Google has announced its support for NVIDIA’s Tesla P4 GPUs to help customers with graphics-intensive and machine learning applications.

The Tesla P4, according to NVIDIA’s data sheet, is ‘purpose-built to boost efficiency for scale-out servers running deep learning workloads, enabling smart responsive AI-based services.’ The P4, which is run on NVIDIA’s Pascal architecture, has a GPU memory of 8GB, and memory bandwidth of 192 GB per second.

While not at the same performance level as the V100, run on Volta instead of Pascal architecture, Google said the P4 accelerators, which are now in beta, represent a ‘good balance of price/performance for remote display applications and real-time machine learning inference.’

“Graphics-intensive applications that run in the cloud benefit greatly from workstation-class GPUs,” wrote Ari Liberman, Google Cloud product manager in a blog post. “We now support virtual workstations with NVIDIA GRID on the P4 and P100, allowing you to turn any instance with one or more GPUs into a high-end workstation optimised for graphics-accelerated use cases.

“Now, artists, architects and engineers can create breathtaking 3D scenes for their next blockbuster film, or design a computer-aided photorealistic composition,” Liberman added.

As is often the case with these announcements, a brand new, shiny customer was rolled out to explain how Google’s services had improved their operations. Except this one wasn’t quite as new; regular readers of this publication may remember oilfield services provider Schlumberger from Google’s GPU price reduction news back in November. The company said it was using Google’s workstations, powered by NVIDIA GPUs, to help visualise oil and gas scenarios for its customers.

The link with machine learning capabilities is again an irresistible one, with Google saying the P4 is ideal for use cases such as visual search, interactive speech, and video recommendations.

Whither NVIDIA, however? The big cloud providers are certainly a key opportunity for the graphics processor. Speaking at the end of last year, the company said its V100 GPU had been chosen by every major cloud firm, saying the applications for GPU servers had ‘now grown to many markets.’

The largest players in cloud computing are looking to Asia for further expansion – Google has announced it is building a new data centre in Singapore, while Alibaba Cloud has announced a second infrastructure zone in Malaysia.

Google’s expansion will take the company up to three data centres in Singapore, taking its overall investment in the country to $850 million. The facilities will also be built in line with Google’s environmental policy; back in April the company announced it had achieved its long-standing goal of becoming 100% renewable.

According to Google’s location map, the company now operates 61 open and provisional zones across 20 regions and five continents. Singapore is joined in Asia Pacific by Japan – an open facility in Tokyo and a future region in Osaka – Mumbai, Taiwan, Sydney, and another future facility in Hong Kong. “We’re looking forward to growing our small team at the data centres here, as well as expanding our ties with the local community,” wrote Joe Kava, VP data centres in a blog post.

Alibaba, meanwhile, is launching a second availability zone in Malaysia to expand its cloud footprint in the country. Among the new products to arrive are DDoS protection, as well as elastic computing, database, networking and monitoring services. In line with Alibaba’s recent partnership with SAP, the zone will also be certified for SAP hosting.

“The success of our trade on a global platform with assistance of companies like Alibaba Cloud depends on an efficient Internet environment,” said Gobind Singh Deo, Malaysia minister of communications and multimedia. “The advanced technology afforded by Alibaba Cloud opens new opportunities, which I believe will quite substantially benefit Malaysia in its efforts to raise competition and efficiency in this new industry.”

There is a major audience for cloud technologies in Southeast Asia – indeed, Google said that in three years more than 70 million people had gotten online for the first time. This has been reflected in recent industry research into the area.

According to the most recent study from the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA), out of 14 Asia Pacific countries, Singapore was considered the most ‘cloud ready’. The country was praised for its broadband quality, cybersecurity and levels of business sophistication. Malaysia was ranked at #8, noting the government’s cloud-first strategy as a potential indicator of future success.

Here’s a good example of how security underlines – or should underline – pretty much everything in the cloud: Cisco has announced it is to acquire Michigan-based Duo Security for upwards of $2.3 billion (£1.8bn).

The deal, which expects to close during the first quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2019, aims to help give the networking giant’s customers straightforward and secure access to any application on any networked device through Duo’s platform.

Duo Security offers a trusted access platform with two-factor, multi-factor and zero trust authentication. The platform verifies the identity of users by checking the health of their device before granting access to company applications.

In a letter to employees, Duo CEO Dug Song cited the traditional reasons why the acquisition made sense – deploying the technology at scale, gaining Cisco’s long-standing enterprise security experience, as well as a nice payoff for shareholders. “This is an important next chapter for Duo and there is much more we can accomplish together to position Cisco for enduring success,” wrote Song. “I am incredibly proud of the company we have built and look forward to our future with our friends at Cisco.”

Song also noted the importance of Cisco’s recent security-based acquisitions – such as OpenDNS, Sourcefire and Cloudlock – and how they were integrated into the wider business. “They are a company evolving themselves under new leadership, new momentum, and a new focus on innovation in the cloud era,” Song added. “Cisco views our leadership in zero trust security as transformational to their business, bringing cloud-based user and device trustworthiness to an already impressive security product portfolio.”

From Cisco’s perspective, the continued prevalence of multi-cloud initiatives was key to the acquisition. “IT teams are responsible for protecting hundreds of different perimeters that span anywhere a user makes an access decision,” said David Goeckeler, EVP and general manager of networking and security at Cisco. “Duo’s zero trust authentication and access products integrated with our network, device and cloud security platforms will enable our customers to address the complexity and challenges that stem from multi- and hybrid cloud environments.”

IBM has had another solid cloud quarter – and now the company is extending its collaboration with telecoms provider CenturyLink to beef up enterprise connectivity in new markets.

The move is part of a wider initiative, the IBM Cloud Direct Link Service Provider Program, which enables IBM customers to select their preferred provider for direct connectivity to IBM’s cloud. The initiative is available in the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific with 21 partners on board including Digital Realty and Colt, with the CenturyLink rollout being available in European, North and Latin American markets.

The reasoning behind the initiative will be familiar to industry watchers; the increasing complexity of workloads, whether through multi-cloud initiatives or more intensive data crunching through the Internet of Things and machine learning. More clouds being utilised need more connectivity options, with IBM citing an IDC study which found companies with a defined hybrid cloud strategy achieve 2.5x higher gross profits.

There are two options for organisations to consider; Direct Link Connect, which favours multi-cloud with private access to IBM cloud infrastructure through a CenturyLink IP VPN connection, and Direct Link Dedicated, utilising CenturyLink’s dedicated broadband service for fast and reliable data transfer.

“The goal in CenturyLink’s integration with IBM Cloud Direct Link was to bring a network experience that simplifies and enhances the cloud experience,” wrote Paul Hertzfeldt, IBM Cloud Direct Link manager in a blog post. “Both [Direct Link Connect and Dedicated] are offered on a global basis and optimise network architecture for low latency and high performance.

“They’re designed to satisfy even the most demanding enterprise workloads and compliment your hybrid cloud strategy,” Hertzfeldt added.

Last month IBM posted a third consecutive quarter of growth, with cloud revenues going up 20% year on year and representing almost a quarter of the company’s total revenue. Jim Kavanaugh, SVP and chief financial officer, said IBM was “becoming the destination for mission-critical workloads in hybrid environments” – although it’s worth noting that all of the hyperscalers are continuing to grow and increase their market share at the expense of the competition.

CenturyLink at one point held lofty cloud ambitions of its own; indeed, this publication asked in May 2014 ‘can CenturyLink take on cloud’s big three?’ Yet with telco cloud initiatives going sideways as the Amazons, Microsofts et al just kept on growing, while the company continues to offer cloud computing and managed services, helping connectivity with the bigger cloud providers has seemed a more likely route to market.

The global infrastructure as a service (IaaS) public cloud services market grew by almost 30% in 2017 to total $23.5 billion (£18bn) according to the latest figures from Gartner – with Amazon Web Services (AWS) securing more than half of the global market.

The figures, which appear in the analyst firm’s latest market share analysis, put Amazon Web Services (AWS) well in clear at the top of the tree with Microsoft a clear second place. No surprises there – yet Alibaba takes third place with 4.6% of global market share, ahead of Google and IBM.

With 51.8% of the total market, AWS remains supremely dominant in the eyes of Gartner, clocking up revenues of $12.2bn in the process in 2017. Microsoft, at 13.3% share and $3.1bn, pales into second. Yet Gartner argues Amazon did lose market share from 2016, where it held 53.7% of the market albeit with merely $9.8bn in revenues. Alibaba broke the billion-dollar revenue barrier in 2017 – therefore representing a reasonable return on investment from 2015 when the parent company invested $1bn to expand the international presence of its cloud computing arm.

Microsoft remains the fastest growing out of all the major players, according to Gartner, with a 98.2% yearly growth. Alibaba (62.7%), Google (56.0%) and IBM (53.9%) all saw strong levels of growth between 2016 and 2017.

This is not quite the way Synergy Research sees the market. As Synergy posits, Alibaba is currently fourth in the market, behind Google and ahead of IBM, with AWS top on all geographies and Microsoft second, aside from APAC where Alibaba takes the silver medal.

Yet either way, the most recent financial reports from the hyperscalers shows a market which continues to side in their favour long after many felt it had become saturated. “The top four providers have strong IaaS offerings and saw healthy growth as IaaS adoption is being fully embraced by mainstream organisations and as cloud availability expands into new regions and countries,” said Sid Nag, research director at Gartner.

“Cloud-directed IT spending now constitutes more than 20% of the total IT budget for organisations using cloud,” added Nag. “Many of these organisations are now using cloud to support production environments and business-critical operations.”

Many in the industry have wondered about when the cloud will dissipate – in other words, when the term ceases to be used because of the technology’s ubiquity. Citrix has stuck its head over the parapet – and said that 2025 may signal the death of the buzzword.

At least, that’s the verdict of a quarter of the 750 UK-based IT decision makers polled by Citrix, alongside Censuswide. Of the 26% who believe the term cloud will be obsolete by 2025, more than half (56%) see cloud technology as being so embedded in the enterprise that it will no longer be seen as a separate term. In some instances, such as referring to the likes of Salesforce as a cloud-native app, the report argues the process has already begun.

The research, as is traditional, also explored cloud habits and strategies within organisations. 91% of respondents said they either have a cloud strategy, or plan to put one in place imminently – yet just over a third (37%) said their strategy was aligned to business objectives.

While nine in 10 (89%) of the large organisations polled said cloud was important to their business, three in five (59%) said they still access and manage data on-premises.

It may be a question of semantics primarily, but the research makes a wider point around whether the term ‘cloud’ is due a revamp. As cloud adoption continues – and as this publication has explored, workloads are becoming more complex – a lack of awareness at board level could give an idea of where the situation rests. According to IT decision makers, more than half of middle management within their organisation had a good understanding of cloud, compared with only 39% for the board.

“Most IT budget holders agree that cloud can improve productivity, lower costs, ensure security and optimise performance as part of a digital transformation agenda,” said Darren Fields, Citrix UK and Ireland regional director. “However, there is still more education required to effectively communicate the benefits of cloud services – and there’s still a gap to be bridged between boardrooms and IT decision makers in relation to this.

“Arguably a level of mistrust and misunderstanding still holds back UK businesses – and it is clear a cultural and educational shake-up is needed for cloud and digital transformation to deliver on its potential,” added Fields. “Once this awareness stems from IT to the board and beyond, there should be fewer barriers to hold cloud adoption back.”

Revenue for Amazon Web Services (AWS) went up 49% year over year to $6.1 billion (£4.6bn) representing another stellar quarter for the cloud infrastructure giant.

The AWS revenues, up from $4.1bn this time last year and up from $5.4bn in the previous quarter, comprise 11.5% of Amazon’s total revenues of $52.9bn.

In an analyst call after the announcement was made, Amazon chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky noted how AWS’ ability to save on infrastructure resources has helped not only the company’s customers, but also on the consumer side of Amazon’s business.

“Our growth is coming from customers that span from startups to enterprise customers to government agencies, and they start small and then they continue to build and shift their businesses to us,” said Olsavsky. “A large number have gone all-in on AWS, and have had a chance to lower their cost structures as a result.”

In the most recent quarter, various new customers have been announced, from Ryanair, to Formula 1, to Major League Baseball (MLB). Only in the case of Ryanair was a customer going all-in – Formula 1 would be migrating the ‘vast majority’ of its infrastructure from on-prem, while for MLB the dialogue was of extending the partnership.

Yet in all three cases, the importance of machine learning crunching bigger and bigger data workloads was cited as a key reason for choosing Amazon’s cloud. Ryanair is aiming to utilise Amazon Lex, the technology which underpins Alexa, on a trial basis, while Formula 1 is looking to deliver real-time insights and predictions drawing from more than 65 years of race data.

Regular watchers will be interested at how often AWS is mentioned during the lengthy highlights reel on each financials release – 30 this quarter, up from 26 three months before – with the company also citing the general availability of EKS, its managed Kubernetes service, as a key highlight.

So how does this compare with the rest of the field, who all published last week? Microsoft trumpeted an 89% uptick in Azure revenues over the course of a year, while Google’s $4.4bn in ‘other’ revenues – of which Google Cloud forms a part – was a 36% increase on the previous 12 months. IBM, meanwhile, secured another quarter of growth, with cloud revenue up 20% representing almost a quarter of the company’s total earnings.

Yet there is still of course a degree of filtering in play.

Ultimately, according to the latest figures from Synergy Research, the hyperscalers continue to squeeze the rest of the market, with each major player growing. Amazon controls more than a third of the overall market, larger than its four nearest rivals – Microsoft (14% market share), IBM (8%), Google (6%) and Alibaba (4%) – combined.

The research firm puts the market into three divisions; IBM, Oracle, Rackspace and Salesforce as strong niche players, Alibaba, Google and Microsoft as gaining market share ‘but a long way to go’, and Amazon ‘in a league of its own.’

“Amazon Web Services and its three main challengers all turned in some exceptional growth numbers in the quarter. Collectively those four firms alone accounted for well over three quarters of the sequential growth in cloud service revenues,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy. “In a large and strategically vital market that is growing at exceptional rates, they are throwing the gauntlet down to their smaller competitors by continuing to invest enormous amounts in their data centre infrastructure and operations.

“Their increased market share is clear evidence that their strategies are working,” Dinsdale added.

You can read the full Amazon financial statement here.

Previous quarter’s analysis: AWS and Microsoft bask in strong financials – but is AI the battleground for the next ‘cloud wars’?

The good news is that many organisations across Europe are looking to embrace a DevOps-centric approach to their application development and delivery. The bad news is that plenty of hurdles have to be overcome first to achieve this ambition.

That is the key finding from a new study by Claranet, which argues a greater emphasis on cloud usage and automation needs to be seen before DevOps dreams become a reality.

The report, which polled 750 IT professionals across Europe, found almost three in 10 (29%) had already moved towards a DevOps approach, with a further 54% expecting to make the switch in the coming two years. Yet three quarters of those (74%) who had migrated had experienced challenges of some kind, with operations teams limiting the potential of DevOps, and a lack of clear business objectives within management cited.

The company adds that some businesses may see DevOps as a magic switch – which of course will lead to lower expectations.

“DevOps can’t simply be implemented overnight – it requires a period of iterative change in which both the technology and the people at an organisation need to be made ready for it,” said Michel Robert, Claranet UK managing director. “Increased automation is essential to achieving the agility that characterises a successful DevOps approach, so businesses need to take steps to implement new measures to facilitate this.”

Claranet argues that making a shift from continuous integration (CI) to continuous development (CD), where releases are not fixed but can be done in smaller chunks once or twice a week, will help ease the pressure on organisations. “Combining this with the flexibility of cloud will deliver maximum benefits,” added Robert.

This warning strikes a similar note to a piece of research published by the Ponemon Institute in June. According to the Ponemon study, a significant gap remained between organisations’ ideal DevOps and microservices capabilities and what they are actually able to deliver. More than two thirds of respondents said they were ‘constantly challenged’ with the management and tracking of assets in their cloud ecosystem.

Google promised that its cloud deals were becoming larger and more strategic – and the company can now count on Domino’s Pizza, SoundCloud and PwC among its customers after posting solid financials yesterday.

Total revenues across all of Alphabet for the three months ended June 30 were at $32.7 billion (£25bn), an increase of 26% compared with the second quarter of 2017. Google’s revenues are put into several buckets; ‘other’ revenues, of which Google Cloud is a part, was at $4.4bn, a 36% increase on the previous year, and similar to the previous quarter’s analysis.

The company is also putting its money where its mouth is with regards to investment; the largest number of headcount additions in the most recent quarter were in Google’s cloud business, with the firm bolstering its engineering, sales, and marketing teams.

In an earnings call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai elaborated on the company’s cloudy momentum. “It’s a natural extension of our long time strength in computing, data centres and machine learning,” he said, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “We have developed these over many years and they power our own services in the cloud and are now helping others.”

Take Kubernetes as an example of that. Back in June, at the Cisco Live US event, Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene took to the stage to explain her company’s partnership with Cisco and how the two firms were combining in making Kubernetes deployments easier for organisations. Naturally, Greene noted how Google was – and remains – a key adopter of the container tool, being the original designer of the technology.

Ruth Porat, Google’s CFO, noted – as Google’s strategy has been – the importance of building out an ecosystem with cloud at the epicentre. “Given the core capabilities that we are building upon, our technical infrastructure, security app, machine learning, analytical tools, our view is that we’re addressing a rapidly growing market with the core pillars that are needed to win,” Porat told analysts.

“What has been the recurring theme that we’ve talked about… is the need to further build out our go-to-market capabilities and ensure that we’ve got the functional requirements that enterprise customers deserve,” Porat added. “So it’s really looking at the scale of the opportunity [and] the pace of investment that can be done effectively and therefore position us well.”

Yet while Google has been making significant strides over the past 12 months, there is still plenty of manoeuvring to be done yet. According to the most recent figures from Synergy Research, Google ranks no higher than third in any region; apart from in APAC where Alibaba is the second biggest player, it remains an AWS, Microsoft and Google 1-2-3 in the key geographies.

This was a fact noted by Pichai responding to an analyst question around an inflection point in the industry. “For sure, I do think there is an inflection point – and that’s why it feels far from [a] zero sum game,” he said, adding that there was a ‘lot of opportunity’ in multi-cloud. “I think all the major players are definitely seeing traction.”

With Google Next kicking off in San Francisco later today, there was a sense of the company keeping some of its cards close to its chest. Yet a couple of news lines have come through.

A blog post from Tariq Shaukat, president of partners and industry platforms, discussed how financial services firms HSBC and PayPal were taking steps with Google’s cloud. Regular readers of this publication may recall that the former made an appearance at Google Next last March – so what’s new? Rather like the recent customer wins AWS has announced, it’s all about machine learning as a differentiator. In the case of HSBC, it’s being used to detect potential fraud; for PayPal, it’s about adding intelligence to customer experiences.

Expect plenty of discussion and use cases on this in the coming two days – as well as blockchain. A session on Tuesday discusses ‘distributed ledger technology partnerships on Google Cloud’, while a partner blog post, under the ‘unveiling new technology integrations with Google Cloud’ banner, mentions DLT solutions, as well as potential integrations with Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum.

Among Google’s other highlights this quarter were launches in Finland and Switzerland, as well as the acquisition of enterprise cloud migration tool Velostrata.

If your organisation has been considering containers, then security concerns will almost certainly be paramount. Alert Logic, an information security provider, thinks it may have the answer.

The company has launched what is claimed to be the industry’s first intrusion detection system for containers which aims to ‘bring organisations powerful new capabilities to inspect network traffic for malicious activity targeting containers’, in the company’s words.

As Alert Logic is an AWS partner, this release, as part of the company’s Cloud Defender and Threat Manager solutions, focuses on containers deployed on AWS. This does of course include Docker, Kubernetes and CoreOS, as well as Amazon’s Elastic Container Service.

The product aims to snaffle malicious activity at the network layer providing greater visibility into container attacks. According to 451 Research, organisations are delaying container adoption because of security concerns, despite a global market which could top $4 billion by 2022.

“Without real-time detection capabilities, attackers and intruders can lurk within containers installing trojans, malware, ransomware and cryptominers or even corrupting and exfiltrating data,” said Chris Noell, Alert Logic senior vice president of engineering in a statement. “Network detection is critical to providing the visibility into container attacks that other approaches miss.”

As this publication has previously explored, there have been various examples of organisations leaving applications and instances open. In February, security researchers from RedLock revealed that hackers had been running crypto mining scripts on unsecured Kubernetes instances owned by Tesla, while further research found Weight Watchers had also left Kubernetes instances open.

In June, a survey from CyberArk found that IT jobs with the word ‘Kubernetes’ in the title shot up year over year – so the need for security is evident. According to Lacework, who revealed the Weight Watchers snafu, organisations need to perform a few tasks to get up to speed with a Kubernetes security policy. Companies need to build a pod security policy, configure pods to run real-only file systems, and restrict privilege escalation, among other tips.

You can find out more about Alert Logic’s container security tools here.