Archivo de la categoría: AWS

AWS, Big Data, Cloud South East Asia, News & Analysis, Policy and Regulation, Safe Harbour

AWS: examine fine print in data transfer legislation

In a week that has seen the European Court of Justice rule that the Safe Harbour agreement on data transfer as invalid, the significance of data transfer legislation in South East Asia has been under discussion at Cloud South East Asia.

Answering audience questions following his Cloud South East Asia keynote this morning, Blair Layton, Head of Database Services for Amazon Web Services, argued that some of the legislation against data transfer was not always as cast-iron as they appear.

Acknowledging that such legal concerns were indeed “very legitimate,” and that there were certainly countries with stringent legal provisions that formed an obvious barrier to the adoption of cloud services such as Amazon Web Services, Layton none the less stressed that it was always worth examining the relevant legislation “in more detail.”

“What we’ve found in some countries is that, even though the high level statement might be that data has to reside in one country, what you find in the fine print is that it actually says, ‘if you inform users then it is fine to move the data,”’ he told delegates. “Also, that for sensitive data you think you may not be able to move – because of company controls, board level concerns etc. – we can have many discussions about that. For instance, if you just want to move data for back-up and recovery, you can encrypt that on the premise, maintain the keys on premise, and shift that into the cloud for storage.”

In the same session, Layton, when not extolling the impressive scope and effectiveness of Amazon Web Services in the South East Asian region and beyond, discussed other reasons for the arguable disparity between the evident regional interest in cloud services, and the actual uptake of them.

“There are in different cultures in different countries, and they have different levels of interest in technology. For example, you’ll see that…. people in Singapore are very conservative compared to the Taiwanese In other countries their IT is not as mature and they’re not as willing to try new things and that’s simply cultural.”

Amazon Web Services, AWS, Infrastructure as a Service, News & Analysis, Platform as a service, Rackspace, Software as a service

Rackspace ups AWS functionality and support, becomes authorised reseller

AWSManaged hosting provider Rackspace has announced a ramped up suite of products featuring enhanced support and functionality with Amazon Web Services.

The agreement with AWS, announced at re:Invent in Las Vegas this week, will see Rackspace launch managed service offerings including tools, expertise, application management and operational support for AWS Cloud. “Fanatical Support for AWS” is the core service offering featured as part of the agreement, with three beta offerings supplementing the managed service – Managed Security for AWS, Compliance Assistance for AWS and Managed Cloud for Adobe Experience Manager.

Through Fanatical Support, Rackspace tells its customers to “leave the heavy lifting to us” as it claims to take care of migration, architecture, security and operations for companies looking to adopt AWS for application hosting.

Rackspace has also become an authorised reseller at AWS, as well as a managed services partner, and has joined the AWS Partner Network. CEO Taylor Rhodes spoke about the announcement on the company’s blog page.

“Over the past year, more and more of them [customers] have told us that they love Rackspace expertise and Fanatical Support, and would like to get it for the workloads that they prefer to run on AWS,” he said. “We have spent the past several months working with those customers and with AWS, to create the best managed-service offering on that platform.”

Rhodes went on to say that AWS adds to Rackspace’s existing commitment to support a number of other platforms.

“We help businesses tap the power of the cloud without the pain and expense of managing it all themselves,” he said. “We have gone deep on support for platforms such as OpenStack, Microsoft and VMware. Our success in leading the managed cloud market for those technologies has been validated by industry experts such as Gartner, and most importantly, by our 300,000-plus business customers.”

Finally, Rhodes then highlighted how Fanatical Support has evolved with today’s announcements, and how it will benefit various customer segments.  He claims it will appeal to businesses that have desired AWS integration with existing Fanatical Support functionality; for rapidly growing businesses needing to outsource some IT functionality in order to reallocate technical resource to other areas; and for customers new to both AWS and Rackspace.

Meanwhile, AWS’s VP of worldwide partner ecosystem Terry Wise, welcomed Rackspace’s increased integration and functionality of AWS.

“We’re pleased to see Rackspace support AWS customers and achieve membership in the AWS Managed Service Program,” he said. “A growing number of businesses who want the benefit of the AWS Cloud will find value in working with AWS Managed Service Partners like Rackspace. We have been impressed with Rackspace’s commitment to include beta customers in their AWS managed services offerings, along with certifying a large number of their technical staff.”

Amazon, Analytics, Avere, AWS, Big Data, Business Intelligence, Elasticsearch, News & Analysis

Amazon enhances AWS with new analytics tools

AWSOn the eve of its AWS re:Invent 2015 event internet giant Amazon is positioning itself for a run at the business intelligence market.

Already announced is the Amazon Elasticsearch Service, is a managed service designed to make it easier to deploy and operate Elasticsearch in the AWS cloud, on which more later.

In addition the WSJ is reporting the likely launch of a new analytics service, codenamed SpaceNeedle, which is set to augment AWS with business intelligence tools. The reported strategic aim of this new service is to both strengthen Amazon’s relationship with AWS customers and allow it to broaden its total available market.

Back to the Elasticsearch service, BCN spoke to Ian Massingham, UK Technical Evangelist at AWS, to find out what the thinking behind it is. “This service is intended for developers running applications that use Elasticsearch today, or developers that are considering incorporating Elasticsearch into future applications,” he said “Elasticsearch is a popular open-source search and analytics engine for use cases such as log analytics, real-time application monitoring, and click stream analytics.”

Apparently Wikipedia uses Elasticsearch to provide full-text search with highlighted search snippets, as well as search-as-you-type and did-you-mean suggestions, while The Guardian uses Elasticsearch to combine visitor logs with social network data to provide real-time feedback to its editors about the public’s response to new articles.

Expect more AWS news as the re:Invent event gets underway. Already Avere Systems has unveiled Avere CloudFusion, a file storage application for AWS, that aims to provides a cloud file system to leverage Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) with the cost efficiencies of Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), all with the simplicity of network-attached storage.

AWS, Cisco, Dell, Equinix, Google, HP, IBM, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Platform as a service, Public Cloud, Salesforce, Software as a service, Synergy Research

Public cloud generating $22 billion a quarter for IT Companies

metalcloud_lowresPublic cloud computing generated over $22 billion in revenues for IT companies in the second financial quarter of 2015, according to a study by Synergy Research Group.

The revenue breaks down into $10 billion earned by companies supplying public cloud operators with hardware, software and data centre facilities and $12 billion being generated from selling infrastructure, platforms and software as a service.

In addition the public cloud supports ‘huge’ revenue streams from a variety of internet services such as search, social networking, email and e-commerce platforms, says the report. It identifies the supply side companies with the biggest share of revenues as Cisco, HP, Dell, IBM and Equinix. On the cloud services side the market leaders are AWS, Microsoft, Salesforce, Google and IBM.

As the public cloud makes inroads into the total IT market, the hardware and software used to build public clouds now account for 24 per cent of all data centre infrastructure spending. Public cloud operators and associated digital content companies account for 47 per cent of the data centre colocation market.

While the total IT market grew at less than five per cent per year, the growth of cloud revenues outpaced it. Infrastructure and platform as a service revenues (Iaas/Paas) grew by 49 per cent in the past year and software as a service (SaaS) grew by 29 per cent.

“Public cloud is now a market that is characterized by big numbers, high growth rates and a relatively small number of global IT players,” said Synergy Research Group’s chief analyst Jeremy Duke.

However, the report noted that there is still a place for regional small-medium sized public cloud players.

Amazon, AWS, News & Analysis, Storage, Storage as a Service

Amazon Web Services to offer new hierarchical storage options after customer feedback

amazon awsAmazon Web services (AWS) is adding a new storage class to speed up the retrieval of frequently accessed information.

The announcement was made by AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr on his company blog. Customer feedback had made AWS conduct an analysis of usage patterns, Barr said. AWS’s analytical team discovered that many customers store rarely-read backup and log files, which compete for resources with shared documents or raw data that need immediate analysis. Most users have frequent activity with their files shortly after uploading them after which activity drops off significantly with age. Information that’s important but not immediately urgent needs to be addressed through a new storage model, said Barr.

In response AWS has unveiled a new S3 Standard, within which there is a hierarchy of pricing options, based on the frequency of access. Customers now have the choice of three S3 storage classes, Standard, Standard – IA (infrequent access) and Glacier. All still offer the same level of 99.999999999 per cent durability.‎ The IA Standard for infrequent access has a service level agreement (SLA) of 99 per cent availability and is priced accordingly. Prices start at $0.0125 per gigabyte per month with a 30 day minimum storage duration for billing and a $0.01 per gigabyte charge for retrieval. The usual data transfer and request charges apply.

For billing purposes, objects that are smaller than 128 kilobytes are charged for 128 kilobytes of storage. AWS says this new pricing model will make its storage class more economical for long-term storage, backups and disaster recovery.

AWS has also introduced a lifecycle policy option, in a system that emulates the hierarchical storage model of centralised computing. Users can now create policies that will automate the movement of data between Amazon S3 storage classes over time. Typically, according to Barr, uploaded data using the Standard storage class will be moved by customers to Standard IA class when it’s 30 days old, and on to the Amazon Glacier class after another 60 days, where data storage will $0.01 per gigabyte per month.

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.