Alibaba Cloud
Alibaba Cloud was quite active at Mobile World Congress (MWC), introducing new services, hosting panels and parading customer use cases, such as Roybi Robot and rural hospitals in China, in front of mobile audiences. PR efforts around cloud software development training programs for women and developing regions around the world helped lift Alibaba Cloud’s Sentiment score as well. The company also introduced a host of new cloud-based analytics and intelligence apps including DataWorks, MaxCompute 2.0, Data Lake Analytics, Real Time Compute, ECI and more.Amazon Web Services (AWS)
There was a lot of talk about security with Amazon Web Services this week. Security professionals were pointing to topics like how cloud developers can inject failures to test AWS Lambda against common function error modes, as others showed how to use an AWS instance for “cloud cracking”. Amid these more academic pursuits, there were substantive concerns over hackers launching a new campaign to compromise the API tokens of AWS accounts.Google Cloud
While other cloud companies took advantage of MWC to get their messages out, Google took a quieter stance for much of the week with less company-driven social media news. Talk that multiple Google Cloud hosts were checking other folks’ devices for vulnerabilities(suspiciously abnormal behavior) might have raised concerns earlier in the week, but the well-timed announcement of endpoint verification that lets admins block individual PCs helped keep that news in check. Microsoft Azure
Microsoft captured a healthy share of attention this week by resurrecting the Microsoft Kinect peripheral for use as an input device for Artificial Intelligence. The first-generation Kinect had a loyal developer base, and they view this update as a great addition to IoT solutions where capturing visual input at the edge and identifying / decoding video is important. Microsoft was also active at MWC this week, announcing a partnership with Spanish Telecom giant Telefonica. The partnership focuses on the future of telecom by using AI to improve customer experience as well as introducing new enhancements for its Cognitive Services’ Computer Vision. These enhancements will expand tagging, automate cropping and monitor brand presence through Microsoft’s Azure Cognitive Service’s AI engine (cloud-based AI services are a potential tie-in with Kinect in the future). Other Cloud News
It was a busy week for IBM, but perhaps not in the way it had hoped. Reports came in regarding a vulnerability in the baseboard management controller that could negatively impact IBM Cloud and SoftLayer customers. Even more embarrassing is the fact that these are Supermicro servers (which have reported BMC issues in the past) and not Lenovo servers, despite IBMs relationship with Lenovo after they sold their x86 server business to the Chinese IT giant. With all of the talk of security this week, it was good to see that Oracle is looking to hire a new director of security who will focus on its red team efforts to help secure the Oracle Cloud infrastructure. Additionally, Oracle announced support for the popular open source analytics dashboard Grafana in its new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Source for Grafana. With more companies focusing on DevOps and relying on the deep analytics capabilities of Grafana, Oracle’s support will definitely be a welcome addition for Oracle Cloud customers. The CEO of MariaDB, the popular open source database, questioned the motivations of the largest cloud companies in relation to its database. Michael Howard asked rhetorically whether companies like AWS might actually hamper the performance or capability of MariaDB to make their own DBMS (Aurora) look better in comparison. | 
