Google in 2012 announced a goal of running its operations 100% on renewable energy. Today the company announced that it plans to meet that target by the end of 2017, a year ahead of schedule.Google will purchase direct renewable energy and buy renewable energy credits that match the amount of power the company uses to power its global operations. That’s 2.6 GigaWatts of electricity, or 2,600 MegaWatts (MW).Google is just one of a handful of vendors, particularly those in the IaaS cloud computing market, who have committed to buying renewable energy to power their operations. Last week Amazon Web Services announced that it plans to be 50% powered by green energy sources by the end of next year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Telecommunications giants Verizon and CenturyLink have each now sold off their data center assets, with Verizon being the most recent to offload its infrastructure operations to Equinix in a $3.6 billion deal.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Amazon's biggest re:Invent cloud announcements +Equinix operates data centers around the world for its colocation and interconnection business and is purchasing 24 sites that have a total of 29 data centers in 15 metropolitan areas. The acquisition brings Equinix’s total data center footprint to 175 in 43 metro areas. Verizon is keeping its data centers in 27 sites across Europe, Asia and Canada.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IoT, Machine Learning and trucking data into the cloudImage by AmazonAWS’s 2016 re:Invent conference is a wrap, and if you missed any of the news check out the biggest announcements Amazon made in Las Vegas. From data analytics tools to machine learning platforms and new IoT functions, there was a lot to digest. Amazon will even truck your data into its cloud!To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The fact that Amazon Web Services announced three new machine learning services this week shouldn’t come as a surprise. Machine learning, artificial intelligence and cognitive computing are hot buzzwords for cloud vendors and the world was waiting to see how AWS would address it at its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.
What may be surprising is how Amazon is positioning these new machine learning tools.
+MORE AT NETOWRK WORLD: A peek inside Amazon’s cloud – from global scale to custom silicon | Cool tech at AWS re:Invent +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
AWS CEO Andy Jassy predicts that as more workloads move to the public IaaS cloud, companies will reduce the number of servers they will manage and the new definition of on-premises infrastructure will increasingly be Internet of Things (IoT) devices.“More and more companies are deploying connect IoT devices,” he notes, from factories, ships, cars, oil rigs and agricultural machines. “Every place they have assets, they want to be able to collect and analyze data.”+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Cool tech from AWS re:Invent | A peek inside Amazon’s cloud – from global scale to custom silicon +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon Web Services is marching toward powering its global cloud footprint completely with renewable energy, with plans to be half way to the goal by the end of next year.As of April 2015, the company was a quarter of the way to its goal of using 100% renewable energy. One of its 14 regions – in Oregon – already runs completely on green power. At the AWS re:Invent conference this week, VP and Distinguished Engineer James Hamilton said the company is now 40% of the way to its goal and hopes to be 45% by the end of this year. By the end of next year it hopes to be half way there.+ MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Cool products at AWS re:Invent | A peek inside Amazon’s massive cloud, from global footprint to custom built silicon +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon Web Services brings on enough new server capacity every day to support the entire operations of Amazon the online retail giant when it was an $8.5 billion enterprise in 2005. Every day.That was just one of the insights that Amazon Web Services' Vice President and Distinguished Engineer James Hamilton shared during an opening night keynote at re:Invent, Amazon’s user conference for its IaaS cloud platform. Hamilton provided an internal glimpse of operations that run the company’s cloud business, from its global network of 14 regions down to the custom-made silicon that run its servers, in many cases revealing information that was not previously public.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Let the show beginImage by Thinkstock/AmazonAmazon Web Service’s re:Invent conference is one of the premier showcases for new cloud technology spanning across the infrastructure, platform and software as a service markets. Check out some of the hottest products being announced or displayed at the show, from new tools for managing big data to products that help optimize your cloud use to ones that help secure your environment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon Web Services executives like to talk about customers who are going “all-in” on the company’s cloud platform, ditching their data centers and investing fully in IaaS.According to media reports, AWS CEO Andy Jassy is encouraging the company’s partners to do the same thing. Jassy reportedly encouraged partners at the re:Invent conference to focus their expertise on the AWS cloud.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: How to compare costs between Amazon, Azure and Google clouds +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft has patched a vulnerability stemming from its configuration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in the Azure public cloud that a customer discovered.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: How to compare costs between AWS, Azure and Google clouds +Microsoft Azure uses a process in which all instances of the RHEL operating system check back to a centralized system to ensure it is up to date. The customer, Ian Duffy in Ireland, found that he was able to access that master copy of RHEL, which could have allowed him or anyone else to implant a security vulnerability into the master copy of the program that would have propagated throughout any Azure customer using the OS.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IBM today announced that American Airlines, considered by some metrics to be the largest airline in the world, would be using its cloud platform.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: How to compare cloud costs between Amazon, Microsoft & Google +A press release announcing the deal provided scant details of how AA will use IBMs cloud. American “will move select enterprise applications to IBM’s Cloud,” is about the all it said, adding that AA has chosen IBM as its cloud provider but not saying the agreement is exclusive.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Comparing prices among the major IaaS cloud vendors is not as easy as simply checking the cost of one virtual machine versus another. Myriad factors influence price: Size of the virtual machine, type of VM and contract length, to name a few.So how are you supposed to know which vendor offers the best deal? The key is to understand the different offers from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform and then determine which is best for your use case.“Comparing cloud pricing is complicated,” begins a blog post from RightScale that analyzes cloud prices among the major vendors. “It can be difficult to make apples-to-apples comparisons because cloud providers offer different pricing models, unique discounting options, and frequent price cuts.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Just two days ahead of the first keynotes at the AWS re:Invent conference, Amazon Web Services announced today that $2 billion international shipping giant Matson plans to close its data centers and go ‘all-in’ on the company's IaaS cloud platform.Matson is a 134-year old Hawaii-based publicly traded shipping company with 22 vessels that run routes primarily in the Pacific Ocean.“The shipping industry requires advanced IT capabilities to enable precise tracking of assets and customer shipments as they move around the world,” a press release announcing the news reads.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The week before Amazon Web Services kicks off its annual re:Invent user conference the company has cut prices of its two biggest products: virtual machines and object storage.The moves come as some analysts have noted that cloud price cuts have slowed in recent years. Price cuts are not dying though, as AWS’s moves from the past few weeks show.On Nov. 14 AWS announced between 5% and 10% reductions in the cost of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), it’s core virtual machine IaaS product, effective Dec. 1.This week, the company announced between 20% and 28% reductions in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), also effective Dec. 1. Before the EC2 price reduction this month, that service’s price had not been reduced since January 2016.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google Cloud Platform solidified its partnership with Intel and announced plans to create customized silicon chips for tasks like machine learning, security, container orchestration and the Internet of Things, while bringing on a new executive to help the company flush out its strategy.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: 10 Tips from the front line of enterprise cloud use +The Cloud Foundry Foundation announced that its former executive director, Sam Ramji has joined Google in a leadership position, but his new title is not yet know. Cloud Foundry Foundation is the home of the open source application development platform of the same name. Companies like Pivotal and IBM base their PaaS off CF. Google cloud is also the preferred public cloud for Pivotal’s hosted CF version.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
What have GE, Citigroup, FedEx, Bank of America, Intuit, Gap, Kaiser Permanente, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan Chase learned from using the public cloud?A group of representatives from each of these companies has worked for the past six months with the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) to develop a whitepaper exploring challenges of using hybrid cloud. ONUG’s Hybrid Cloud Working Group (HCWG) includes not only valuable tips from their experiences using the cloud, but also a wish-list of how these enterprises would like vendors to evolve their platforms.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Popular developer platform GitLab has concluded that the public IaaS cloud is not an effective platform for hosting its open source file storage system with high input/output demands. So, GitLab is ditching the cloud.In a blog post explaining the decision, GitLab engineers say they’ll transition their CephFS storage tool to bare metal infrastructure that they will manage themselves. GitLab provides a platform to help teams of developers write, test and ship code. GitLab's storage issue is a prime example that not all workloads are ideally suited for the public cloud. GitLab is hardly the first company to pull an application from the public cloud; DropBox announced plans to build out its own cloud platform instead of using Amazon Web Service’s cloud earlier this year, for example. Still, many other enterprises are going all in on the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
F5, considered the market-share leader in application delivery control (ADC), today released new versions of its flagship BIG-IP product that make it easier to use the company’s load balancer, firewall and other application delivery services not only in data centers but in the public cloud.The maturation of BIG-IP represents a broader shift among ADC vendors to embrace public cloud. Traditionally these ADC products have been optimized for applications that are hosted on infrastructure controlled by customers. As more and more applications shift to the public infrastructure as a service cloud, vendors have evolved their products to work in those environments too.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A team founded by PhD researchers who studied some of the first instantiations of software defined networking at Stanford University have a new startup named Forward Networks that help users understand network behavior while protecting and predicting how changes will impact the system.The key to Forward Networks' technology is an algorithm developed at Stanford that allows a software copy of a network to be created. Using this copy, users can run tests on it before implementing changes into production and identify the cause of a problem when something is wrong, says CEO David Erickson.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: What you need to know about Microservices +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A team founded by PhD researchers who studied some of the first instantiations of software defined networking at Stanford University have a new startup named Forward Networks that help users understand network behavior while protecting and predicting how changes will impact the system.The key to Forward Networks' technology is an algorithm developed at Stanford that allows a software copy of a network to be created. Using this copy, users can run tests on it before implementing changes into production and identify the cause of a problem when something is wrong, says CEO David Erickson.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: What you need to know about Microservices +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Brandon Butler