Upcoming Events
This month is a busy one for cloud events. Close to home, South by Southwest will be kicking off in a couple of weeks, right here in Austin, TX. Senior Principal Analyst Paul Teich and Social Media & PR Specialist Trent Warren will be attending for Liftr Insights. If you’d like to meet with Paul and Trent onsite, please contact publicrelations@liftrcloud.com to schedule a meeting.
Teich won’t be getting too comfortable after SXSW Interactive; the next morning he will be traveling to represent Liftr from March 14-15 to the Open Compute Project Global Summit. Teich game plan for the Global Summit is to meet with most of the global CSP datacenter infrastructure supply chain. To set up a meeting with Teich during events such as this, email analyst@liftrcloud.com. Also, make sure you have Liftr Cloud Insights on Twitter and Instagram to see live coverage of events and the latest cloud happenings.
Alibaba’s “Tech for Change” Initiative
Alibaba has had quite an active week. Last week the Chinese cloud giant announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the largest mobile event in the world, a new initiative called the Tech for Change initiative. Tech for Change calls for ideas and collaborative efforts from enterprises, start-ups, and young entrepreneurs to tackle global, social, and humanitarian challenges through technologies such as education, economic development, and the environment.
Alibaba Cloud will contribute by offering partners with access to its technology expertise, global computing resources, and talent development programs including Alibaba Cloud, Academy, and its AI competition platform, Tianchi. The initiative also includes helping more women and young girls around the globe start their careers in coding. The first collaborative effort that was revealed in Barcelona is iamtheCODE, the first African-led global movement to mobilize governments, businesses, and the philanthropic foundation on STEAMED education, or science, technology, engineering, arts, mathematics, entrepreneurship, and design.
In other news for Alibaba, the company’s share of the roughly $5 billion CDN market was estimated to be around 30 percent, giving rise to overall sentiment about the company. While the company is still trailing far behind the global leaders, they are growing quickly from that small base. Alibaba’s overall cloud business was reported to have seen a recent increase of 84 percent. These numbers show a path for the company to be one of the strongest competitors to AWS.
Lastly, in Alibaba news, the cloud behemoth introduced a host of new analytics and intelligence apps: DataWorks, MaxCompute 2.0, Data Lake Analytics, Real Time Compute, ECI and more.
Google’s G-Suite New Spelling Feature
Google brought new updates to their G-Suite. Part of that update will be that G-Suite will not add spelling and grammar checking through the use of AI. The changes have already begun to roll out in the beta stage and will be available for a wider audience in the next week or so.
On the downside, warnings are surfacing about security. Multiple Google Cloud host accounts may have been used for checking devices for vulnerabilities. The Twitter account Bad Packets Reports tweeted at the beginning of last week that there were incoming scans being detected that were checking for WordPress sites with the “WP Cost Estimation” plugin installed. The plugin has an AJAX-related flaw that allows RCE and arbitrary deletion of core WordPress files, making any customer using versions prior to 9.660 vulnerable.
Google also reported other changes such as an update to give were more control over how devices running endpoint verification can access corporate data in Google Cloud, giving users the ability to tag endpoint devices running Chrome as approved or blocked, and to ability to decide whether an additional review is needed for newly registered endpoint verification devices before they’re tagged as approved.
OVH Brings Managed Kubernetes to Europe
OVH, the French cloud company is bringing Managed Kubernetes to Europe as a managed service in their public cloud business. The company’s Kubernetes service is free and will enable customers to better orchestrate their containerized applications within the OVS cloud, which recently increased its global footprint last week by adding Singapore and Australia to its service offerings.
Red Hat Introduces OperatorHub.io
Red Hat has introduced OperatorHub.io, which is essentially a clearinghouse for Kubernetes services. The registry will work directly with AES, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, giving customers better tools for automating infrastructure and managing applications. Remember, Red Hat shareholders recently approved IBM’s acquisition offer in January, though it will likely take until 2020 to fully close the acquisition.
Aparna Sinha, group product manager at Google cloud stated, “At Google Cloud, we have invested in building and qualifying community developed operators, and are excited to see more than 40 percent of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters running stateful applications today. Operators play an important role in enabling lifecycle management of stateful applications on Kubernetes.”
Red Hat will be talking more about their Kubernetes announcements at their upcoming Kubernetes Operator Framework workshops in Pasadena on March 7 at ScaleX and on March 11 at the OpenShift Commons Gathering on Operating at Scale in Santa Clara.
That’s a wrap for this week’s Liftr Cloud Look Ahead. Has your business made major strides using cloud? We want to hear from you! Email us at ideas@liftrcloud.com.
