Alibaba Launches New Data Centers
Alibaba Cloud has officially cut the ribbon at its two new data centers in London. This means the company now has a total of 52 availability zones in 19 regions worldwide. The company just announced the arrival of the data centers last month and is set to have 99.99% availability, cooling configured with N+1 redundancy, and dual availability zones for stronger disaster recovery. This move shows Alibaba’s continual push to make their presence known outside of the Asia Pacific; though they continue to make headway amidst competitors in their own domain.
GitHub Network Instability and Microsoft Acquisition
Starting late Sunday night, GitHub experienced a major outage causing developers to be unable to use vital code repository for several hours. A status update, made by Senior Vice-President for Technology at GitHub Jason Warner, said no data was lost. Well into Monday morning, the company was still unable to resolve the issues or examine pull requests on GitHub due to inconsistent results generated by database errors. They were able to get their services back up and running Monday afternoon.
The company also experienced major outages back in 2015 during a DDoS attack and a similar attack in 2012. Though it’s still not clear what exactly caused the issue, some thought the outage might be an indication that GitHub needs to partner with a cloud provider for better reliability.
While we can’t know if the outage affected this acquisition one way or another, it certainly seems to have come at an interesting time. As of Friday morning, Microsoft confirmed that they have acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock. Former Xamarian CEO and current Microsoft corporate vice president, Nate Friedman will become the CEO of GitHub starting Monday.
More Quarterly Earnings Stream In
This week, Microsoft, Google and Amazon announced their quarterly earnings results. Microsoft announced that their commercial cloud revenue was $8.5 billion for the quarter, up 47% year-over-year and their Azure revenue was up 76%. Their commercial cloud gross margin percentage was 62%, up 4 points year-over-year, twice the margin of AWS, which they cited was driven by Azure’s improved gross margin. The Liftr Cloud index shows that Azure is gradually catching up to AWS. With much higher overall gross margin percentages than Amazon, Microsoft can afford to put more of its cloud revenue back into infrastructure research and development. Microsoft has shown their clear focus on commercial customers in the waning days of the PC market.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, reported an aggregated revenue for YouTube, cloud, and desktop search of $33.7 billion, up 21% year-on year and up 22% in constant currency. During the call, the company discussed some new customer wins on Google Cloud and indicated they are ramping their investments in partnerships and infrastructure for their cloud business.
Lastly, Amazon announced their earnings, reporting revenue of $6.68 billion for AWS, up 46%. AWS had a 31 percent operating margin for the quarter, the highest in more than four years. During their earnings call, the company also talked about lowering prices to pass on infrastructure cost savings to consumers.
Alibaba will be announcing their earnings November 2.
Insights from Oracle OpenWorld
This week our Principal Analyst, Paul Teich attended Oracle’s OpenWorld in San Francisco, bringing back key insights on the company’s latest announcements in the cloud.
Oracle is launching its second-generation cloud infrastructure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or OCI. The company believes that its OCI hardware infrastructure will be well matched with optimized in-house runtime software frameworks that support modern open source container software environments.
The company has been expanding its Seattle presence over the last few years to design the cloud infrastructure. Seattle is also where Amazon designs AWS infrastructure and where Microsoft designs Azure infrastructure. Oracle appears to have hired experienced new hardware and software architects and designers from both companies.
Though OCI is set to roll out now, 2019 will be when we see the infrastructure in full deployment mode with 12 regions going online in the next 12 months.
To view Paul’s coverage of OpenWorld, check out the Liftr Cloud Insight’s twitter page.
Insights for Next Week
Next week, Paul will be attending the DCD Colo+Cloud Event in Dallas. Follow Liftr’s twitter coverage of Paul’s attendance and check back in to future Liftr Cloud Round-Ups. We will also be keeping an eye on the Baidu World 2018 where Baidu is set to unveil their latest AI innovations.
