Category Archives: AWS

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.

Amazon, AWS, Brent Alderfer, Community Energy, Datacentre, Green America, Jerry Hunter, News & Analysis, sustainability

AWS announces huge solar project following criticisms of its green cred

AWS announced a large solar project, part of its commitment to powering all of its global infrastructure with renewables

AWS announced a large solar project, part of its commitment to powering all of its global infrastructure with renewables

Amazon announced this week that it has teamed up with Community Energy to build and operate an 80 megawatt (MW) solar farm in Virginia, which the companies claim to be the largest solar farm in the state.

The announcement comes just one day after an environmental advocacy group hit out at AWS over its carbon footprint and energy reporting practices.

The companies said the solar farm, to be named the Amazon Solar Farm US East, will start generating approximately 170,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of solar power annually as early as October 2016 – which is roughly equivalent to the amount of energy used to power approximately 15,000 US homes for a year.

Amazon said the power purchasing agreement (PPA) is part of its long-term goal announced last year of powering all of its datacentre infrastructure using 100 per cent renewables. It said as of April this year about a quarter of its infrastructure is powered by renewables.

“We continue to make significant progress towards our long-term commitment to power the global AWS infrastructure with 100 percent renewable energy,” said Jerry Hunter, vice president of infrastructure at Amazon Web Services. “Amazon Solar Farm US East – the second PPA that will serve both existing and planned AWS datacenters in the central and eastern US – has the added benefit of working to increase the availability of renewable energy in the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

Community Energy chief executive Brent Alderfer said: “We are pleased to work with Amazon Web Services to build the largest solar farm in Virginia and one of the largest east of the Mississippi. This project, which wouldn’t have been possible without AWS’ leadership, helps accelerate the commercialization and deployment of solar photovoltaic (PV) technologies at scale in Virginia.”

Earlier this week Green America, a US-based environmental advocacy group, said Amazon is far behind other datacentre operators – including some of its large competitors like Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook – in terms of its renewable energy use and reporting practices. Google and Apple have been particularly strong in using or generating renewable energy to power their datacentres, with Apple committed to a number of large solar projects globally.

The group launched a campaign this week aimed at convincing Amazon to alter its environmental strategy. It is calling on Amazon to commit to full use of renewables for its datacentres by 2020 (AWS hasn’t set a target date publicly); submit accurate and complete data to the Carbon Disclosure Project; and issue and annual sustainability report.

Amazon, AWS, Carbon Disclosure Project;, Datacentre, Elizabeth O'Connell, Green America, Infrastructure as a Service, News & Analysis, Todd Larsen

Green America hits out at Amazon for its dirty cloud

Amazon has committed to bolstering its use of renewables, but Green America thinks it needs to go further

Amazon has committed to bolstering its use of renewables, but Green America thinks it needs to go further

Notforprofit environmental advocacy group Green America is launched a campaign to try and convince Amazon to reduce its carbon footprint and catch up with other large cloud incumbents’ green credentials.

Green America said Amazon is behind other datacentre operators – including some of its large competitors like Google, Apple and Facebook – in terms of its renewable energy use and reporting practices.

“Every day, tens of millions of consumers are watching movies, reading news articles, and posting to social media sites that all use Amazon Web Services.  What they don’t realize is that by using Amazon Web Services they are contributing to climate change,” said Green america’s campaigns director Elizabeth O’Connell.

“Amazon needs to take action now to increase its use of renewables to 100 percent by 2020, so that consumers won’t have to choose between using the internet and protecting the planet,” O’Connell said.

Executive co-director Todd Larsen also commented on Amazon’s green cred: “Amazon lags behind its competitors, such as Google and Microsoft, in using renewable energy for its cloud-based computer servers.  Unlike most of its competitors, it also fails to publish a corporate responsibility or sustainability reporting, and it fails to disclose its emissions and impacts to the Carbon Disclosure Project.”

Amazon has recently taken strides towards making its datacentres greener. In November last year the company committed to using 100 per cent renewable energy for its global infrastructure, bowing to pressure from organisations like Greenpeace which have previously criticised the company’s reporting practices around its carbon footprint. But organisations like Green America still believe the company is way off the mark on its commitment.

Green America’s campaign is calling on Amazon to commit to full use of renewables for its datacentres by 2020; submit accurate and complete data to the Carbon Disclosure Project; and issue and annual sustainability report.

An Amazon spokesperson told BCN that the company and its customers are already showing environmental leadership by adopting cloud services in the first place.

“AWS customers have already shown environmental leadership by moving to cloud computing, which is inherently more environmentally friendly than traditional computing. Any analysis on the climate impact of a datacentre should take into consideration resource utilization and energy efficiency, in addition to power mix,” the spokesperson said.

“On average, AWS customers use 77 per cent fewer servers, 84 per cent less power, and utilize a 28 per cent cleaner power mix, for a total reduction in carbon emissions of 88 per cent from using the AWS Cloud instead of operating their own datacentres. We believe that our focus on resource utilization and energy efficiency, combined with our increasing use of renewable energy, will help our customers achieve their carbon reduction and sustainability goals. We will continue to provide updates of our progress on our AWS & Sustainable Energy page,” she added.

Amazon, AWS, Education, News & Analysis, Teresa Carlson

AWS unveils programme to train, attract students to cloud

Amazon has launched a programme to help attract students to its cloud services

Amazon has launched a programme to help attract students to its cloud services

Amazon has launched the AWS Educate in a bid to help educators and student cultivate cloud-centric development and operations skills, and attract the next generation of users to its cloud services ecosystem.

The company plans to offer students and educators credits for AWS cloud services and make available cloud-related educational content for teachers to use as course materials. Amazon said the move is intended to help train up students on cloud, which it said it becoming the default environment for developing and deploying greenfield applications.

“For years, the AWS educational grants program has put cloud technology in the hands of educators and students, giving them the ability to put big ideas into action. We’ve seen students develop assistive computer vision technology in collaboration with the National Federation of the Blind, and aspiring entrepreneurs take a web startup from conception to launch within 60 hours,” said Teresa Carlson, vice president, worldwide public sector, AWS.

“Based on the feedback and success of our grant recipients and the global need for cloud-skilled workers, we developed AWS Educate to help even more students learn cloud technology firsthand in the classroom. We’re pleased to offer AWS Educate to educators, students and educational institutions around the world,” Carlson said.

Students and educators at any educational institution can join the programme and can apply to redeem AWS credits for a range of its services including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon CloudFront, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR), Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Glacier.

Programme participants will also get access to online training materials and app testing labs, collaboration forums and materials uploaded from other educators.

Amazon, AWS, Azure, Content & Applications, Microsoft, NetSuite, News & Analysis, Steve Guggenheimer, Vendor, Zach Nelson

NetSuite ditches AWS in Microsoft partnership

NetSuite and Microsoft are linking their cloud services, and NetSuite is moving its services onto Azure

NetSuite and Microsoft are linking their cloud services, and NetSuite is moving its services onto Azure

NetSuite has inked a deal with Microsoft in a move that will see the two companies link up the cloud-based financial and ERP platform with Microsoft Office, Windows and Azure.

As part of the deal the two companies have already integrated NetSuite and Azure Active Directory to enable single sign-on (SSO) for customers using NetSuite together with Azure AD, and in the coming months plan to drive further integration between NetSuite and Office 365 – for instance, to be able to do things like connect NetSuite data to Microsoft Excel and PowerBI in a more seamless way.

The partnership will also see NetSuite move its service off Amazon Web Services, a long-time partner of the firm, as well as take its on-premise deployments and move them into Azure, now its “preferred cloud” provider, by the end of the year.

“We’re at the ‘end of the beginning’ of the cloud, in that the cloud business model that NetSuite pioneered in 1998 is becoming the de facto standard for how fast-growth businesses are run,” said Zach Nelson, NetSuite chief executive.

“We’re thrilled to work with Microsoft to deliver a fluid cloud environment across the key NetSuite and Microsoft applications that companies and their employees rely on to continually improve their day-to-day operations and run their business better and more efficiently,” Nelson said.

Steve Guggenheimer, corporate vice president of developer platform & evangelism and chief evangelist for Microsoft also commented on the deal: “I’m excited about NetSuite’s support for Azure Active Directory for single sign-on, cloud-to-cloud integration and increasing our collaboration across mobile and cloud solutions. Our joint vision is all about giving people the freedom to get more done through the broadening set of devices they interact with that in turn helps businesses innovate and grow.”

AWS, Google, IBM, John Dinsdale, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Synergy Research

Synergy Research: AWS still larger than four biggest rivals combined

AWS is larger than its four top rivals combined

AWS is larger than its four top rivals combined

Amazon pulled the curtain back from its AWS business last week, announcing its cloud services now rakes in over $5bn annually. John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group said that now puts the e-commerce giant ahead of most of its largest competitors.

Amazon recently reported its cloud business took in revenues of $1.57bn in the first quarter of 2015, and enjoyed close to 50 per cent growth year on year. This is the first time the e-commerce giant has publicly disclosed AWS revenues.

Following on from that, some vendors which shall remain nameless (AWS competitors) worked behind the scenes to remind press off how much more profitable their cloud businesses are by comparison. But Synergy Research data suggests AWS is far larger than most of its competitors combined, at least in the infrastructure services market specifically.

Microsoft enjoys the highest revenue growth rate and IBM is leading private & hybrid services segment, but according to Synergy AWS continues to grow faster than the market as a whole, and that its market share approached 30 per cent in the most recently reported quarter.

Google is quietly gaining share though it remains just half the size of Microsoft in this market, the firm said.

“Across the full and varied spectrum of cloud activities there are now six companies that can lay a valid claim to having annual cloud revenue run rates in excess of $5 billion – AWS, IBM, Microsoft, HP, Cisco and salesforce – and all are able to claim leadership in different parts of the cloud market,” Dinsdale said.

“However, on a strict like-for-like basis AWS remains streets ahead of the competition in cloud infrastructure services. Furthermore, this part of the cloud market is growing much more rapidly than SaaS or cloud infrastructure hardware and software.”

Like-for-like comparisons seems scarce in cloud revenue reporting, not the least of which because it’s such a nascent sector. Considering the market leader in cloud only just started publicly disclosing revenues tacked onto that business, it may be some time before vendors and service providers come up with standard definitions for what can be reported as ‘cloud’ (for instance, IBM recently reported its annual cloud revenues now exceed $7.7bn).

Synergy estimates quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (which includes IaaS, PaaS and private & hybrid cloud) now total exceed $5bn.

Amazon, AWS, Brian Olsavsky, Infrastructure as a Service, Jeff Bezos, News & Analysis

AWS a $5bn business, Bezos claims, as Amazon sheds light on cloud revenue

Amazon publicly shed light on AWS revenues for the first time

Amazon publicly shed light on AWS revenues for the first time

Amazon reported first quarter 2015 sales revenues of $22.7bn, an increase of 15 per cent year on year from $19.7bn, and quarterly cloud revenues of $1.57bn. This is the first time the e-commerce giant has publicly disclosed AWS revenues.

North America saw the bulk of Amazon’s sales growth, with revenue swelling 24 per cent to $13.4bn and operating income increasing 79 per cent to $517m. Outside North America, revenues actually decreased 2 per cent to $7.7bn (excluding the $1.3 billion year-over-year unfavourable foreign exchange impact, revenue growth was 14 per cent).

The company was for the first time pleased to report AWS revenue grew close to 50 per cent to $1.57bn in Q1 2015, with operating income increasing 8 per cent to $26m and a 16.9 per cent operating margin.

“Amazon Web Services is a $5 billion business and still growing fast — in fact it’s accelerating,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon.

“Born a decade ago, AWS is a good example of how we approach ideas and risk-taking at Amazon. We strive to focus relentlessly on the customer, innovate rapidly, and drive operational excellence. We manage by two seemingly contradictory traits: impatience to deliver faster and a willingness to think long term.”

Brian Olsavsky, vice president, chief financial officer of global consumer business said that excluding the favourable impact from foreign exchange, AWS segment operating income decreased 13 per cent. But speaking to journalists and analysts this week Olsavsky reiterated the company was very pleased with the results, and that it would “continue deploying more capital there” as it expands

AWS has dropped its prices nearly 50 times since it began selling cloud services nearly a decade ago, and this past quarter alone has seen the firm continue to add new services to the ecosystem – though intriguingly, Olsavsky refused to directly answer questions on the sustainability of the cloud margins moving forward. This quarter the company announced unlimited cloud storage plans, a marketplace for virtualised desktop apps, a machine learning service and a container service for EC2.

Amazon, AWS, GPU virtualisation, Infrastructure as a Service, Jeff Barr, News & Analysis

AWS bolsters GPU-accelerated instances

AWS is updating its GPU-accelerated cloud instances

AWS is updating its GPU-accelerated cloud instances

Amazon has updated its family of GPU-accelerated instances (G2) in a move that will see AWS offer up to times more GPU power at the top end.

Announced on the tail end of 2013, AWS teamed up with graphics processing specialist Nvidia to launch the Amazon EC2 G2 instance, a GPU-accelerated instance specifically designed for graphically intensive cloud-based services.

Each Nvidia Grid GPU offers up to 1,536 parallel processing cores and give software as a service developers access to higher-end graphics capabilities including fully-supported 3D visualization for games and professional services.

“The GPU-powered G2 instance family is home to molecular modeling,  rendering, machine learning, game streaming, and transcoding jobs that require massive amounts of parallel processing power. The Nvidia Grid GPU includes dedicated, hardware-accelerated video encoding; it generates an H.264 video stream that can be displayed on any client device that has a compatible video codec,” explained Jeff Barr, chief evangelist at AWS.

“This new instance size was designed to meet the needs of customers who are building and running high-performance CUDA, OpenCL, DirectX, and OpenGL applications.”

The new g2.8xlarge instance, available in US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Northern California), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo), offers four times the GPU power than standard G2 instances including: 4 GB of video memory and the ability to encode either four real-time HD video streams at 1080p or eight real-time HD video streams at 720P; 32 vCPUs; 60 GiB of memory; 240 GB (2 x 120) of SSD storage.

GPU virtualisation is still fairly early on in its development but the technology does open up opportunities for the cloudification of a number of niche applications in pharma and engineering, which have a blend of computational and graphical requirements that have so far been fairly difficult to replicate in the cloud (though bandwidth constraints could still create performance limitations).