Category Archives: AWS

Amazon, AWS, News & Analysis, training, Vendor

Amazon Pop-up Loft programme to give start ups free web service training

amazon awsThe Amazon Web Services (AWS) Pop-up Loft programme has extended to London, with the opening of dedicated office space where start ups can get free support from cloud computing experts.

The Fore Street offices, close to the city of London, will be open until the end of October with the intention of bringing together developers, engineers, entrepreneurs and tech enthusiasts. AWS is offering personal help and guidance from a range of experts from both AWS and its partners, with the intention of encouraging entrepreneurs to build new systems on AWS or create their own startups. Once registered, visitors can participate in training courses, boot camps, self-paced labs, seminars or networking events.

The programme will feature a number of educational strands for would-be developers. Under the Ask an Architect initiative, AWS users can book appointment for a one to one meeting with an AWS systems expert to discuss technical questions about their AWS architecture, AWS features and cost optimization. The AWS Technical Bootcamps will be free one day training sessions run by experienced AWS instructors and systems designers, with the aim of giving delegates hands-on experience using a live environment with the AWS Management Console.

The free technical sessions are designed to cover development areas in which experienced instructors are rare in the cloud industry, such as mobile and gaming, databases, big data, compute and networking, architecture, operations, and security. AWS customers, partners and industrialists will also host evening sessions to share their experiences.

Startups will also get the chance to hear from customers, venture capitalists and incubators. Experts in venture capital, from Seedcamp and Techstars, will be on had to offer funding and business development guidance.

Intel, a supporter of the programme, will host talks and demonstrate new advances in Xeon processors and the Internet of Things. IT automation company Chef will advise on development operations.

Pop-up Loft London is the third initiative in the programme after previous events in San Francisco and New York as AWS aims to help local startups to grow their businesses using its cloud services.  Two thirds of the UK’s startups with valuations of over a billion dollars, including Skyscanner, JustEat, Powa, Fanduel and Shazam, now use AWS to run their services, Amazon claims.

“We’re bringing some of the brightest and most creative minds in the industry to help startups across the UK,” said Amazon CTO Werner Vogels.

apps, AWS, Content & Applications, digital publishing, Financial Times, Opinion, Public Cloud

The FT discusses app and cloud strategy

christy rossBCN caught up with Christy Ross, Head of Application and Publishing Services, Technology at the Financial Times, to get some insight into the company’s approach to digital publishing, mobile apps and the cloud.

BCN: From a digital perspective, what is the FT currently focussed on?

Christy Ross: Print has been written off for years now, no pun intended, but we’re still doing very well. However our main interest these days — rather than investing in print product – is in looking at how we can identify and supply other means of content delivery and then to actually make some money from that. Over the past few years we’ve done things to help us to maintain a direct relationship with our subscribers, such as building our own web app rather than place anything on the Apple Store or Play Store.

We have also done a lot around building APIs, so that we can provide distinct feeds of information to businesses, enabling them to come to us and say, ‘we are particualrly interested in these areas of news, or analysis, and will pay you for that’. Of course we’ve also seen mobile take off massively, so probably over 50% of our new subscription revenue comes from mobile, rather than fromm the browser or tablets.

Why is the FT able to be so confident when asking for revenue from its readers?

We’ve been quite lucky. We were one of if not the first UK newspaper to introduce a paywall. A lot has been made of the fact that paywalls ‘don’t work,’ and we’ve seen a number of other daily national papers put them up and pull them back down again, but we are very wedded to ours.

That’s because we are a niche product. If you like, we’re ‘the business world’s second newspaper.’ So in the UK someone will have, say, their Times or the Telegraph (or in the US they’ll have the Washington Post or the New York Times), but then their second newspaper will be the Financial Times. You can’t get our content anywhere else, particularly not the analysis we provide. While we are interested in breaking news and do follow it, our key differetnaitor is analysis and that comment of what is going on in the world and what it means long term. People aree able to use these insights in their business decisions – and people are prepared to pay for that.

Is there anything unique about your current mobile application in itself?

At the end of the day we are a  content provider. It’s about getting the content out as quickly as we can, and providing the tools to our editorial users so they can concentrate on writing and not worry so much about layout – we’re doing a lot more about templating, metadata, and making our content much richer, so that, when a reader comes on, the acutal related stories mean something to them, and it’s easier for them to navigate through our considerable archive on the same poeople and companies, and be able to form a much more rounded opinion.

What about internal technical innvoation?

We’ve built our own private cloud, and we’re also heavily investigating and starting to use AWS, so doing a lot out there to support the public cloud. One of our strategy points is that any new applcaition or new functionality that we look to bring online, we have to start by looking on the public cloud to see if we can host and proivide it on that, and there has to be a very good technical reason for not doing it. We’re pushing it much more that way.

We have also borrrowed a concept from Netflix, their Chaos Monkey appraoch, where every now and then we deliberately break parts of our estate to see how resilient applications are, and to see how we can react to some of our applications not being available and what that means to our user base. Just a a couple of weekends ago we completely turned off one of our UK data centres, where we’d put most of our publishing and membership applciations in advance, to see what it did, and also to see whether we could bring up the applications in our other data centres – to see how long it took us and what it meant for things like our recovery time objectives.

 

Christy Ross will be appearing at Apps World Europe (18- 19 November, Excel, London)

Alibaba, AWS, Azure, Infrastructure as a Service, News & Analysis, NTT Com

NTT Com to provide private links to AWS, Azure

NTT Com is getting into the cloud interconnection service game

NTT Com is getting into the cloud interconnection service game

NTT Com has launched a multi-cloud connect service that will provide direct private links to leading public cloud providers’ infrastructure including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

The Multi-Cloud Connect service, which is being pitched as an optional feature for NTT Com’s Arcstar Universal One, lets users access various public cloud services through its MPLS network.

The company, which already offers a range of cloud services under its own brand and through a range of subsidiaries, said that while a growing number of its customers are shifting workloads onto public cloud platforms variable network performance and cybersecurity are still inhibiting widespread adoption.

The Multi-Cloud Connect service will initially offer direct access to Microsoft Azure and AWS cloud platforms in Tokyo this week, followed by London later this year.

NTT Com is among a growing number of datacentre providers leveraging their network and real-estate for cloud interconnection services.

Earlier this Summer Equinix, an NTT Com competitor, added Alibaba to its cloud interconnection service, Cloud Exchange, which already boasts close to 100 cloud providers. In July BT redoubled its Cloud of Clouds initiative, which is already being deployed from about 20 facilities globally and a further 30 third-party datacentres operated by other cloud providers. And last year, Digital Realty announced a deal with Zayo enabling the datacentre operator offer low-latency connections to over 20 cloud platforms.

Amazon, AWS, Chef, Infrastructure as a Service, Intel, News & Analysis, Werner Vogels

AWS goes hipster, plans pop-up shop in London

AWS is opening a pop-up shop in London following other openings in San Fran and NYC

AWS is opening a pop-up shop in London following other openings in San Fran and NYC

Amazon Web Services has announced plans to take its AWS Pop-up Loft programme to London in early September in a bid to reach out to local UK startups.

The temporary shops will be a place where developers, engineers and entrepreneurs can come to learn about AWS services, get trained up on the company’ services, meet clients, and receive guidance on cloud migration.

The company has opened similar pop-up shops in in San Francisco and New York City, but the most recently announced shop, which is due to open September 10, is the company’s first crack at it outside the US.

The UK is a hotbed of innovation and London is one of the main places where we see talented, ambitious entrepreneurs coming together to test ideas and start new businesses that leverage cloud computing,” said Werner Vogels, chief technical officer and vice president, Amazon.com.

“With the AWS Pop-up Loft in London we will be bringing together a host of AWS resources, and some of the brightest and most creative minds in the industry, to help startups across the UK. We look forward to working alongside the next generation of UK businesses and helping them to reach their full potential,” Vogels said.

Intel and Chef will also be supporting the pop-up shop.

Patrick Bliemer, managing director, Intel Northern Europe said: “The startup community is a fundamental driver of technology innovations fuelling the rapid growth of the digital services economy. Intel is excited to be working closely with AWS on the AWS Pop-up Loft program to help enable environments around the world where users have access to the tools and expert guidance they need to bring new ideas and innovations to market.”

AWS, developer, DigitalOcean, Funding, Khosla Ventures, News & Analysis, Nitin Gupta

Koding bags $10m to boost cloud-native IDE

Koding secured $10m in series B this week

Koding secured $10m in series B this week

Independent development environment provider Koding closed $10m in series B funding this week in a round led by Khosla Ventures.

Koding offers a platform that aims to bridge user-friendly collaboration features with a robust, device-agnostic development platform, and the service is hosted directly on AWS and DigitalOcean infrastructure.

500 Startups and existing investors Matrix Partners and RTP Ventures also participated in the funding round, which brings the total amount secured by the company since its founding to just under $30m.

As part of the most recent round, Ari Zilka, a partner at Khosla Ventures and formerly chief technology officer at big data specialist Hortonworks, will join the company’s board.

“The cloud-based development environment has dramatically shifted how software engineers write code and collaborate. The cloud provides an immersive environment that increases productivity without requiring any installation,” explained Nitin Gupta, Koding’s chief business officer in a recent blog post.

“Already, we have over a million software developers using Koding who, in aggregate, have written over a billion lines of code, spun up millions of virtual machines and consumed over eight petabytes of storage. Our recently forged partnerships with developer focused companies like DigitalOcean and Amazon Web Services (AWS) help get Koding into the hands of even more developers worldwide.”

The company said it plans to use the funding to double down on developing its Koding for Teams offering, which brings new capabilities that allow developers to more easily on-board team members and build internal development communities across heterogeneous developer organisations.

Alibaba, Aliyun, AWS, Daniel Zhang, Datacentre, Equinix, Google, IBM, Infrastructure as a Service, Intel, Meeras, News & Analysis, PCCW, Singtel

Alibaba takes aim at AWS, Google, Microsoft, pours $1bn into global cloud rollout

Alibaba is pouring $1bn into its cloud division to support global expansion

Alibaba is pouring $1bn into its cloud division to support global expansion

Alibaba announced plans this week to plough $1bn into its cloud computing division, Aliyun, in a bid to expand the company’s presence and establish new datacentres internationally. The move may give it the scale it needs to compete more effectively with the likes of Amazon and Google.

The company currently operates five datacentre in China and Hong Kong, and earlier this year set up a datacentre in Silicon Valley aimed at local startups and Chinese multinational corporations.

The $1bn in additional investment will go towards setting up new cloud datacentres in the Middle East, Singapore, Japan and in various countries across Europe.

“Aliyun has become a world-class cloud computing service platform that is the market leader in China, bearing the fruits of our investment over the past six years. As the physical and digital are becoming increasingly integrated, Aliyun will serve as an essential engine in this new economy,” said Daniel Zhang, chief executive officer of Alibaba Group.

“This additional US$ 1 billion investment is just the beginning; our hope is for Aliyun to continually empower customers and partners with new capabilities, and help companies upgrade their basic infrastructure. We want to enable businesses to connect directly with consumers and drive productivity using data. Ultimately, our goal is to help businesses successfully transition from an era of information technology to data technology,” Zhang said.

The company said it also plans to use the funds to expand its partnerships through its recently announced Marketplace Alliance Program, a move that sees it partnering with large tech and datacentre operators, initially including Intel, Singtel, Meeras, Equinix and PCCW among others to help localise its cloud computing services and grow its ecosystem.

The investment if anything confirms Alibaba’s intent to grow well beyond Asia and displace other large public cloud providers like AWS, IBM and Google, which already boast significant global scale.

AWS, Financial Results, Google, IBM, Microsoft, News & Analysis

AWS rakes in $1.8bn in Q2 as ‘big four’ corner half the cloud services market

AWS is bringing in nearly $2bn in quarterly revenues

AWS is bringing in nearly $2bn in quarterly revenues

AWS revenue for the second quarter of this year topped $1.82bn, an increase of about 81 per cent year on year. The results come as other major IT service providers revealed strong cloud growth for the quarter.

Last quarter, the first time it pulled the curtain back on its cloud business, Amazon revealed AWS raked in $1.57bn in revenue. Operating income for Q2 increased 407 per cent to $391m.

Commenting on the results Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos said “[we] continued to double down on our fastest growing geography — India, launched 350 significant AWS features and services so far this year, ahead of last year’s pace, introduced AWS Educate, and entered into agreements for new solar and wind farms — enough to exceed our 2016 goal of 40 per cent renewable energy.”

Speaking to analysts this week Amazon’s chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky said the company is also getting more competitive on cost as it continues to optimise its services.

“We had over 350 significant new features and services and we believe that’s what resonates with customers. While pricing is certainly a factor we don’t believe it’s always the primary factor; in fact what we hear from our customers is that the ability to move faster and more agility is what they value,” he explained.

But he deflected questions about the capital intensity of the AWS business – which represent about 80 per cent of its overall capex.

Synergy Research Q2 Cloud Market Estimates“We do realise it’s a capital-intensive business and we have modelling that shows it’s going to be a very good business for us and that’s what we aim for as long-term return on invested capital and free cash flow. So, we’re certainly cognizant of the capital part of the calculation,” he said.

Amazon revealed the results as other large incumbents pulled back the curtain on their cloud performance. The second quarter saw Microsoft grow its cloud revenues 88 per cent and IBM 60 per cent.

But the results suggest some of the smaller cloud providers are being left in the dust. According to John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group, quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS and private & hybrid cloud) are now approaching the $6bn, while trailing twelve-month revenues hitting close to $20bn. Synergy estimates AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google (the ‘big four’) control well over half of the worldwide cloud infrastructure service market.

“The cloud infrastructure services market is quite clearly bifurcating with a widening gap between the big four cloud providers and the rest of the service provider community,” Dinsdale explained. “Developing the necessary global hyperscale datacentre infrastructure along with the required marketing and operations support is simply beyond the reach of all but a very small number of players. This is not going to change.”

The good news for smaller and medium-sized cloud providers, he said, is that there does remain a wealth of opportunity for them to specialise in a particular niche industry or geography. At the moment the firm reckons North America accounts for over half of the worldwide cloud services market, followed by the EMEA and APAC regions.

Amazon, AWS, Iberdrola Renewables, Jerry Hunter

AWS, Iberdrola partner to power cloud with renewables

AWS and Iberdrola are building a massive wind farm in North Carolina

AWS and Iberdrola are building a massive wind farm in North Carolina

Amazon has announced another clean energy project in the US, this time with Iberdrola Renewables. The companies are partnering to develop a “utility-scale” wind farm in North Carolina to supply both current and future AWS datacentres.

The companies said the wind farm is expected to generate 670,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of wind energy annually, roughly enough energy to power 61,000 homes, starting in December 2016.

“This agreement, and those previously in place, puts AWS on track to surpass our goal of 40 per cent renewable energy globally by the end of 2016,” said Jerry Hunter, vice president of infrastructure at Amazon Web Services.

“We’re far from being done. We’ll continue pursuing projects that deliver clean energy to the various energy grids that serve AWS datacentres, we’ll continue working with our power providers to increase their renewable energy quotient, and we’ll continue to strongly encourage our partners in government to extend the tax incentives that make it more viable for renewable projects to get off the ground,” Hunter said.

The move is another sign Amazon is keen to position itself among a slew of other cloud service providers that have gone conspicuously green – Apple, SAP, and Google for instance.

In April this year Amazon said about a quarter of the energy its datacentres consume come from renewable energy sources. Last month Amazon teamed up with Community Energy to commit to building and operating an 80 megawatt (MW) solar farm in Virginia, which the companies said would be the largest solar farm in the state.

AWS, Chef, Dave McCann, Infrastructure as a Service, IT automation, Ken Cheney, News & Analysis, Vendor

AWS and Chef cook up DevOps deal

Chef is moving onto the AWS Marketplace

Chef is moving onto the AWS Marketplace

IT automation specialist Chef and AWS announced a deal this week that would see Chef’s flagship offering offered via the AWS Marketplace, a move the companies said would help drive DevOps cloud uptake.

Tools like Chef and Puppet Labs, which use an intermediary service to help automate a company’s infrastructure, have grown increasingly popular with DevOps personnel in recent years – particularly given not just the growth but heterogeneity of cloud today. And with DevOps continuing to grow – by 2016 nearly a quarter of the largest enterprises globally will have adopted a DevOps strategy according to Gartner – it’s clear both AWS and Chef see a huge opportunity to onboard more users to the former’s cloud service.

As one might expect, the companies touted the ability to use Chef to migrate workloads off premise and into the AWS without losing all of the code developed to automate lower level services.

Though Chef and Puppet Labs can both be deployed on and automate AWS cloud resources the Chef / AWS deal will see it gain one-click deployment and a more prominent placement in its catalogue of available services.

“Chef is one of the leading offerings for DevOps workflows, which engineers and developers depend on to accelerate their businesses,” said Dave McCann, vice president, AWS Marketplace. “Our customers want easy-to-use software like Chef that is available for immediate purchase and deployment in AWS Marketplace. This new partnership demonstrates our focus on offering low-friction DevOps tools to power customers’ businesses.”

Ken Cheney, vice president of business development at Chef said: “AWS’s market leadership in cloud computing, coupled with our expertise in IT automation and DevOps practices, brings a new level of capabilities to our customers. Together, we’re delivering a single source for automation, cloud, and DevOps, so businesses everywhere can spend minimal calories on managing infrastructure and maximise their ability to develop the software driving today’s economy.”

Andy Jassy, Asia Pacific, AWS, Datacentre, Gartner, India, Infrastructure as a Service, News & Analysis

AWS to expand to India in 2016

AWS said India is the next big market for public cloud expansion

AWS said India is the next big market for public cloud expansion

Amazon unveiled plans this week to bring its Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure to India by 2016 in a bid to expand into the quickly growing public cloud services market there.

AWS is already available in India and the company claims to have over 10,000 local customers using the platform, but the recently announced move would see the company set up its own infrastructure in-country rather than relying on delivering the services from nearby availability zones like Singapore.

The company says the move will likely improve the performance of the cloud services on offer to local organisations.

“Tens of thousands of customers in India are using AWS from one of AWS’s eleven global infrastructure regions outside of India. Several of these customers, along with many prospective new customers, have asked us to locate infrastructure in India so they can enjoy even lower latency to their end users in India and satisfy any data sovereignty requirements they may have,”said Andy Jassy, senior vice president, AWS.

“We’re excited to share that Indian customers will be able to use the world’s leading cloud computing platform in India in 2016 – and we believe India will be one of AWS’s largest regions over the long term.”

The India expansion comes at a time when the local market is maturing rapidly.

According to analyst and consulting house Gartner public cloud services revenue in India will reach $838m by the end of 2015, an increase of almost 33 per cent – making it one of the fastest growing markets for public cloud services in the world (global average growth rates sit in the mid-twenties range, depending on the analyst house). The firm believe many local organisations in India are shifting away from more traditional IT outsourcing and using public cloud services instead.