Amazon iterates, Google partners
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 […]
451 Research on IaaS
This diagram, from a recent 451 Research report, is intriguing. AWS is top of the heap, “used by the majority of enterprise IaaS customers in the study (57%) and is also cited as the most important IaaS provider by 35% of these current IaaS customers.” But look at Rackspace, ahead of AWS on ‘promise’ and only just […]
Hewlett-Packard gets real
The New York Times’ Quentin Hardy reports HP’s Bill Hilf as saying that: “We thought people would rent or buy computing from us. It turns out that it makes no sense for us to go head-to-head [with Amazon].” Well, yes. But, and it’s a huge but… this doesn’t mean HP is abandoning (or should abandon) the […]
Amazon binds itself more tightly to the enterprise
Amazon Web Services (AWS) spent years being dismissive of anything that didn’t run in an AWS data centre. Private and hybrid clouds were, we were repeatedly and vehemently told, ‘false clouds.’ There was no value in doing anything cloudy any way but the Amazon way. Non-cloudy workloads were, simply, anachronistic. Left alone, they’d get on with the […]
Software Load Testing: A Perfect Match for the Cloud
The cloud has allowed modern, web-scale IT companies, like Airbnb and Netflix, to grow and flourish into booming enterprises all over the web. With its flexibility and efficiency, it supports the demand of an organization’s growth from zero to millions of users, allowing them to prepare for this potential growth, as well. Before the cloud, […]
50% on S3? AWS Helping Google Into the Game or Stopping the Cloud Race to Zero?
One day after Google announced a substantial price reduction for their cloud services, Amazon announced their own dramatic price reduction on several AWS offerings. This move will reduce the revenues of one of Amazon’s most profitable services, the S3, by about 50%. What were the AWS leaders thinking just before Andy Jassy went on the […]
Cloud Just Got Real – The Race Begins
This week, Google hosted its Cloud Platform Live event. Some people were a little surprised at my enthusiastic live twitter coverage for a number of Google’s announcements. I have been waiting for them to “go big or go home” for a while now. My biggest surprise was how long it took Google to get up […]
Cloud, DevOps and Herding Cats
The conventional wisdom is that 2014 is that year that enterprise IT finally “rolls up the sleeves” and gets serious about cloud adoption. But what does this really mean? Basically we’re seeing the era of cloud pilots and proof-of-concepts in the enterprise drawing to close, especially around IaaS and to a certain extent PaaS. CIOs […]
5 Recommended AWS re:Invent Breakout Sessions for Scalability and Optimization
I’m OnDemand is heading to Las Vegas for Amazon’s official cloud show – AWS re:Invent. In my honest opinion, the show is the most significant conference in the cloud and IT industries, and includes a number of fantastic educational sessions. To navigate the sessions, Amazon has provided conference attendees with a great tool that helps […]
The Perceived Risk of The Purely Cloud Deployment
In this post series, I will raise some basic questions and will delve deeply into this topic to debate the common resistance to what I call “pure cloud deployment”. Let’s begin with a leading question: Can’t the hybrid economy model live within the public cloud? From the enormous number of conversations with top cloud thought leaders, CIOs, […]
Ravello Systems Announcing General Availability of Its Cloud Application Hypervisor
The public cloud market is young, despite AWS’ growth and current worth of a few billion dollars. Most of the enterprise’s IT resources are still hosted on the organizational premise supported by VMware hypervisor. The enterprise hybrid challenge is hidden in the cloud utility model’s basic notion of hardware as software, whereas legacy application topology, […]
Looking in the Mirror: A Response to My Open Letter
Last week I published an open letter to the OpenStack community calling for more focus on Amazon Web Services (AWS) compatibility. I feel strongly about this, as do others. However, in retrospect, I could have gone about elevating this issue in a different manner. I realize now that it might have been better had my […]
Who are you, Cloud Broker?
Cloud brokers were recognized and described by Gartner analysts as the `Intermediary services that support fast cloud adoption`. From their customers’ perspectives cloud brokers are the system integrators (SI) or the `cloud enablers` that support fast adoption and maintenance of cloud technologies. For example, the independent software vendor (ISV) can benefit greatly from a cloud […]
Missing the Point on Private, Public, and Hybrid Cloud APIs
At the recent Structure event in San Francisco, I watched Werner Vogels’ presentation, along with about 500 others in a packed auditorium. Werner is the CTO of Amazon Web Services and one of the industry’s more prophetic voices. (I was honored to share the keynote stage with him at Cloud Connect a couple of years ago.) During Werner’s conversation with […]
Has the Time Come for Cloud Insurance?
In the enterprise market much of the adoption for public cloud IaaS services so far has been driven by innovators and early adopters. One of the defining characteristics of these early adopters is their willingness to accept and manage risk. These risks can come in many forms, including technological, organizational, operational and financial. Financial risk […]
