In-Depth Analysis

Alibaba Cloud’s (also known as “Aliyun”) overall Liftr Cloud Index score (66.6, -0.1%) was flat despite a decrease in Sentiment (102.9, -1.7%). Alibaba Cloud was not featured in the news this week.

Amazon Web Services’ overall index score (108.4, 0.0%) was unchanged from the previous week. Sentiment decreased but was offset by an increase to its Presence score. AWS added a new regional data center (ap-east-1) in Hong Kong SAR. AWS launched a beta site for building a secure cloud which includes a free repository of customizable AWS security configurations and best practices.

AWS also introduced new Amazon EC2 Instances that contain AMD EPYC and AWS Graviton processors. Liftr Cloud Insights began tracking new compute instance introductions in our Liftr Cloud Components Tracker database in late March 2019. The first report in this monthly subscription will be released this week.

Google Cloud’s overall index score (83.1, -0.4%) decreased slightly due to negative Sentiment (100.0, -3.9%) around several outages. Google Cloud also added a new datacenter in Osaka, Japan (Asia-northeast 2). In major news, former CEO Eric Schmidt and former Google Cloud leader Diane Greene will leave the Alphabet board. Gitlab has migrated its SaaS infrastructure from Azure to Google Cloud to be more suited for mission-critical workloads and more.

Google Cloud also announced general availability of the NVIDIA T4 GPU, making Google Cloud the first CSP to offer NVIDIA’s newest GPUs. The new NVIDIA T4 accelerated instances have been recorded in the late April update of our new Liftr Cloud Components Tracker database.

Microsoft Azure’s overall index score (106.5, +0.5%) edged higher. Its Sentiment (102.9, +2.2%) and Presence (86.9, +1.5%) scores increased after adding two availability zones in Japan-east and in uk-south, bringing the total to three zones in each region.

Microsoft and Dell Technologies announced a new partnership at Dell Technologies World. The two companies will deliver a supported and certified VMware cloud infrastructure on Microsoft Azure. And customers of Microsoft 365 and VMware Workspace ONE will be able to control Office 365 across devices through cloud-based integration with Microsoft Intune and Azure Active Directory.

Microsoft announced its container registry was unaffected by the recent Docker Hub data exposure. The exposure consisted of unauthorized access to a Docker Hub database, with 190k Hub accounts exposed and their associated GitHub tokens for automated builds.

Azure has migrated big data workloads to Azure HDInsight with the goal of simplifying the delivery of reliable application performance when migrating data from on-premises or a different cloud platform onto HDInsight.

Other Cloud News

Oracle Cloud announced the availability of Nokia’s Nuage Networks virtualized service platform on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

OVH’s founder and president Octave Klaba began setting up the company’s first office in Texas. The French cloud computing company chose Texas for its central location and tax benefits for companies.

Tencent Cloud released its Developer Tools Suite 3.0, a complementary tool for the Cloud API 3.0 platform.

VMware introduced VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. According to VMware, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC will be pivotal to the Dell Technologies Cloud Data Center-as-a-Service solution and will “provide a simple, more secure and scalable infrastructure delivered as-a-service to customers’ on-premises data center and edge locations.”

Earnings Reports

Liftr Cloud Insights is not a financial analyst firm. We provide strategic analysis of company earnings reports and associated end of quarter statements.

AMD reported its server processor revenue in its Enterprise, Embedded, and Semi-Custom (EESC) segment. EESC revenue declined 17% year-to-year and increased 2% sequentially from the previous quarter. AMD said, “Server revenue growth was more than offset by anticipated lower semi-custom revenue.” AMD remains bullish that its second-generation EPYC server processor (codename “Rome”) can address at least 80% of data center workloads. AMD’s bullishness is supported by many potential customers and data center ecosystem partners.

AMD expects Rome to deliver “four times the floating-point performance and double the [integer] compute performance per socket compared to our current generation EPYC processors.” AMD stated that Rome is on track for Q2 production, which means a likely Q3 launch in OEM customer server models and in CSP customer deployments (which are mostly dependent on ODM system designs). Our Liftr Cloud Components Tracker database will track AMD EPYC compute instance deployments month-by-month as its new Rome generation is deployed by tracked CSPs.

Alphabet (Google Cloud) does not break out Google Cloud revenue separately from the rest of its non-advertising related businesses. Alphabet simply stated that “mobile search, YouTube, and Cloud” lead its “robust growth”. It is notable that shortly after its earnings report, Alphabet also reported that veterans Eric Schmidt and Diane Greene would step down from its board of directors. Their departure paves the way for Thomas Kurian to be the sole architect of Google Cloud’s new enterprise strategy and the sole point of responsibility for its new enterprise strategy’s success or failure. Google Cloud is investing heavily in human talent for priority areas like cloud, search and machine learning, stating “headcount growth in Cloud is the largest [expense] driver, both for technical and sales roles” and “Cloud has been and continues to be the primary area of headcount growth.”

The next round of cloud-related earnings will be reported the week of May 13:

• Alibaba Group (Alibaba Cloud)
• Baidu (Baidu Cloud)
• Cisco
• NVIDIA
• Oracle (Oracle Cloud).

The week of May 20 will continue with HPE and Lenovo.

Events

Open Infrastructure Summit (formerly OpenStack Summit): Denver, CO April 29 – May 1, 2019

Liftr Cloud Insights Principal Analyst Paul Teich attended OpenStack’s Open Infrastructure Summit in Denver, Colorado along with about 2,000 other attendees.

“Looking back, a smaller, more focused OpenStack Open Infrastructure Summit is the result of cloud, and enterprise-class infrastructure stabilizing and becoming boring,” said Mr. Teich, adding “Boring is good. It means that OpenStack software infrastructure has become stable and reliable. It doesn’t need the same level of investment as less mature solutions.”

It is likely that container and container orchestration events and initiatives will follow this same type of investment curve. DockerCon (Docker containers) was also held last week and three KubeCon (Kubernetes orchestrator) events are scheduled for the remainder of 2019 (see below for May’s event).

Upcoming Events

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.

AWS re:Inforce Security Conference Boston, MA June 25-26, 2019

Attendees of AWS re:Inforce will experience two days of security, identity, and compliance learning and community building. Although we won’t be in attendance, we’ll be monitoring news and announcements intently.

Check out our upcoming and recent events

– Paul R. Teich, Principal Analyst, and your Liftr Cloud Insights team

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