Category Archives: AWS

AWS, Google, IaaS, Microsoft Azure, News & Analysis, Public Cloud

Google backs multi-cloud strategy with Orbitera purchase

August 9, 2016 Jamie Davies

Google has confirmed the acquisition of cloud commerce platform Orbitera, marking an alternative strategy to its main cloud rivals AWS and Microsoft, reports Telecoms.com.

The Orbitera platform acts as a marketplace for cloud solutions which simplifies the way in which customers search and purchase products. The platform currently supports deploying applications on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, but not currently Google Cloud Platform, though the company said it would continue to support software deployments on platforms other than its own.

As the practise of cloud computing has become normalized throughout the industry, multi-cloud strategies have become more common as enterprise organizations aim to spread workloads to reduce risk. It would appear Google are using the move to multi-cloud environments to further establish its platform and build credibility in the industry. Although Google is generally ranked in the top three cloud providers worldwide, the gap between Microsoft and AWS, and Google in third place has been widening slightly in recent quarters.

Microsoft and AWS do also support multi-cloud propositions, though the majority of the marketing messages are focused on standardizing on a single platform. It would seem Google are moving to a position which would be more aligned with customer trends in the cloud ecosystem.

“At Google, we partner closely with our enterprise customers and software providers to ensure their transition to the cloud is as simple and seamless as possible,” said Nan Boden, Head of Global Technology Partners, on the company’s blog. “We recognize that both enterprise customers and ISVs want to be able to use more than one cloud provider and have a way to conduct product trials and proofs of concept before building a full production deployment, all using their trusted SIs (System Integrators), resellers and normal sales cycles.”

The deal ties in well with another acquisition which the internet giant made in recent months. Back in November the company acquired enterprise development platform start-up bebop, which some industry commentators believed was a move to lure former VMware CEO Diane Greene to head a new business-oriented cloud service. The bebop business created a set of tools which simplified the process for enterprise organizations to build cloud apps. Combining Orbitera with Bebop could potentially form the central theme of a new marketing message for Google; simplifying the cloud.

Google are still playing catch-up with cloud rivals AWS and Microsoft, though it does have lofty ambitions. Last year, Urs Hölzle, SVP for Technical Infrastructure, stated he believes the cloud business has the potential to exceed advertising revenues for the internet giant, which stood at $19 billion for the last quarter. Although the company has been growing in the cloud space, its competitors are expanding at a faster pace. Taking Microsoft and AWS on at their own game does not appear to be working, though a new strategy have the potential to act as a differentiator, as it does match customer trends moving towards multi-cloud strategies.

AWS, Google, IBM, Microsoft Azure, News & Analysis, Private Cloud, Public Cloud

AWS, Microsoft, Google and IBM continue cloud market dominance

August 2, 2016 Jamie Davies

New research from Synergy states while the cloud market is growing at a healthy rate quarter-by-quarter, the four dominate cloud brands are continuing to pull away from the pack, controlled more market share month-by-month, reports Telecoms.com.

Data from Synergy Research claims the four companies now collectively control more than 50% of worldwide cloud market share (IaaS, PaaS and Hosted Private Cloud), with AWS maintaining its lead at the top of the leader board controlling almost a third of worldwide share. Over the course of the second quarter of 2016, the top four grew revenues by 68%, while the next 20 players, who roughly account for a quarter of the market share, grew 41%. All other vendors in this space grew by a collective 27%.

“In a variety of ways Amazon and the other big three players have distanced themselves from the competition in this market and continue to widen the gap,” said John Dinsdale, Research Director at Synergy Research Group. “What marks them out as different is their global presence, marketing muscle, ability to fund huge investments in hyper scale data centres and, in most cases, a determination to succeed in the market.

“The ranking of the next 20 largest cloud providers features some interesting companies, with Alibaba and Oracle growing particularly strongly, but they are all starting from a long way behind Google, which is itself growing by well over 100% per year and yet remains only a sixth the size of Amazon.”

Although AWS is still the dominant market player, growth is slowing. Google and Microsoft both posted growth figures of more than 100%, though it is far too soon to write AWS’ obituary, as it still controls more than three times the market share of its nearest rival, Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft has been going through a number of transformation projects in recent years, and while the market share for cloud shows it will still be some time before it catches AWS, the team are finding success in other arenas. According to additional research from Synergy, in the data centre infrastructure market, HPE and Cisco may be leading the way for public and private cloud hardware, but Microsoft now accounts for just over 40% of cloud software share, with VMWare its nearest competitor at roughly 20%. The research including share for servers, server OS, storage, networking, network security and virtualization software.

“With spend on cloud services growing by over 50% per year and spend on SaaS growing by over 30%, there is little surprise that cloud operator capex continues to drive strong growth in public cloud infrastructure,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Chief Analyst. “But on the enterprise data centre side too we continue to see a big swing towards spend on private cloud infrastructure as companies seek to benefit from more flexible and agile IT technology. The transition to cloud still has a long way to go.”

AWS, Financial Results, IaaS, News & Analysis

AWS posts 60% boost as it creeps towards $10bn revenues

July 29, 2016 Jamie Davies

AWS has continued its promising progress towards breaking the $10 billion barrier, after reporting revenues of $5.4 billion for the first six months of 2016, a boost of 60% from the same period last year, reports Telecoms.com.

Speaking during its Q1 earnings call in April, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky highlighted there was a very realistic chance the AWS business would exceed $10 billion in annual revenues, becoming the first cloud infrastructure company to do so. After another quarter of healthy growth, revenues were up 58% to roughly $2.9 billion, the team are well on track to exceed the ambitious target. Progress has been healthy over the last few quarters, but the team are looking to push the accelerator harder.

“We actually see nine availability zones in four regions coming out in the next – in the coming year,” said Olsavsky. “The impact on short-term is pretty much indistinguishable from the growth that we’re seeing in our expansion of our base customers in our existing regions, so we don’t see a large step-up from the addition of new regions relative to the large and rapid growth in the business itself.”

With new data centres popping up all over the world to meet the demand of the burgeoning cloud computing sector, AWS is keeping trend, opening up in Mumbai last month, as planning nine new availability zones within the next 12 months. The impact of these new assets are unlikely to be felt during the next quarter, though long-term there the current cloud leader could reinforce its position at the top of the leader board.

“Again, we like our position, our industry leading position in the cloud space, and we’re working on things that would incent more and more customers to accelerate their cloud conversion,” said Olsavsky. “The lower prices and services that we offer, and as I said, we’ll work on things that will make it easier and easier for customers to work with us with their hybrid data centers or transfer their volume to us.”

One area of growth which could have a more short-term impact is the new FedRAMP High compliance certification, which will allow government agencies the ability to use the AWS Cloud for highly sensitive applications and workloads like patient records, financial data, and law enforcement data. Government contracts represent lucrative wins in the technology sector, which could underpin the company’s surge towards $10 billion. The accreditation also creates a useful precedent for the business if/and the team look to expand its footprint with government organizations in the international markets.

AWS, Competition, News & Analysis, Public Cloud, Utility

The cloud is a utility, and we’re fine with that – AWS

July 8, 2016 Jamie Davies

While the telco industry is fighting to avoid being relegated to the likes of utilities, AWS has already accepted cloud computing is commoditised, reports Telecoms.com.

As cloud as a concept continues to become normalized within the business world, the number of competitors is growing day by day. AWS would generally still be considered the leader in the market, though progress from Microsoft and Google, as well as a number of new players appearing has slightly eroded this dominant position. According to Brendan Bouffler, AWS’ lead for the team responsible for developing the scientific computing segment, the prospect of cloud becoming utilized would not bother the market leader.

“It already is,” said Bouffler. “You can move in and out of our cloud whenever you like. There’s no long term commitment as our standard terms and conditions last for an hour. You can sign up for an hour and then move out. We see it all the time. We’re constantly holding our feet to the fire and forcing ourselves to innovate, that’s how we keep customers.”

Within the telco industry, operators are fighting against the tide to prevent the business being classed in the same bracket as utilities. Competing on price and constantly attempting to undercut challengers is not a battle ground the industry wants to operate in. The telcos would like to compete on value adds and brand equity, though Bouffler believes there is enough untapped business in the cloud market for the utility model to be successful.

Estimates on the value of the global cloud computing market vary, though statista believes it is worth in the region of $114 billion this year. Should AWS continue its healthy start to 2016, it will account for $10 billion. By 2020 the market is predicted to grow to roughly $159 billion, offering plenty of opportunity for competitors to establish themselves, and AWS to continue its growth.

“Running a company like a hardware vendor does where they are looking for high margins is a legitimate business model, but ours is different to that,” said Bouffler. “We’re a high volume, low margin business and it’s successful for us. It was pretty successful in disrupting the retail industry in the way books were sold. As a consumer of books, I’m in awe of that. You can put books in the hands of people for almost pennies. We democratized reading and we’re going to do the same for cloud.”

Bouffler believes the disruptive nature of Amazon and AWS is fuelling future growth within the business itself. Competing on price is not a worry for the team, as this was the origins of the Amazon book business. Amazon was launched in 1994 and shook up the retail book industry. It drove down prices, opened up new distribution channels and created an entirely new way of consuming literature. Bouffler believes the same is being done for computing.

Although the telco industry is concerned with the direction it is heading, the potential for growth within the cloud computing industry means being classed as a utility is not necessarily a terrible fate for AWS. While there are some organizations who would like to create an industry with higher margins, Bouffler believes the origins of Amazon, the disruptive nature of the business and the experience of operating in a low margin/high volume environment puts the company in a strong position to compete and succeed in a utility environment.

“This is only the tip of the iceberg,” said Bouffler. “Some of our customers are people doing something they wouldn’t have usually done without cloud computing. It wasn’t that they were substituting for money which would have been spent on a hardware cluster, these are projects that weren’t going to happen. This is net new stuff. This whole net new universe is still in front of us, I think we’re only just scratching the surface.

“It’s incredibly sustainable. Even though we’re a low margin business and a high volume business we’re good with that. We’ve been doing this since Amazon came into business (22 years ago), and the model is still working. I think there is still tons to be done before anyone writes obituaries about that business model.”

Asia Pacific, AWS, data centre, Datacentre, India, News & Analysis

AWS expands footprint in India with new data centre

June 28, 2016 Jamie Davies

AWS has expanded its reach in the Asia Pacific region, opening two new Availability Zones in Mumbai, taking the total globally to 35.

The company already has 75,000 customers in the country, which is one of the fastest growing economies worldwide. According to the CIA World Factbook, India is listed as the 12^th fastest growing nation with a 7.3% real GDP growth rate, as well as a population growth rate of 1.22% per annum. The new region will support numerous services including Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), as well Elastic Block Store (EBS), Virtual Private Cloud, Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing.

“Indian start-ups and enterprises have been using AWS for many years – with most Indian technology start-ups building their entire businesses on AWS, and numerous enterprises running mission-critical, core applications on AWS,” said Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS. “These same 75,000 Indian customers, along with others anxious to start using AWS, have asked for an AWS India Region so they can move their applications that require low latency and data sovereignty.

“We’re excited to make this available today, with the same pay-as-you-go pricing, ability to get started immediately without having to negotiate enterprise agreements or wait days for access, and unmatched functionality that customers enjoy in AWS Regions worldwide – all of which allows customers to go from idea to launch faster than ever before was possible.”

Although India is one of the company’s fastest growing markets worldwide, AWS have been slower to market than its competitors. Last year, Microsoft has brought online three cloud data centres in India for its Azure offering, and IBM opened its first data centre in Chennai for Softlayer. Google is yet to gain traction in the market.

Making the announcement through the official blog, the team also announced numerous local partners ranging from Managed Service Providers such as Spruha Technologies and Consulting Partners including HCL, Tata Consulting Services, and Wipro.

AWS, Google, Hotels.com, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Public Cloud

The rest of the world is catching up with AWS – Hotels.com CIO

June 21, 2016 Jamie Davies

Speaking at Cloud and DevOps World, Hotels.com CIO Theirry Bedos outlined some of the cloud industry’s growing trends, including the erosion of AWS’ dominant position, reports Telecoms.com.

The growth of the cloud industry has been well documented over recent months, as numerous studies and surveys dominate web searches claiming adoption rates are accelerating. While it is still debatable if cloud has penetrated the mainstream market, according to Bedos, what is clear is the industry is heading that direction; there’s no turning around now.

“The world is becoming fluffier and fluffier,” said Bedos. “There are countless studies and surveys on the internet which show the cloud is becoming more popular and widely used, which is only good for the industry. AWS is still the number one player in the market, but the rest are starting to catch up now. This is one of the most interesting trends which we are seeing.”

As with the acceptance and adoption of any new technology, there are bound to be a number of underlying trends. For Bedos, one of the more interesting of those trends is the acceptance there is another way aside from AWS.

While AWS is still considered the leader in the industry, controlling notably more market share than other cloud providers, the lead is slimming. Microsoft and Google have both been prominent over the course of the last 18 months in bolstering their cloud capabilities, and this has not gone unnoticed by the industry. Although cloud adoption rates are increasing, AWS is getting a smaller and smaller slice of the pie as customers are taking alternatives into consideration.

This should not be considered a major surprise, as this is a trend which has been witnessed with the growth of other technology sub-sectors. Back in the early 2000s, Netscape’s web browser was once dominant in terms of usage share, but lost most of that share to Internet Explorer during the so-called first ‘Browser War’. Bedos highlighted Netscape was first to market, and enjoyed that position for some time until the proposition became normalized and competition grew. This is the same trend AWS is undertaking currently.

“I’m not saying AWS will disappear in the same way Netscape did, but we’re going to see other players chip away at their market share,” said Bedos. That said, the increased competition and drive to acquire new customers could see the balance of power shift towards the consumer.

On top of the increased competition, Bedos also commented on the USPs of the individual cloud providers themselves. Buyers generally buy for a specific reason and these USPs in the cloud provider’s offerings is starting to fund the trend of multi-cloud environments in the enterprise business. Why choose when you can have the best of multiple cloud worlds? For Bedos, this is driving the trend of interoperability. Before too long moving workloads and data sets between different cloud environments will be a simple task, as vendors appreciate a lock-in situation will negatively impact their own business. Co-operation could potentially be the new battle ground.

AWS will continue; they are continuing to innovate and have the backing of one of the worlds’ most recognizable brands. However, increased competition, as well as the tendency of buyers to prefer a multi-cloud proposition, will see a more even playing field, and the bargaining power of these deals potentially leaning towards the consumer.

AWS, News & Analysis, Outage, Public Cloud

AWS release statement to explain Aussie outage

June 9, 2016 Jamie Davies

AWS has blamed a power shortage caused by adverse weather conditions as the primary cause of the outage Australian customers experienced this weekend.

A statement on the company’s website stated its utility provider suffered a failure at the regional substation, which resulted in the total loss of utility power to multiple AWS facilities. At one of these facilities, the power redundancy didn’t work as designed and the company lost power to a large number of instances in the availability zone.

The storm this weekend was one of the worst experienced by Sydney in recent years, recording 150mm of rain over the period, with 93 mm falling on Sunday 5^th alone, and wind speeds reaching as high as 96 km/h. The storm resulted in AWS customers losing services for up to six hours, between 11.30pm and 4.30am (PST) on June 4/5. The company claims over 80% of the impacted customer instances and volumes were back online and operational by 1am, though a latent bug in the instance management software led to a slower than expected recovery for some of the services.

While adverse weather conditions cannot be avoided, the outage is unlikely to ease concerns over public cloud propositions. Although the concept of cloud may now be considered mainstream, there are still numerous decision makers who are hesitant over placing mission critical workloads in such an environment, as it has been considered as handing control of a company’s assets to another organization. Such outages will not bolster confidence in those who are already pessimistic.

“Normally, when utility power fails, electrical load is maintained by multiple layers of power redundancy,” the statement said. “Every instance is served by two independent power delivery line-ups, each providing access to utility power, uninterruptable power supplies (UPSs), and back-up power from generators. If either of these independent power line-ups provides power, the instance will maintain availability. During this weekend’s event, the instances that lost power lost access to both their primary and secondary power as several of our power delivery line-ups failed to transfer load to their generators.”

In efforts to avoid similar episodes in the future, the team have stated additional breakers will be added to assure that we more quickly break connections to degraded utility power to allow generators to activate before uninterruptable power supplies systems are depleted. The team have also prioritized reviewing and redesigning the power configuration process in their facilities to prevent similar power sags from affecting performance in the future.

“We are never satisfied with operational performance that is anything less than perfect, and we will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to drive improvement across our services,” the company said.

AWS, News & Analysis, Public Cloud, Service Outage

Aussies lose AWS for six hours

June 6, 2016 Business Cloud News

AWS’ Australian customers suffered an outage over the course of the weekend for approximately six hours due to a power outage which coincided with adverse weather conditions.

The cause of the outage has not been officially confirmed, though did occur at the same time as a storm system that ran from Brisbane to the NSW South Coast which caused widespread flooding, was limited to the Sydney data centre roughly between 11.30pm 4.30am (PST) on June 4.

On the company’s status page it stated, “We are investigating increased connectivity issues for EC2 instances in the AP-SOUTHEAST-2-Region,” at 10.47pm as well as, “We can confirm that instances have experienced a power event with a single availability zone AP-SOUTHEAST-2-Region. Error rates for the EC2 APIs have improved and launches of new EC2 APIs instances are succeeding within the other Availability Zones in the Region,” at 11.49pm PST. Full connectivity was not reported until 4.43am PST.

Although the company has not since commented on the episode, the status page on the website currently states all services are up and running. The outage impacted a number of core and value add services including EC2, Elastic Load Balancing, ElastiCache, Redshift, Relational Database Service, Route 53 Private DNS, CloudFormation, CloudHSM, Database Migration Service, Elastic Beanstalk and Storage Gateway.

While there have been a number of outages in recent months, AWS has seemingly faired pretty well avoiding headlines for the most part. Google appeared to be taking the route of damage control in April following an 18 minute outage, while Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff took to twitter last month to apologize for his company’s 12 hour outage and Apple customers lost numerous iCloud services for seven hours earlier this month.

AWS, Docker, Microsoft Azure, Public Cloud

Cloud and software jobs surge over last 12 months

June 1, 2016 Business Cloud News

Rackspace has released the findings from its annual analysis of the IT job market which highlighted demand for positions in and around cloud computing are rising at a healthy rate.

Vacancies for AWS engineer roles increased by 125% over the last 12 months, where are those advertised for Microsoft Azure competencies also increased by 75% in the same period. The rise in job focused on tailoring cloud solutions for individual companies, and also migrating from legacy technologies, supports previous research and claims that cloud computing is penetrating the mainstream marketplace.

“Our industry moves so fast that we can’t rely entirely on traditional forms of education from schools and universities to fill skills gaps,” said Darren Norfolk, Managing Director for Rackspace in the UK. “Therefore, technology companies have a responsibility to address these shortages by growing and fostering talent through on the job training and experience.

“I expect the rise in demand for cloud related jobs to continue as a growing number of businesses adopt a multi cloud strategy, using platforms such as Microsoft Azure, Openstack and AWS. The highly competitive recruitment market for skills in these areas means that managing the platforms in-house could become more costly than it has been in the past.”

Software development is another area which has demonstrated healthy growth as the number of vacancies for individuals who have Docker expertise has risen by 341%, though this is down from the 991% increase which was reported in the 2015 findings. The accelerated rate in which new technologies are penetrating the market and being implemented by companies throughout the world is seemingly too fast for in-house resource to be trained on these competencies, leaving hiring new employees the only option for some. Docker expertise is now the second most sought after job function in the IT world, according to the research.

DevOps as a practise would also appear to be have accepted in the business world, as the number of roles grew 53% over the last twelve months, following a 57% increase from the findings last year. The rise in roles would appear to be an indicator DevOps has not been integrated within the IT ecosystem, though it may still be considered too early to be mainstream.

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