In this Weeks Liftr Cloud Look Ahead:
Baidu’s New Cloud Computing Center
Baidu, which operates China’s largest search engine, has announced in a press release that it is setting up a cloud computing center in Xi’an, the capital of China’s northwestern province Shannxi. The new center will serve the company’s central and western regions. Baidu plans to install 100,000 servers in the center, which is set to cover an area of 84,700 square meters.
Last week the company stated that, according to information they pulled from IDC’s China Public Cloud Services Tracker, Baidu Cloud ranked 4th in market share among public cloud providers in China during the 4th quarter of 2018. Total spending on cloud, both public and private, in China reached $12.1 billion in 2018, up nearly 75% year-on-year and accounting for 12% of the global market.
Azure AD’s Character Limit Increase
Microsoft Azure has announced an increase of the character limit for passwords created in its Azure AD system. Prior, Customers have been making complaints about the 16 character limit. Note that on-premises Windows AD allows for longer password strings.
The company released a blog post saying that the character limit for Azure AD will be increased to 256 characters, including spaces. Comments on the post-show positive customer’s sentiment around the change and how Microsoft responded to their feedback.
Huawei Launches AI-Backed Database
Last Wednesday in Beijing, Huawei unveiled at a launch event aimed to redefine data infrastructure through a data+intelligence strategy that they have created a new database product, putting them in direct competition with major vendors like IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft. The database, called GaussDB, works both locally as well as on public and private clouds and the company claims it uses ai capabilities to improve tuning performance, a process that typically requires human administrators, by 60%. When it is run on Huawei’s own cloud, GaussDB provides data warehouse services for a vast range of customers in financial, Internet, logistics, education, and automotive industries.
The announcement comes at a time when Huawei’s core telecom business is drawing scrutiny in the West over the company’s alleged ties to the Chinese government.
In the initial reporting of the database, sources say that the database will initially focus on the Chinese market. At the launch event, David Wang, Huawei Executive Director of the Board and President of ICT Strategy & Marketing, reiterated Huawei’s commitment to advancing intelligent industries by innovating together with customers and partners and building a data industry ecosystem on the principles of openness, collaboration, and shared success.
Wang stated, “Humanity is entering the age of an intelligent world. Data is the new factor of production, and intelligence the new productivity. Heterogeneous, intelligent, and converged databases will become the key data infrastructure of the financial, government, and telecoms industries.” The creation of the database shows the company’s push towards the enterprise business market. Huawei’s consumer unit makes up about half of the company’s annual revenue, while enterprise business currently makes up a quarter of Huawei’s revenue. However, their current moves exhibit their intentions to change that.
AWS Lambda@Edge Updates
AWS released a post on their blog announcing a number of updates to the AMI of the Lambda@Edge Execution Environment. The execution environment is the runtime framework that a customer’s code runs inside of in an edge computer or device. Launched back in 2016, Lambda@Edge enables customers to run Lambda functions that customize content AWS CloudFront delivers to the edge. AWS Lambda was first announced at AWS Re:Invent 2014, where Amazon CTO, Werner Vogels highlighted the need to run “no servers, no instances, nothing, you just write your code.”
This newer AMI brings updates that offer improvements in capabilities, performance, security, and updated packages that your application code might interface with.
This does not apply to the recently announced Node.js v10 runtime which today runs on Amazon Linux 2. AWS expects all functions to be migrated over by June 24.
Last week Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (Chinese internet giants are collectively known as ‘BAT’) released quarterly earnings, as well as Cisco, NVIDIA, and Oracle. Subscribe to the Liftr Cloud Index newsletter for more coverage and insights.
That’s a wrap for this week’s Liftr Cloud Look Ahead. Has your business made major strides using the cloud? We want to hear from you! Email us at ideas@liftrcloud.com.
See you next week!
