Google has announced the launch of GPUs attached to preemptible VMs, offering a 50% discount – but with a catch.

As with the preemptible VMs, first announced in 2015 but with prices significantly lowered in August last year, resources can be used for a maximum of 24 hours. In addition, Google Compute Engine can shut them down with a 30 second warning. The ideal place for these instances is distributed, fault-tolerant workloads – hence the substantial discount.

Users will be able to attach NVIDIA K80 and NVIDIA P100 GPUs to preemptible VMs for $0.22 and $0.73 per GPU hour respectively.

Google adds that the preemptible GPUs will be “a particularly good fit for large-scale machine learning and other computational batch workloads as customers can harness the power of GPUs to run distributed batch workloads at predictably affordable prices.”

As is always the way with these announcements, Google rolled out a happy customer – in this instance, healthcare technology provider Silicon Therapeutics. “Preemptible GPU instances from CSP give us the best combination of affordable pricing, easy access and sufficient scalability,” said CSO Woody Sherman. “Preemptible GPU instances have advantages over the other discounted cloud offerings we have explored, such as consistent pricing and transparent terms.

“This greatly improves our ability to plan large simulations, control costs and ensure we get the throughput needed to make decisions that impact our projects in a timely fashion,” added Sherman.

You can find out more in a blog post here.

SolarWinds, an IT management software provider, has announced the acquisition of software as a service (SaaS) firm Loggly to deepen its cloud software engineering and analytics expertise.

Loggly, founded in 2009, offers a SaaS-based, unified log monitoring and log analytics product. The company has received six funding rounds in total, the most recent being a series D of $11,500,000 (£8.5m) in June 2016. The company was named in a 2015 report from Skyhigh Networks as one of the fastest growing cloud services, based on anonymised data of more than 15 million global enterprise users.

The acquisition will see Manoj Chaudhary, CTO and VP engineering at Loggly, and Vito Salvaggio, VP product, join SolarWinds as leaders in engineering and product, while other members of the development, operations, support, sales and marketing teams will also transition.

“Rapidly visualising vast amounts of data through log analytics is absolutely critical to solving many problems in today’s diverse, complex cloud-application and microservices environments,” said Christoph Pfister, executive vice president of products at SolarWinds. “Adding Loggly to our industry-leading portfolio will empower customers to accelerate their time-to-insight and solve problems faster, with our usual, disruptive affordability.

“Building on these strengths, we will continue investing in Loggly to innovate and extend its value to customers, while integrating its capabilities with our other cloud offerings to address even broader needs,” added Pfister.

SolarWinds already has a log monitoring product in place in the form of Papertrail. The company added it will continue investing to innovate and enhance Loggly, and ‘advances SolarWinds’ strategy to deliver comprehensive, simple, and disruptively affordable full-stack monitoring solutions built upon a common, seamlessly integrated, SaaS-based platform’, as the company put it.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The global cloud computing market is now worth $180 billion in vendor revenues with the market still growing by 24% annually, according to the latest note from Synergy Research.

The industry is put into six different buckets. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), the first, remains the fastest growing sector, with 47% growth, and – as this publication has long since explored – Amazon and Microsoft at the top of the tree. The second fastest growing area was enterprise software as a service (SaaS), at 31%, with Microsoft and Salesforce the leading vendors.

The weakest growing areas were private and public cloud, led by Dell EMC/HPE and Cisco/Dell EMC respectively, while unified communications as a service (UCaaS) gained just over 20% annual growth, with RingCentral and Mitel the leading vendors, and hosted private cloud hit almost 30% led by IBM and Rackspace.

“We tagged 2015 as the year when cloud became mainstream and 2016 as the year when cloud started to dominate many IT market segments. In 2017, cloud was the new normal,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy.

“Major barriers to cloud adoption are now almost a thing of the past, with previously perceived weaknesses such as security now often seen as strengths,” Dinsdale added.

“Cloud technologies are now generating massive revenues for cloud service providers and technology vendors and we forecast that current market growth rates will decline only slowly over the next five years.”

Synergy has obviously been busy during the end of year break, issuing three research notes this week. According to their analysis, the data centre market saw record mergers and acquisitions in 2017, ahead of 2015 and 2016’s totals combined, while hosted cloud and collaboration revenues remain the quickest growing area of enterprise IT infrastructure.

Leading cloud providers have said they are aware of and working on securing systems after the disclosure of two major chip-level security vulnerabilities earlier this week.

As first reported by The Register, a ‘fundamental’ design flaw in Intel’s processor chips, dubbed Meltdown, was followed by another flaw, called Spectre, found in chips from Intel, AMD and ARM. The latter was confirmed by Google researchers in a blog post published yesterday.

The key to the vulnerability is through a processor technique called ‘speculative execution’. In other words, modern processors can estimate what task needs to be done next, and if it is correct, then is executed in a much quicker time than otherwise. As the Google blog notes, malicious actors ‘could take advantage of speculative execution to read system memory that should have been inaccessible’, such as passwords or encryption keys.

So how does this affect cloud providers? A blogger going under the name of Python Sweetness asserted on January 1 that the vulnerability will affect major cloud providers. “There are hints the attack impacts common virtualisation environments including Amazon EC2 and Google Compute Engine,” the post reads.

In a security bulletin, Amazon Web Services (AWS) said ‘all but a small single-digit percentage of instances across the Amazon EC2 fleet’ were already protected. Microsoft said in a statement that it was “in the process of deploying mitigations to cloud services”, as well as releasing security updates. Google issued a bulletin for its cloud products with Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Dataflow and Cloud Dataproc requiring updates, while a statement from Josh Feinblum, chief security officer at DigitalOcean, recommended server reboots for users and promised urgent maintenance if this was unsuccessful.  

A statement from Intel issued yesterday said the company was committed to product and customer security and was working with AMD, ARM, and others ‘to develop an industry-wide approach to resolve this issue promptly and constructively.’

“Intel has begun providing software and firmware updates to mitigate these exploits,” the statement added. “Contrary to some reports, any performance impacts are workload-dependent, and, for the average computer user, should not be significant and will be mitigated over time.”

AMD also issued an update, stressing the importance that the research was performed in lab conditions and the threat had not been seen in the public domain.

New figures from Synergy Research around the state of the enterprise IT infrastructure market show that hosted and cloud collaboration revenues continue to grow quickly – with Microsoft at the top of the tree.

The overall market however – including data centre servers, switchers and routers, on-premise collaboration, network security and WLAN – has Cisco at its front with HPE behind. Aside from data centre servers and cloud collaboration, where it is second behind Microsoft, Cisco leads in the other segments and has a 26% overall market share, according to Synergy. HPE has 11% market share across the six segments.

Not surprisingly, hosted and cloud collaboration remains the fastest growing segment of enterprise IT infrastructure, with a growth rate of more than 12% year on year. WLAN, switchers and routers and network security also grew above the average rate, with the data centre server market flatlining and on-premise collaboration going backwards.

Other cited vendors include Dell EMC, with second position in data centres servers, Huawei for switches and routers, and Check Point for network security.

“Despite a burgeoning public cloud market, enterprise IT infrastructure spending was still on the rise in 2017 and will be for the next five years,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy founder and chief analyst in a statement. “The focus of that spending is changing, however, with a growing emphasis on hosted solutions, subscription-based business models and emerging technologies.

“Those changes will continue to present challenges for incumbent vendors and opportunities for new market entrants.”

Figures issued by Synergy earlier this week focused on the data centre market, with M&A deals for 2017 outpacing 2015 and 2016 combined.

The appetite for data centre deals in 2017 increased dramatically, with 48 transactions at $20 billion overall, according to Synergy Research.

The total surpasses those of 2015 and 2016 combined, which produced 45 deals – 28 in 2016 and 17 in 2015 – at just over $15bn. What’s more, Synergy adds, 2018 will start with $2.6bn of deals which have been agreed but are yet to close. In this category, for instance, would be Equinix’s planned acquisition of data centre provider Metronode for $1.035bn AUD (£594m), announced in December.

Not surprisingly, Equinix is, alongside Digital Realty, the largest investor in the space. A deal which ran into this year having been announced in December 2016 was the buying of 29 data centres from Verizon for $3.6 billion. Excluding Metronode, between 2015 and 2017 Equinix and Digital Realty have made acquisitions totalling $19 billion between them, with the former focusing on a global strategy and the latter concentrating on the US and Europe.

Digital Realty spent the most on one deal in 2017, its $7.6bn acquisition of DuPont Fabros. In comparison, the largest acquisition in 2015 and 2016 was Equinix buying TelecityGroup for $3.8bn.

John Dinsdale, research director and a chief analyst at Synergy Research, said the shift was being driven by enterprises giving less priority to owning data centre assets – the Verizon case being a good example – and more priority to improving their IT capabilities.

“That shift is driving huge growth in outsourcing, whether it is via cloud services, or use of colocation facilities, or sale and leaseback of data centres,” said Dinsdale, adding: “The dramatic growth of cloud providers is also driving changes in the data centre industry, as data centre operators strive to help them rapidly increase scale and global footprint.

“We expect to see much more data centre M&A over the next five years.”

It’s been another exciting year in the cloud computing space. From blockchain, to AI, to containers and microservices, the technological developments have made for interesting reading – as well as the continued pushes by the leading companies in the ecosystem.

Below, CloudTech has put together five trends which shaped 2017, featuring some of the biggest stories of last year, as well as a series of predictions from executives on what they expect from 2018.

2017

The AWS/Azure competition – with Alibaba and Oracle on their tail?

2016 ended with the race for IaaS success pretty much all over: Amazon Web Services (AWS) at #1, Microsoft Azure at #2, and a panoply of tech giants fighting for the bronze medal.

How did last year end? No change really, but a few interesting developments nevertheless took place. First off was the rise of Alibaba into a major cloud player in 2017. Gartner put the company in third place for public cloud IaaS back in September, with the company itself passing one million paying cloud customers. CEO Daniel Zhang said in November the cloud business “continues to defy gravity”.

Oracle’s cloud push continued at some strength in 2017. Financial results appeared strong – $1.5bn in total cloud revenues for the most recent quarter albeit with some concerns about guidance – but at the heart of the strategy was the first fully autonomous database cloud. Larry Ellison said at an event in October it was “the most important thing [the company has] done in a long, long time.” Digs at AWS were not backwards in coming forwards from the Oracle side in 2017, although one was queried in April by AWS distinguished engineer James Hamilton.

Despite all this however, AWS remains well ahead of Azure, which remains well ahead of the chasing pack. In July AWS hit $4.1bn in revenue, contributing almost 11% of Amazon’s overall revenue. Synergy Research described the numbers of the big players as “spectacular”, continuing to grow ahead of a larger, maturing market. A study from Cowen in June found how the competition between AWS and Azure bolsters innovation and growth in the wider public cloud ecosystem. Yet 2017 also saw both companies working together for one project: Gluon, an open artificial intelligence platform.

Google beefs up its game under Diane Greene

Whither Google, one may ask after reading the previous four paragraphs? The truth is the search giant’s cloudy initiatives in 2017, under the leadership of Diane Greene, deserves a spot of its own.

The company’s Next conference, in San Francisco back in March, saw a host of customers announced representing a serious step up; Verizon (ranked #13 on the most recent Fortune 500), Colgate-Palmolive (#174) and eBay (#300). What’s more, the number of its ‘big’ cloud deals – designated at $500,000 or more – tripled year over year, according to CEO Sundar Pichai in July.

Writing for sister publication Enterprise CIO, Nick McQuire, VP enterprise research at CCS Insight, was suitably impressed by the ‘dizzying’ total of announcements and the ‘speed of progress’ the company was making at Next. “Just two years ago many argued Google lacked relevancy and credibility in the enterprise market,” wrote McQuire. “Today, however, Google’s critics are quieting.”

The rise of blockchain in a cloudy context

It’s official: 2017 was the year of blockchain and thousands of other assorted cryptocurrencies. At the start of the year CloudTech spoke with Jessica Groopman – now at Kaleido Insights but then principal analyst at Tractica – about a research report the latter had published. The report was early in identifying how blockchain technologies could revolutionise enterprise applications. At the end of January, Pat McCool of Market Gravity, writing for this publication, noted how collaborative cloud technologies were the forerunner and how the two overlapped. “Google Docs is to Microsoft Word what blockchain is to a traditional ledger system,” as the article put it.

The two pieces promised much – and delivered. In June, this publication ran a picture exclusive following a further research report, from industry advisory group Crowd Companies, on how blockchain will affect 10 industries, from energy to education, and from food to pharmaceuticals.

Artificial intelligence ‘set to finally break through’

If 2017 was the year of blockchain, then AI was not too far behind it. You couldn’t move for executives talking about how AI and automation were going to supercharge their projects in 2017. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, took to the stage at IBM’s InterConnect in March to wax lyrical. “When you look at things like machine learning, machine intelligence, things like deep learning, there’s an acceleration going on,” he told attendees. “I can’t believe how fast artificial intelligence is evolving and changing.”

Google? Check. “Google continues to lead the shift to AI driven computing,” CEO Sundar Pichai told analysts in July. “It’s our focus on infusing our products and platforms with the power of machine learning and AI that’s driving our success.” Microsoft? But of course. Satya Nadella told analysts in July: “The core currency of any business going forward will be the ability to convert their data into AI that drives competitive advantage.” Not to mention the previously-noted Gluon project between Microsoft and AWS.

In August, McKinsey’s Global Institute Study found that the current rate of investment in AI is three times the external investment growth since 2013.

Kubernetes on the march – and the big boys take note of the CNCF

In January 2017, Rob Greenwood, technical director at cloud consultancy firm Steamhaus, wrote in this publication about how the rise of Kubernetes represents “the next generation of cloud” – albeit with caveats around culture and development.

Fast forward 12 months, and one key trend has emerged. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a San Francisco-based outfit aimed at sustaining containers and microservices architectures, welcomed several high profile new members. Microsoft was the first to sign up in July, citing it as ‘another natural step’ on its open source journey, followed by AWS in August and Oracle in September.

2018?

Ross Mason, founder and CTO at MuleSoft:

“2018 will be the year that self-serve IT goes mainstream, as organisations look to become more agile by decentralising IT and empowering internal teams to drive more of their own innovation. One approach that will gain increasing popularity centres around IT creating an API marketplace, where the wider business can easily discover and reuse IT assets and capabilities.

“In the same way that Apple taught consumers ‘there’s an app for that’, IT teams will start to teach employees and partners that ‘there’s an API for that’. When the need arises for a new digital function, such as the ability to connect to a SaaS application, non-IT teams will learn to browse the API marketplace to see if that capability already exists rather than starting from scratch. For instance, analysts could find Tableau data sources for sales insights or developers could find customer data for use in mobile apps.

“As the marketplace organically grows, an application network will form, where digital building blocks can be plugged in and out as market conditions change.”

Rich Campagna, CEO at Bitglass:

"Organisations tend to adopt security measures in a reactive fashion. With the cloud's rapid rise to prominence, many enterprises still fail to close cloud security gaps. Even among informed, cloud-first firms, it is inevitable that a new vulnerability will be exploited in 2018 that will trigger a frenzy to secure data-in-transit, regardless of how that data is being transmitted.

“Many cloud security solutions are built to control employee access and limit data exposure that is the result of unauthorised access or sharing. However, this focus ignores the way in which cloud apps are increasingly sharing data with one another, via APIs. For example, massive amounts of sensitive information can be automatically transferred between Salesforce and several connected applications.

“As the connection is unseen and largely divorced from direct human involvement, little thought is typically given to securing these data flows. In the near future, data transmitted via API may find itself on systems or stored in apps that are vulnerable. Even if an enterprise has secured one cloud app, other connected apps may be readily exploited.”

Neil Stobart, global technical director at Cloudian:

“GDPR is going to be a major topic in 2018. Many organisations have not yet scratched the surface on meeting these regulations and with May 25 just around the corner, there are likely to be some hefty high-profile fines next year. The challenge for organisations is going to be interpreting what the new regulations mean to them and understanding how they can guarantee compliance.

“I think we will see a number of EU companies looking to service providers who offer public cloud services within EU-owned and regulated data centres and moving away from the American-owned providers – it will be very difficult to adhere to GDPR regulations and store data within American-owned public clouds due to the US Patriot Act.”

Issy Ben-Shaul, CEO and founder at Velostrata:

“The majority of enterprises that will migrate to cloud at scale will employ a multi-cloud strategy. More specifically, they will split their production workloads across more than one public cloud.
Enterprises don’t want to be locked in. If an enterprise can get significant cost reduction on infrastructure, this can mean millions of dollars in savings a year. Furthermore, different clouds offer different innovation and functionality. Enterprises would like to use best of breed for the different workloads to take advantage of what all clouds have to offer.

“Last, some industries (such as finance and healthcare, for example) are mandated to have an alternative cloud to run on. Others just want to make sure they can switch in case of security breaches, outages, or other issues that might affect a specific cloud.”

Amit Gupta, VP of product management at CloudPassage:

“Public cloud has matured significantly. Friction points have been addressed and there are now mature solutions available on the market. As a result, the migration of enterprise apps to public cloud will accelerate in 2018, as more CIOs and CISOs are ready to move their infrastructure to the cloud.

“As enterprises continue to adopt public cloud solutions, they’ll develop diversified cloud policies. Multi-cloud will be a key design requirement for CIOs and CISOs. Unified security standards will be paramount, as few enterprises will want separate security solutions across clouds.

“2018 will be a year of carnage for point security solutions. Though point solution approaches have worked in the past, security practitioners now have to support a multitude of platforms. Enterprises will look for comprehensive security solutions across multi-cloud environments in an attempt to future-proof their security. Point security solutions have reached the end of their usefulness.”

(c)iStock.com/MarkRubens

The upcoming holiday season certainly seems to have brought some festive cloudy cheer in one corner of the world, with two Australian cloud and data centre companies being acquired by Oracle and Equinix respectively.

Aconex, a Melbourne-based cloud software provider which aims to manage teams in the construction industry, has been bought by Oracle for $1.2 billion US (£899m) to create ‘the world’s most comprehensive cloud offering for managing all aspects of construction projects’, as Oracle puts it.

The Redwood giant already has offerings in this space under the umbrella of the Oracle Construction and Engineering Cloud. Oracle acquired Primavera, a project portfolio management (PPM) software provider, in 2008, with the company’s applications being used in a wide range of industries, including construction, while added to this mix last year was Textura, acquired by Oracle for $663m.

Leigh Jasper, Aconex founder and CEO, said the Aconex and Oracle businesses were ‘a great, natural fit and highly complementary in terms of vision, product, people and geography.’ “With the addition of Aconex, we significantly advance our vision of offering the most comprehensive cloud-based project management solution for this $14 trillion industry,” said Mike Sicilia, SVP and GM of Oracle’s construction and engineering global business unit.

A bit further up, in Sydney, data centre provider Metronode is to be acquired by Equinix for $1.035 billion AUD (£594m). The company has 10 data centres in seven locations across Australia, from Adelaide, to Brisbane, Canberra and Illawarra, with two in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney.

Equinix already has a presence in the latter two, with the company saying the acquisition will ‘further strengthen the leadership position of Equinix in the Asia-Pacific region and support its ongoing global expansion.’ The deal will bring the total number of global Equinix sites to 52 across five continents.

“With this acquisition, companies operating across Australia will have access to the largest network of highly interconnected data centres in the world,” said David Yuile, Metronode CEO. “Metronode is excited to become part of an industry-leading company and further help our customers to build their digital infrastructure and drive competitive advantage in the digital age.”

According to the most recent study from the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA), Australia dropped a place to be the fourth most cloud ready Asia Pacific nation. The country scored well in terms of privacy, broadband connectivity, freedom of information and intellectual property protection, but struggled in terms of international connectivity. Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and New Zealand had overtaken Australia for data centre risk.

Both deals are expected to close in the first half of 2018. You can find out more about the Oracle/Aconex deal here and the Equinix/Metronode acquisition here.

Oracle has announced its latest financial results with cloud again the backbone of success – although its stock slipped due to a struggling guidance.

Total cloud revenues were up 44% year over year to $1.5 billion, with software as a service contributing almost three quarters of that figure at $1.1bn, a yearly increase of 55%. Platform and infrastructure as a service was at $396 million, representing year over year growth of 21%. In total, cloud revenues represented 16% of Oracle’s total revenues, again up from 12% this time last year.

Proposed guidance for cloud revenue, including SaaS, PaaS and IaaS, was at between 21% and 25%, while Mark Hurd, Oracle co-CEO, said that the company expects to sell around $2 billion in enterprise software as a service revenues in the coming four quarters.

The announcement of BYOL – bring your own license – in September reaped dividends, according to co-CEO Safra Catz. “With BYOL, we are seeing a strong increase in our technology install base as customers renew their unlimited license agreement, investing more licenses and options and renew support,” said Catz, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “Because BYOL is now available and customers better understand their tradition options to move to the Oracle Cloud, technology new software license revenue is dramatically improving from the declines we were seeing previously.”

Catz added this trend was likely to continue as Oracle rolls out its long-awaited autonomous database – and this was the primary focus of CTO Larry Ellison’s remarks. The elimination of human labour and the price advantages – particularly when compared to Amazon – was nothing different from when Ellison took to the OpenWorld stage in October. The bullishness, however, remains. “We expect this innovative new technology to dramatically accelerate the growth of our PaaS and SaaS businesses and keep our database license business strong as well,” said Ellison.

Total revenues for Oracle in the most recent quarter were at $9.6bn, up 6%. You can read the full set of results here (pdf).

Two pieces of research have hit CloudTech HQ, both examining how the security of data is perceived – and which data is more private than others.

Information security provider Trustwave, in its ‘Value of Data Report’ published today, aimed to look at which data was most important to the 500 IT decision makers polled across five countries. On average, the per capita value of personally identifiable information (PII) in the US is more than double that of the UK – $1,820 and $843 respectively. The UK ended up having scantest regard for their data, behind Australia ($1,186), Japan ($1.040) and Canada ($1,025) respectively.

What’s more, PII is of greater import than all other types of data – in most sectors, anyway. 47% of respondents cited it as a high priority, compared with intellectual property (27%), payment card data (18%), with corporate email (6%) bringing up the rear. Healthcare and hospitality give the biggest priority to PII data, with average scores of 3.5 and 3.4 out of four respectively, while industrial companies and IT firms rank IP as most important.

Given this around how fiercely protected certain types of data are, findings from Kaspersky in another report released today make for particularly interesting reading. Polling more than 2,000 IT decision makers across Europe in organisations with more than 50 employees, fewer than three in five (55%) of respondents believe companies are looking after their personal data properly.

Almost three quarters (73%) said the security of their private data was important, while 67% admitted they were concerned about their information being hacked. A similar number (64%) said they were worried about how many organisations have access to their personal information.

Again, the UK does not come out in the best light when it comes to data security. Only 56% of IT decision makers trust organisations to keep hold of their data – a meagre number when compared to their equivalents in France (76%), but a little better than Germany (48%).

Both studies cited the importance of the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – an issue which this publication has covered in chapter and verse – in their findings. “Companies that fail to accurately value their data are unlikely to make the right decisions regarding the level of cyber security investments to protect that data and are those most likely to fall short of regulations, such as the GDPR coming into effect in 2018,” commented Ziv Mador, vice president of security research at Trustwave.

“Businesses should look to the managed security services business model so that they have the confidence that full data risk vigilance is applied to all types of confidential and valuable data by specialists in the industry.”