| Oracle Cloud layoffs, Microsoft Azure Stack HCI debuts, IBM Watson helps Bausch+ Lomb see better workflow and AWS sets intro for its Inferentia cloud AI chip |
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This Week’s Top Cloud News Headlines |
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VPN Providers Pull Russian Servers
Russian authorities are beginning to enforce a law, signed by Vladimir Putin almost two years ago, banning virtual private networks.Oracle Partners with Ghana
The Vice President of Ghana, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, announced the launch of a collaboration between the nation and Oracle to develop technology-enabled startups.Google Cloud Issues a Refund
Google Cloud gives non-profit XRPL Labs a refund and credits after mistaken billing. For more in-depth analysis see below |
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| 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. |
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| | 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 4/5/2019 is 102.9 (+0.1%) flat from the previous week as all tracked CSPs were virtually unchanged. AWS (106.6, 0.0%) leads while Microsoft Azure (105.7, 0.3%) continues the chase. Google Cloud (81.2, +0.2%) is solidly in the middle, and Alibaba Cloud (64.7, -0.4%) still remains below the other tracked CSPs. |
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| Alibaba Cloud’s overall Liftr Cloud Index score (64.7, -0.4%) declined slightly this week, mostly due to Lower Sentiment (104.4, -2.5%). This decrease is within Alibaba’s normal fluctuations, given its small English social media volume. Alibaba Cloud announced a new TinkerPop-enabled graph DB product called Graph Database (GDB). GDB is a real-time online database for supporting highly-linked data query and storage. Alibaba Cloud says GDB will help users build highly connected data sets at a quicker pace. Siemens’ announced at Hannover Messe that MindSphere, its cloud-based open Internet of Things operating system, is now available on Alibaba Cloud to leverage the industrial IoT in China. Finally, Chinese regulators approved of the first 197 blockchain companies to be administered in China, including Alibaba, Baidu, JD.com, and Tencent. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was unchanged overall (106.6, 0.0%) after stability reigned across the eight Liftr Cloud Index attributes. In the news however, over 500 million Facebook user records were discovered on public Amazon servers. Meanwhile, Amazon joined the race to create a network of satellites in low Earth orbit to provide high-speed internet from space. See Principal Analyst Paul Teich’s article on Forbes.com AWS And IBM Want To Move Internet Traffic Off The Ocean Floor And Into Space. SUSE has launched the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for Arm on AWS. SLES for Arm on AWS is available via AWS Spot Instances. Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes can now send log data from the Kubernetes control plane to Amazon CloudWatch Logs. AWS also announced plans to open a new region in Indonesia by the end of 2021. AWS was reported to have opened an office in Bahrain in late March, prompting tens of thousands of tweets pleading with AWS to host the online game Fortnite on Middle East in-region servers for lower gaming latencies. Google Cloud’s overall index score (81.2, +0.2%) was flat. Its Adaptability score (48.6, +0.8%) increased as its marketplace grew from 669 to 690 apps. Sentiment (104.6, 0.9%) improved due to a lack of negative news. It was a relatively quiet week for Google Cloud in the news. Google Cloud offered a large refund to distributed ledger non-profit XRPL Labs after learning of a billing mistake. Also, hackers are now targeting D-Link home routers from Google Cloud Platform. Microsoft Azure’s overall index score (105.7, +0.3%) was flat. Sentiment (100.6, 1.7%) increased amid positive reaction to several news items. Microsoft announced a self-service exchange and refund for Azure Reservations. It also announced the Azure Functions Premium Plan for enterprise serverless workloads, designed to enable scaling and connectivity options without compromising on event-based scale. Azure Active Directory Password is now generally available to the public. Azure now supports Spinnaker and its continuous delivery platform. Spinnaker is an open source, multi-cloud platform responsible for releasing software changes with velocity and confidence. Microsoft also announced that Azure Front Door Service (AFD), “a scalable and secure entry point for fast delivery of global applications,” is now generally available. Other Cloud News IBM Cloud partnered with CenturyLink to expand its cloud ecosystem and offer IBM cloud object storage for customers. With the new storage option, CenturyLink says it can offer media companies a more scalable, highly available and secure way to improve the delivery of their content globally. Oracle Cloud launched a collaboration with Ghana to develop technology-enabled startups throughout the country. The collaboration will be known as the Ghana-Oracle Digital Enterprise Program. Ghana is the first African country chosen by Oracle. Ghana’s Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia challenged Ghana’s youth to take part in innovation and make technology an integral part of Ghanaian society. Oracle Cloud also announced its Developer Image for the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, which is designed to enable users to rapidly pre-install and automatically configure and launch a complete development environment on OCI. Tencent partnered with two Chinese banks in the cloud business in an effort to rival Alibaba in the enterprise cloud business. One partnership will establish an online loan management platform with improved risk controls. The other will form a financial technology laboratory, focused on research and development for financial cloud computing, data analysis, and AI. OVH created the Loops application platform for developers to efficiently push multiple queries per container into a Function as a Service (FaaS) environment. It is not yet clear whether OVH will open source Loops, but its blog does a good job of describing OVH’s implementation. Russian authorities are beginning to enforce a law, signed by Vladimir Putin almost two years ago, banning virtual private networks as they comply with the country’s extensive censorship of the internet. Russia’s online regulator said it had written to ten popular virtual private network (VPN) services to demand they sync their systems to the watchdog’s blacklist of banned websites. Liftr Cloud Insights’ Principal Analyst Paul Teich says he has personally used ExpressVPN when traveling overseas and uses a light-weight corporate VPN when traveling within the North America and in the EU: “The whole point of a VPN is to keep my corporate communications and data private to my company while traveling. Industrial espionage is a fact of life in the high-tech sector. But high-tech road warriors have to balance protecting corporate intellectual property with being productive. Access to collaboration tools and file shares is absolutely necessary while on business trips. Granting any government access to encrypted VPN traffic defeats the purpose of using the VPN. If there is a back door, then others can exploit it, as well.” |
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| Upcoming IBM will kick-off our 2Q 2019 earnings report coverage next week on Tuesday, April 16. The following week, April 22-26, Amazon, AMD, Baidu, Inspur, Microsoft and SAP are expected to report earnings. |
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Open Infrastructure Summit (formerly OpenStack Summit): Denver, CO April 29 – May 1, 2019
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.The Next AI Platform: San Jose, CA May 9, 2019
Liftr Cloud Insights Principal Analyst Paul Teich will be one of the hosts at The Next AI Platform and will conduct live onstage interviews with leaders in cloud infrastructure and cloud AI technology development. Contact analyst@liftrcloud.com to schedule a meeting with Paul before or after the event.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. Click here for more about our upcoming and recent events |
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| Have a great week! – Paul R. Teich, Principal Analyst, and your Liftr Cloud Insights team |
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