Top Cloud Computing News: April 2018
Happy spring (or fall depending on your hemisphere)! Last month was a big month for both Amazon and Microsoft, with positive news on earnings and several new services. Netflix was also in the news several times this month, when they open sourced their container management and let slip they’ve been cheating on AWS with GCP. Lastly, Gartner makes some bold spending predictions. Read on!
Amazon Blows Out Earnings Projections
Happy Amazon earnings! Am I the only one who looks forward to the Christmas that comes 4 times a year, otherwise known as Amazon earning announcements? Some greeted this with a yawn, since ***SPOILER ALERT*** AWS posted 49% revenue growth for the quarter: a cool $5.44B, way above analyst projections. Another interesting tidbit that came to light this month was Amazon’s investments in R&D last year, which was the highest of the cloud giants at $23B. Granted, the majority of this spend is not on AWS specific areas, but neither is Microsoft’s or Google’s spend.
Microsoft Posts Strong Results, I Think?
Microsoft also posted Q1 2018 earnings last month, reporting 58% growth and revenue of $6B for their commercial cloud products. You might be thinking, huh? I thought AWS was the public cloud leader (don’t worry, this confused a lot of publications)? They still are, it all comes down to how Microsoft defines “commercial cloud products,” which includes Azure, Office 365, Dynamics 365 and a slew of other things. We estimate that revenue from Azure alone was roughly $2.7B in Q1 2018. It’s no $6B, but it’s still healthy growth at 93% YoY, showing that Azure is definitely gaining momentum.
Netflix Open-Sources their Container Management, and Dabbles in GCP
Netflix has been a source of industry thought leadership and engineering best practices for years, starting in their early days of using AWS and the “chaos monkeys.” Their most recent contribution? An open source container management platform called Titus. Netflix has used Titus for years, which is based on a variant of Apache Mesos. Titus is built both for massive scale (it powers many critical components of the Netflix experience), and for tight integration into AWS. The open sourcing of Titus has been long awaited in the developer community, Netflix says this is a question they field frequently, and I believe it, given this website.
On a completely different note, Netflix was also in the news last month because it came to light that they also use GCP, in addition to AWS. YAWN. No offense, AWS, but most large organizations prefer a multi-cloud strategy. News also broke last month that Twitter was moving some infrastructure to GCP. Is this even news anymore?
Microsoft Goes All-In on IoT
Last month, Microsoft announced they are investing $5B into the IoT market over the next four years. Given the latest revelations on how much Amazon is spending on R&D, I wonder if this may have spurred this investment. Either way, this is a great move for Microsoft as they look to differentiate their offerings from the other cloud giants — IoT seems to be mostly greenfield at this point. Microsoft also announced a security platform for IoT endpoints called Azure Sphere, which will span from the Chip, to the OS, to the connectivity layer. This is especially exciting for those of us who live in constant fear of having our refrigerators hacked.
Amazon Launches New S3 Class: One-Zone IA
It’s been awhile since Amazon launched any new significant storage offerings into the market. Last month broke the dry spell, when Amazon announced S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA) storage at their San Francisco Summit. Other S3 offerings will automatically replicate storage across at least three zones, to ensure availability and durability of storage. The S3 One Zone-IA option, does not offer this replication, your data will reside in a single zone. This impacts the availability (designed for 99.5% instead of 99.9% like regular IA storage) and durability (designed for eleven nines of durability, but data will be lost in the event of the destruction of an AZ). In exchange, you receive a 20% discount. This new offering effectively replaces the old S3 Reduced Redundancy storage, which was quietly retired when it actually became more expensive than standard S3 last year. The new S3 One Zone-IA storage is a good choice for companies storing lower criticality data that still might need to be accessed with some frequency.
Gartner Adjusts 2018 IaaS Spending Predictions
Rounding out our news for the week is the latest in Gartner’s predictions for cloud computing spending. Their latest prediction for 2018 is that overall cloud spend will hit a massive $186B in 2018, the biggest chunks coming from SaaS, at $60.2B, cloud business process services at $46.4M and IaaS at $40.8B. While this is a significant jump from in spending overall from 2017, with IaaS growing rapidly with 35% YoY growth, it’s worth noting that this number was adjusted down from Gartner’s previous forecast. In October 2017, Gartner was forecasting $45.8B in IaaS spending in 2018. They also were predicting 2017 IaaS spending to close out at $34.7B in spending, and it appears that they since adjusted that to $30B. It’s clear that public cloud spend is growing fast, but maybe not quite as fast as we initially thought.
That wraps up the top cloud computing news in April 2018! Join me next month for the latest and greatest happenings in all things cloud computing.
Top Cloud Computing News: March 2018
They say that March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb. But this year between the multiple Nor’easters in New England, snow in Rome and the United Kingdom, and a constant onslaught of cloud news, I’d say this year March came in like a lion and out like a dragon. Click here to read more.
Top Cloud Computing News: February 2018
February 2018 was a short but eventful month in the cloud computing industry. From Microsoft taking a new approach to recruiting startups onto Azure, to Oracle quadrupling their data center footprint, read on for all the cloud computing news that caught our eye this month. Click here to read more.
Originally published at www.cloudhealthtech.com.
