As a new year dawns, it marks the perfect time to assess the industry landscape. According to the latest note from Synergy Research, 2018 saw the cloud market hit $250 billion (£196bn) globally, with a 32% annual growth.

While plenty of the critical acclaim goes on the public cloud infrastructure side of the house, the analyst firm posited that all market segments had risen comfortably over the past 12 months.

The wider bucket of infrastructure hardware and software saw particularly impressive growth in 2018, with public, private and hybrid cloud. The leading vendors in this space are the usual suspects in terms of network and infrastructure equipment; Dell EMC, Cisco and HPE, with a note for Microsoft and VMware. In terms of software, enterprise SaaS saw a 30% gain, with unified comms as a service (UCaaS) at just over 20%.

IaaS and PaaS however remained the biggest growth area with an almost 50% gain. This would be considered poor fare compared with previous years, but as Synergy itself noted during the most recent round of financial postings, expecting 100% growth off the bat every time would be optimistic. “[This] is just the law of large numbers kicking in,” said chief analyst John Dinsdale at the time. “You cannot keep on growing at 100% when you reach massive scale.”

The leading cloud providers also continued speculating to accumulate in 2019. As figures from November found, hyperscaler capex hit more than $26 billion, with spending up 53% from the first three quarters of 2017. This represented the largest spend – barring anomalies – since records began.

While spending on cloud services first overtook spend on the hardware and software used to build clouds in 2016, the previous two years has seen that gap ‘widen dramatically.’

“In 2018, cloud started to dominate IT spending in some areas, sucking up potential growth opportunities for non-cloud technologies and services,” said Dinsdale. “Cloud technologies are now generating massive revenues for both cloud service providers and technology vendors and our latest forecasts show that while market growth rates will inevitably erode due to the sheer scale of the numbers, the overall market will double in size in under four years.”

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Google has added a little app expertise to its skillset with the acquisition of DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment). The move will aim for the research firm to help ‘continue to create delightful experiences for developers and operators’, in the company’s own words.

DORA said the company’s positioning was a ‘natural fit’ for Google Cloud with both organisations “known for mutual commitment to the developer and operations ecosystems.”

In a statement, DORA noted: “DORA’s data-driven approach has helped teams leverage automation, process, and cultural change to improve the quality of their software and the quality of their work-life. Google Cloud is beloved for its contributions to the open source community, and is known for its research-driven approach to understanding how developers and operators work, and what makes them successful.”

It’s difficult to argue with that. Google’s mission with regards to openness is evident, and like all the other cloud behemoths there is a panoply of products available for building and running applications – although AWS may quibble at the depth of its competition.

As far as DORA is concerned, its annual State of DevOps report is, alongside an equivalent from software automation provider Puppet, one of the benchmarks of research in the sector. The most recent offering, published in September, found organisations’ initiatives had matured to the extent that a few ‘elite’ performers across industries were becoming apparent.

“The key here is that companies who exhibit all signs of cloud readiness – on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, elasticity and measured service – are significantly more likely to be in the elite group instead of the lowest performers,” this publication put it at the time.

This is the latest example of a large company acquiring consultancy and expertise. Over the past 18 months Hewlett Packard Enterprise bought both Cloud Technology Partners and RedPixie for its cloud consulting arm, acquiring Amazon and Azure skills respectively. It’s worth noting that the most recent DORA State of DevOps report had Google Cloud as its primary collaborator.

“The best, most innovative organisations develop and deliver their software faster, more reliably, more securely, and with higher quality, standing as high performers in technology,” said Dr. Nicole Forsgren, DORA CEO and chief scientist in a statement. “We are excited to join a team committed to delivering research-backed DevOps practices, and we look forward to continuing our work to understand key capabilities, measure value-driven outcomes, and optimise processes to help teams deliver their software as they move to the cloud.”

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Read more: Why efficient multi-cloud management and DevOps requires transparency

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2018 was yet another fascinating year when it came to cloud computing, along with the emerging technologies which complement and rely on the cloud.

As the ecosystem has matured and organisations’ confidence has increased, conversations have shifted gear accordingly. RightScale’s State of the Cloud report for 2018 back in February found that for every enterprise which hadn’t dipped its toes in one of the major cloud vendor offerings, there were at least two who had. In one of the more outlandish predictions from last year, a report from Citrix in July argued that, by 2025, the term ‘cloud’ will have gone the way of ‘internet’ et al, its ubiquity forcing a semantic sea-change.

With that in mind, what were the key trends of last year? In many ways, they were variations on previous themes. Below, CloudTech explores some of the stories which shaped 2018, and predictions from industry executives on what may happen in 2019.

The behemoths lurch ever further forward

At the end of 2018, according to industry market trackers at Synergy Research, Amazon Web Services (AWS) held just over one third of the cloud infrastructure space. Microsoft was a clear second, holding approximately 14% of the market, ahead of IBM and Google, in joint third, and Alibaba. Meanwhile, capex for data centre infrastructure among the largest players continues to skyrocket.

Again, little has changed in with regard to the vendors, with those who follow these companies’ bets purely for the financials missing the bigger story. That said, another benchmark analyst report came to a different conclusion. Gartner’s 2018 Magic Quadrant for infrastructure as a service (IaaS) found room in its leaders’ section for Google, breaking a half-decade duopoly between AWS and Microsoft. Only six vendors made the final cut for inclusion – the lowest ever – showcasing the strength and saturation of the market.

AWS had another stellar year. On the revenue side, $6.7bn for its most recent quarter represented a 45% increase from this time last year, with profit breaking $2bn, more than half Amazon’s overall figure. On the product side, re:Invent revealed a mix of the new and old, from beefier blockchain and machine learning initiatives – more of which shortly –  to a potentially game-changing hybrid cloud renewal of vows with VMware.

For Microsoft, as this publication put it, the message has barely changed, but the numbers just kept going up – a claimed 76% leap in Azure year on year according to the most recent figures. Google meanwhile had a year of mixed emotions. Growth was again strong, with CEO Sundar Pichai crowing in April of ‘significantly larger, more strategic deals’ as the enterprise strategy came more into place in 2018. Yet the departure of Google Cloud chief Diane Greene, announced in November, makes the near future an interesting one.

Blockchain, AI and getting the recipe right

As the sun set on 2017, this publication noted how blockchain and artificial intelligence had made major strides in a cloudy context. 2018 again saw notable leaps in this area. AWS, for instance, who had previously denied being interested in blockchain, changed tack in the first half of the year before adding a managed blockchain and quantum ledger database service at re:Invent.

In terms of AI, everyone has their eyes on the prize. Google Cloud’s initiatives in this area were impressive, with the launch of pre-packaged AI services in August particularly notable. AWS customers who signed up in 2018 included Major League Baseball and Formula 1, worth noting because of their insistence on exploring all things machine learning.

From a software perspective, one of the most interesting reports issued last year was from venture capital firm Work-Bench who explored emerging enterprise software with rip-roaring results. Their analysis was that the behemoths were winning at AI right now – largely by hoovering up the best talent – and if other companies were to make strides, automated machine learning (AutoML) and focusing on revamping traditional business intelligence was the answer.

Looking at the infrastructure side, organisations’ requirements for deeper insights powered by AI and ML would naturally require a stronger network. Writing in October, regular columnist Sagar Nangare noted how Gartner was ‘emphasising the empowerment of edge-focused infrastructure.’ “Looking at a future of having all digital devices serving to end users, there was a need for such edge topology which can give cloud-like performance closer to devices and reduce the burden on network usage,” he wrote.

One small step for quantum computing – but a leap in the near future?

A trend which became more apparent from the cloud vendor perspective in 2018 was quantum computing – but there is naturally still a long way to go.

In October, this publication attended the annual predictions jamboree of analyst firm CCS Insight. The material around quantum was especially intriguing. “Those interested in cloud are going to differentiate themselves around quantum,” explained Nick McQuire, VP enterprise. “The size of customer workloads is doubling every year as more and more organisations go to cloud. We think quantum over time is going to solve a lot of this strain.”

Naturally, it’s all research and development right now and specific signposts are a little way off. In the same month, Travis Humble, distinguished scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and leader of the IEEE working group for quantum computing devices, wrote on the progress being made at the sharp end.

The ever-changing goalposts for cloud security

As technologies emerge, gaps appear and the race is on between the good and bad guys. One area which had seen a serious increase in 2018 was cryptojacking, where compute resources are ransacked to mine for cryptocurrency. While a report from Unit 42 in December mused that the decline in blockchain markets meant cryptojacking was not as hot as previously, cloud infrastructure is still a major target.

A debate which continues to rage is around how much responsibility the biggest cloud players need to take for their customers’ security. Evidently, the messages around shared responsibility are still not getting through to all customers. In November for instance AWS launched extra steps to ensure customers’ S3 buckets don’t become misconfigured – the redesign of a key dashboard earlier in the year to include bright orange warning indicators having not proved sufficiently effective – to help ensure a simple user error doesn’t become a major data breach.

The market for cloud access security brokers (CASBs), those vendors who sit between on- and off-premises infrastructure looking for potential mishaps and misconfigurations, has therefore grown. Gartner published a specific Magic Quadrant in November focusing on CASBs, positing that through 2023 “at least 99%” of cloud security issues will be the fault of the customer. Ultimately, as technology has matured, security practices have appeared to stand still.

2018’s major mergers and acquisitions

March – Salesforce acquired MuleSoft for $6.5 billion
July – Broadcom acquired CA Technologies for $18.9 billion
October – Cloudera and Hortonworks announced $5.2 billion merger deal
October – IBM acquired Red Hat for $34 billion in total enterprise value
November – SAP acquired Qualtrics for $8 billion

What will happen in 2019?

“Multi-cloud strategies reached new levels of adoption last year. But despite considerable uptake already, we expect multi-cloud’s prominence to grow further still in 2019,” said Stephan Fabel, director of product management at Canonical. “Multi-cloud is almost becoming the default cloud strategy as organisations look to avoid vendor lock-in, granting themselves greater flexibility in deploying the most relevant cloud across different departments and functions.

“Instead of being restricted to the ecosystem of one vendor, a multi-cloud approach permits organisations to deploy a mixture of cloud apps to suit their needs across the business, while at the same time technologies such as Kubernetes can be used to containerise and deploy applications across different cloud providers when necessary,” added Fabel.

Containers – a technology whose continued rise was exemplified by the IBM/Red Hat deal in October – will again solidify, but it has to be in line with security priorities. “We’ve seen this all too frequently – speed is good for business, bad for security,” said Dan Hubbard, chief product officer at Lacework. “Security isn’t given the attention it needs and containers can fall victim to loose security management.

“In 2019, we’ll see smart enterprises build containers into their overall security posture and ensure they are using the right processes and tools for development while adhering to security principles,” added Hubbard. “We can expect that to become gospel for companies who really ‘get it’ in terms of effective container strategies. They will realise that there’s no such thing as fast development without security.”

“I will call it and say that Kubernetes has officially won the battle for containers orchestration,” added Lee James, CTO EMEA at Rackspace. “But this battle has left us with some interesting observations. While companies are fully embracing the benefits of containers and microservice architecture, usage of Kubernetes is still very much within software development-focused organisations.

“With AWS, Azure, Google and VMware [having] launched or launching their own Kubernetes services, it will be interesting to see whether lock-in Kubernetes starts to surface as take up grows or whether the multi-cloud brokerage can prevail,” said James.

If 2018 emphasised anything, it was that organisations who fail to become truly data-driven will most likely fail at almost everything else. Naturally, this continued growth is in the minds of many industry execs as 2019 dawns. “Enterprises unable to leverage their data will face extinction – it’s that simple,” said Manish Sood, CEO of Reltio. “Companies that don’t evolve according to new customer expectations or develop innovative business and revenue models will become a part of these stats.”

“In 2019 organisations will discover that assuring the security of their supply chain is a lost cause,” added Steve Durbin, managing director of the Information Security Forum. “Instead, it is time to refocus on managing their key data and understanding where and how it has been shared across multiple channels and boundaries, irrespective of supply chain provider.

“This will cause many organisations to refocus on the traditional confidentiality and integrity components of the information security mix, placing an additional burden on already overstretched security departments.”

Looking at more general business strategies, Neil Thacker, CISO and DPO EMEA at Netskope, argued the need for more advanced adoption through 2019. “In 2019 it will be more cost-effective to move to the cloud for both digital and security transformation,” said Thacker. “By adopting a cloud-first mentality, businesses will be able to effectively future-proof and operate more efficiently than on-premise, legacy solutions.”

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If cloud is part of the conversation for organisational digital change, then cloud security will forever be not far behind. According to new research from Unit 42, compliance needs to be stepped up, yet cryptojacking may be on the decline.

The company – the threat intelligence arm of Palo Alto Networks – put together analysis based on existing threats to cloud security over the second half of 2018, focusing on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud environments.

The majority of findings predictably belied the spirit of the festive season. Almost one in three (29%) organisations assessed had potential account compromises, while more than two in five (41%) access keys had not been rotated at all over the past three months.

It only takes a brief glance at recent industry headlines and trends to come to the conclusion that any organisation could be at risk. Indeed, while the concept of shared responsibility for cloud security must again be emphasised – as the very first page of the Unit 42 report illustrates – it must be noted vendors are trying to help ease the burden.

For AWS environments, companies inadvertently setting ‘world-read’ permissions to their data repositories is the classic recipe for disaster. In 2017 the vendor spruced up its dashboard design, giving bright orange warning indicators for buckets which were publicly accessible. Feeling even this wasn’t enough, last month saw the launch of Amazon S3 Block Public Access, which aims to demarcate the process by offering configuration at the account level, on individual buckets, or on future buckets created.

Those who do walk through this open door can therefore get up to any nefarious scheme they choose. In the case of Tesla at the start of this year, for example, hackers got into unsecured S3 buckets to mine cryptocurrencies. Yet while more than one in 10 (11%) organisations experienced cryptojacking activity in their environments, it represented a significant decrease from 25% in May. Unit 42 puts this shift down to a combination of better detection tactics and weakening crypto value.

More good news, albeit unsurprising, came in the shape of container adoption. According to the research, one in three organisations analysed use native or managed Kubernetes orchestration, with a quarter utilising managed services in the cloud. AWS, Google and Microsoft all have products in this space – and for the former, as re:Invent showed last month, breadth of portfolio, from containers tightly integrated with AWS, to managed services, to more ad hoc approaches, is the key differentiator on the vendor side.

Yet the report warns that basic security hygiene is not being observed for container services, making Kubernetes pods vulnerable to attack. 46% of those polled had not applied ‘appropriate network policies’ for their managed Kubernetes services. Organisations should not rely on basic authentication for this, the researchers argue, as brute force attacks can result, instead going for IAM roles.

As far as compliance goes, however, the figures were ‘undeniable’, in the report’s words. One in three (32%) organisations publicly exposed at least one cloud storage services, while half (49%) of databases checked were not encrypted. While Unit 42 notes exposed public cloud storage is slowing trend, data encryption will have the potential to become a much more serious issue with GDPR top of mind. “Clearly, organisations have a long way to go before they can claim compliance in their public cloud environments,” the report warns.

You can read the full analysis here (pdf, email required).

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If you thought the cloud skills gap was bad, then it’s only going to get worse as more emerging technologies mature.

According to a new report from Cloudera, more than half of the 200 European IT managers surveyed said they were reticent at adopting machine learning technologies because they did not have enough skills and knowledge of the area.

As might be expected, plenty of investment is going to be taking place. Almost nine in 10 (87%) of those polled said they have already implemented machine learning technology, or plan to do so. While a similar number (89%) said they had a ‘basic’ understanding of ML’s benefits, 60% admitted they lacked the skills to implement the solutions fully.

When it came to cost, however, there was an overall positive reaction. Three quarters (74%) of respondents said machine learning would be a cost that would eventually reduce the bottom line, while a third of companies said they were already seeing a return on investment from their initiatives. 84% of those polled said machine learning provided a competitive advantage, with key benefits being the improvement of operational efficiency and greater data insights.

Regular readers of this publication will be more than aware of the difficulties organisations face in terms of closing the skills gap, seemingly regardless of technology. Cloud computing professionals continue to be at a premium; a study earlier this week from OpsRamp found 94% of the more than 100 respondents were having a ‘somewhat difficult’ time finding candidates with the right tech and business skills to drive digital innovation.

Problems can go in both directions too. Let’s put it this way: if organisations are going to hire someone to take charge of their ML initiatives, they are going to receive a driven, talented, intelligent professional. If this is the case, make sure you have enough work for them to get on with.

Writing in Medium in March, Jonny Brooks-Bartlett, data scientist at Deliveroo, noted the disparity between companies who didn’t know what they were doing and young, hungry execs. “The data scientist likely came in to write smart ML algorithms to drive insight, but can’t do this because their first job is to sort out the data infrastructure and/or create analytic report,” he wrote. “In contrast, the company only wanted a chart they could present in their board meeting each day.”

Ultimately, it is this uncertainty which needs to be eradicated if organisations want to get serious about machine learning. “Although most IT buyers understand the benefits of machine learning, many are still unsure about how to implement and how it will impact their businesses,” said Stephen Line, VP EMEA at Cloudera. “These are barriers that can be overcome through upskilling staff, recruiting new data talent, working with the right partners who can complement existing teams, and through leveraging external technology.”

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Docker has its DockerCon event in Barcelona this week while Microsoft is running its online Connect() conference – and the two have combined on a new product which aims to help empower developers working in container environments.

The product, known as Cloud Native Application Bundles (CNAB), is an open source specification for packaging and running distributed applications, enable a single all-in-one packaging format, across any combination of environments.

As containerisation came to pass, the theory of a truly distributed application – one which can run on multiple computers at the same time, whether on servers or in the cloud – was edging closer. Yet, as is always the way when technologies mature, there are bumps in the road, with the rise of Kubernetes meaning this vision took a step back. Microsoft and Docker are here trying to steer the ship back in the right direction; think of it as a container for containers.

“By design, it is cloud agnostic,” wrote Matt Butcher, Microsoft principal engineer, in a blog post explaining the move. “It works with everything from Azure to on-prem OpenStack, from Kubernetes to Swarm, and from Ansible to Terraform. It can execute on a workstation, a public cloud, an air-gapped network, or a constrained IoT environment. And it is flexible enough to accommodate an array of platform needs, from customer-facing marketplaces to internal build pipelines.”

Patrick Chanezon, chief developer advocate at Docker, put it in similar terms. “As more organisations pursue cloud-native applications and infrastructures for creating modern software environments, it has become clear that there is no single solution in the market for defining and packaging these multi-service, multi-format distributed applications,” Chanezon wrote. “Real-world applications can now span on-premises infrastructure and cloud-based services. Each of these need to be managed separately.”

For Docker, this makes for an interesting development considering the various avenues its competitors recently gone down. Heptio’s acquisition by VMware and Red Hat being bought by IBM have led some to consider whether Docker has missed the boat. At the very end of last year, Chris Short, product marketing manager at Ansible, wrote a personal blog arguing that 2017 would be seen as ‘the year Docker, a great piece of software, was completely ruined by bad business practices leading to its end in 2018.’

Perhaps this collaborative aspect is its future? “At the heart of great developer innovation is community, and that’s why open source is to important,” added Scott Guthrie, EVP of Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise group. “We’re committed to empowering developers at every stage of the development lifecycle – from ideation to collaboration to deployment.

“Our announcements are not only about open-sourcing more of our own products for community collaboration and contribution, but how we are also actively investing in collaborating on initiatives with others.”

You can take a look at the draft specification for CNAB here.

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Another day, another story focused around cloud skillsets – or lack of them. A new survey from artificial intelligence platform provider OpsRamp has found the vast majority of respondents continue to struggle finding the right talent for cloud environments.

The research, which was conducted at Gartner’s Infrastructure, Operations and Cloud Strategies conference, found 94% of the 124 respondents were having a ‘somewhat difficult’ time finding candidates with the right technology and business skills to drive digital innovation. Nine out of 10 hiring managers polled said the digital skills gap was either ‘somewhat big’, ‘quite big’, or ‘huge.’

The survey findings appear in a report which focuses on how the battle for cloud talent has become well and truly joined. With the ominous subtitle of ‘from a cloud-native skills gap to a full-blown crisis’, there are plenty of warnings in place.

Even if there is talent available, it takes a while to get it all together. A quarter of those polled said it takes more than three months to fill an open role in IT operations, DevOps, or IT engineering. The report cites Glassdoor figures which found more than 260,000 unfilled technology jobs cost the US economy almost $20 billion in 2017. Yet it is not for the want of trying. 41% of organisations polled said they were ‘willing’ to pay competitively for skilled IT professionals, while 28% said they were ‘very willing.’

Ultimately, the biggest effect the report notes on organisations is around culture. With a skills gap, companies are challenged with an unwillingness to change pre-existing attitudes towards technology more than anything else. Other concerns are limited ability in adopting new technologies, as well as limitations in workforce productivity. “Unless veteran IT staff gain the core competencies to succeed in a digitally driven environment, organisations will not be able to confidently navigate their digital landscape,” the report noted.

Initiatives are taking place with regards to closing the skills gap. In October Cloud Academy announced the launch of two new products which aim to provide a greater picture of the jobs and skills landscape. Cloud Roster is a job roles matrix which analyses thousands of public job postings per week to provide trending tech skills, while Cloud Catalog provides a stack ranking of technologies based on developer community data.

“We knew that a skills gap existed, but we didn’t truly understand its severity until now,” said Jordan Sher, director of corporate marketing at OpsRamp. “Enterprise IT leaders would like to make the leap to cloud-native technologies but are struggling to adjust their workforce to transform their digital DNA.”

The findings of this report may not be news to some executives. As this publication reported last month from a study by software provider Domo, three quarters (71%) of respondents said a lack of data access and skills could put their organisation at risk, but only one in five was willing to invest in training for existing staff or invest in recruiting employees with strong digital skills.

“Enterprises will need to invest in skill building and retraining programs to equip their internal teams to manage hybrid workloads effectively, given how expensive and difficult it is to hire the right external talent,” added Sher.

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Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services, noted during his keynote at re:Invent today that on a recent business trip, a senior AWS executive found themselves sat next to an exec from an unnamed competitor. They pulled up a presentation deck which – Jassy paraphrasing – noted its product strategy was to ‘look at what AWS launches, and then move as fast as possible to get something vaguely in that area.’

So with that story in mind, customers and partners, media and analysts, and perhaps a few cloud vendors as well, sat down in Las Vegas to absorb AWS’ updates. Database, blockchain and machine learning all ended up getting a significant airing – but the last announcement, on hybrid cloud, stole the show.

Compute and storage

Jassy started out by putting down the various numbers which asserted AWS’ dominance in the cloud market, both in terms of market share and absolute growth. Regular readers of this publication will be more than aware of these numbers; Synergy Research, for instance, said at last count that AWS led across all geographies and was ‘in a league of its own.’ It was here that Jassy threw in his obligatory Oracle dig. “There are some providers who don’t have enough revenue to show up here,” he said, who only appear when they try and grab attention for themselves. You can guess the rest.

Yet with so much to get through, competitor-bashing was relatively brief. The first segment underlined the breadth of the AWS portfolio. Take containers as one example. Customers can use ECS for a container service most tightly integrated with AWS, EKS to use Kubernetes in a managed service, or Fargate for a more ad hoc approach.

With that in mind, a new storage class was unveiled. Glacier Deep Archive is aimed as being the lowest cost storage available in the cloud, at less than one tenth of a cent per gigabyte per month – or $1 per terabyte per month. Naturally, it is aimed at the coldest possible usage; enterprises who are managing data on ancient tape. “You have to be out of your mind to manage your own tape moving forward, and this will be here for you in 2019,” said Jassy.

One of the key themes throughout the presentation focused around how developers and technology builders needed the right tools to get the job done. Indeed, practically every announcement AWS made was in response to specific customer pain points. In terms of file systems, Amazon already had Linux workloads covered with its FSx storage product, but added Windows Server and Lustre to it. While the former is an evident attempt to lure Windows users, the latter is of particular interest, focusing on high performance computing (HPC). Both products have the HIPAA, ISO and PCI-DSS security standards out of the box.

The second generation of builders

To some extent, the second stanza contradicted the first. With AWS’ huge depth in its products, complexity can of course be seen as an issue. Indeed, the cloud management space, with vendors such as CloudHealthTech – acquired by VMware, more on whom later – is testament to that. Jassy noted how a second type of builder was emerging; mostly found in enterprise organisations who wanted more of a guiding hand in how to set up products. AWS Control Tower and AWS Security Hub – the former enabling customers to set up a landing zone or environment easily, the latter centrally managing security and compliance across an AWS environment – were launched with that in mind.

One of the more eye-opening statistics was that more than 10,000 data lakes were being built on top of AWS S3. As Jassy noted, the data lake may be the in-vogue concept for 2018. “People realise there is significant value in moving all that disparate data and making it much easier by consolidating it into a data lake to enable you to run analytics and machine learning,” he said. “But if you’ve tried to build a data lake, it’s hard.”

AWS Lake Formation, therefore, was launched in order for organisations to take their data out of silos in days, rather than months, with Amazon offering to do the heavy lifting, from cleaning to partitioning, to indexing and cataloguing. “This is a step level change in how easy it’s going to be for all of you to have data lakes,” said Jassy.

“It’s obvious what The Beatles were singing about,” Jassy joked as the strains of Blackbird came to a close. “Database freedom!” Indeed, they ‘were only waiting for this moment to be free’, and this was where some of the harshest criticism came in – reserved for the legacy, relational database players. “People are sick of it, and now they have choice,” he said.

Again, the breadth of the portfolio was noted with three customer examples. For simpler iterations there is DynamoDB; Lyft uses it to coordinate passenger information and GPS coordinates. Airbnb uses ElastiCache for its single sign on (SSO) to be firing with microsecond latency. Nike used Neptune to build an app whereby athletes, their followers, and all their interests correlated. But if you have tables that fluctuate due to seasonality, or spikiness, then it’s a matter of guesswork knowing how to scale. The snappily-named Dynamo DB Read/Write Capacity On Demand aims to take care of that.

Perhaps the biggest cheer of the keynote came when Amazon Timestream was announced. The database can process trillions of events per day at one tenth of the cost of relational databases, and is focused on IoT and edge computing.

Blockchain, machine learning, and old friends

When it came to blockchain and machine learning, both saw leaps forward. Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) – cited by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels as one of his favourite announcements – aims to solve the problem of providing a ledger with a trusted entity without having to surf through complicated functionality provided by blockchain frameworks. The second, Amazon Managed Blockchain, does what it says on the tin, supporting both Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum. The company has certainly come a long way from this time last year when it said it wasn’t especially interested in the technology.

As far as machine learning went, Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth, which aims to help label data more accurately, and AWS Inferentia, a high-performance machine learning inference chip, stood out. Yet in one of the few nods to previous business, Ross Brawn, managing director of motor sports at Formula 1, took to the stage to expand on AWS’ partnership with the sporting giant first announced in July.

ML had been promised as a cornerstone at the time, and Brawn duly delivered. ‘F1 Insights Powered By AWS’ had been launched to some extent this season, providing more data as well as predictions on what may happen. This is being extended next season by further integrating telemetry data to predict performance and race strategy, as well as using HPC to simulate environments where slipstreams don’t knock out as much equilibrium of the preceding car, leading to closer racing. “These are insights the teams have always had – but we’re going to bring them out to the fans to show them what’s happening,” said Brawn.  

Mindful perhaps that looking back rather than forward may have turned into a habit, the next segment was also the last. Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, went on stage – much as Jassy had done during VMworld keynotes – to help launch AWS Outposts. In some way, the best – or perhaps most shocking – had been left till last. The company claims to deliver a ‘truly consistent hybrid experience’ by bringing AWS services, infrastructure and operating models to ‘virtually any’ on-premises facility. This can be achieved either as AWS-native, or running VMware Cloud on AWS.

“The breadth and scale of the AWS platform now, combined with the sheer velocity of new feature releases means that few firms on the planet are moving faster,” said Nick McQuire, VP enterprise at CCS Insight. “It bodes ominously for Microsoft and Google in the high stakes cloud wars.”

Picture credits: AWS/Screenshot

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There is a major vendor cloud conference taking place this week. No, not that one: Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has moved lock, stock and barrel to Spain this week for its Discover 2018 Madrid Conference, and taken the opportunity to update its product roadmap and strategy with it.

First up, the products. HPE has launched Composable Cloud, aimed squarely at workloads for both private and hybrid cloud environments. The overall focus was to unveil ‘the next phase of HPE’s composable strategy’ – in other words, putting together on-premise hardware, software and cloud into a single server platform.

The composable cloud has two strands; for customers of ProLiant DL servers, HPE’s rack-based server, and for customers of infrastructure platform Synergy. The ‘open hybrid cloud platform’ – open as in being available to provision more than one cloud provider – promises greater scalability, 90% faster deployment of new configurations, and a 97% decrease in time for lifecycle operations. As has to be the way today, Composable Cloud for ProLiant DL can also make use of HPE’s InfoSight software – ‘AI for the data centre’ as the company puts it – to offer predictive analytics and continuous learning.

Speaking of InfoSight, HPE also unveiled new machine learning capabilities for the tool, including an AI-driven resource planner, as well as the ability to self-diagnose performance issues. This has been extended to purely on-prem environments, or those with restricted access to the cloud.

Other announcements as part of a more general product tune-up included the expansion of multi-cloud storage service HPE Cloud Volumes to the UK and Ireland, HPE Memory-Driven Flash, an enterprise storage offering, and renewal of vows with hyperconverged storage provider Cohesity focused around hybrid cloud consolidation.

HPE’s strong position when it comes to both cloud and traditional IT infrastructure equipment – servers, routers, switches and so forth – remains, with the company competing at the top end with Cisco, Dell EMC, and Microsoft. It is upon these foundations that the company is targeting a more holistic approach looking at public, private, and hybrid cloud.

Alongside other vendors in its position, HPE is focusing on what CEO Antonio Neri calls the ‘innovative enterprise.’ Essentially, it is just a question of semantics: SAP, for instance, prefers to call it the ‘intelligent enterprise.’ Yet the concept is the same, focusing on the full enterprise digital transformation journey; connecting and making the most of data garnered from edge to cloud, sprinkled with a smattering of AI and machine learning, among other emerging technologies.

The company has spent the past 15 months beefing up its cloudy knowledge. HPE’s consultancy unit, Pointnext, has welcomed both Cloud Technology Partners, an AWS specialist, and RedPixie, an Azure house, to its bosom. In an editorial post outlining the company’s strategy to be a partner for the ‘edge-centric, cloud-enabled, data-driven enterprise of the future’, Neri noted that 90% of cloud projects which don’t involve advisory and professional services fail.

In June, HPE outlined a $4 billion investment over four years to define the ‘intelligent edge’, a term also favoured by Microsoft. While specific details were thin on the ground at the time, the announcement represented a statement of sorts, and Neri used the editorial to add more context.

“Today, 75% of data is created at the edge, but 94% of that data is untapped or lost,” Neri wrote. “This data waste is a missed opportunity and lost value. HPE knows the value of data and the insight it can give us, and that’s why we have announced our commitment to invest $4bn in the intelligent edge over the next four years.

“We’ve started at the edge because it is increasingly here that business – and life – takes place,” Neri added. “The edge Is all about using technology and data to redefine the experiences and business outcomes you deliver to your end customers, making them more satisfied and loyal. For your employees, the edge helps them to be more productive and engaged, whether they are in an office, oil rig, or university.”

Ultimately, despite the different buzzwords and the eye-catching investments, vendors are all pulling in the same direction – in some cases after dragging their feet – and recognising a data-driven future, as well as the tough road ahead for enterprise digital transformation. “We believe that the cloud experience should be open and seamless across all your clouds, public, private, on-premise and off-premise,” added Neri. “Further, we believe the best cloud partner is one who is unbiased and without an agenda.

“At HPE, the cloud is an experience, not a destination. It is by engaging edge to cloud that new opportunities can be created.”

You can find out more about HPE’s Discover announcements here.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Cloud computing will continue to be a business driver across the globe – and according to a new report, India will see significant growth in the coming years.

Great Learning, an ed-tech platform provider, argues that more than one million cloud computing jobs will be created in India by 2022. The potential salaries for cloud professionals in the country represents a step up from traditional IT engineers, the report adds.

Moving up to a mid-level managerial role could see employees ‘easily command’ upwards of Rs 20 lakh (£22,000) per year as a salary, while at the very highest level, senior professionals at the largest cloud companies can pay up to Rs 1 crore (£110,000) per annum.

Naturally, Great Learning has an immersive program on offer in cloud computing – with an application deadline of November 29 – which covers various infrastructure models and technologies, from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to Microsoft Azure, to containers and big data. Harish Subramaniam, program director for Great Learning’s cloud portfolio, noted similar interest from senior industry engineers in the program, alongside budding professionals.

According to the most recent Cloud Readiness Index from the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA) back in April, India placed a disappointing 12th position out of 14 nations analysed, representing no change from the previous analysis and above only China and Vietnam. The report noted how cloud infrastructure was ‘the weakness weighing India down’, arguing that while progress was being made, the country’s vast expanse – much like China – meant many areas were still not up to speed.

“Lack of access to quality broadband and sustainable power remain serious issues throughout India, making it difficult for even the most polished security and governance frameworks to drive cloud adoption,” the report noted. “Much like other emerging economies, this is slowly but steadily improving, but the sheer scale of the task poses a serious challenge.”

The largest cloud infrastructure providers do have a presence in India. AWS has a Mumbai region with two availability zones, while Google opened up its doors in November last year. Alibaba, recognised by industry research as the second largest player in the Asia Pacific region, opened its first Mumbai data centre in January of this year, with a second arriving in September.

Analysts have argued serious growth in the Indian data centre market is only a matter of time. Commercial real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield said in April that the market will reach $7 billion by 2020, with interest expanding from Mumbai to New Delhi, Chennai, and Bangalore.

The ACCA report recommended India needed to ‘accelerate digital literacy and support IT startups to ensure its workforce drives cloud adoption in the public and private sectors.’ If Great Learning’s report comes to fruition, stakeholders are preparing to do exactly that.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.