBaaS, offering easy management of instances – initially on AWS, but soon to come to Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
The service intends to alleviate devs of tedious evenings wasted with hardware provisioning, covering failure recovery, software patching, upgrades, configuration and backups.
Kelly Stirman, the company’s strategy veep, explained to The Register that the user experience was receiving a single bill from MongoDB “while we handle the infrastructure, the upgrades, the security. You get to decide what region, and how big a server you want – and if you need change in that size you just click a button and our engineers sort it out.”
Atlas is pitched as “unlimited, elastic scalability, either by scaling up on a range of instance sizes or scaling out with automatic sharing, all with no application downtime.”
The company believes that the majority of MongoDB’s use is in the cloud, and the plan is that Atlas is the best way to manage that. “There are millions of Mongo instances,” said Stirman, “this is a huge opportunity for us.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hey cloud lawyer: Can I take my client list with me?
It’s not like my boss painstakingly nurtured the contacts, right?
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2016/06/20/nda_cloud_lawyers_column/
You spend months or years building up a client list for your employer. You nurture the relationship and build up personal ties with the client. When you leave the employer, naturally the client goes with you. And so does the client list, via a USB stick or Dropbox or your webmail account. If you don’t get all the details before you leave, you can simply log back in later and copy the rest.
Your former employer doesn’t have the relationship with the client anyway – it was personal to you – and business is business after all.
But wait. In doing so, you’ve possibly got yourself and your new employer in hot water. There are numerous measures preventing you doing this and, if any of this is done with your new employer’s encouragement or assistance, they could be liable too.
Client lists are, by their very nature, likely to contain personally identifiable information protected by the Data Protection Act.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ron Miller / TechCrunch:
Box launches Shuttle to help companies move large amounts of legacy files into the cloud with software and consulting help
http://techcrunch.com/2016/06/29/box-announces-shuttle-tool-to-ferry-legacy-file-stores-to-cloud/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jordan Novet / VentureBeat:
Amazon expands AWS Simple Notification Service feature to 200 countries outside the US, updates admin controls for more flexibility
AWS expands SNS messaging service beyond U.S., now works in 200 countries
http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/29/aws-expands-sns-messaging-service-beyond-u-s-now-works-in-200-countries/
Public cloud market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced a bunch of updates for the Simple Notification Service (SNS) service that automatically sends SMS messages to phones. Most importantly, SNS will now work outside the U.S. — support is available in 200 countries.
And AWS will operate the service out of six regional data centers, not just one: US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo), and EU (Ireland), AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post.
There are new management features, too. You can choose to receive daily reports about successful and failed deliveries of text messages; receive delivery status logs; and manage phone numbers that have been opted out. Admins can set spending limits per month, per account, or per message.
And users no longer need to opt in to the SNS service before they can receive messages from it, Barr wrote.
This is a substantial update to SNS, which first came out in 2010 and received push notification support in 2013. SNS isn’t the most popular service on AWS, but it’s one that used more often than you might think. Apps like Tinder, Wunderlist, Yelp, Yik Yak, and Yo rely on it.
For push needs, the Google public cloud offers Firebase Cloud Messaging and Microsoft has Notification Hubs, although neither supports SMS. Twilio, among other third parties, can provide SMS messaging for applications.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google expands Firebase with analytics, remote config, crash reporting, and dynamic links
http://venturebeat.com/2016/05/18/google-expands-firebase-with-analytics-remote-config-crash-reporting-and-dynamic-links/
At its I/O 2016 developer conference today, Google announced an expansion of Firebase, its service for helping developers build apps for Android, iOS, and the Web. At the same time, the company also simplified Firebase’s pricing in an effort to woo more developers.
Google acquired Firebase in October 2014. Since then, the backend-as-a-service has grown from 110,000 developers to over 470,000. Now the company has decided it’s time to turn Firebase into a true Google service.
Tomi Engdahl says:
GitHub releases data on 2.8 million open source repositories through Google BigQuery
http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/29/github-releases-data-on-2-8-million-open-source-repositories-through-google-bigquery/
GitHub today announced that it’s releasing activity data for 2.8 million open source code repositories and making it available for people to analyze with the Google BigQuery cloud-based data warehousing tool.
The data set is free to explore. (With BigQuery you get to process up to one terabyte each month free of charge.)
This new 3TB data set includes information on “more than 145 million unique commits, over 2 billion different file paths and the contents of the latest revision for 163 million files, all of which are searchable with regular expressions,” Arfon Smith, program manager for open source data at GitHub, wrote in a blog post.
Making open source data more available
https://github.com/blog/2201-making-open-source-data-more-available
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon Elastic File System
Simple, scalable, and reliable file storage for the AWS Cloud
http://aws.amazon.com/efs/
Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) provides simple, scalable file storage for use with Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS Cloud. Amazon EFS is easy to use and offers a simple interface that allows you to create and configure file systems quickly and easily. With Amazon EFS, storage capacity is elastic, growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files, so your applications have the storage they need, when they need it.
When mounted to Amazon EC2 instances, an Amazon EFS file system provides a standard file system interface and file system access semantics, allowing you to seamlessly integrate Amazon EFS with your existing applications and tools. Multiple Amazon EC2 instances can access an Amazon EFS file system at the same time, allowing Amazon EFS to provide a common data source for workloads and applications running on more than one Amazon EC2 instance.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s cloud growing, but partners have concerns
http://www.cloudpro.co.uk/cloud-essentials/public-cloud/6127/microsofts-cloud-growing-but-partners-have-concerns
Security and speed of updates are worrying partners as they try to sell products to customers
Although Microsoft’s enterprise cloud business grew by 75 per cent year-on-year, the company’s partners are concerned about security and the speed of updates being rolled out to customers.
A report by Windows apps UX firm Harmon.ie that explored partner attitudes toward the company’s cloud services has revealed Microsoft needs to be more innovative, but offer simpler services to appease both partners and their customers.
“As Microsoft continues to innovate in the cloud, its rapid release of new capabilities is overwhelming its customers who are struggling to make sense of them,” Yaacov Cohen, CEO of Harmon.ie said.
“This creates opportunities for Microsoft partners to offer consulting services and innovative products that hide complexity and simplify the evolving Office 365 user experience. It’s a win-win.”
Out-of-the-box security needs to be addressed, Harmon.ie’s report said, with 69 per cent of respondents reporting their customers didn’t want to sign up to Office 365 because they are concerned it isn’t secure enough for the storage of confidential company files and information.
Other revelations in the report revealed that partners think cloud migration will account for more than half of their business by 2017 and their customers are looking to move a proportion of their productivity services to the cloud or Office 365 in the next 12 months, including email and Office, online meetings technologies, Skype for Business and file sharing.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Brexit Threatens London’s Data Center Market
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1330044&
The historic decision by voters in the UK to leave the European Union has generated an atmosphere of uncertainty about the role of London in the multi-tenant data center and hosting markets, a new report by 451 Research claims.
The report notes the Brexit vote could challenge the strategy of international hosting firms using London as their European base — and could possibly prompt providers to consider other locations. It’s also a huge people issue, with more than 1.5 million of them employed in “digital companies” throughout the UK.
“London is currently the European capital of the data center, hosting, and cloud markets,”
Brexit Threatens London’s Data Center Market
http://www.informationweek.com/data-centers/brexit-threatens-londons-data-center-market-/d/d-id/1326142
“It’s considered somewhere that is easy to do business. It’s the most cosmopolitan and diverse location in terms of IT service providers, has the broadest supply, the largest choice of facilities, a common working language, and a skilled labor force — particularly in the tech-rich Thames Valley.”
The uncertainty following the vote could mean other main metro markets for data center and hosting services in Europe — like Frankfurt, Paris, and Amsterdam — stand to gain from customers or providers looking to move their data or data center facilities out of the UK, Duncan said.
However, Duncan cautioned that while European providers may be opportunistically hungry for a slice of London’s business, they face their own supply issues.
“Perhaps Dublin potentially stands to gain the most from any immediate move: Some of the largest new data center builds are happening at the moment — including facilities for Facebook and Apple — and its location just across the Irish Sea and well-connected to transatlantic sub-sea cables might make it a convenient halfway house for some looking to have low-latency connectivity to the UK, but still be in the EU,” Duncan said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linux cloudy tie ups: SUSE and Microsoft, Canonical and Pivotal
All my friends are getting married
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/07/linux_cloudy_tie_ups_suse_and_microsoft_canonical_and_pivotal/
It’s a big week for Linux cloud tie-ups, with SUSE and Microsoft expanding their partnership, and Canonical becoming Pivotal’s preferred operating system in Cloud Foundry.
In the SUSE/Microsoft deal, the Linux outfit joins two Redmond programs: the Microsoft Enterprise Cloud Alliance, and the its test drive program.
The latter will be interesting to supercomputing geeks, because Azure customers will be able to try out SUSE’s HPC Edition on Redmond’s cloud.
The HPC offering includes Intel’s Message Passing Interface (MPI) packages, and access to an Infiniband back end via Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA).
The test drive uses SUSE Studio to create the images, and SUSE Manager, which is integrated with Microsoft Systems Center to manage the Linux Vms. SUSE’s canned statement is here.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Got the Brexit fear? Keep calm and keep using AWS – Amazon UK boss
UK region still on way despite Gartner warnings
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/07/amazon_on_brexit/
AWS Summit 2016 Amazon has urged customers to keep investing in cloud in the wake of British voters’ decision to leave the European Union.
Gavin Jackson, AWS UK, Ireland and Europe managing director, said today that the best approach is to “keep calm and carry on”. He was opening the AWS London Summit and tackled Brexit head on in front of 5,000 attendees.
He said Amazon’s own plan to open a UK region, announced last November and due to open later this year or early next, is going ahead unchanged.
AWS currently has two regions in Europe, one in Ireland and the other in Germany.
“We at AWS will continue to be an inward investor in the UK and will continue on a path to launch a UK region at the end of the year.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Amazon’s AWS buys Cloud9 to add more development tools to its web services stack — Amazon Web Services has made an acquisition to continue building out the services that it offers around and on its cloud storage platform. It has bought Cloud9, a San Francisco-based startup that has built …
Amazon’s AWS buys Cloud9 to add more development tools to its web services stack
https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/14/amazons-aws-buys-cloud9-to-add-more-development-tools-to-its-web-services-stack/
Amazon Web Services has made an acquisition to continue building out the services that it offers around and on its cloud storage platform. It has bought Cloud9, a San Francisco-based startup that has built an integrated development environment (IDE) for web and mobile developers to collaborate together.
The news was made public by Cloud9 itself in a statement on its site, which also says that the company will continue to offer its existing service while it also works on building new tools for AWS.
Great News!
https://c9.io/blog/great-news/
We’re excited to let you, our users and customers, be among the first to learn that we have been acquired by Amazon! We will be joining the Amazon Web Services family, and we’re looking forward to working together on terrific customer offerings for the future.
Happy coding!
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jay Greene / Wall Street Journal:
Oracle to Buy Cloud-Software Provider NetSuite for $9.3 Billion
Oracle to Buy Cloud-Software Provider NetSuite for $9.3 Billion
Larry Ellison is largest holder of NetSuite, which is led by an ex-Oracle executive
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/oracle-to-buy-netsuite-for-9-3-billion-1469708380-lMyQjAxMTA2MTI1ODkyMDg5Wj
Oracle Corp. agreed to pay $9.3 billion for a cloud-computing pioneer that counts Larry Ellison as a major investor, using its second-largest acquisition to try to catch up in a key area where it has lagged.
The Ellison family’s stake in NetSuite means chances for a rival bidder to emerge are “slim to none,” said Stifel Nicolaus Co. analyst Brad Reback.
The 19% premium offered by Oracle for NetSuite is lower than the average 26% premium for all technology mergers and acquisitions valued above $1 billion year to dat
NetSuite is among the leaders in providing such software via subscription-based, on-demand computing, and buying it will help Oracle compete against SAP SE, the leader in ERP software, according to Gartner Inc.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jordan Novet / VentureBeat:
Amazon Web Services posts $2.88 billion in revenue in Q2 2016, up 58% from last year
http://venturebeat.com/2016/07/28/aws-q2-2016/
Ecommerce company Amazon today disclosed that its Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud division generated $2.88 billion in revenue in the second quarter of this year. That’s 58 percent more than AWS generated in the second quarter of 2015. And it’s the most revenue AWS has ever captured in a quarter.
In the past four quarters, AWS has registered $9.94 billion in revenue — not very far off from $10 billion. That said, revenue growth is not as high as it’s been in previous quarters.
AWS brought in $718 million in operating income for the second quarter — the most operating income ever for the business unit — with $2.02 billion in operating expenses, Amazon said in a statement.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Alibaba, Baidu, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and VMware are among AWS’ competitors in the cloud infrastructure business. Samsung recently acquired another AWS competitor, Joyent.
Source: http://venturebeat.com/2016/07/28/aws-q2-2016/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Rackspace Hosting is in advanced sale talks with one or more private-equity firms, could reach deal this week; firm could be valued at up to $4B — Move comes two years after cloud-computing company says it would explore deal amid heightened competition
Rackspace Hosting Nears Sale to Private-Equity Firm
Move comes two years after cloud-computing company says it would explore deal amid heightened competition
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/rackspace-hosting-nears-sale-to-private-equity-firm-1470342568-lMyQjAxMTE2MTAxNDEwODQ2Wj
Last year, Rackspace and Amazon, once fierce rivals, unveiled a partnership in which Rackspace would help make it easier for corporate customers to move computing operations from their own facilities to Amazon Web Services, the web-retailing giant’s cloud platform. Rackspace also has a similar partnership with Microsoft.
A partnership between Rackspace and Amazon would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier, but in early 2014, Rackspace, facing ever slimmer margins amid a cloud-computing price war, withdrew from head-to-head competition with Amazon. Since then, its focus on offering higher-margin services has helped boost the company’s cash flow from operations
At $4 billion, the company would still be valued well below what it was worth just a few years ago.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Recent cloud news:
Amazon Web Services has been growing at a blistering pace, registering a 58% year-over-year revenue gain to $2.89 billion in the most recent quarter
Last month, Oracle Corp. agreed to buy NetSuite Inc. for $9.3 billion.
In June, Microsoft Corp. agreed to buy professional social network LinkedIn Corp. for $26.2 billion.
Source: http://www.wsj.com/article_email/rackspace-hosting-nears-sale-to-private-equity-firm-1470342568-lMyQjAxMTE2MTAxNDEwODQ2Wj
Tomi Engdahl says:
Brexit likely to stall UK data center build-outs: Analyst
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/pt/2016/06/brexit-likely-to-stall-uk-data-center-build-outs-analyst.html?cmpid=Enl_CIM_DataCenters_July122016&eid=289644432&bid=1459800
“Get ready for the pause in U.K. data center build-outs. The only certainty about the United Kingdom’s move to exit the European Union is the cloud computing ecosystem is going to see some turbulence and uncertainty ahead as U.K. data center plans by large cloud providers may go on hold.”
“That Brexit simply makes Ireland a better country to carry out financial services and technology. Ireland also becomes the hub for Western European cloud operations.”
Brexit Likely to Pause U.K. Data Center Build-outs
http://www.circleid.com/posts/20160627_pause_in_uk_data_center_build_outs_in_lieu_of_brexit/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Google buys Orbitera, a platform for buying and selling cloud-based software; source says Google paid $100M+ — Google today announced another acquisition that will help the company improve how it competes against Amazon’s AWS, Salesforce and Microsoft in the area of enterprise services …
Google buys Orbitera, a platform for cloud marketplaces, for $100M+
https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/08/google-buys-orbitera-a-platform-for-building-marketplaces-cloud-software/
Google today announced another acquisition that will help the company improve how it competes against Amazon’s AWS, Salesforce and Microsoft in the area of enterprise services, and specifically selling enterprise services in the cloud: it has acquired Orbitera, a startup that developed a platform for buying and selling cloud-based software.
This is an acquisition of talent, technology, and existing business. The CEO Marcin Kurc (tellingly) is an alum of AWS. And Google notes that some 60,000 enterprise stacks have already been launched on Orbitera. These include the likes of Adobe, Oracle and Metalogix, who all resell cloud services from third-party vendors as part of their larger enterprise businesses.
“This acquisition will not only improve support of software vendors on Google Cloud Platform but also provides customers with more choice and flexibility in today’s multi-cloud world,” Google said in a statement provided to TechCrunch.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Where in the world is my data and how secure is it?
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36854292
When Max Schrems, an Austrian privacy activist, requested to see his personal data that Facebook stored on its servers, he was mailed a CD-ROM containing a 1,222-page document.
offered a glimpse into Facebook’s appetite for the private details of its 1.65 billion users.
The information included phone numbers and email addresses of Mr Schrems’ friends and family; a history of all the devices he used to log in to the service; all the events he had been invited to; everyone he had “friended” (and subsequently de-friended); and an archive of his private messages.
It even included transcripts of messages he’d deleted.
But Mr Schrems, who says he only used Facebook occasionally over a three-year period, believes a sizeable chunk of information was withheld from him.
Mr Schrems’ experience vividly illustrates the challenges we face in a digital age full of messaging apps, social networks, tailored search engines, email clients, and banking apps, all collecting personal data about us and storing it, somewhere, in the cloud.
But where is all this data exactly, how is it being used, and how secure is it?
The Big Four
More than half of the world’s rentable cloud storage is controlled by four major corporations. Amazon is by far the biggest, with about a third of the market share and 13 massive data centres in the US, three in South America, five in Europe, 11 spread across Asia, and three in Australia.
The next three biggest providers are Microsoft, IBM and Google, and each of them adopts a similar global pattern of server farms.
These major public cloud providers habitually duplicate user data across their networks. It means that information uploaded to the cloud in, say, the UK or the US, is likely to be transferred at some point to servers in major cities around the world, from Sydney to Shanghai.
The problem with this, says Prof Dan Svantesson, an internet law specialist at Bond University, Australia, is that “there is always a risk that the country your data goes to doesn’t have the same level of protection [as your own].
“No-one really quite knows how the sausage is made,” says Mr Caudill, whose work includes testing firms’ defences though “ethical hacking”.
“It’s very difficult to understand where your data is stored. A lot of times the companies themselves aren’t sure where all the data could reside.”
He says a client of his, who was using Microsoft’s Azure cloud service, fell victim to a hack – all data and back-ups were deleted.
But after some digging, it emerged that a portion of the lost data had been stored elsewhere on Azure’s servers
“No-one really knows how secure the cloud services are from the major providers,” says Mr Caudill, who suspects that “both Amazon and Azure have had major security compromises at some point.”
“The data of your Gmail account is absolutely on more than one server. It’s absolutely in more than one country,” says Prof Svantesson.
But why should we care?
The more of our data that’s out there scattered throughout the world, the more vulnerable it is to hackers, argues Mr Caudill – a supposition borne out by the fact that identity fraud is on the rise.
As people continue to upload their digital information online, into a marsh of territorial legal complexities and undisclosed national security protocols, Prof Svantesson offers some practical advice – which many people still do not follow.
“I would suggest never putting anything sensitive on the cloud, such as credit card information, or personal images that you don’t want others to see.
“Some things you should just leave to yourself,” he advises.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The New Cloud Challenges and How to Address Them
http://www.belden.com/blog/datacenters/the-new-cloud-challenges-and-how-to-address-them.cfm
Despite the image it conveys, the cloud consists of a physical infrastructure: many computers housed in massive data centers all over the world. Various hyperscale cloud service providers are competing on service quality and pricing to offer virtualized cloud services, but they are facing an increasing number of cloud challenges: building faster, denser, bigger, cost-effective and more power-efficient data center infrastructure that can be scalable, sustainable and resilient.
According to the latest Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) forecast for 2020, global IP traffic will reach 2.3 zettabytes (ZB), a 100-fold increase from 2005. Smartphone traffic will exceed PC traffic for the first time, and more than 23 billion IP-enabled devices – also known as Internet of Things (IoT) devices – will be connected to the network.
According to the Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast, for every 200 additional mobile devices added to a network, one more server in the cloud will be required for data processing. Increasing numbers of devices is the source of many cloud challenges.
Today, nearly 75% of data center traffic remains within data centers for computing, processing and storage. For example, Facebook users are uploading more than 300 million pictures per day; each of these pictures is stored in different locations in different format sizes for caching and reviewing. As more and more pictures are uploaded, cloud challenges increase.
New Cloud Challenges
As cloud leaders, such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook, are investing heavily in technology innovation, designing new topologies to best suit their needs and pushing hardware to customize the most cost-efficient components through multi-source agreements, the industrial standards bodies – IEEE, TIA and ISO/IEC – are accelerating to develop and release new standards that support this growth.
There are some fundamental cloud challenges, however, that cannot be solved by hyperscale data centers:
1. IoT needs to work even when the connection is temporally unavailable.
2. Cloud data centers cannot provision enough bandwidth or appropriate service levels to cover every corner of the world.
3. Centralized data center architecture cannot meet the emerging requirements of instantaneous data analysis due to the latency of data generation, transmission and processing.
4. It’s not viable for cloud service providers to optimize infrastructure costs by only providing services from their own data centers.
Can we solve these cloud challenges by building more hyperscale data centers? More hyperscale data centers would be great, but that’s not the answer to everything. The return on investment would diminish for further scale increase due to the premise and infrastructure costs:
1. Fixed costs have already been amortized across very large number of servers.
2. Migration from hard disk to flash storage will reduce the processing latency considerably, but would further increase the cluster bandwidth.
3. Power consumption limits geographical data center locations.
Fortunately, we already have some new solutions to cloud challenges on the horizon:
1. Distributed data center topology, which allows for quick disaster recovery. Data center interconnect (DCI) solutions have been developed to efficiently connect geographically separated data centers in the same region.
2. Edge computing platforms that support quick data analytics locally can address the latency-sensitive applications in the new ecosystem of IoT, such as connected autonomous vehicles.
3. Multi-tenant data centers (MTDCs), as a fast-growing segment, provide colocation services such as hosting the private cloud infrastructure and providing public cloud access to end users. They can help enterprise customers reduce cost of ownership, allowing the content delivery network and cloud service providers to quickly expand their service coverage.