The rise of Alibaba Cloud, to become a major player in cloud infrastructure, is a fascinating one.

Between 2014 and 2016, Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) saw the top right box change not one iota. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was out on its own, followed by Microsoft, then a gap to the rest. 2014 had a swarm of ‘visionary’ players, but by 2016 only Google remained to take third place.

Last year, however, things changed. The top right of course remained the same, but alongside IBM and Oracle – a fellow debutant and another company who has recently speculated to accumulate in this space – Alibaba Cloud joined Google in the visionaries category. Crucially, Alibaba placed highest out of the three in terms of ability to execute. Indeed the analyst firm, in a separate study, put Alibaba in third place for public cloud IaaS back in September.

Why the change? The rise reflects Alibaba Cloud’s push for expansion outside China – and as Yeming Wang (left), general manager of Alibaba Cloud Europe explains, it’s a plan for the whole of Alibaba Group as well. “To go global is definitely a corporate level of strategy,” he tells CloudTech.

Naturally, there are a couple of reasons behind this. One is political, the other technological. On the first point, Wang notes how China is opening its doors more. In November this year, the country will launch the China International Import Expo (CIIE), the first national expo dedicated to imports, while China is estimated to import $24 trillion of goods in the coming 15 years.

On the technological side, the rise of multi-cloud makes perfect sense for Alibaba. The trend is inexorable. According to Cisco, cloud traffic will represent 95% of total data centre traffic by 2021. As cloud workloads become bigger and more sophisticated, and as business needs advance, having a single public cloud vendor isn’t going to cut it. Yet according to recent analysis from IDC, fewer than 10% of European organisations are on board with a multi-cloud strategy.

“It is naturally the customer choice – [customers] prefer to have more than two, or even more than three public cloud providers,” says Wang. “This is a very natural evolution. For the first part, it’s about whether to go cloud, and then later on it will be how to manage multi-cloud.”

Companies who choose Alibaba as one course of their multi-cloud meal do so for various reasons. Avoiding vendor lock-in is fairly standard. Wang says Alibaba has ‘invested a lot of internal resources’ to facilitate multi-cloud technology for their customers, both at infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) levels. For global businesses, ensuring a full geographical infrastructure from west to east is also key. But there is another interesting point of comparison.

“Today, we have a lot of clients asking to adopt Alibaba as a second or third public cloud provider,” says wang. “Alibaba Cloud, from a user experience point of view, is quite similar to AWS. That is why we got some comments from different clients – they say ‘okay, if the guys are AWS certified or [an] AWS expert, then you’re halfway to being very familiar with Alibaba also.’

“This gives them a lot of flexibility regarding the practical adoption,” adds Wang.

Alibaba Cloud’s recent expansion has been predominantly Europe-based with some exceptions -opening a data centre region in Indonesia being one of them. At this year’s Mobile World Congress, Alibaba – with the claim of being the fastest growing cloud provider in the world on its booth – announced a major European expansion, with a wide variety of products available, from bare metal services to big data and AI, across the continent.

Wang says it is the start of things to come. “It’s the first time Alibaba released new products together with our international portal and domestic portal,” he says. “Regarding the product feature development point of view, [there are] very strong signals that Alibaba starts to develop new products and new features to the global market – not just the Chinese market.”

This also extends to events. Back in October, CloudTech reported one of the keynote speeches of Alibaba’s Computing Conference in Hangzhou, where it was revealed the company’s ambitions, along with its partners, was to move from one million to 10 million customers. The conference was held over four days with more than 50,000 participants, according to Wang. Plans are in place for another event focusing more on the international market, albeit with less scale than the flagship conference.

Ultimately, this is one of the key goals for Alibaba, and Wang. “We want more people, consumers, users, to know Alibaba Cloud,” he adds. “Sometimes, people know the name, but don’t know it’s a real technological, powerful company.”

Picture source: www.alibabagroup.com

Verizon is moving to Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its preferred public cloud provider – migrating more than 1,000 business critical applications and backend systems in the process.

The announcement, made by AWS, notes that Verizon first started working with the cloud infrastructure behemoth in 2015, with the latest wave of migrations ‘part of a corporate-wide initiative at Verizon to increase agility and reduce costs through the use of cloud computing.’ Among the migrations are a series of production databases to Amazon Aurora.

“We are making the public cloud a core part of our digital transformation, upgrading our database management approach to replace our proprietary solutions with Amazon Aurora,” said Mahmoud El-Assir, Verizon senior vice president of global technology services in a statement. “The agility we’ve gained by moving to the world’s leading public cloud has helped us better serve our customers.

“Working with AWS complements our focus on efficiency, speed, and innovation within our engineering culture, and has enabled us to quickly deliver the best, most efficient customer experiences,” El-Assir added.

The move to AWS is an interesting one – and it’s worth noting here the distinction between having a ‘preferred’ provider and going all-in, as in the recent case with Ryanair. At Google Next last year, Alin D’Silva, VP and CTO of Verizon’s digital workplace initiative, explained to attendees how the company was rolling out G Suite to more than 150,000 employees.

Verizon’s history in the space is also worth mentioning. The telco acquired Terremark back in 2011, with a press release at the time noting the move would ‘clear the way for Verizon to lead the rapidly evolving global managed IT infrastructure and cloud services market.’

Alas, history did not quite turn out that way. Verizon’s cloud service was launched at the back of 2013, with Terremark’s technology at the forefront, and despite making a fair amount of noise and putting partnerships in place – one with Oracle for database software and middleware stands out – the ship had long since sailed. In February 2016, Verizon shut down part of its public cloud service, and a year later it sold up to IBM.

The companies described the move as a ‘unique cooperation between two tech leaders’ – a description which raised a few eyebrows. Speaking to this publication back in 2016, John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research, summed it all up. “Early on in the growth of the cloud market it had seemed like telcos might have a leading part to play – but the speed of cloud market development and the aggressiveness of the leading cloud providers has largely left them behind,” he said.

Google’s focus on the enterprise side of cloud has been strong in recent months – but it has by no means neglected the consumer arena either with a new storage plan and price cuts to match.

The company has announced the launch of Google One, a premium tier cloud storage offering aimed at replacing paid consumer Google Drive plans. The new service includes options ranging to 30TB, alongside access to Google experts for customer service, and added perks, such as credits on Google Play, or select hotels found on Google search.

Pricing starts at $1.99 per month for 100 GB and $2.99 for 200 GB, with prices above 2TB remaining the same as before. Yet the big change is around the 2TB mark, which now costs $9.99 per month – the price of 1TB previously.

In other words, Google is giving everyone an extra terabyte out of the goodness of its heart, halving the price of its 2TB plan in the process. The company confirmed it will upgrade existing 1TB Drive plans at no extra cost. In comparison, Dropbox and Microsoft offer 1TB at $9.99 – but the latter also bundles it in with Office 365.

“Thanks to mobile phones, and new file formats like 4K video and high-res photography, people are storing more than ever before,” wrote Pavni Diwanji, VP of Google One in a blog post confirming the news. “That’s why we’re introducing Google One, a simple plan for expanded storage that includes extra benefits to help you get more out of Google.”

This publication has covered in chapter and verse Google’s recent cloudy plays. Earlier this week, the company announced its intent to acquire Velostrata, an Israel-based company which focuses on accelerating enterprise cloud migrations. The storage wars continue, but more in the background these days. In February, Microsoft unveiled plans to poach rival customers by offering free OneDrive for Business so long as companies weren’t already Redmond houses in some capacity. The offer runs out at the end of June.

Google One has received favourable reviews, however. Writing for Forbes, Kevin Murnane argued that the live help aspect of the service “could turn out to be the most useful element of the new service.”

You can find out more about Google One here.

Google is set to acquire enterprise cloud migration provider Velostrata, citing the Israel-based company’s ‘technical strength’ as key alongside potential capabilities for their customers around advanced data analytics and machine learning.

Velostrata’s primary goal is to speed up enterprise’s cloud transitions through what it calls ‘real-time agentless workload streaming’ – in other words, decoupling compute from storage without an effect on performance. Theoretically, workloads can transfer to the public cloud in minutes, whether migrating entire data centres or working in a hybrid cloud environment.

The two companies had worked together previously; as recently as April, Velostrata announced it supported migrations into Google Cloud Platform, promising time savings for GCP customers of up to five hours per server during migrations.

From Google’s perspective, it is yet another sign of the company’s strong cloud bet, with the size and scope of its customers changing. The company’s path has long been charted by this publication, with CEO Sundar Pichai telling analysts last month Google’s cloud arm was securing ‘significantly larger, more strategic deals.’

As organisations pay more for Google’s services – Spotify, for instance, is set to spend €365 million on Google Cloud over three years, as revealed by a share sale document following its IPO – performance is key, as Eyal Manor, VP engineering, explained.

“As more and more enterprises move to the cloud, many need a simple way to migrate from on-premises and adopt the cloud at their own pace,” wrote Manor in a blog post. “With Velostrata, Google Cloud customers obtain two important benefits: they’ll be able to adapt their workloads on-the-fly for cloud execution, and they can decouple their compute from storage without performance degradation.

“This means they can easily and quickly migrate virtual machine-based workloads like large databases, enterprise applications, DevOps, and large batch processing to and from the cloud,” Manor added. “On top of that, customers can control and automate where their data lives at all times – either on-premises or in the cloud – in as little as a few clicks.”

“Over the years, Google Cloud has made significant investments in building a robust global cloud infrastructure that delivers industry-leading availability, reliability and security,” wrote Issy Ben-Shaul, Velostrata CEO and co-founder in a blog post confirming the news. “Google Cloud continues to innovate with advanced compute and services platforms. We are proud to join forces and help pave the way for enterprise customers to transform their most demanding enterprise workloads on Google Cloud Platform.”

Speaking to this publication at the end of last year around 2018 trends, Ben-Shaul noted how enterprises will ramp up their multi-cloud efforts. “The majority of enterprises that will migrate to cloud at scale will employ a multi-cloud strategy,” said Ben-Shaul. “More specifically, they will split their production workloads across more than one public cloud.

“Enterprises don’t want to be locked in,” he added. “If an enterprise can get significant cost reduction on infrastructure, this can mean millions of dollars in savings a year.”

The AWS Summit, in London, has seen a few pieces of news emerge – including a new customer and new functionality – with machine learning at the heart of it.

The cloud infrastructure behemoth announced Ryanair will be going all-in, with the Irish-headquartered airline set to close 'the vast majority' of its data centres in the coming three years. This includes moving from Microsoft's SQL Server to Aurora, Amazon's MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database engine.

Ryanair said machine learning, from gleaning greater data insights to improving the customer experience, was 'hugely important' to its growth. Amazon Lex, the technology underpinning Alexa announced as a general service at re:Invent in 2016, is being used by the airline on a trial basis.

"Because we have the most comprehensive set of cloud services, including our leading machine learning and deep learning services, Ryanair will be able to employ those services to drive greater customer and employee satisfaction," said Mike Clayville, AWS VP worldwide commercial sales in a statement. "We're excited to help them create first-class experiences on AWS as they continue to use our capabilities and services at an acclerated pace."

On the product side, AWS announced a new machine learning competency for consulting partners in the AWS Partner Network (APN). The move is an extension of the competency for APN technology partners announced at last year's re:Invent, and aims to match customers with the most qualified partners who have to have shown 'technical proficiency and proven customer success' with AWS machine learning tools. Launch partners include Accenture, Deloitte, and ECS.

Going back to Aurora, another release which may provide blessed relief to database admins is Backtrack, essentially a system restore – up to 72 hours, at least – for production databases if a fat finger incident occurs. The feature can be enabled at launch time for all newly-launched Aurora database clusters, with AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr proclaiming it to be 'as close as we can come, given present-day technology, to an 'undo' option for reality.'

Users can pause their application, select the appropriate cluster, click the backtrack option, choose the appropriate point in time, and go from there. "You then wait for the rewind to take place, unpause your application and proceed as if nothing has happened," wrote Barr. "When you initiate a backtrack, Aurora will pause the database, close any open connections, drop uncommitted writes, and wait for the backtrack to complete. Then it will resume normal operation and be able to accept requests."

AWS also added that Marketplace, its software supermarket, is being used by 1,400 ISVs and more than 170,000 enterprises respectively.

Google Cloud is already expanding into five new regions this year – and now Switzerland can be added to the list.

The move to open facilities in Zurich will mean Google has half a dozen regions in Europe, taking the overall total of existing and announced regions to 20. The Swiss zones will open in the first half of 2019, Google said.

“Customers in Switzerland will benefit from lower latency for their cloud-based workloads and data, and the region is also designed for high availability, launching with three zones to protect against service disruptions,” wrote Urs Hölzle, Google SVP technical infrastructure in a blog post confirming the news.

Back in January, Google announced extensive infrastructure expansion plans, with five new regions and three subsea cables launched. The new regions were in the Netherlands – opened immediately with two zones, with the third arriving in March – and Montreal, also open for business, with Los Angeles, Finland and Hong Kong to follow.

Google Cloud’s performance continues to impress, with CEO Sundar Pichai telling analysts last month the company was ‘growing well’ and that deals being struck were ‘larger’ and ‘more strategic.’ The company does not disclose specific cloud revenues, but according to its most recent financial results its ‘other’ revenues – of which Google Cloud is a part – hit $4.35 billion, up 35% on this time last year.

Evidence of the company’s more impressive client roster has been seen in recent months through various disclosures. Spotify is a confirmed Google Cloud customer after it came out in their IPO filing, while eagle-eyed observers saw, buried deep in an iOS security guide, that Apple was also a customer. More recently Netflix, the poster child of Amazon Web Services (AWS), confirmed it also ran disaster recovery workloads on Google after a story from The Information, which the company described as ‘overly sensationalised.’

You can find out more about the Switzerland opening here.

Revenues at Alibaba have soared to $9.8 billion US (£7.2bn) for the company’s most recent quarter – with cloud computing revenues nudging $700 million.

The figures represent another good quarter for the Chinese eCommerce giant, whose cloud push continues to intensify. Cloud revenues, which topped at $699m went up 103% year over year, while total revenues saw a 61% yearly increase.

Alibaba puts its revenues in four buckets; core commerce, which was at $8.1bn, cloud, digital media and entertainment, at $840m, and ‘innovation initiatives and others’, at $158m.

The company said it was “seeing significant traction and diversification of customers and revenue” and that it “will continue to invest to further expand the market by developing value-added products and features.”

New customers highlighted by the company in the quarter included the China National Petroleum Corporation, Cathay Pacific, and – outside of China – the Malaysian government, which is using Alibaba’s cloud in an Internet of Things play around traffic management.

Like the rest of its competition in the cloud infrastructure space, Alibaba cited the importance artificial intelligence (AI) is playing in its roadmap. There were more than 300 new products and features launched by Alibaba Cloud in the most recent quarter with 20% focused on AI, data management and security, the company said.

Other initiatives the company has introduced this year included an expansion into Turkey, alongside further product launches in Europe, as well as the opening of data centre facilities in Indonesia.

“Looking ahead to fiscal 2019, we expect overall revenue growth above 60%, reflecting our confidence in our core business as well as positive momentum in new businesses,” said Maggie Wu, Alibaba Group chief financial officer in a statement. “We expect our new growth initiatives will drive long-term, sustainable value for our customers and partners and increase our total addressable market.”

You can read the full financial statement here (pdf).

Picture source: www.alibabagroup.com

HubSpot, SendGrid, and Nutanix are among the top publicly traded cloud companies to work for, with Algolia, Asana and Canopy taking the honours for private firms, according to new research.

The study comes from workplace ranker Glassdoor alongside Battery Ventures, and puts the analysis together based on CEO approval rating as well as ‘positive business outlook.’  

The report is the second from the companies, after 2016’s analysis. Since then, several companies have swapped over from private to public, including AppDynamics, Coupa, Dropbox, and Okta. Companies who made the private lists twice include Chef, Demandbase, and Smartsheet.

With a CEO approval rating of 96% and a positive business outlook of 89%, HubSpot took the top level for public cloud computing companies, ahead of Ultimate Software and Guidewire Software. The private sphere saw higher scores. Algolia took top spot with 100% approval in CEO Nicolas Dessaigne, as well as a 100% positive business outlook, with the company given a score of 4.9 out of 5.0 in the report. To even make the top 50, companies had to achieve a score of 4.4.  

The report’s ultimate goal is to show how important company culture and employee happiness is in an increasingly competitive tech and software as a service (SaaS) economy.

As this publication reported earlier this week, one potential path for ensuring a happy workforce is to enlist machine learning capabilities, using the example of Eightfold.ai, which claims to be the first AI-based talent intelligence platform combining analysis of publicly available data as well as internal data repositories.

According to research from PayScale last year, AT&T, General Electric and Oracle provide the best remuneration for top performers, with the role of enterprise IT architect, at a median salary of more than $138,000, the most valued. The average employee tenure at a Silicon Valley cloud-based enterprise software company is 14 months, down from 19 months elsewhere.

 “Since we first partnered with Glassdoor to compile these lists, the cloud has only grown in influence and market power, and some of the private companies we previously featured have now gone public or been acquired,” said Neeraj Agrawal, Battery general partner. “We view these rankings as a key indicator of company health and potential growth.”

You can find out more about the report here.

With KubeCon and CloudNativeCon taking place in Copenhagen this week, it is not surprising that a series of Kubernetes-based announcements has hit the wires over the past 24 hours – with Cisco, Red Hat and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) taking top honours.

The CNCF, which maintains Kubernetes alongside other open source technologies, has announced the launch of a certified Kubernetes application developer (CKAD) examination, alongside a Kubernetes for Developers course.

The decision was made to expand the training and certification from administrators – more than 1,500 people have registered for the certified Kubernetes administrator (CKA) exam – to app developers. More than 700 developers have already signed up to beta test the CKAD exam, which is open to all entrants and costs $300.

The rationale behind the move is simple: as Kubernetes has grown and matured, so too has the demand for app developers who want to build projects on top of it. The CNCF cites figures from Indeed.com which showed that in March, 2% of all software engineer jobs posted on the portal demanded Kubernetes skills – a number which is only going to rise significantly.

At the Open Source Leadership Summit in March, Kubernetes became the first project to ‘graduate’ from the foundation, with CNCF saying the technology was ‘mature and resilient enough to manage containers at scale across any industry in companies of all sizes.’

Elsewhere, Cisco announced Kubernetes support for AppDynamics and Cisco CloudCenter to help enable greater enterprise adoption of the technology. Support with AppDyanmics will help organisations gain end-to-end visibility on performance metrics, as well as correlating Kubernetes performance with business metrics, while CloudCenter support focuses more on multi-cloud environments.

“The Kubernetes platform has emerged as the de facto container solution as customers accelerate adoption of containerised application architectures,” said Kip Compton, vice president of the Cisco Cloud Platform and Solutions Group. “But organisations are still challenged to efficiently and confidently utilise Kubernetes as they modernise legacy applications and develop new cloud applications.

“With our latest Kubernetes support, customers can now easily adopt production-grade Kubernetes across multi-cloud environments.”

Red Hat, meanwhile, has launched the Operator Framework alongside the Kubernetes open source community, to aid the building of applications on the platform. The move builds on Operators, an initiative put together in 2016 as a method of packaging, deploying and managing Kubernetes applications.

“We believe that the new Operator Framework represents the next big step for Kubernetes by using a baseline of leading practices to help lower the application development barrier on Kubernetes,” a blog post reads. “The project delivers an SDK and the ability to manage app installs and updates by using the lifecycle management mechanism, while enabling administrators to exercise operator capabilities on any Kubernetes cluster.”

Read more: Why Kubernetes networking is hard – and what you can do about it

Multi-cloud is certainly a compelling trend – but according to new data from IDC, fewer than 10% of European organisations are fully on-board with a multi-cloud strategy.

The analyst firm argues that multiple cloud service usage will be an inevitability – but understanding and strategy from European firms varies wildly.

More than a third of firms polled overall (34%) said they had no plans to move workloads from current cloud providers in the coming 12 months. Yet for the UK market, 29% of respondents do have plans, with IDC noting UK businesses are much more fluid when it comes to multi-cloud.

In total, only 9% of organisations polled were considered multi-cloud ready, with IDC designating them as ‘pathfinders.’ 43% of respondents were designated as ‘travellers’ and 38% ‘pedestrians’; IDC argues that these middle organisations are stuck in the transition process from hybrid cloud environments. The remaining 10% were considered ‘bystanders’ – those unlikely to make moves in the space.

IDC adds that, while these results show reticence among European businesses, it is still relatively early days for assessing the ‘how’ and ‘where’. “While the perception of multi-cloud infrastructure as an end goal certainly resonates with European organisations, there remains uncertainty over what a multi-cloud strategy looks like and how this strategy should be disseminated within an organisation,” said Michael Ceroici, IDC research analyst for European multi-cloud infrastructure.

As regular readers of this publication will be aware, a major aspect of getting multi-cloud right is through security. Writing in March, Chintan Patel, CTO Office at Cisco, argued that while it is easier to deploy new IT services in a multi-cloud world, user visibility and behaviour suffers with it. “In order to obtain the level of control in a multi-cloud environment, it is essential to have the cloud controls and technologies in place to allow businesses to get the protection and visibility they need,” Patel wrote. “Businesses can no longer afford to be complacent when it comes to a multi-cloud security strategy.”

“Virtually all European enterprises will soon use multiple cloud services. The smart ones are already actively planning for those services to be benchmarked, price-compared, and selected against each other based on the workload need,” said Giorgio Nebuloni, IDC research director for European multi-cloud infrastructure.

“To get there, a central point of control based on software and potentially services is needed, as are strategic approaches to skillsets, processes, and data centre infrastructure.”