Amazon AWS saw a minuscule increase in its overall index (106.7, +0.1%) score, primarily driven by consistent neutral attribute scores across the board. Scores remained neutral for AWS after a slow news week for the company. We recorded that AWS added a fourth zone to its US West region in Oregon (us-west-2), increasing its Presence score slightly.

Google Cloud’s overall index score (81.0, +0.8%) saw a slight increase. Sentiment (105.5, +3.1%) increased alongside much attention on its new and innovative Stadia gaming platform (more below). Its Reliability score (100.4, +1.1%) recovered from the outage of the prior week. Google Cloud saw an increase in its Presence (115.3, 2.1%) score as we recorded the addition of a new region in Zürich, Switzerland (europe-west-6).

Microsoft Azure experienced a small change to its overall index score (104.5, +0.3%) despite a dip in Sentiment (97.2, -1.5%). Microsoft Azure saw a large increase it its Presence score (83.2, +4.2%) after it opened two new regions South Africa North (south-africa-north) and South Africa West (south-africa-west) and a third zone to its East US region (east-us).

Summary
The week’s Liftr Cloud Index was essentially flat, as solid gains across Presence scores were offset by declines in other attributes. Microsoft Azure continues chase AWS for the #1 ranking on the overall index. Alibaba was the only cloud provider with an overall index score decline, which was due entirely to its decrease in Sentiment.

News, Analysis, Commentary & Opinion

At its Beijing Summit, Alibaba Cloud announce PolarDB, cloud-native relational database service designed for enterprise-grade database applications. PolarDB is compatible with Oracle, MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Also at the summit, Alibaba Cloud announced its release of X-dragon Super-Computing Cluster instance SCC-GN6: a super-computing bare-metal server instance with the capability to enhance cluster performance by more than 100%. The instance offers “50 Gbps of RDMA networking throughput, 96 custom Intel Skylake vCPUs, 8 NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs, providing a total of 1000 TFlops to computational throughput, and high-performance parallel file system CPFS with 1TB/s R/W throughput.”

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Last week, AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr gave a glimpse at AWS’s newest GPU-equipped instance, the G4 using NVIDIA T4 GPU. G4 is designed for machine learning training and inferencing, video transcoding and other similar applications. Barr states that the G4 instances will be available in multiple sizes and in bare-metal form.

In addition, Amazon EKS introduced Kubernetes API Server endpoint access control. Kubernetes API Server endpoint access control will allow traffic between Kubernetes worker nodes, the Kubectl command line tool and the EKS-managed Kubernetes API server to stay within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

Google Cloud

Google revealed its Stadia cloud gaming service at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco March 19. Stadia will stream games from the cloud to the Chrome browser, Chromecast and Pixel devices. Google power this streaming using its own data centers, which it says will “ensure servers are as close to players around the world as possible” and deliver lower latency to stream games effectively across the internet.

Google Cloud is also the official cloud provider of the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament. Google Cloud is teaming up with student developers to analyze data and implement prediction analysis of games in the tournament using cloud tools.

Microsoft Azure

Last week, Azure announced in coordination with NVIDIA’s GTC event ONNX runtime integration with NVIDIA. This announcement is a step towards open and interoperable AI, letting developers easily leverage industry-leading GPU acceleration regardless of their choice of framework. Developers can now use TensorRT through ONNX Runtime to accelerate inferencing of ONNX models, which can be exported or converted from PyTorch, TensorFlow and many other popular frameworks.

Other Cloud News

Huawei announced a new event on March 29 at the ISP Asia Pacific Summit 2019 Conference in Bali, Indonesia. The event’s theme is slated to be “Leading new ICT – Accelerate Service Innovation with ISP.”

Recent Events

Liftr Cloud Insights Principal Analyst Paul Teich attended the annual OCP Summit in San Franciso. This year the summit hosted 3,600 key cloud decision makers, executives, engineers, developers and suppliers.

Several new hardware-related IaaS working groups were announced at the summit, including the OCP Accelerator Module (OAM) project to define a compute accelerator packaging specification, the Open Domain Specific Architecture (ODSA) project to define a standard specification for workload-specific multi-chip system-in-package and the Open System Firmware project to define an open cloud server boot environment.

In addition, the Intel-led Compute Express Link (CXL) open specification for server processor to compute accelerator interconnection was announced, and several consortium members (including Dell EMC, Facebook, Google, Huawei, Intel and Microsoft) promoted CXL onsite at the summit.

Upcoming Events

Liftr Cloud Insights Principal Analyst Paul Teich will be at OpenStack’s Open Infrastructure Summit in Denver, Colorado. The event is targeted at builders and operators of open infrastructure, with over 300 sessions and workshops on Container Infrastructure, CI/CD, Telecom + NFV, Public Cloud, Private & Hybrid Cloud, Security and members of open source communities. Contact analyst@liftrcloud.com to schedule a meeting with Paul during the event.

Earnings Reports

Tencent

Tencent reported earnings on Thursday March 21. The Chinese investment conglomerate stated its cloud revenue increased over 100% to 9.1 billion RMB, or $1.36 billion, for the year 2018. The company’s paying customers more than doubled year-on-year in the fourth quarter of 2018.  Tencent Cloud’s global infrastructure covered 25 regions and operated 53 availability zones as of the end of 2018, posting an increase of 4 more regions and 17 availability zones from the end of 2017.

– Paul R. Teich, Principal Analyst, and your Liftr Cloud Insights team