In-Depth Analysis Alibaba Cloud’s (also known as “Aliyun”) overall Liftr Cloud Index score (67.8, -0.4%) dipped marginally on lower Sentiment (99.4, -2.7%), which is within Alibaba Cloud’s normal variation range, which is wider than the other tracked CSPs. Alibaba Cloud published a use case for its China Gateway initiative, highlighting Australia’s largest pharmacy retailer Chemist Warehouse and its growing digital business in China. Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) overall index score (109.3, +0.2%) was fractionally up on a mild Sentiment boost (100.7, +0.9%), due to positive buzz around its AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington DC last week. AWS also reported compliance with Nova Scotia’s PHIA security compliance. AWS CEO Andy Jassy also took some verbal shots at the Microsoft and Oracle collaboration. Microsoft and Oracle intend to create high speed links between the two clouds to enable both CSPs to deploy apps and databases across their two clouds with unified identity and billing support. If the collaboration is not a competitive concern for AWS, Mr. Jassy would not have felt obliged to try to publicly counter it (see below for more). Google Cloud’s overall index score (82.6, +1.4%) increased as its Reliability score (88.2, +7.9%) rebounded following its recent outage. Its Security score (62.5, +0.6%) rose after earning Germany’s TISAX security accreditation. Google Cloud’s marketplace grew from 731 to 750 apps, including MongoDB availability, which helped its boost Adaptability score (50.2, +0.5%) The big news for Google Cloud was its published documentation for how to integrate Chainlink middleware to connect to Ethereum’s distributed contract technology, i.e. blockchain, with Google Cloud’s cloud-native BigQuery service. Back in February 2019, Google Cloud made public blockchain data freely available in BigQuery through the Google Cloud Public Datasets Program for eight different cryptocurrencies. This will enable apps running in Google Cloud to respond to contract triggers from each of the eight cryptocurrencies. However, demonstrating the capability with Ethereum lends Ethereum a bit of respectability and some time-to-market advantage over the others. Microsoft Azure’s overall index score (106.3, 0.0%) was unchanged from the previous week and now trails AWS by three percentage points. Last week’s announced collaboration between Microsoft and Oracle gives both the ability to deploy apps and databases across either cloud with unified identity and billing support. This ability may provide Microsoft with a creative loophole for enabling access to Oracle’s software under the US government’s JEDI contract’s single-source requirement. The initial connection between the two clouds will be implemented between Oracle’s Ashburn region and Azure’s US East region, which both cover the Washington DC area. It is unlikely that is just a happy coincidence. Microsoft announced a slew of Azure updates and enhancements last week. These include extended FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) Server for Azure to SQL, improved integration of Azure Security Center with Azure Advisor, Azure Application Gateway Standard v2 and WAF v2 general availability and the release of Azure Service Fabric 6.5. IBM Cloud joined the rest of the major cloud providers with the general availability of its Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). This release shows that IBM Cloud is maturing and attempting to stack up with other major cloud providers. IBM Cloud also launched its Cloud Paks, described as lightweight, enterprise-grade, modular cloud solutions, integrating a Kubernetes container platform, containerized IBM middleware and open source components, and common software services for development and management. Oracle Cloud announced its OCI Gen 2 Quick Start program to help customers quickly deploy, launch and manage commonly used applications on OCI Gen 2. Think of it as deploying complex app stacks from Oracle Cloud partners on OCI gen 2 as a private PaaS stack. Salesforce announced plans to buy Tableau, an interactive visualization software company, for $15.7 billion. This is just a little over a week after Google announced it is buying data analytics company Looker. It’s a major win for Salesforce as it continues to diversify beyond CRM software and dive deeper into analytics. Post-acquisition, Tableau will continue to operate independently and will remain headquartered in Seattle headed by its CEO Adam Selipsky. Moves like this one shows how much analytics are starting to matter in the cloud. OVH tweeted photos of and a few specs for its water-cooled NVIDIA DGX-1 cloud servers ahead of this week’s ISC conference (below). The DGX-1 is intended to be a deep learning training workhorse. OVH claims 25% reduction in power consumption by moving from fan-driven air cooling to water cooling. However, wedging 12 DGX-1 chassis into a 30kW rack still leaves the fact that 30kW is a lot of power to deliver to one rack. Only 34 of those racks would be needed to contribute a megawatt of power consumption to a cloud data center. Intel acquired Barefoot Networks for an undisclosed sum, filling in the last gap in its data center software defined networking (SDN) chip portfolio. | 
