Category Archives: Amazon AWS

Amazon AWS, Cloud computing, News

Oracle Looks to Compete With Companies Like Amazon

Oracle has been working to establish itself as a major player in the cloud computing industry and is preparing to take on Amazon Web Services.  Oracle Executive Chairman Larry Ellison has said the company will offer online storage and customers will be able to have their applications run entirely on Oracle’s cloud network.

The new cloud service, called Oracle Cloud Platform, will be a lower cost alternative to Amazon Web Services and will contain automation to improve cost efficiency and faster processing. In addition, there will be 24 new cloud services such as Oracle Database, Oracle Integration and Oracle Process Cloud to increase Oracles presence in SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. These programs are designed to give users a better experience while increasing productivity, allowing Oracle to compete with the big names in cloud computing like Amazon. As an example of the cost differences between Oracle and Amazon, Ellison has said “Our new archive storage service goes head-to-head with Amazon Glacier and it’s one-tenth their price.”

 

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Also, Oracle Cloud Services has been growing rapidly. Ellison notes, “Oracle is growing really fast. We sold $426M worth of business in SaaS and PaaS last quarter, a 200 percent increase over the same quarter last year. That’s an industry record; no company has ever sold that much in just one quarter… Oracle is the only company on the planet that can deliver a complete, integrated, standards-based suite of services at every layer of the cloud. Those technology advantages enable us to be much more cost-effective than our competitors.”

So, while Amazon Web services may be the big name in cloud computing for now, Oracle is on the rise in the rapidly expanding industry.

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Amazon AWS, Cloud computing, Cloud Services

Google Discloses Cloud Information

Recently, google has been talking more about companies that utilize its cloud business as well as revealing information about its computing resources, which may be the largest on the planet, beating Amazon Web Services. This information includes Google’s ultra-fast fiber network, its big data resources, and the computers and software it has built for itself.

 

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The aim of these disclosures is to present Google as more fit to handle the biggest computational exercises as opposed to a company such as Amazon Web Services. This follows earlier moves by Google Cloud Platform to show off its data analysis capabilities.

Details like the ability to pass information between Europe and the United States in less than 100 milliseconds, and a practice of fully backing up user data in nine different locations, make google seem innovative and cutting-edge.

At an event on Tuesday, Google Cloud Platform will announce HTC as a customer. The company has utilized Google’s services to construct computing architecture that enables smartphone apps to update data fast and reliably to many devices at once, and appear efficient even when the phones are in areas of poor reception.

On Wednesday, it is expected that a Google executive will present a look at the overall network design. This includes key tools that enable large-scale management of computing devices around the globe. As the  senior director of engineering at HTC, John Song, claims, “We are managing two million to three million smartphones in this network. Google is the only player in cloud that owns lots of fiber-optic cable worldwide, and it replicates its users’ data in nine different places at all times.”

While Song did consider other companies lime Amazon and Microsoft, Google’s technical dedication made them stand out. Google crunches large amounts of data and has already begun to branch out specialties in areas such as genomics.  Google Cloud Platform currently has 90 points of presence, where a company’s computers get direct access to the Internet and a local telecommunications service provider, throughout the world compared to Amazons 53.
 

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Amazon AWS, Cloud Services, Collaboration, Microsoft

Microsoft Partnering With Accelerators To Give Startups Free Cloud Computing Credits

Microsoft has begun to partner with startup accelerators to gift startups that qualify for their BizSpark Plus program free cloud computing on their Azure platform. Beginning July 1, these startups will receive $10,000 a month in credits for one year. They will be able to apply through accelerators or incubators such as Techstars, ERA, MassChallenge, Seedcamp, and 1871.

Startups can use these credits to help alleviate stress related to cloud services. This includes Microsoft’s App Service (a set of tools designed to power mobile, Web and other applications) as well as infrastructure services like virtual machines and high-level services like Azure Machine Learning.

 

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In addition to the Azure credits, startups get access to free software like Office and Visual Studio, which is supported by Microsoft Ventures, a division of the company that works with startups. Startups that qualify for the BizSpark Plus program can also receive up to $750 in Azure credits from BizSpark’s own system.

Getting growing companies to use their products drives Microsoft’s core business growth. Many other cloud service providers, such as Amazon Web Services, also offer similar programs. In order to qualify for this program, startups must be less than 5 years old, be privately owned and have less then $1 million in annual revenue.

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Amazon AWS, Cloud computing, Cloud Services, Cloud Technology, hybrid cloud

Cisco Systems Inc. Announces Plans for Intercloud

A year ago, Cisco Systems Inc. announced its plans to invest one billion dollars in a cloud computing company to compete with six billion dollar Amazon Web Services. This plan was christened with the name Intercloud.

At the Cisco Live annual conference, the company revealed its plans to take the Intercloud a step forward. The Intercloud will not offer this cloud itself from its own data centers but will instead unify smaller cloud service providers onto a large platform of products that will be compatible with each other.  The Intercloud will prevent the smaller providers from losing customers to Amazon while allowing Cisco to continue to sell these providers hardware as they grow and develop. So, the aim of Intercloud is to enable these smaller providers and Cisco to unify and compete with Amazon.

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In addition, Cisco is opening the Intercloud marketplace, an app store that gives customers the tools, software, and technology they need to quickly and efficiently use their cloud. Cisco is partnering up with many tech companies like Hortonworks and Docker for this marketplace, which will 35 apps.

Cisco also announced the development of the Intercloud Fabric, which will allow customers to manage and control their data centers and Intercloud at the same time. The Inter cloud Fabric makes it easier for customers to manage what can be a very tough technology. Cloud service providers like Datalink, Peak 10, and Sungard Availability Services have already backed Cisco’s plan to develop the Intercloud Fabric.

Cisco insists that while Amazon Web Services may have a head start in the cloud computing market, cloud computing still has much room to grow, making it anyone’s game.

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Amazon AWS, Cloud Technology

Amazon Web Services Announces AWS Educate

Amazon Web Services announced the launch of AWS Educate, whose goal is to help students and teachers use real-world technology in classrooms. It is designed to help teachers seeking cloud-related course content, to teach them how to use the technology and to provide students with cloud-technology experience. This all comes with AWS credits.

 

In a press release, AWS said that their educational grants have been able to give teachers and students cloud technology that they have then used to put big ideas into motion. The primary goal of AWS Educate is to help more students learn cloud technology and how to use it to do this.

 

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Upon approval, the program will be free for institutions, students or educators to join. There will also be some benefits to using the program. Educators and students can apply for and redeem AWS credits for eligible services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon Simple Storage Service, Amazon Relational Database Service, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Glacier.

 

Educators and students will gain hands on experience through web-based training and self-paced labs. They will also have access to collaboration forums, AWS resources and other education contents including videos, case studies of customers, assignments, and webinars related to courses and practices.

 

This step for online education combined with more affordable education services can not only benefit the industry but also innovation.

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Amazon AWS, Cloud Services, Cloud Technology, Google, Microsoft

Amazon at the top of the Cloud Market

On Thursday, Amazon released their financial performance numbers, and they proved that Amazon is at the top of the cloud market compared to their competitors. Though they are known as an online marketplace, most of their stock market returns and revenue has come from renting processing power to start ups and enterprises.

 

Amazon was the leader in popularizing the cloud-computing field, and for a while they were the only ones to offer such services. This allowed for them to gain an advantage when others began to offer cloud-computing services. Others saw this field as an opportunity to tap into hundreds of billions of dollars. Microsoft has been especially committed to advancing in the field.

 

Though Amazon is the leader by a long shot, its resources are much lower than its competitors who have billions of dollars stashed away. Cloud computing demands heavy investments to set up data centers around the world as well as research and development if the field is to continue to grow and advance.

 

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In their first quarter reports, Amazon Web Services reported earnings of $1.57 billion and their operating income was $265 million. These statistics are strange coming from a company who often reports losses. This drove Amazon shares up by more than 6% in after-hours trading, and stock is at an all time high.

 

Microsoft, who ranks in at number 2 for cloud computing, reported that its annual revenue from its commercial cloud business would be $6.3 billion based on recent performance. Amazon predicted a similar figure of $5.16 billion. However, included in Microsoft’s number is revenue from different online applications. Azure, the Microsoft equivalent of Amazon’s cloud services, was estimated to be one-tenth of AWS.

 

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AWS got its start about a decade ago as a way to provide computing power to different divisions of Amazon. It has such a positive impact that it then was being offered to start-ups struggling to scale. After this, Amazon focused on expanding market share like it usually does, and it worked.

 

AWS was expected to rival the other businesses within Amazon. The cloud business has been growing by roughly 40% per year, which is twice the rate of the company overall.

 

Recently though, Google’s cloud service has been competing with AWS on pricing, which has been hurting profitability. Amazon has tried cutting prices many times at the expense of revenue growth. Their solution has been to provide other services such as database software and analytics. Amazon has also increased the number of resellers.

 

The big battle is going to be getting to the large companies that have the largest cloud computing needs.  Many companies just floated through the first years of the cloud, they were not ones to adopt the latest technology. They had compliance and contracting processes to follow. Now, cloud computing is commonplace at these companies.

 

Microsoft’s cloud business has doubled in the last year. This is great considering how they have been suffering from low PC sales. Analysts believe that Microsoft has the edge in obtaining larger companies for clients. This is because they might be able to convince them to use their cloud services in addiction to the Microsoft products they already use. For start-ups though, cloud computing and AWS are synonymous.

 

The cloud computing market is going to continue to grow, and no single company can cover all aspects of it. It will be exciting to see where things go from here.

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Amazon AWS, Cloud Services, Cloud Storage, Microsoft

Amazon and Microsoft Bring Public Cloud Storage to a New Level

Microsoft announced last week that Azure Premium Storage would soon become widely available. The week before this announcement, Amazon launched their Elastic File System, a new public storage cloud, at the AWS Summit. Both of these have helped the adoption of using the cloud.

 

Public storage is usually available in one of three types. Object storage is exposed via standard REST APIs to store and retrieve data. Block storage files are attached to a VM and then become available as local disks. Lastly, archival storage is an alternative to tape-based backing systems. This type of storage is used to store data that is not accessed very often. These three storage types address specific situations, but the network file share equal on the public cloud is missing from the equation.

 

Amazon’s Elastic File System (EFS) provides multiple E2 instances with low-latency, shared access to file systems. EFS provides flexible capacity that adjusts as files are added or removed and is accessible from both Microsoft Windows and Linus operating systems. Because it is available as a multi-user, shared service, it is being backed up with SSD-based storage. The data is copied over multiple zones for redundancy and availability. EFS integrates with Amazon’s security model based on Identity and Access Management (IAM) and VPC security groups. Managers can use standard file and directory permissions to control who can access the systems.

 

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Before this service, customers had to set up dedicated file servers, and this extra step resulted in higher operating and maintenance costs. With EFS, customers get a managed file sharing service backed by SLA, and they only pay for what they use each month. Amazon is charging $0.30 per GB per month, which is 10 times more expensive than Amazon S3 which costs $0.03 per GB per month (excluding access charges and bandwidth). However, while the data stored in S3 can be accessed from any application, the data stored on EFS is available only to those applications running in Amazon EC2. EFS is also primarily meant for administration and management.

 

Amazon is not the first to offer a shared file system like this. Microsoft’s Azure announced a file service last year. Customers look for performance matching when they decide to shift their workloads to the cloud. In recent years, public cloud providers tried to address this by moving to Solid State Drives (SSDs). This type of storage is expensive, but customers still prefer to run their workload sets on them. Microsoft’s Azure Premium Storage claims to offer the best public cloud storage for this type of work. The Premium Storage is aimed for Azure VM workloads that require constant IO performance and low latency. It needs to be attached to Azure DS Series VMs in the form of a Page Blob or Data Disk. Multiple disks can be attached to a VM in order to get up to 32 TB of storage per VM. With the right configuration, VMs can reach what is considered the best performance on the public cloud: 50,000 IOPS.

 

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The new storage can be used by both Windows and Linux VMs. The fee structure is as follows: 128GB for $17.92, 512GB for $66.56 and 1TB for $122.88.

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Amazon AWS, Cloud Storage

Amazon Cloud’s Unlimited Storage Plans

Amazon recently announced two unlimited storage plans for its cloud-based storage service Amazon Cloud Drive. The plan focuses on two points. The first is for those who want to store an unlimited amount of photos, called the Unlimited Photos Plan, which costs $11.99 per year. The second is called the Unlimited Everything Plan that costs $59.99 per year. There is also a free three-month trial, but at around $5 per month it is a great deal no matter how much or how little storage you actually will use.

 

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Previously, Amazon offered 5 GB of cloud storage for free and a tiered price structure for anything more. The most storage offered was 1TB for $500 per year. The new plan completely crushes these plans. Amazon has not said whether it will allow those on the 5GB free plan to stay that way or upgrade them to the lowest tier of the new plans, though the old plans are most likely going to be obsolete in the near future.

 

The Amazon Cloud Drive, unlike some other drive services, does not have proper desktop sync software. This means you have to manually select the files and folders you want to upload and then manually download them when you add them to another device through the cloud. It does, however, have an automatic photo backup apps for iOS and Android.

 

In comparison of the Amazon Cloud Drive:

  • Dropbox charges $10 for 1TB per month with 2GB available for free
  • Google charges $9.99 per month for 1TB and $299 for 30TB with 15GB free
  • Apple charges $19.99 per month for 1TB with 5GB free
  • Microsoft charges $6.99 per month for 1TB ad 15GB free

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Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Service, DropBox, Google, Google Drive, Microsoft, New Relic, Splunk

Amazon AWS Moving ‘Up the Stack’ to Applications

Amazon Web Services has entered the applications end of the cloud world with several recent releases:

  • Log monitoring and admin with Logs for CloudWatch
  • Collaboration and file sharing with Zocalo
  • Mobile application development with Cognito, Mobile Analytics and a new Mobile SDK

Logs for Cloudwatch works with the AWS CloudWatch network monitoring console to collect log file activities which can then be stored and analyzed in AWS Kinesis. The new tool automatically moves logs from instances and aggregates them into a central service where exceptions can be set directly on those applications.

Third-party products already that, and companies like Splunk, Logentries, and New Relic , which launched its new Insights real-time analytics tool just hours before the AWS news, will all be watching this very carefully (probably also very nervously).

The new AWS Zocalo collaboration/file-sharing plans are further proof that Amazon knows it must be a broad platform player to compete against two mega platform rivals – Google and Microsoft, as well as two younger, well-funded but more limited contenders in Dropbox and Box. Zocalo thus targets Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive, which are part of a much bigger portfolio of end-user products at those companies.

Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, Cloud computing, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, OpenStack, Research

Cloud Computing Entering Hypergrowth Phase

Cloud services and cloud platforms are now an undeniable part of the IT landscape. Forrester research indicates the shift has begun from exploration of cloud as a potential option, to rationalization of cloud services within the overall IT portfolio.

Cloud platforms, most notably Amazon Web Services, were only collectively $4.7 billion last year but are maturing quickly thanks to stronger recent solutions from traditional IT partners IBM, HP and Microsoft. The growth in use, maturity, and financial viability of public cloud platforms are proving their longstanding value as legitimate deployment options for enterprise applications. While not a one-for-one replacement for on-premise, hosting, or colocation, cloud platforms fit well as ideal deployment options for elastic and transient workloads built in modern application architectures.

For applications and services built in an agile mode with modern architectures, discrete cloud services, such as database, storage, integration and other standalone cloud middleware components, will empower developers by freeing them from the management and maintenance of these components and reduce overall deployment footprint and cost. They are also managed and enhanced by vendors as often as daily delivering new capabilities that can help a company maintain pace with the changing desires of an empowered customer base

As the largest clouds continue to invest in efficiencies that can only be achieved at their massive scales, the gulf between the cost efficiencies that can be had from the cloud and what is possible on-premise or through other outsourcing and hosting options will widen dramatically.

How Forrester came to these conclusions.