Six years ago over two days engineers from Rackspace and NASA met in Austin, Texas, for the very first OpenStack Summit. Six years later, OpenStack is returning to its roots.As it does so, OpenStack has cemented itself as the dominant open source IaaS platform. But at the same time, more proprietary offerings from vendors like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and VMware still seem to reign in the broader market.+More on Network World: 15 most powerful OpenStack companies | OpenStack by the numbers: Who’s using open source clouds and for what? +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In the latest installment of the Cloud Chronicles video series, we visit Care.com in Waltham, Massachusetts, a company that found tremendous benefit from using the cloud.
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A new report from JP Morgan quantifies just how significant the enterprise shift to the cloud has become.The Wall Street giant queried 207 CIOs who have budgets of more than $600 million to find that 16.2% of the workloads under management by the CIOs run in the public cloud and within five years, 41.3% are expected to.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: IDC: The cloud is eating legacy systems +We don’t normally put too much stock in surveys, but this one caught our eye because of who administered and took the survey.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The AWS Summit in Chicago this week kicks off an international tour of dozens of Summits from New York to Tokyo this year, culminating with AWS re:Invent in December. At today’s conference Amazon Web Services GM of Product Strategy Matt Wood announced new features for the cloud platform.But one thing that was not officially discussed has been a rumored product that could give Amazon partner reason for concern.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: AWS Exec on competing with Google and Microsoft; the next big thing in the cloud| 10 big announcements from Google’s cloud conference +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
General Electric is on an aggressive pursuit of going embracing cloud services, the company's CTO – IT Chris Drumgoogle told me recently.GE has tens of thousands of apps; petabytes of storage and more than $100 billion in annual revenue. So it can’t rely on just a single vendor. Drumgoole says that GE’s highest value apps in the cloud straddle across at least two providers. Lower-priority apps can run in one cloud.
Chris Drumgoole, CTO of IT, General Electric: Hybrid cloud hype is 'overblown'To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For Jim Fowler, CIO of General Electric, there’s a simple reason he is marching the company toward the cloud: “I’m not going to sell another aircraft engine because I run a global compute factory very well; I’m not going to sell another locomotive because I figured out how to engineer the user experience really well for my developers; I’m not going to sell an oil and gas pump because I’ve figured out how to do self-service,” he said at last year's Amazon Web Service’s re:Invent conference. “That’s AWS’s differentiator. That's what they do well.”
GE, the 123-year-old staple of the global industrial sector, is going all in on the cloud. The company plans to migrate 9,000 applications to public IaaS over the next three years. It is reducing its data centers from more than 30 to the single digits.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Open source cloud computing platform OpenStack has a new semi-annual version of its code out this month and one symbolically important aspect is a deepened partnership with Google’s public cloud.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Status check on OpenStack: The open source cloud has arrived | Why Google hasn’t taken off in the cloud yet +In a blog post, Google announced that the Mitaka release of OpenStack includes a native option to backup OpenStack Cinder storage volumes to its public cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New research from IDC shows that spending on infrastructure to run public and private clouds continues to grow at leaps and bounds as spending on non-cloud infrastructure decreases.
+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: 10 Best Cloud SLA practices +
IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker tracks spending patterns of users and service providers, along with revenues of vendors to paint a picture of cloud adoption trends.
Infrastructure spending on public and private cloud technology – which includes servers, storage and Ethernet switching – grew 21.9% in 2015 to be a $29 billion industry. Cloud technology made up almost one-third (32%) of all IT infrastructure sales; that’s up from $28.6% in 2014.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In an interview with Matt Wood, Chief product strategist at Amazon Web Services, one thing that stuck out was how big of an emphasis he placed on Lambda.Many people probably don’t know what Lambda is, or why it’s important. But Wood says it could usher in a new era of application development and cloud-based hosting. And perhaps most interestingly, it could be a replacement for one of Amazon’s core cloud services: Virtual machines.+ MORE AWS FROM NETWORK WORLD: Q&A with Amazon Web Service’s strategist on competing with Google and Microsoft and building the next big thing in the cloud +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s been a busy past couple of weeks in the IaaS cloud with Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft each holding major user events and announcing significant advancements, which continues to put pressure on the company many consider to be the market leader: Amazon Web Services.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Google and Microsoft make their pitch to unseat amazon in the cloud | Jeff Bezos letter to shareholders: At 10 years old, AWS is bigger than Amazon was and growing faster +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The second largest car manufacturer in the world, Volkswagen Group, will use the open-source cloud computing platform OpenStack to build a private cloud that will host websites for its brands VW, Audi and Porsche, and be a platform for innovating automotive technology, the company announced today.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Mirantis beats out Red Hat for big VW OpenStack deal | Jeff Bezos to shareholders: At 10 years old, AWS is bigger than Amazon was and growing faster +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In a letter to shareholders, Amazon.com founder, CEO and Chairman of the board sounds like a proud father talking about the success of the moonshot project that launched the company into being a powerhouse of the cloud computing market.Amazon Web Services is on pace to earn $10 billion in revenue this year, he notes. “AWS is bigger than Amazon.com was at 10 years old, growing at a faster rate,” he adds.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: The myth about how Amazon's cloud started that just will not die | Happy 10th birthday AWS +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Billions of devices, lots of opportunityThe Internet of Things (IoT) is still nascent, but growing quickly. Research firm IDC predicts it will become a $1.46 trillion international market by 2020, up from $700 billion last year. A trillion-dollar market means a lot of companies will want a slice. So who are the leaders of the IoT? We consulted with some of the leading analysts to find out. (Note: Companies are listed in alphabetical order.) To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Even as security remains a concern for cloud users, research firm IHS says managed security vendors are increasingly delivering their security products via the cloud.And by 2020, most managed security services will be delivered via the cloud, IHS predicts.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: IT is getting cloud storage security all wrong + IHS
IHS predicts that by 2020, more managed security vendors will deliver their products via the cloud than on-premises. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In San Francisco this week at Pier 48, overlooking the Giants’ AT&T Ballpark, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) executives are holding a user conference to introduce products and services they hope will help make the case for choosing Google in the cloud.Sam Charrington, a cloud and big data analyst and advisor, summed up Google executives’ pitch best this week on Twitter: “GCP exec team’s operating thesis: ‘Cloud’s not done. The industry’s just beginning the journey.”+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Is Google pushing the cloud envelope too far? +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The confluence of applications being hosted in the cloud and end users accessing them via mobile devices is accelerating advancements in wide area networking technologies.A new report issued today by research firm IDC predicts those factors will drive what was a relatively nascent software defined WAN (SD-WAN) industry, worth a mere $225 million last year, to grow at a more than 90% compound annual growth rate for the next five years to become a $6 billion industry by 2020.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: SD-WAN: What it is and why you’ll use it one day +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s that time of year again: Pi Day! Image by Flickr/kok_sexton Pi enthusiasts around the world wait each year for March 14 to celebrate the mathematical constant that represents the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Check out our tried and true tips for celebrating Pi Day, and be sure to check out our past year’s coverage for even more ideas.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Over the past decade Bank of America has grown by leaps and bounds internally and through an array of mergers and acquisitions. From a technical standpoint, that growth has created a complex and disparate set of data centers, computing architectures and vendor relationships.For CTO David Reilly, there was an obvious goal: Standardize on more efficient infrastructure. For a company that spends $3 billion on technology each year – nearly double the amount it did five years earlier – any reduced expenditures translate directly to improved bottom line profitability for the bank. Transitioning to a shared virtualized computing platform not only drove savings in the IT organization, but net profit for the bank. But soon Reilly realized that standardizing and virtualizing was not enough. He wanted to start all over again.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
At this week’s RSA Conference, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger is positioning the company’s NSX network virtualization product as a tool for encrypting data in flight and at rest, in the public cloud or on premises.It’s an attempt to showcase NSX – one of the two major network virtualization platforms on the market along with Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) – as not just enabling software-defined networking (SDN), but being a serious security tool as well.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Why Martin Casado is leaving VMware | VIDEO: What you didn’t know about private cloud +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Looking to capitalize on the emerging software-defined WAN market opportunity, Verizon has entered into an agreement to offer startup Viptela’s SD-WAN technology as a hosted product.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: SD-WAN: What it is and why you’ll use it one day +SD-WAN is the idea of bringing software defined networking capabilities to branch office sites. Controlling the WAN through software allows for easier management of the network if changes are needed and SD-WANs typically support multiple types of connections, from broadband to MPLS to LTE.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Brandon Butler