Category Archives: AWS

AWS, News & Analysis, Public Cloud, Service Outage

Aussies lose AWS for six hours

amazon awsAWS’ 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 Outage

AWS, Docker, Microsoft Azure, Public Cloud

Cloud and software jobs surge over last 12 months

New productRackspace 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.

AWS, CRM, data centre, Database, Datacentre, News & Analysis, Salesforce

Salesforce to run some core services on AWS

Salesforce 1Salesforce has announced it will run some of its core services on AWS in various international markets, as well as continuing investments into its own data centres.

The announcement comes two weeks after the company experiences a database failure on the NA14 instance, which caused a service outage which lasted for 12 hours for a number of customers in North America.

“With today’s announcement, Salesforce will use AWS to help bring new infrastructure online more quickly and efficiently. The company will also continue to invest in its own data centres,” said Parker Harris, on the company’s blog. “Customers can expect that Salesforce will continue to deliver the same secure, trusted, reliable and available cloud computing services to customers, regardless of the underlying infrastructure.”

While Salesforce would not have appeared to have suffered any serious negative impact from the outage in recent weeks, the move could be seen as a means to rebuild trust in its robustness, leaning on AWS’ brand credibility to provide assurances. The move would also give the Salesforce team options should another outage occur within its own data centres. The geographies this announcement will apply to have not been announced at the time of writing.

Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, App Cloud, Community Cloud and Analytics Cloud (amongst others) will now be available on AWS, though the move does not mean Salesforce is moving away from their own data centres. Investment will continue as this appears to be a failsafe for the business. In fact, Heroku, Marketing Cloud Social Studio, SalesforceIQ and IoT cloud already run on AWS.

“We are excited to expand our strategic relationship with Amazon as our preferred public cloud infrastructure provider,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. “There is no public cloud infrastructure provider that is more sophisticated or has more robust enterprise capabilities for supporting the needs of our growing global customer base.”

AWS, Database, Datacentre, News & Analysis

AWS announce launch of X1 Instances for EC2

Cloud in my handAWS has announced the availability of X1 Instances for Amazon EC2, which it claims is the most memory available in any SAP-certified cloud instance available today.

The X1 instances have 2 TB of memory, and are powered by four 2.3 GHz Intel Xeon E7 8880 v3 processors delivering 128 vCPUs. The X1 instances also offer up to 10 Gb per second of dedicated bandwidth to Amazon Elastic Block Store, which the team believe is well suited to support large-scale in-memory databases, big data processing, and high performance computing.

“Amazon EC2 provides the most comprehensive selection of instances, offering customers, by far, the deepest compute functionality to support virtually any workload,” said Matt Garman, VP at Amazon EC2. “We’ve had a Memory Optimized instance family (our R3 family) for a while that is quite popular for high performance databases, in-memory analytics, and enterprise applications; however, customers have increasingly asked for even more memory to help run analytics on larger data sets with in-memory databases, generate analytics in real time, and create very large caches.

“With 2 TB of memory – 8 times the memory of any other available Amazon EC2 instance, and more memory than any SAP-certified cloud instance available today – X1 instances change the game for SAP workloads in the cloud. Now, for the first time, customers can run their most memory-intensive applications at scale with the elasticity, flexibility, and reliability of the AWS Cloud, rather than having to battle the complexity, cost, and lack of agility of colo or on-premises solutions.”

The X1 Instances are available via request in a number of AWS regions, including US East, US West, EU (Germany and Ireland), Asia Pacific (Tokyo, Sydney and Singapore), and will be available in the remaining areas over the next few months.

AWS, GE, Intel, Internet of Things, IoT, Microsoft, News & Analysis

IoT revenues grow to $6.7bn in Q4 2015

Development projectA new study from Technology Business Research (TBR) has found IoT’s revenues have grown to $6.7 billion over the course of Q4.

The research, which focused on the industry’s largest IoT players, including AWS, GE, Google, Intel and Microsoft amongst others, highlighted strong year-on-year growth as tier one vendors aim to drive profits in a relatively open marketplace. A lack of competition, high-profits and immature regulations/standards, are driving IoT up the priority list for tier one vendors currently.

“Effectively, every type of IT and operational technology (OT) vendor will have a stake in the growing commercial IoT market, as IoT solutions will drive increased use of diverse IT and OT products and services,” said TBR Devices and IoT Analyst Dan Callahan. “In addition to building interest in established IT products, commercial IoT will create growth in specialized business consulting, hardware, network, development, management and security components.

“IT and OT vendors that are quick to capture IoT opportunities within their current customer base, and attract new ones through developer programs and investing in growing mindshare, will enjoy additional, immediate, revenue opportunities.”

The ongoing adoption of cloud computing and the increasing pressure to capitalize on the growing amount of data available to organizations, were highlighted as drivers for the adoption of the technology, as customers aim to increase operational efficiency and the effectiveness of the decision making process. TBR believes the 21 benchmarked companies are gaining an advantage in the attractive IoT market due mainly to minimized competition. A lack of standards and security concerns around the technology has set a high barrier to entry for tech companies, though there is a healthy value chain in which smaller organizations can capitalize.

North America is seen as the leading region to integrate IoT and develop an early adopter community, accounting for just over 40% of the activity. APAC and CALA represented 24.8% and 5.5% of the market, respectively, whereas EMEA accounted for the majority of the remainder.

AWS, Internet of Things, IoT, News & Analysis, Public Cloud, Salesforce

Salesforce plans to launch IoT offering on AWS

Salesforce WearSalesforce has announced plans to launch its new IoT offering on AWS facilities, moving away from it traditional play of using its own data centre infrastructure, reports The Wall Street Journal.

The offering is reportedly going to be launched by Salesforce in the next couple of months, is currently available to a select number of customers as the team test the various features. Saleforce’s IoT Cloud was initially announced last September, enabling customers to personalize the way they sell, service and market top their prospects. As part of the development, Salesforce has partnered with a number of firms including ARM, Etherios, Informatica, PTC ThingWorx and Xively LogMeln, to bring the service to market.

“Salesforce is turning the Internet of Things into the Internet of Customers,” said Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce at the time. “The IoT Cloud will allow businesses to create real-time 1:1, proactive actions for sales, service, marketing or any other business process, delivering a new kind of customer success.”

Salesforce has traditionally built new services on its own data centre infrastructure, though it would appear to be joining a number of other companies, including Netflix, who are utilizing the services of AWS as well as in-house options. This is not the first experience of AWS for Salesforce however, as the company acquired Heroku in 2010, which operated on AWS. Working with AWS also gives Salesforce the flexibility to manage what could be large scale growth should the offering receive large scale traction upon launch, as adding additional hardware to its own data centre to meet demand could take days or even weeks.

Alongside the IoT announcement, Benioff has taken to Twitter to apologize for a database failure on the NA14 instance, which caused outages for a number of customers in North America, which lasted for more than 12 hours.

The failure occurred after “a successful site switch” of the NA14 instance “to resolve a service disruption that occurred between 00:47 to 02:39 UTC on May 10, 2016 due to a failure in the power distribution in the primary data centre” the company said. Although not confirmed by Salesforce, it would appear a large number of customers throughout North America were impacted by the failure.

Salesforce apology

AWS, Financial Results, hybrid cloud, Managed services, Microsoft Azure, News & Analysis, OpenStack, Private Cloud, Rackspace

Rackspace prioritises AWS and Azure partnerships for future growth

Taylor Rhodes

Taylor Rhodes, President and CEO at Rackspace

Rackspace has reported healthy growth for Q1 2016, as the team continues its transition to become managed services provider, leveraging partnerships with AWS and Microsoft Azure.

Revenues for the first quarter were reported at $518 million, a year-on-year growth of 9.9%, while profits grew 77.5%. Although the growth of the business over the last 12 months has been viewed as generally positive, industry commentators highlighted the $24 million gain from the divestiture of Jungle Disk, and what could be perceived as a lacklustre outlook for the rest of 2016 has dampened the news. The exec team expects revenues of between $519 million and $524 million for the second quarter.

“First, we saw a strong demand for our expertise and support on the AWS and Microsoft Clouds and for our OpenStack private cloud offer. Collectively, we now serve more than 400 customers on these platforms and our demand is scaling rapidly,” Taylor Rhodes, President and CEO at Rackspace. “From the October launch of our AWS service through the end of April, we’ve been actively marketing with AWS and have signed 187 customers across every firm size, geography, and vertical.”

The transition to a managed cloud services company began a number of years ago with the launch of Rackspace’s Fanatical Support services, though seemingly began making real traction within the industry last year, as the team announced expanded partnerships with Microsoft in July, when Azure public and private cloud infrastructure was incorporated into the offering, and AWS in August. The team also recently announced a new partnership with Cloud Technology Partners, which it believes will increase cloud adoption rates.

The partnerships are also enabling the company to diversify its geographical focus as over 40% of the AWS customers are coming from non-U.S. regions. Rhodes also believes the new capital-light business models employed enables the company to roll-out new offerings worldwide. Previously, new products were rolled out first in the USA, due to capital intensity, and then phased out over time into other regions worldwide, however the new model is claimed to offer Rackspace increased flexibility and agility in bringing new offerings to the market.

The shift in strategic direction is supported by a renewed effort in the marketing department, as Rhodes highlighted campaigns will now be directed towards driving brand awareness and demand generation for the managed cloud services business, specifically the Fanatical Support services offered to AWS and Microsoft Azure customers.

“Our new head of Global Sales and Marketing, Alex Pinchev, started work at the beginning of Q1,” said Rhodes. “He and his team are moving aggressively to shift resources toward our new fast-growing offers while sustaining our core business. They are training more of our sales teams to sell our new offers and are hiring additional specialists in areas of high demand. We advised you last quarter that these sales and marketing efforts will take time to gain full traction, that transition contributed to our slow start to the year”

Efforts for Rackspace on the OpenStack front would also appear to be bearing fruit, with the launch of OpenStack Everywhere, Next Generation Bare Metal Servers and the Private Cloud Powered by Red Hat offering. All three offerings would seemingly demonstrate the company’s drive towards the OpenStack private and hybrid cloud market segments. The team are confident in the growth potential of the OpenStack private cloud market, and highlighted a number of major customers wins were through this aspect of the business.

“Our role as the co-founder of OpenStack has given us unique capabilities in software development, DevOps, continuous integration and deployment, and other key disciplines,” said Rhodes. “Those capabilities provide a major differentiation for us versus other managed services providers as we expand to provide managed cloud services on AWS and the Microsoft Cloud.

“We’ve really seen a tipping point, what really looks like a significant tipping point in the market for OpenStack private clouds in the last six months to nine months. Some of our largest deals that we closed in March were OpenStack private cloud deals and some of the largest deals that we have in our pipeline today are OpenStack private cloud deal. So, really that’s the traction that we’re seeing.”

AWS, Google, hybrid cloud, IBM, Microsoft, News & Analysis

AWS, Google, Microsoft and IBM pull away from pack in race for cloud market share

racing horses starting a raceNew findings from Synergy Research highlight the cloud market is still dominated by AWS, Google, Microsoft and IBM, as the pack is seemingly struggling to gain ground in the race for market share.

AWS still leads the way in the segment, accounting for roughly 31% of the global market share, with IBM, Google and IBM collectively accounting for the next 22%. The next 20 players in the market, companies such as HPE, VMWare and Alibaba for example, account for a collective 27%. AWS year-on-year growth was estimated at 57% while Google and Microsoft both demonstrated more than 100% growth over the same period.

“This is a market that is so big and is growing so rapidly that companies can be growing by 10-30% per year and might feel good about themselves and yet they’d still be losing market share,” said John Dinsdale, Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group. “The big question for them is whether or not they are building a sustainable and profitable business. This can be done by focusing on specific regions or specific services, but the bulk of the market demands huge scale, a broad footprint, very deep pockets and a long-term corporate focus.”

Worryingly for the rest of the pack outside of the top four, the gap would appear to be growing as AWS, Google, Microsoft and IBM are pulling further ahead. The 20 companies outside the top four averaged year-on-year growth of approximately 41%, though Synergy claim the cloud segment grew more than 50% over the course of Q1.

The team estimate the quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues, which include IaaS, PaaS and private & hybrid cloud, has now surpassed the $7 billion milestone, with the US accounting for roughly 50% of the worldwide market share.

 

Growth

AWS, Financial Results, News & Analysis

AWS quarterly revenues grow 64% to $2.6 billion

amazon awsAWS reported growth of 64% year-on-year growth to $2.6 billion for the quarter, becoming one of the few tech giants to have experienced a healthy Q1.

While IBM, VMWare, Intel and EMC have experienced mixed fortunes during the first few months of 2016, AWS has seemingly weathered the storm successfully. The company now anticipates it will break through the $10 billion barrier for annual revenues, and plans to improve its global footprint with continued expansion and new feature announcements. AWS ended the quarter with 33 Availability Zones in 12 geographic regions, with 11 more planned over the next 12 months.

“I would say there’s no let-up in the pace of invention here, particularly on the AWS side,” said Brian Olsavsky, CFO at Amazon. “We usually quote the number of new features and services to you each quarter, we had 214 in Q1, up from 170 the first quarter of last year. So over 26% growth in this quarter alone coming off a year where I believe the number was 722 significant new features and services delivered for AWS customers last year.”

The company did not update its figures for its data management revenues, at re:Invent AWS disclosed the product suite was at a $1 billion run rate, though it did highlight the Aurora database offering is the fastest growing product in the business unit’s history. The quarter also saw a number of product launches and updates including Amazon Lumberyard, a free, cross-platform, 3D game engine for developers to create games, the general availability of the AWS Database Migration Service, the general availability of Amazon Inspector, an automated security assessment service and updates for its block storage service, Amazon Elastic Block Store.

While the AWS results have generally been well received across the industry, Amazon shares were up 12% during pre-market trading at the time of writing, it would appear to be one of the few bright spots across the quarter for technology businesses, as the accompanying Google Finance screen grab shows.

Finance

 

AWS, containers, Enterprise IT, Google, Microsoft, News & Analysis

What did BCN readers say last week?

What do you think written on whiteboardOver the past week, we took the opportunity to gauge the opinion of the BCN readership on industry trends and issues, through a number of polls. Here’s what we found out:

Microsoft is unlikely to be successful? 58% say no

For the most part, Microsoft’s lawsuit has been keep out of the headlines. This is unlikely to indicate the whole episode is unimportant to the industry, but maybe more due to the fact the story has been overshadowed by the ongoing saga between Apple and the FBI.

In any case, Microsoft filed a lawsuit against the US government, citing the first and fourth amendment with regard to government agencies using secrecy orders to access its customer’s emails or records. From Microsoft’s perspective, the company should have the right to tell customers the government is accessing their data, aside from in exceptional circumstances. The government disagrees.

While the tech giant has taken it upon itself to fight the good fight alone, BCN readers are a bit more sceptical on the success of the venture. Only 42% believe Microsoft’s lawsuit will be successful, though this is a question which is unlikely to be answered for a substantial period of time. Any decision will be appealed by the despondent party, dragging out any decisions or changes in government practise.

When will containers hit mainstream? 21% say right now

Containers are one of the hottest trends in 2016. We recently ran a buzzword-buster article not only discussing what containers actually are, but more importantly what the value to enterprise actually is. Since then there have been numerous announcement focused around the technology, from Microsoft to Red Hat to Juniper, indicating containers are starting to get some traction.

But how much of the press is a smoke-screen and how much is reality? In short, it’s looking quite positive.

Cloud took a healthy amount of time to be trusted and understood by the mainstream market, and maybe it is this longer adoption time which has accelerated containers as a technology. 21% of BCN readers highlighted that they are currently using the technology in a meaningful way in their business currently, 50% believe it will be in the next 1-2 years, and only 29% said longer than three years.

Who is the best innovator in the cloud industry? 75% still say AWS

Last week AWS launched a host of new features at the AWS Chicago Summit, ranging from new security features, tools which simplify the movement of data around an organizations cloud, platforms for automatically deploying and running apps on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure, testing features, as well as authentication services.

Although this is the first major update from AWS in some time, Google and Microsoft have been feverishly bolstering their offerings over the last six months ranging from new hires, to new features and new acquisitions. Industry insiders have even told us at BCN that AWS could be seen to be sitting back to much, offering Google and Microsoft the opportunity to improve their own standing, and make up ground on the number one player in the cloud space.

BCN readers do not agree however. 75% believe AWS is still by far and away the industry leader, 10% believe AWS, Google and Microsoft are all on par, while 15% believe innovation has faltered at AWS, and the rest of the industry is catching up fast.

Is DevOps mainstream? 48% say no

DevOps is another of the buzzwords which has floated over from 2015 into 2016. However, as buzzwords go, few have captured the attention of the industry in the same manner. Such is the prominence of DevOps, it seems although every company is now a DevOps specialist, DevOps expert or DevOps orientated organization.

In fact, this isn’t only vendors who have adopted DevOps, but pretty much every enterprise decision maker has DevOps on the lips also. The main concern here is the definition of DevOps can be seen as lost on certain organizations. Yes, there are practitioners of the methodology, though there are also a host of people who have taken the phrase without fully understanding the implications and the means to implement such an idea.

And it would appear BCN readers also agree with that assumption. Despite DevOps being one of the most used words in the cloud industry, only 52% of our readers believe DevOps has hit the mainstream market.