| Alibaba Cloud’s (also known as “Aliyun”) overall Liftr Cloud Index score (66.6, +1.9%) increased this week from a large gains scores for Momentum (21.8, +8.9%) (explained above), Instance (89.9, +3.8%) and Sentiment (107.2, +3.1%). Its Instance score was up due to a slight decline in its median compute instance price. Alibaba Cloud’s Sentiment score ended the week up a little, but that is well within its normal bounds, there were no significant social media drivers for sentiment this week. Alibaba Cloud has partnered with the Cloud Native Foundation to offer its first free cloud native online technology course for Chinese developers. Amazon Web Services (AWS) increased its overall index score (108.4, +1.0%) after a large Momentum boost (166.5, +5.7%) (explained above). AWS Sentiment increased (101.3, +2.1%) following last week’s announcement that Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports Multi Major Version upgrades. AWS also added some new CloudFormation features for Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS and Amazon Elastic Load Balancer. AWS marked the one-year anniversary its Registry of Open Data (RODA). RODA has grown by 392% and now includes 110 datasets organized by 111 tags. Google Cloud’s overall index score (83.5, +2.3%) increased following solid gains to its Momentum score (48.8, +12.1%) (explained above). Sentiment also increased (103.8, +5.6%), due to many announcements last week, including… Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, recently announced that the current President of Google Cloud Global Customer Operations of two years, Paul Henri Ferrand is stepping down and taking on new challenges within Google. Taking his place will be long time SAP executive Robert Enslin. Atos, a European IT corporation, was recognized as a global leader in the Google Cloud certificate program after 300 of its employees became certified. Symantec partnered with Google Cloud to improve Zero Trust Cloud Access. Google is partnering with Pluralsight to launch Andela Learning Community 4.0 with an objective to train 100,000 software engineers across Africa in the next 10 years. Google Cloud released AutoML Vision to beta to help developers automate the training of custom machine learning models for vision. (Free demo of AutoML here.) CenturyLink announced at the National Association of Broadcasters event that it is expanding Vyvx Cloud Connect to Google Cloud. Last year it had announced its partnership with AWS. Microsoft Azure’s overall index score (106.0, +0.1%) was unchanged. Its Momentum score increased (84.9, +3.3%) (explained above), but its Instance score dropped (120.7, -3.1%) as the price of its median compute instance increased slightly. As mentioned earlier, AzCopy v10 now supports AWS S3 as a data source by using a simple, command-line tool. Azure users now can copy an entire AWS S3 bucket, or even multiple buckets, to Azure Blob Storage. Using ‘Put Block from URL’, which copies data directly from a given URL, AzCopy v10 moves data from an AWS S3 bucket to an Azure Storage account directly from the source. Azure’s Container Registry now supports Singularity Image Format containers after its collaboration with Sylabs. Microsoft also announced a Azure Government secret private preview and expansion of DoD IL5. Ernst & Young will leverage Microsoft Azure to assess trustworthiness of AI systems. Azure has made a Sprint 150 update for managing organization billing in Azure DevOps. Other Cloud News Fusion Broadband migrated its SD-WAN service to IBM Cloud following intense capacity pressure. According to Fusion MD Jason Maude, the company’s former infrastructure was inhibited by increasing growth, leading to more support calls. Maude says the switch to IBM has resulted in a 400% growth for Fusion’s SD-WAN services. IBM Cloud and Sysdig, a cloud native visibility and security platform, have partnered to help manage the complexities of monitoring application and infrastructure performance in a distributed environment for IBM Cloud customers with IBM Cloud Monitoring with Sysdig. OVH announced the release of its updated top of the line HG servers “with compute and network configurations to support virtually any application or workload”. | 
