In-Depth Analysis Tracked CSPs Alibaba Cloud’s (also known as “Aliyun”) overall Liftr Cloud Index score (68.2, -0.1%) was relatively unchanged. Sentiment (103.4, -1.4%) dipped slightly but stayed within its normal variation range, which is wider than the other tracked CSPs. Its Adaptability score (35.6, +0.8%) was up somewhat due to additions in its app marketplace. Alibaba Cloud’s chief scientist Min Wanli resigned to start a venture capital firm. Min said he established the firm to help fund the integration of cloud computing and artificial intelligence technologies into other industries such as manufacturing, agriculture and healthcare. CEVA, licensor of signal processing platforms and AI processors for connected devices, introduced an integrated Wi-Fi solution to connect IoT devices to Alibaba Cloud. The solution uses CEVA’s RivieraWaves Wi-Fi Low Power IP with the AliOS Things operating system on a single RISC-V CPU core. This is noteworthy because it couples Alibaba Cloud to the open source RISC-V architecture through Alibaba’s own IoT OS, reducing Alibaba’s dependence on Western intellectual property, such as Arm’s IoT processor and microcontroller cores and IoT derivatives of Google’s Android OS. Finally, Alibaba Cloud is putting its second UAE data center on hold as it evaluates its current business in the region. Customer demand has been insufficient to support a second data center thus far. Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) overall Liftr Cloud Index score (108.8, -0.5%) was marginally down on lower Sentiment (98.0, -3.2) and Reliability (99.0, -0.9%) scores. AWS’s Sentiment score declined primarily due to a June 24th outage that similarly affected its Reliability score – a routing error by a small ISP in Pennsylvania was exacerbated by the ISP’s use of a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Optimizer. This outage also affected other non-tracked CSPs, including Verizon. AWS introduced VPC Traffic Mirroring to help customers detect unusual traffic patterns or content that could signify a network intrusion, compromised instance or other anomaly. AWS wants customers to think of VPC Traffic Mirroring as a “virtual fiber tap” that gives direct access to the network packets flowing through their VPC. Other CSPs already have similar features, such as the Azure Network Watcher, Google Cloud’s VPC Flow Logs and Alibaba Flow Logs. This is an indication that CSP’s are filling in gaps in widely used PaaS services as the cloud services market continues to mature. Just over a week ago AWS released a short video with a first-look at its upcoming private cloud AWS Outposts rack-level hardware stack (announced at re:Invent 2018 for 2019 end of year release). There is a lot to unpack in this video – we believe it will be compared favorably to Microsoft’s Azure Stack solution. Look for more analysis from Liftr Cloud Insights shortly. Google Cloud’s overall Liftr Cloud Index score (84.6, +0.3%) was directionally up amid higher Reliability (100.9, +3.2%) and Sentiment (104.4, +2.1%) scores and a lower Adaptability score (49.0, -2.7%). Its Reliability score returned completely to normal this week following its worldwide three-hour Google Calendar outage on June 18. Google Cloud’s Sentiment enjoyed a boost due to a Forrester Wave announcement, announcement of its “Equiano” undersea cable from Portugal to South Africa, and other well-received announcements. It’s Adaptability score dropped with a small decrease in the number of apps available in its marketplace. Google introduced Deep Learning Containers designed to provide a consistent environment for testing and deploying applications across GCP products and services like Cloud AI Platform Notebooks and Google Kubernetes Engine. With AWS Deep Learning (DL) Containers and NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC) container registry (used by Alibaba Cloud and Azure) already in-market, this is a catch-up move by Google Cloud to broaden its DL user base beyond TensorFlow. Google Cloud Data Catalog is now available in public beta. Data analysts can now use Data Catalog to search for tables in Google BigQuery or topics in Cloud Pub/Sub across all cloud projects that they can access. It seems like a basic data management feature, but CSP’s have historically have created many development teams that move fast but don’t communicate well with each other, so this is an indication that Google Cloud’s software development process is maturing. Microsoft Azure’s overall Liftr Cloud Index score (106.2, -0.1%) was relatively unchanged on lower Sentiment (99.6, -1.1%). Azure’s lower Sentiment score is primary due to a general lack of very positive social media sentiment, but exacerbated by its widely publicized ban on employee use of Slack and other external productivity tools, plus rating AWS and Google Docs as “discouraged for use.” Azure is previewing Azure Load Balancer to provide customers access to their applications in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). The addition of the load balancers is an excellent move for Azure. However, Azure is playing catch-up with the other major cloud service providers. AWS has two load balancers that support Kubernetes: the Network Load Balancer and the Classic Load Balancer. Google Cloud has two: the HTTP Load Balancer and the TCP/UDP Load Balancer. And Alibaba has the Alibaba Cloud Server Load Balancer. Like AWS’s Traffic Mirroring solution above, this is an indication that CSP’s are filling in gaps in widely used PaaS services as the cloud services market continues to mature. Cloud Ecosystem Oracle is partnering with Chainlink to help startups use Chainlink’s decentralized Oracle technology to monetize APIs via smart contracts on the Oracle Blockchain Platform. The announcement was one of many recent Chainlink announcements, including Google Cloud integration (covered in our June 17 Liftr Cloud Index newsletter). Oracle announced its Oracle Blockchain Platform in February 2019 and has been steadily adding features to the platform since then. IBM customer Analytic Partners says it is “converting weather forecasts into smart business decisions with AI.” Analytics Partners is touting “weather-based demand modeling” using data from The Weather Company stored in IBM Cloud. IBM announced availability of IBM POWER9-based IBM Power Systems Virtual Servers in the IBM Cloud. IBM has been shipping its POWER9 processors in high-performance computing (HPC) servers since December 2017, but has not publicized availability of POWER9 instances in IBM Cloud until now. This may signal that IBM is now in volume production of smaller core count, lower cost, air-cooled versions of its POWER9 chips designed specifically for cloud service providers instead of HPC clusters. IBM and Cisco expanded their global partnership with a hybrid cloud reference architecture. that implements IBM’s hybrid cloud offering (IBM Cloud Private) on Cisco’s hyper-converged infrastructure (Cisco HyperFlex and HyperFlex Edge). The hybrid cloud reference architecture is intended to provide customers a steady and secure production grade environment for distributed applications. Cisco had been developing its own private cloud solution, this partnership indicates that IBM and Cisco see a “better together” story as other CSPs fortify competitive private cloud offerings. | 
