This Week’s Top Cloud News Headlines
Liftr Launches Cloud Components Tracker
The Liftr Cloud Components Tracker is the cloud industry’s first in-depth assessment of worldwide Cloud Service Providers IaaS and bare metal compute instances. A free sample report is available here.
Red Hat & Microsoft Charge Hybrid with OpenShift
The co-developed solution will allow users to easily extend containers on Red Hat infrastructure to Azure.
Microsoft Revs up Cloud Battle Following Build Conference
Azure made several announcements related to its Azure cloud branch, including Azure SQL Database Serverless
Azure Marketplace Expansion Opportunity
Azure also announced during Build that it would be expanding its widely successful Co-sell Program.
SAP Announces Collaborative Project ‘Embrace’
The project seeks to allow enterprises to move SAP’s ERP Software, S/4HANA, to the cloud by working closely with Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud.
See below for more in-depth analysis.
Liftr Cloud Components Tracker
We’re excited to announce the launch of the Liftr Cloud Components Tracker. This new service identifies and catalogs the prices, configurations and components of all the infrastructure-as-a-service and bare metal compute instances being deployed by tracked cloud service providers, region by region around the entire world.
To celebrate the launch of the Liftr Cloud Components Tracker we’ve made the first report available as a complimentary download. You may download the free May 2019 sample report here.
Watch the Liftr Cloud Look Ahead, a weekly video series that presents recent cloud news with an eye toward the future. Check out this week’s video to stay current and prepare for what’s next in the cloud industry.
Liftr Cloud Index
The daily Liftr Cloud Index compares the competitive state of cloud service provider (CSP) infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) products.
The overall Liftr Cloud Index for the week ending Friday 5/10/2019 was 104.2 (+0.3%), stable from the previous week. Among the top 3 tracked CSPs, Amazon AWS (108.6, 0.2%) was flat, while Microsoft Azure (107.2, +0.7%) and Google Cloud (83.8, +0.8%) both rose slightly. Number 4 Alibaba Cloud (65.7, -1.4%) dropped.
Download our free sample Liftr Cloud Index 4Q 2018 Analysis report here.
In-Depth Analysis
Alibaba Cloud’s (also known as “Aliyun”) overall Liftr Cloud Index score (65.7, -1.4%) decreased after a large negative impact in Sentiment (92.2, -10.4%). Alibaba Cloud was not featured in the news this week. For consecutive weeks now, Alibaba Cloud has had a reduced volume of English tweets which negatively impacted its Sentiment because of the small sample size. Liftr Cloud Insights is evaluating options to add native Chinese language sentiment analysis to increase Alibaba Cloud’s social media postings sample size for determining its Sentiment score (we will also search for the other tracked CSPs in Chinese language posts to maintain a consistent methodology).
Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) overall index score (108.6, +0.2%) was practically unchanged from the previous week. Sentiment decreased (98.4, -1.6%) but was offset by an increase to its Presence score (117.7, +3.1%). AWS announced Amazon S3 storage products will no longer support path-style API requests starting September 30, 2020.
Google Cloud’s overall index score (83.8, +0.8%) increased slightly due to positive Sentiment (103.5, +3.5%) and an increase to its Presence score (121.1, +2.9%).
Google Cloud announced the grantees of the Google AI Impact Challenge. The challenge is Google’s mission to address social, humanitarian and environmental problems. Google Cloud also introduced a public beta for Cloud TPU v2 and Cloud TPU v3 pods at its annual I/O developer conference.
Finally, Google Cloud published its assistance in creating an AI-enabled human biology map for Recursion Pharmaceuticals to accelerate discovery of treatments for rare, untreated diseases.
Microsoft Azure’s overall index score (107.2, +0.7%) edged higher. Its Presence score (94.5, +8.7%) increased significantly after adding two availability zones in Japan-east and in uk-south the previous week. However, Microsoft Azure’s Reliability score (98.5, -2.6%) decreased.
Big news for Microsoft was its announcement for hybrid cloud development with Azure Red Hat Open Shift. According to a press release from Microsoft, the co-developed solution will allow customers to feasibly extend containers on Red Hat infrastructure to Azure.
Microsoft Azure made several announcements during Build Conference, including Azure SQL Database Serverless. According to Microsoft, the product will “automatically pause during inactive periods when only storage is billed and automatically resume when activity returns”.
Starbucks is using a range of Microsoft Azure technologies to improve its customer experience. Examples include machine learning reinforcement learning techniques to create more personalized experience behind Starbucks’ mobile app and Azure Blockchain Service to track coffee beans from plantation to package, including were it was roasted. Starbucks expects traceable coffee shipments to also provide a richer experience for customers.
Microsoft also announced Visual Studio Code Kubernetes Tools version 1.0 release on GitHub and in its Visual Studio Marketplace. These extensions for Microsoft’s Visual Studio development environment are aimed at developers building applications to run in Kubernetes clusters and for DevOps staff troubleshooting Kubernetes applications. Microsoft claims that these new Visual Studio extensions will work for Kubernetes on any cloud, including Azure, AWS and Google Cloud.
Azure also announced during Build it would be expanding its successful Co-sell Program. Two years ago, Microsoft introduced its IP Co-sell Program that brought the Microsoft sales force, the largest enterprise sales force in the world, to sell its partners’ solutions built on Microsoft Azure. Now Microsoft is expanding the IP Co-sell Program beyond Azure to now also include partners building on Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Power Platform.
More Microsoft Build announcements can be found here.
Other Cloud News
Oracle Cloud announced the opening of an Oracle Cloud Solution Hub in Kuala Lumpur that will specialize in solutions and support for businesses and also announced a new cloud infrastructure data center in Tokyo.
SAP announced a collaborative project called Embrace wherein SAP will work closely with multiple cloud providers to allow businesses to move SAP’s ERP Software S/4HANA to the cloud, including AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. SAP’s relationship with the enterprise sector makes it an attractive partner, particularly for Azure and Google Cloud, which have both stated their intent to pursue enterprise business more actively. Liftr Cloud Insights Principal Analyst Paul Teich said,
“The major SaaS providers may have the potential to influence enterprise migration of key SaaS applications to specific clouds and could potentially play favorites among the IaaS and PaaS providers, influencing the direction of global IT cloud migrations.”
Earnings Reports
Liftr Cloud Insights is not a financial analyst firm. We provide strategic analysis of company earnings reports and associated end of quarter statements.
The next round of cloud-related earnings will be reported this week
- Alibaba Group (Alibaba Cloud)
- Baidu (Baidu Cloud)
- Cisco
- NVIDIA
- Oracle (Oracle Cloud).
The week of May 20 will continue with HPE and Lenovo.
Events
The Next AI Platform San Jose, CA May 9, 2019
Liftr Cloud Insights Principal Analyst Paul Teich and Senior Account Executive Brian Ralston were at the Next AI Platform event. Paul was one of the hosts at The Next AI Platform and conducted live onstage interviews with leaders in cloud infrastructure and cloud AI technology development. The Next Platform will post recorded interviews from the event, and we will forward the link after the recordings have been posted.
Upcoming Events
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe Barcelona, Spain May 20-23, 2019
Liftr Cloud Insights Principal Analyst Paul Teich will be at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe conference in Barcelona, Spain. The event is targeted at cloud service providers, open source cloud operations framework developers and cloud applications developers. Contact analyst@liftrcloud.com to schedule a meeting with Paul during the event.
AWS re:Inforce Security Conference Boston, MA June 25-26, 2019
Attendees of AWS re:Inforce will experience two days of security, identity and compliance learning and community building. Although we won’t be in attendance, we’ll be monitoring news and announcements intently.
Have a great week!
– Paul R. Teich, Principal Analyst, and your Liftr Cloud Insights team
Download our free sample Liftr Cloud Index 4Q 2018 Analysis.
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