The Walt Disney Company has extended its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as it continues the global rollout of its Disney+ streaming service.

Since it was revealed in 2017, AWS has been heavily involved in the development of Disney+, providing a range of services from data analytics to storage.

The extension will see Disney tapping into more than 50 different AWS services, such as machine learning, content delivery, and serverless computing, as it continues to launch in new regions.

The service has been built on a flexible, secured cloud video infrastructure powered by AWS with the two firms collaborating «closely» to balance loads and handle usage spikes with viewing peaking during premium content like The Mandalorian and the WandaVision. When it launched in November 2019, there were more than 10 million new sign-ups within the first 24-hours.

«Disney+ has completely reinvented what’s possible in content delivery by challenging convention and using cloud technology to build a streaming product from scratch that had never been launched and marketed before on such a global scale,» said Joe Inzerillo, the executive vice president and CTO, direct-to-consumer, of the Walt Disney Company. 

«AWS has been our preferred cloud provider for years, and its proven global infrastructure and expansive suite of services has contributed meaningfully to the incredible success of Disney+.»

Amazon Kinesis, which is a data analytics platform, and Amazon DynamoDB, a database that helps manage metadata and enables content to be watched on different devices, have both been extensively used by Disney to create and deploy Disney+. The company also uses Amazon Timestream to monitor the streaming platform and ensure that users continue to have access to the highest quality video content.

With the assistance of AWS, the Walt Disney Company has been able to rapidly expand Disney+ to 59 countries across North America, Europe, Asia and South America and there are plans to continue pushing its service around the world.

Red Hat has launched an advanced tier of its OpenShift container application platform, with added tools designed to offer a complete Kubernetes stack out-of-the-box. This is in addition to launching three new managed cloud services. 

Red Hat’s OpenShift Kubernetes Engine is the foundational layer of OpenShift, allowing customers to run containers across hybrid cloud deployments on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) OS. The OpenShift Container Platform adds developer and operations services, as well as advanced features for app development and modernisation. 

The tertiary tier, OpenShift Platform Plus, builds on the OpenShift Container Platform to provide advanced security features, ‘day two’ management capabilities and a global container registry. It brings together all the aspects needed to build, deploy and run any application where OpenShift software runs, Red Hat claims.

Its launch has come alongside a set of managed cloud services tightly integrated with the Red Hat OpenShift platform to help organisations build, deploy and manage cloud-native apps across hybrid configurations. 

Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka, Red Hat OpenShift Data Science and OpenShift API Management are being launched to ease the complexities of modern IT environments, while not compromising on productivity. 

OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka is designed to make it easier for customers to create, discover and connect to real-time data streams regardless of where they’re based.

OpenShift Data Science also offers organisations a way to develop, train and test machine learning models and export in a container-ready format.

OpenShift API management, meanwhile, reduces the operational cost of delivering API-first, microservices-based apps.

“To take full advantage of the open hybrid cloud, IT leaders need to be able to use the technologies that they need in whatever IT footprint makes sense for them,” said Red Hat’s executive vice president for products and technologies, Matt Hicks, at Red Hat Summit 2021. 

“Red Hat managed cloud services effectively drops many barriers that have kept organisations from harnessing the full potential of the hybrid cloud. We believe eliminating the traditional overhead of managing cloud-scale infrastructure will spark a genesis moment for customers and open up a future of possibility where those barriers once stood.”

Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus adds Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes, a standalone product developed from the firm’s recent acquisition of StackRox. This offers built-in Kubernetes-native security tools to safeguard infrastructure and management workloads through an app’s development cycle. This is in addition to Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes and Red Hat Quay. The former brings end-to-end visibility and control of clusters, while the latter provides a secure registry for a consistent build pipeline.

“We believe this version addresses the need for a hybrid cloud solution that we hear from our customers, and we’ll be working lead with customer-managed OpenShift across data centre, public and private cloud,” said senior vice president for cloud platforms at Red Hat, Ashesh Badani.

“This version also becomes a landing point for additional capabilities, and we have worked hard to reduce costs compared to purchasing any of these capabilities a la carte, and we will continue to offer all three versions so customers can best decide what’s appropriate for their use case, and subscribe to the best available version.”

One of the key appeals is it grants businesses system-level data collection and analysis, as well as more than 60 security policies out-of-the-box that can be enforced from the time apps are built to when they’re deployed. 

RedHat OpenShift Platform Plus also lets organisations take a DevSecOps approach to security by integrating declarative security into developer tooling and workflows.

The three managed services, being launched in the coming months, build on Red Hat’s existing suite of OpenShift apps, allowing customers and partners to build an open Kubernetes-based hybrid cloud strategy.

Based on the open source Apache Kafka project, OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka allows dev teams to more easily incorporate streaming data into their apps. Real-time data is critical to these apps, and provide more immediate digital experiences wherever a service is delivered.

OpenShift Data Science builds on Red Hat’s Open Data Hub project and provides faster development, training and testing of machine learning models without the expected infrastructure demands. 

Finally, the OpenShift API Management managed cloud service offers full API management to Red Hat Oepnshift Dedicated, as well as OpenShift on AWS. This combines managed operations with native OpenShift integration to let organisations focus on the innovation side of things as opposed to the infrastructure. 

Red Hat OpenShift API Management also enables customers to build their own API management program, with the capabilities to control access, monitor usage, share common APIs and evolve their overall application landscape through a single DevOps pipeline.

Google and Microsoft reported surging profits on Tuesday as the two tech giants continued to capitalise on the COVID pandemic.

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, posted first-quarter revenues of $55.31 billion, an increase of 34% year-on-year, and profits more than doubled to $17.93 billion, marking the third consecutive quarter of record profit for the company.

Similarly, Microsoft reported that revenues increased by 19% to $41.7 billion for the fiscal third quarter, its biggest quarterly increase since 2018, while profits soared by 44% to $15.5 billion.

Google’s first-quarter growth was largely fuelled by its advertising business, which brought in $44.68 billion during the first three months of 2021 – a 32% increase compared to Q1 2020.

Google Cloud also reported impressive gains during the three-month period, although it continues to make a loss for Alphabet. The division reported $4.02 billion in revenue and had an operating loss of $974 million in Q1, compared to $3.83 billion in revenue and $1.24 billion in operating losses during Q4 2020, the first time Google broke out its cloud business’ performance separately.

Meanwhile, Alphabet’s «other bets», which include Verily and Waymo, reported revenue of $198 million and an operating loss of $1.15 billion.

“Over the last year, people have turned to Google Search and many online services to stay informed, connected and entertained. We’ve continued our focus on delivering trusted services to help people around the world. Our Cloud services are helping businesses, big and small, accelerate their digital transformations,» said Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet.

Cloud remained Microsoft’s biggest driver during its fiscal third quarter, ending in March 2021. Sales of commercial cloud products generated $17.7 billion in revenue, up 33% from a year earlier, and Azure revenues soared 50% during the three-month period. Commercial Office 365 products were also up 22% for the quarter as corporate customers continued to embrace cloud-based tools as a result of the shift to mass remote working.

“Over a year into the pandemic, digital adoption curves aren’t slowing down. They’re accelerating, and it’s just the beginning,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. “We are building the cloud for the next decade, expanding our addressable market and innovating across every layer of the tech stack to help our customers be resilient and transform.”

Microsoft’s Personal Computing business also saw growth of 19% year-on-year, thanks to a 10% increase in Windows OEM revenue, a 10% year-over-year increase in Windows commercial products and cloud services revenue, and a 35% jump in Xbox and gaming revenue.

Red Hat has added a host of features to its flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) platform to refine the product as a lightweight, production-grade operating system for edge computing. 

With RHEL 8.4, which will launch in the next few weeks, the company is adding Linux container deployment and management capabilities scaled for the intensive demands of edge computing. The latest version of the flagship operating system adds container images, enhanced management of edge deployments at scale, and automatic container updates.

Together, these improvements comprise the foundational layer for the ‘Red Hat Edge’ initiative, which aims to extend the capabilities of the firm’s hybrid cloud portfolio to edge computing across various industries. The segments being targeted initially include telecoms, transport, as well as smart vehicles. 

“The vision of open hybrid cloud – that sort of build once and deploy anywhere – that gets extended to the edge as we have seen this incredible thirst for the capabilities that edge can bring,” said senior vice president and general manager for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Stefanie Chiras, speaking on a panel at Red Hat Summit 2021. 

“As we look at what we have done with open hybrid cloud, edge becomes that next extension for us to broaden out that hybrid cloud, bringing that choice that our platform delivers out into edge use cases.”

“To me when we look at our value in edge, it fundamentally comes to our capabilities in Linux. What we’ve done in RHEL, how we’ve built that out to be the heart of an ecosystem, and a stable, secure platform, how we’ve brought that into the OpenShift platform to deliver Kubernetes and management around containerisation – all of that consistency is critically important when we get out to the edge.” 

With updates to Podman, RHEL’s open standards-based container engine, the platform will help to maintain standardisation and control across several Linux containers, which is critical to edge deployments. 

There’s also new functionality to Image Builder, a tool that creates customised deployable operating system images for a variety of users. This tool supports the creation of installation media tailored for bare metal, which helps IT teams maintain a common foundation across disconnected edge environments.

Finally, the Red Hat Universal Base Image (UBI), which allows containers to retain RHEL’s traits such as security at the application level, is now available in a lightweight micro image. This makes it ideal for building redistributable, cloud-native app standardisation on an enterprise-grade Linux foundation, minus the overhead of an entire operating system deployment. 

The latest version of RHEL also adds a few non-edge-oriented features, including greater flexibility for cloud-based applications, more simplified and automated system configuration and management, as well as greater security. 

Microsoft Teams has suffered a global outage for the second time this month that is preventing users from sending messages and logging in to the service. 

The tech giant confirmed the issue on Twitter and said it was currently investigating the root cause. 

The issue, which is throwing up a 401 error code, is preventing users from accessing the service via the web and blocking messaging systems on the app itself. Some have managed to log in, but Microsoft has warned that they might experience «degraded performance with multiple features». 

«We’ve confirmed that this issue affects users globally,» says Microsoft’s 365 status account on Twitter. «We’re reviewing monitoring telemetry and recent changes to isolate the source of the issue.»

The problems began around 10:30am BST, according to DownDetector, with login and server issues the most commonly cited by users. Other Microsoft services, such as Azure and Xbox have so far been unaffected, but with the pandemic still lingering and many still working from home, the outage is causing trouble for many in the UK and around the world – including Doncaster’s local planning committee.

«Unfortunately due to global issues with Microsoft Teams today’s scheduled Planning Committee is cancelled,» the organisation said on Twitter. «The meeting will be rearranged in due course, we will share details of the new date once it becomes available.»

Since, Microsoft has said that it’s identified the root cause of the issue and «performed mitigation actions». 

«We’re seeing signs of recovery and will continue to monitor the service,» the company added. «Users still experiencing impact should restart their clients to expedite recovery. Further details can be found under TM252802.

This is the second outage Teams has suffered in April and the third its experienced in the past two months. In March, users lost four hours of usage after an authentication change knocked out access to the comms platform. That coincided with an Azure Active Directory outage that impacted Office web apps, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and other Microsoft services. 

IT Pro has approached Microsoft for details and will update this article when more information is released. 

Zoom has rolled out a video background feature called Immersive View that aims to make its video calls feel more like physical, in-person meetings. 

The feature was unveiled last year at the firm’s Zoomtopia conference but has this week rolled out to both free and paid-for accounts for meetings and webinars of up to 25 participants. 

Zoom already has virtual background options, but Immersive View – which is available on Zoom desktop for Windows and macOS – adds functions to select and move participants into more realistic scenarios. It can be enabled via the dropdown menu where you can find ‘Speaker’ and ‘Gallery’ view.

From there, users will have the choice to either automatically place attendees in a variety of built-in virtual scenes, such as a boardroom or auditorium, or do so manually. 

Each attendee can be resized by the host and moved around a chosen scene, and users can even upload their own. It’s possible to use any image as an Immersive View background, but Zoom recommends that matching up file type, aspect ratio and resolution, as it has with its choices, will produce the best results. 

«Whether you want to create the feeling of being in a classroom, a boardroom, a conference auditorium, or your favourite place to catch up with friends, Zoom’s Immersive View assembles up to 25 participants in one fun, consistent meeting environment,» Zoom product marketing specialist, David Ball, said in a blog post.

Unfortunately, there are some limitations; calls over 25 people will see remaining guests in a strip of video thumbnails at the top of the scene. Worse, participants that are not using the latest version of Zoom will simply see the standard grid. Recordings are also subject to these limitations; they’ll be recorded in the standard Speaker or Gallery View, rather than a fun virtual scene.

IBM has unveiled a set of improvements to its storage portfolio designed to give its customers greater access to and management of their data across their complex hybrid cloud environments. 

The technology giant, which has pivoted its operations towards hybrid cloud in recent months, will launch IBM Spectrum Fusion later this year, in addition to updating its IBM Elastic Storage System (ESS). 

IBM Spectrum Fusion is described as a container-native hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) system that integrates compute, storage and networking functions into a single platform. It’s been designed to come equipped with Red Hat’s OpenShift to allow customers to support environments for both virtual machines (VMs) and containers, and provide software-defined storage for cloud, edge and containerised data centres. A software-defined storage (SDS) version will follow in 2022.

Updates to IBM’s ESS suite, meanwhile, include a revamped model ESS 5000 that delivers 10% greater capacity, as well as a new ESS 3200 which offers double the read performance of its predecessor. They’re designed to provide scalability at double the performance of previous models for faster access to enterprise data.

“It’s clear that to build, deploy and manage applications requires advanced capabilities that help provide rapid availability to data across the entire enterprise – from the edge to the data centre to the cloud,” said Denis Kennelly, general manager for IBM Storage Systems. 

“It’s not as easy as it sounds, but it starts with building a foundational data layer, a containerised information architecture and the right storage infrastructure.”

Spectrum Fusion integrates a fully containerised version of the parallel file system and data protection software to provide businesses with a streamlined way to discover data across the organisation. Customers can also use the system to virtualise and accelerate data sets more easily by using the most relevant storage tier. 

Businesses will also only need to manage a single copy of the data, no longer needing to create duplicate data when moving workloads across the business. This eases processing functions such as data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI).

With regards to IBM’s ESS updates, the IBM ESS 3200 is designed to provide data throughput of 80Gbps per node, which represents a 100% performance boost from its predecessor, the ESS 3000. The 3200 also offers up to eight InfiniBand HDR-200 or Ethernet-100 ports for high throughput and low latency.

The IBM ESS 5000 model has been updated to support 10% more density than the previously available, for a total storage capacity of 15.2PB. In addition, all ESS systems are now equipped with streamlined containerised deployment capabilities automated with the latest version of Red Hat Ansible. 

Both these models include containerised system software and support for Red Hat OpenShift and the Kubernetes Container Storage Interface (CSI), CSI snapshots and clones, Red Hat Ansible, Windows, Linux and bare metal environments. IBM Spectrum Scale is also built into them. The 3200 and 5000 units also work with IBM Cloud Pak for Data, its fully containerised platform of integrated data and AI services

The global semiconductor shortage will last for at least another six months, according to Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins.

Robbins told the BBC that it would take “another six months to get through the short term” of the global chip shortage, adding that the crisis is unlikely to be fully resolved until 2022.

«The providers are building out more capacity. And that’ll get better and better over the next 12 to 18 months,” he said.

According to Robbins, the shortage has been caused by unprecedented demand for semiconductors, which “go in virtually everything”.

“When COVID hit, everyone thought that the demand side was going to decline significantly and in fact we saw the opposite,” Robbins said. “And at the same time demand went up instead which was a complete shock to so many of us.”

The UK’s first national lockdown saw a massive surge in demand for virtual office components such as laptops and network peripherals as companies scrambled to accommodate their employees in the mass shift to working from home. 

Robbins’ statement comes as the European Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton announced plans to hold discussions with Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger and TSMC Europe president Maria Marced on 30 April.

Breton is reportedly looking to secure the EU’s role in chip production by persuading a leading chip manufacturer, most likely TSMC, to open a fabrication plant in the region, with France, Germany, or Poland mentioned as potential locations.

Opening a major factory in Europe would help the continent to become less reliant on shipments coming in from Asia, which has proven increasingly difficult due to pandemic travel and transport restrictions. Breton is seeking to double the EU’s share of global semiconductor production to 20% by 2030.

«Increasing our autonomy does not mean isolating ourselves in a world where supply chains are global,» Breton told Reuters. «In parallel to exploring how we can increase Europe’s capacity…we will continue to build bridges with international partners – but with us in the driving seat,» he added, confirming the meetings.

The NHS has partnered with AI startup Faculty to improve its forecasting and predictive capabilities to improve patient care.

The new partnership, which saw Faculty appointed as a partner following a tender process, will reportedly help the NHS to build on its success using AI so far and address new areas where AI forecasting tools can improve service delivery and patient care, such as understanding and predicting A&E demand and winter pressures.

Faculty has been working with the NHS during the COVID-19 pandemic and developed the Early Warning System (EWS). This AI tool is purportedly based on Bayesian hierarchical modelling, using aggregate data to warn hospitals about potential spikes in cases so they can divert staff, beds and vital equipment to where it’s needed.

Currently, there are around 1,000 users of the forecasts across the NHS, who use the outputs for their own analysis or to help inform the prioritisation of safe care delivery for patients on a daily basis, according to Faculty.

“The response to the pandemic has demonstrated the importance and impact of using data and machine learning techniques to make predictions about the future and inform more effective decision-making, wrote the company.

“The techniques applied in the EWS allow forecasts to use specific information from that trust, as well as incorporating a broader set of contextual information that impacts the forecast, such as what’s happening in COVID-19 admissions in other local hospital trusts.”

Faculty has faced controversy in the past when it comes to government contracts. Last year, the startup, which had worked on the Vote Leave campaign, won a contract to analyse social media data, utility bills and credit score ratings, according to the Guardian. However, the full details were unknown as the published version of the contract was partly redacted.

After facing pressure from Open Democracy and Foxglove in June last year, the UK government released contracts governing its deals with a number of companies including Faculty. It emerged the Dominic Cummings-linked firm was being paid over £1 million to provide AI services for the NHS, with Open Democracy claiming that the terms of the deal were changed after initial demands for transparency were made under a FOI request.

Furthermore, cabinet minister Lord Agnew owed £90,000 of shares in the company when it was awarded a £2.3m contract from the NHSX to help run the NHS Covid-19 Data Store, according to Digital Health. A report by the National Audit Office (NAO) revealed the conflict of interest, although the organisation found «no evidence he was involved in awarding or managing the procurements». It also notes he relinquished his shares on 23 August 2020.

At the start of the month, NHS Digital signed a deal with Scandit, an augmented reality solutions provider, to digitise the UK’s Covid testing process. The company was going to provide the NHS with a data capture service in the form of barcode scanning technology to make it easier to track and identify tested samples.

Embattled Chinese telecoms giant Huawei is pivoting towards software and cloud services in a bid to attract more developers.

The firm launched six new cloud products over the weekend, further expanding its ambitions to take on the likes of Alibaba, Amazon, and Google, according to CNBC. 

The six cloud products include containers, artificial intelligence (AI) programming assistants, databases, computing services and infrastructure software. Each was launched at the company’s three-day developer conference in Shenzhen, which has cloud, AI and open source as its main theme.

The announcement also included a $200 million investment in Huawei’s developer programme, which aims to boost its software ecosystem and cloud services. 

Huawei’s cloud efforts have paid off, according to Canalys Research, with revenues jumping 168% year on year in 2020. However, the firm is still far behind the likes of Amazon and Alibaba in China. Huawei Cloud is currently the second-largest player in China with a 17.4% market share, compared to Alibaba’s 40%, according to Canalys.

«By 2025, 100% of enterprises around the globe will be utilising cloud technology,»  said Richard Yu Chengdong, executive director of Huawei. «Cloud is the future of the ICT industry and the foundation for enterprises digital transformation. Developers are the soul of the industry.»

The cloud update comes after a tough year for Huawei, with its hardware unit struggling in the face of US sanctions. Its 5G equipment and services have been shunned in the US and UK over security fears and its smartphone sales have declined swiftly. It is widely believed that the lack of Google services on its Mate and P series of handsets is a big turn off for Western customers – although reports also suggest a decline in China too. 

The firm has been rapidly building out its own operating system, pivoting Harmony OS from an IoT-focused platform to one that can work on high-end smartphones. It is due to be released on Huawei handset in the coming weeks, but it’s still in need of development and is a far cry from Android.