In-Depth Analysis Alibaba Cloud’s (also known as “Aliyun”) overall Liftr Cloud Index score (66.2, +1.6%) increased due to higher scores for Momentum (22.4, +2.8%) and Sentiment (96.3, +7.8%). Canalys reported Alibaba Cloud’s revenue grew significantly more quarter-over-quarter than any of the other top eight CSPs, driving its Momentum score growth. In collaboration with WeWork and other companies, Alibaba launched a service platform called China Gateway to help foreign companies scale in China. China Gateway will provide clients with access to cloud and data intelligence technologies, cross-border information technology infrastructure, as well as enterprise solutions from Alibaba Cloud. Alibaba Cloud’s Sentiment score increase is mostly due to its China Gateway initiative. According to Principal Analyst Paul Teich, China Gateway is a direct competitor to other efforts to establish a route for non-Chinese companies to have public or private cloud resources on Chinese soil, like Chayora. We expect to learn more about China Gateway at Alibaba Cloud’s next summit in Malaysia later this year. Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) overall index score (108.6, -0.3%) was flat from the previous week as its Sentiment (99.2, -2.1%) and Security (106.3, -0.8%) scores decreased. Sentiment dropped, because AWS-generated social media posts dropped during the US Memorial Day holiday week, and so post sharing (retweeting) also dropped. AWS also consolidated a few of its security certificates, temporarily lowering its Security score. We will adjust our data collection to update AWS’s Security score during the next two weeks to reflect the consolidation and return AWS’s Security score to its previous value. AWS announced last Wednesday that Textract has become generally available for its customers. Textract is a cloud-hosted and fully managed service that uses machine learning to comb through data tables, forms and entire pages for text and data. Textract is designed to be more capable than the average optical character recognition system. Textract can find information and the context it is presented, such as names, social security numbers or photographed receipts. In addition, AWS announced general availability for its Amazon managed streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK). Apache Kafka (Kafka) is an open source platform that lets users to record streaming data such as click stream events, transactions, IoT events, application and machine logs. Google Cloud’s overall index score (83.9, +0.2%) relatively unchanged after small boosts to its Adaptability (49.9, +0.8%) and Momentum (49.2, +0.9%) scores. Its Adaptability score reflects the relatively higher growth of apps offered in its marketplace (726 apps growing to 731 week-to-week) as compared to the other three tracked CSPs. Google Cloud’s slight Momentum score increase reflects slightly higher quarter-to-quarter growth than market leader AWS. Google Cloud’s announcement to partner with Informatica is a move for Google to push into the enterprise information-technology market. The partnership will combine Informatica’s data management and integration tools with Google Cloud services including data-storage platforms and market analytics tools. The Football Association of England made Google Cloud its official cloud and data analytics partner for the 28 national teams it oversees. The FA plans to use Google Cloud’s portfolio of machine learning, data analytics and processing tools to help support its ongoing efforts to make football a more diverse and inclusive game. Microsoft Azure’s overall index score (107.3, -0.4%) remained stable despite dips in its Sentiment (100.6, -1.6%) and Momentum (83.7, -1.4%) scores. As with AWS, Azure’s Sentiment dropped due to the US Memorial Day holiday week. Its Momentum score declined as Canalys reported that Azure’s revenue contracted quarter-to-quarter. Azure Cloud announced that adaptive network hardening in the Azure Security Center is now generally available. The adaptive network hardening feature tells the Azure Security Center to learn the network traffic and connectivity patterns of a customer’s Azure Workloads and provide them with NSG rule recommendations for their internet-facing virtual machines. Azure also announced general availability for its API Management Consumption Tier, which reveals serverless properties, performs on a shared infrastructure, can scale down to zero in times of no traffic and is billed per execution. Finally, Azure announced general availability announcement for its Azure NetApp Files, “the industry’s first bare-metal cloud file storage and data management service.” Other Cloud News Cockroach Labs,a computer software company specializing in developing commercial database management systems, launched one of the broadest public cloud partnership programs to date. The partner program allows companies to deploy CockroachDB on-premises, in the cloud or across clouds, all intended to enable enterprises to replicate or partition data across cloud vendors or to specifically target the most appropriate vendor for the task at hand. The company currently has partnerships with what seems like the majority of major cloud players, including AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Rackspace, Oracle Cloud, Digital Ocean and Openshift. | 
