Positive cloudy news from two of the big three, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) making some significant improvements to their DynamoDB service and Google signing on as a sponsor of the OpenStack cloud platform.
AWS has got this incremental improvement thing down to a fine art, to the extent that too many competitors have stopped paying enough attention. AWS launches services that are rather limited, and then tweaks and tweaks and tweaks until the pieces fall into place and something far stronger emerges. An awful lot of players in this space are frogs in water, and the AWS team just keep gradually turning up the heat.
And Google, lately, has been making a big push to win friends in the open source world. Its latest move is a low-level sponsorship of OpenStack, citing shared interest in containers as a primary motivator. The news – and the money – aren’t that significant. Yet. What will be far more interesting is to see, in six months or so, whether Google ramps up involvement or quietly lets their logo simply sit amongst the hundred-or-so other sponsors. Could we – should we – see something bolder, with smoothed on-ramps from OpenStack private clouds to Google public clouds? Or some marrying of OpenStack with Google’s own public cloud offering? Perhaps not… Maybe a Google-friendly approach to containers inside OpenStack is enough.
