Amazon Web Services (AWS) is to move to a per-second billing model for its EC2 and EBS services from October 2.

The move aims to go one step ahead of its competitors, Microsoft, Google et al, who have been since 2013 been utilising per-minute billing for its services.

Given the developments of products such as AWS Lambda, among others in the serverless realm, it makes sense to make the shift. AWS said many of its customers had been ‘dreaming up applications’ for EC2 that utilised a larger number of instances in a short space of time.

The move will affect usage of Linux instances launched in on-demand, reserved and spot form, as well as Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) and AWS Batch.

Jeff Barr, AWS chief evangelist, noted in a post announcing the news the price aspect is just the start of what can be achieved with per-second billing.

“I believe that this change will inspire you to innovate and to think about your compute-bound problems in new ways,” he wrote. “How can you use it to improve your support for continuous integration? Can it change the way that you provision transient environments for your dev and test workloads? What about your analytics, batch processing, and 3D rendering?

“One of the many advantages of cloud computing is the elastic nature of provisioning or deprovisioning resources as you need them,” Barr added. “By billing usage down to the second, we will enable customers to level up their elasticity, save money, and customers will be positioned to take advantage of continuing advances in computing.”

You can read the full blog post here.

“CIOs are starting to wake up to the fact that there’s going to be multiple clouds to address multiple workloads and applications,” says Thor Culverhouse, CEO of Seattle-based Skytap, “which tells me the war around the cloud hasn’t even started.”

It makes for an interesting viewpoint, considering the assertion that the market is all but sewn up. Indeed, Gartner, in its most recent Magic Quadrant for cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), has placed Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft on their own as leaders for the second year running.

But Skytap, who made its debut appearance in the niche players section this year, says its area of the market is not covered by AWS and Microsoft – and could even be larger than where the two behemoths are looking.

Founded in 2006, the company, in its own words, offers an alternative to the mindset of ‘forcing customers to rewrite their traditional applications’ for migrating to the public cloud. With Jeff Bezos – yes, you read that right – as its first investor, the original business plan, of renting applications online, was influenced around virtualisation more than cloud. By the time Culverhouse had joined as chief exec in 2013, however, the focus had changed to workloads and applications which couldn’t easily be lifted and shifted into the cloud.

“Investors, and myself, felt like the real pot of gold was really around more traditional legacy workloads in the enterprise that were never really designed to live in what I would call cloud-native platforms, like AWS, Azure, and Google Compute Engine,” Culverhouse tells CloudTech. “If you think about the market itself, they tend to focus really on network application development, so the majority of their wins – almost all of their revenue – is really people building brand new applications that are going to take advantage of their services.”

The market appears to be getting used to this idea. Last month, as this publication reported, Skytap secured $45 million in a funding round led by Goldman Sachs, in a round which Culverhouse says will ‘likely’ be the company’s last before potentially going public. More than sorting out a few unwieldy apps, mind you; the Skytap CEO adds the entire software development lifecycle is sped up for businesses on board.

“The vast majority of enterprises run their core applications either on x86, AIX, so many on mainframe… and so the breadth of those applications can be lifted and shifted into Skytap relatively easily,” says Culverhouse. “Now they can start to do things like agile, and DevOps, and CI/CD, which is basically changing the way they develop software.

“You’re effectively improving the infrastructure and you can also improve the process by which you develop software,” he adds.

As a result, despite the company’s position in the cloud IaaS Magic Quadrant, Skytap does not see itself as a competitor of the AWS and Azures. “What we end up competing with is the on-premise world,” says EMEA general manager Chris Griggs. Culverhouse says the company’s offering is “somewhere between a PaaS and an IaaS”, and that its IP sits on top of the raw infrastructure – the company has an OEM reseller partnership with IBM also utilising its bare metal.

“We like it when we walk into an account and they’ve already started using Amazon and Azure, because it tells us they’ve done the evaluation, they know where the applicability of those services are, and therefore, where the applicability of our services are,” he says. “The more educated the market is, the more educated the CIO is, the better it is for all of us.”

That said, Culverhouse adds there was ‘no question it was an important day’ for Skytap being named in the Quadrant – but there is still a long way to go. “This is an ongoing process as they get to know us better,” he says of Gartner. “I think their criteria is more raw infrastructure as a service oriented, and we’re effectively a service that sits on top of [that] infrastructure.”

The Skytap CEO also takes umbrage with the term ‘niche’ – and it is here that the biggest opportunity reveals itself. “If you think about niche, it sort of suggests that it’s small in nature,” says Chulverhouse, “but Gartner will also tell you in a variety of other reports by 2020 76% of the multi-trillion dollar IT spend is still going to be on-prem, both applications and infrastructure.

“That is not a niche; that’s absolutely huge,” he adds.

Read more: Skytap secures $45m in funding round led by Goldman Sachs

It is something the industry already suspects, but new figures confirm it: the traditional data centre infrastructure market has nosedived over the past two years as private and public cloud roars on.

The numbers (below) come from analysis by Synergy Research, whose latest data shows spending on traditional, non-cloud data centre hardware and software had dropped 18% between the second quarters of 2015 and 2017.

The public cloud market grew 35% during the same period, while the private cloud – or cloud-enabled – grew 16%. The overall market grew by just 5%, to a total now of more than $30 billion.

Leaders in public cloud data centre infrastructure, aside from original design manufacturers (ODMs), are Cisco, Dell EMC and HPE with Cisco on top, while the same three companies lead the private cloud market alongside Microsoft, with Dell EMC out in front.

Each vendor – HPE in servers, Dell EMC for storage, Cisco in networking and Microsoft in server OS – has specific expertise and leadership with different product segments of the market.

“With cloud service revenues continuing to grow by over 40% per year, enterprise SaaS revenue growing by over 30%, and search/social networking revenues growing by over 20%, it is little wonder that this is all pulling through continued strong growth in spending on public cloud infrastructure,” said John Dinsdale, research director and a chief analyst at Synergy.

“While some of this is essentially spend resulting from new services and applications, a lot of the increase also comes at the expense of enterprises investing in their own data centres.

“One outcome is that public cloud build is enabling strong growth in ODMs and white box solutions, so the data centre infrastructure market is becoming ever more competitive,” Dinsdale added.

Investment in the Nordic data centre market has hit $3 billion (£2.2bn) over the past 18 months, while the combined power for third party facilities and hyperscales is approaching 800MW for the region.

That is the key finding from a new report by BroadGroup, whose third Data Centers Nordic report has found that the region, noted by data centre and server operators due to its naturally cooler climes, is set fair for more investment by US and Asia-based vendors.

Third party m2 space will increase by more than 26% by the end of next year, with BroadGroup saying the landscape will be ‘significantly changed’ by a variety of factors during that time, from M&A activity, to new investors, and promotional initiatives by Nordic countries.

The report covers eight countries in total. Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden are fairly obvious, but BroadGroup also assesses Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, with the three Baltic states owning 260 third party data centre facilities between them.

Plenty of reports have hit the news in recent months around investments from providers in the Nordics. Last month, a development from Kolos hit the news as being the world’s biggest data centre, build in the Arctic Circle in the Norwegian town of Ballangen. IBM is just one example of a company which has expanded to this region, building a cloud data centre in Oslo this time last year, while in Sweden a battle to give data centre providers reduced electricity rates was won late last year after new legislation was confirmed.

“Given the outlook for available renewable energy attached to greenfield and brownfield sites across the region, with more than 5500MW, the outlook for the end of 2018 and beyond is extremely positive,” said Philip Low, chairman of BroadGroup.

“As the Nordic markets are now much more integrated with Europe, existing colocation and content distribution hub opportunities, the emergence of edge [computing], fixed price contracts for renewable energy and further investment in connectivity present attractive opportunities for enterprises deploying IT assets globally.”

You can find out more about the report (subscribers) here.

Microsoft has announced the launch of ‘confidential computing’ in Azure, claiming to be the first public cloud provider to offer encryption of data while in use.

The project, for which a variety of Microsoft teams have been working for four years, is similar in scope to the Coco Framework, Redmond’s confidential computing blockchain initiative.

“Despite advanced cybersecurity controls and mitigations, some customers are reluctant to move their most sensitive data to the cloud for fear of attacks against their data when it is in-use,” Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Azure CTO wrote in a company blog post. “With confidential computing, they can move the data to Azure knowing that it is safe not only at rest, but also in use from [various] threats.”

The threats Russinovich outlined included classic scenarios; malicious insiders with administrative privileges, as well as hackers and malware exploiting bugs in operating systems. The platform Microsoft is building enables developers to take advantage of different trusted execution environments (TEE) – which ensure there is no way to view data from the outside – without having to change their code.

“We see broad application of Azure confidential computing across many industries including finance, healthcare, AI and beyond,” Russinovich wrote. “In finance, for example, personal portfolio data and wealth management strategies would no longer be visible outside of a TEE. Healthcare organisations can collaborate by sharing their private patient data, like genomic sequences, to gain deeper insights from machine learning across multiple data sets without risk of data being leaked to other organisations.

“In oil and gas, and IoT scenarios, sensitive seismic data that represents the core intellectual property of a corporation can be moved to the cloud for processing, but with the protections of encrypted-in-use technology,” Russinovich added.

You can find out more here.

Oracle has announced it has joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) at the platinum level, boosting its push for Kubernetes with new open source product releases.

The foundation, whose role is to help sustain containers and microservices architectures, said Oracle’s ‘key role will help define the future of enterprise cloud.’

“CNCF technologies such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, gRPC and OpenTracing are critical parts of both our own and our customers’ development toolchains,” said Mark Cavage, vice president of software development at Oracle. “Together with the CNCF, Oracle is cultivating an open container ecosystem built for cloud interoperability, enterprise workloads and performance.”

Oracle becomes the third such vendor to sign up to the CNCF in a matter of weeks, after Amazon Web Services (AWS) confirmed its participation earlier this month and Microsoft did so in July. The cast list of the CNCF now reads like a who’s who of cloud computing, with Oracle the last holdout among the first and second tier players.

Alongside this, Oracle is releasing Kubernetes on Oracle Linux, as well as open sourcing a Kubernetes installer for its cloud infrastructure. “Developers gain unparalleled simplicity for running their cloud native workloads on Oracle,” as the company put it.

This is one of various initiatives Oracle has recently been putting into place regarding open source. The company announced in June it was making investments into Kubernetes, with a blog post from the developer team saying at the time: “Oracle is investing in Kubernetes first and foremost as a way to deploy and operate our new cloud services. We think our understanding of operating Kubernetes will translate into value for the community as we turn our real-world experience into action.” In the same month, Oracle also announced three new open source container utilities.

The company’s most recent financial results, in June, saw total cloud revenues hit $1.36 billion (£1.06bn), or 13% of overall revenue, with Larry Ellison predicting its platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) businesses will outperform the software arm in due course.

With Q118 earnings set to be announced later today, Wallace Witkowski, writing for MarketWatch, said the company is “expected to mark a major milestone in its transition from traditional software sales to the cloud.”

Editor’s note: This story will be updated later with the announcement of Oracle’s financial results.

If you want to get ahead – and get better paid – in the cloud game, then chuck in the sysadmin role and become a DevOps engineer instead.

That’s the primary finding from Puppet’s 2017 DevOps Salary Report, which finds that 66% of DevOps engineers and 69% of software engineers in the US take home pay packets of more than $100,000 per year – up 2% and 3% respectively from the year before – while sysadmins on six figures were only at 31%.

Naturally, this disparity lent itself among the 3,200 technology professionals polled to job titles themselves. DevOps engineer was the most popular overall with software engineer in second place, with the roles reversed for the US. System administrator was the fifth most cited occupation, behind system developer or engineer and architect.

Not surprisingly, more experienced respondents were more likely to be earning the bigger bucks, with more than half (56%) in the industry for between 15 and 20 years making more than $100k, a figure that rises to 63% for 20 years’ experience or more.

When it came to the number of servers employees were responsible for, there was a general trend of bigger is better. Only 27% of those managing fewer than 100 servers earned six figure salaries, compared with 52% for those managing 100,000 or more. Only 6% of respondents identified themselves as female with a ‘small number’ identifying as non-binary – a rise, albeit small, on the previous year’s survey.

“As more enterprises fundamentally change the way they deliver IT services and software to users around the globe in support of digital transformation efforts, they are also challenged with finding the right talent to help increase deployment speed and innovation,” said Alanna Brown, Puppet director of product marketing. “To address these issues, they are adopting new processes, technologies and cultural norms to keep pace with the rapid rate of change.

“This year’s salary report reveals that organisations are investing more heavily in talent and positions that better support DevOps as they rush to transform their businesses and remain competitive,” added Brown.

You can read the full report here (registration required).

Rackspace has announced it is to acquire managed service provider Datapipe in what is being touted as the ‘biggest acquisition by far’ in the company’s history.

The company added it would make Rackspace the world’s leading provider of multi-cloud managed services, managed public cloud services across all the hyperscale infrastructure vendors, and – by a larger margin – the managed hosting and private cloud market.

“As we’ve learned more about one another, leaders of Rackspace and Datapipe have been struck by how similar our two companies are,” wrote Joe Eazor, Rackspace CEO in a company blog post announcing the news. “Rackspace intends to build on the industry leadership the two companies have established in reliability and support to create a new level of end to end customer experience.”

The acquisition once completed – sometime in the fourth quarter, Rackspace added – will overtake the previous buyout of TriCore Solutions, announced back in May, in size. “When Rackspace went private late last year, we did so mainly because, at this point in our history, we need to make major, long-term investments in the capabilities our customers are demanding,” added Eazor. “And that’s just what we’re doing.”

Since Eazor took over, around the same time as the TriCore acquisition was announced, the company’s focus on managed cloud services has been clear. Writing his debut blog as CEO, Eazor noted: “Thanks to the strategy Rackspace adopted a few years ago, it’s got the early lead in the managed cloud space. My goal here is to build on that foundation and make us the world’s preeminent IT services company.”

The acquisition of Datapipe therefore plays very nicely into this trend. The company has been featured in this publication on various occasions, not least when the British Medical Journal (BMJ) used Datapipe to transform its infrastructure. As CloudTech noted when telling this story in September last year, the BMJ’s environment was not the easiest to work with; one release per month changed to up to four releases per day, with content and services built and delivered around APIs as opposed to weekly batch file transfers.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Picture credit: Rackspace Afterparty TechStars Boulder 2011, by Andrew Hyde, used under CC BY / Modified from original

If you’re taking the plunge and migrating to cloud technologies, make sure you do a full return on investment (ROI) assessment – as companies who do are almost 50% more successful in realising cost savings.

This is the key finding from a new study issued by global IT provider Unisys. The report, conducted by IDG, polled 400 IT and business executives across eight countries and found four out of five respondents expected cost savings from adopting the cloud. An even higher number (82%) of those polled who had conducted formal ROI analysis up front said cost savings matched their expectations, compared to only 57% who had not previously assessed ROI.

In a similar vein, more than two thirds (68%) of respondents said they had contracted with a third party for cloud migration, with almost three quarters (72%) using the partner for cloud strategy and planning, and an even higher number still (79%) saying this partnership had helped their organisation achieve expected cost savings.

Organisations report the number of on-premises data centres continues to go down, from 43% usage per organisation today to 29% by 2019, with private cloud usage up to 28% from 20% and public cloud up to 21% from 18% in the same timeframe. As is often the case with such surveys, the questions also focused on the benefits of cloud computing, with improved disaster recovery and business continuity, agility and flexibility, more efficient storage, reduced capital costs and standardisation of IT all cited.

“Migration offers a plethora of cloud options…however, those choices can create unforeseen complexities that can easily derail expectations,” said Paul Gleeson, vice president of cloud and infrastructure services at Unisys. “Those organisations that plan their cloud migration carefully, drawing on the expertise of established partners where it makes the most strategic sense, are the ones best positioned to realise operational, financial and competitive success from cloud transformation.”

Enterprise interest in container technologies continue to grow, but adoption has not gone up with it, according to a report from the Cloud Foundry Foundation.

The Global Perception Study report, which polled more than 540 enterprise developers across different industries, found that only 25% of organisations polled were using containers in 2017, up only 3% from 22% in 2016. There was, however, a greater uptick in companies evaluating options, at 42% from 31% in 2016.

Perhaps this is somewhat to be expected; as the report notes, “nothing in enterprise moves as quickly as anyone predicts when it comes to the adoption of the latest and greatest technologies.” But the conversation, Cloud Foundry argues, is shifting from ‘why’ containers to ‘how’, which will drive larger scale adoption as organisations move forward.

When it comes to individual solutions, the report assessed several sources of information for the answers and found a conflicted data set. Sysdig found 43% of its users run Kubernetes, compared to 9% for Mesos and 7% for Docker Swarm, while Evans’ cloud development survey last year put Mesos at 44%, Kubernetes at 18% and Docker Swarm at 17%.

“Anecdote might lead us to believe the world already runs on containers, but the reality remains: enterprises continue to lag behind,” the report notes. “Increasingly, though, orchestration tools are not the problem. Companies have more mature options than ever before, with a particular interest in Kubernetes.”

In June, the Cloud Foundry Foundation saw Microsoft join its ranks as a gold member, with the Redmond giant announcing the launch of Azure Container Instances (ACI) a month later having also joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

This is a reasonable way of noting the technology’s rise – and it is starting to pervade the enterprise level, as Marco Ceppi, Ubuntu product strategist at Canonical wrote for this publication in August. “We see a lot of small to medium organisations adopting container technology as they develop from scratch, but established enterprises of all sizes, and in all industries, can channel this spirit of disruption to keep up with the more agile and scalable new kids on the block,” Ceppi wrote.

“In the 2016 Container Report we saw the excitement around containers and their potential – yet this excitement was constrained by the complex challenges of deploying, managing and orchestrating containers at scale,” said Abby Kearns, Cloud Foundry executive director in a statement. “In our follow up one year later, we see the same steady growth in interest but actual adoption of containers has still failed to accelerate.

“We believe the gradual or even glacial adoption of containers in production reflects more on the central challenge we pointed to in the Container Report – the challenges of container management are real, and loom larger at scale,” added Kearns.

You can read the full Cloud Foundry report here (registration required).