Top Cloud Computing News: June 2018

June was a whirlwind month with major news centered around Oracle inexplicably changing how their reported public cloud revenue, and then taking another punch from a JP Morgan CIO survey. Oh, and Microsoft bought GitHub…queue the angry Twitterverse. Lastly, everyone and their mother is getting into managed Kubernetes. Read on for all the latest news in cloud computing you may have missed last month.

Oracle Changes How They Report on Cloud Revenue

Surprise! Oracle decided to change how they report out on cloud revenue last month. Why? Oh, no particular reason… hey look over there! Previously, Oracle broke out SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS revenue, which was reported at $1.36B at the end of 2017. According to co-CEO Safra Catz, under the previous model, cloud revenue would have been $1.7B, which would represent 25% growth compared to the same quarter last year. Instead, cloud revenue is reported in a combined figure of cloud SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, software license updates, and product support, which only grew 8%. Huh? Oracle is clearly hiding something, likely poor performance on the cloud revenue side. Commenting on this, co-CEO Mark Hurd said the whole thing was a “nothing burger,” (yes, that is a direct quote) which of course made everyone more suspicious. All of this just confirms what I’ve thought for awhile, that Oracle’s whole cloud business is a nothing burger.

JP Morgan Survey Shows Microsoft A Bigger Threat to AWS in Enterprise

Speaking of Oracle’s rough month, things didn’t get much better for them when JP Morgan released their annual survey that found that CIOs listed Oracle as their number one vendor to shrink spend with, ouch. But that’s not why I bring up this survey, we’ve had enough Oracle bashing for one blog. There were several other results that pointed to the potential for Azure to significantly overtake AWS in the large enterprise. Now, I know that these surveys are a dime a dozen and depending on who is paying for them, will tell you one result over another. However, I’ve spent some time going in-depth with the JPM survey, and this is one I do put a lot of credence in. One of the findings that I believe is very telling is that 27% of CIOs named Microsoft as their first “must-have” vendor (compared to 12% for AWS). This is not a completely fair comparison when it comes to public cloud since obviously Microsoft sells a LOT more than just Azure, but in the large enterprise and at the executive level, the importance of relationships cannot be overlooked. JPM hasn’t released their full findings to the broader public yet, but I hope they do soon since there are some fascinating discoveries in this data.

Microsoft Buys GitHub

The Twitterverse exploded last month when Microsoft announced their intention to buy GitHub. As the world’s largest development platform, used by startups and Fortune 500 companies alike, it’s no surprise that there were strong feelings when the company was bought by a tech giant like Microsoft. While Microsoft has vowed to let the coding site operate independently, many are wary of these promises and are moving to alternatives like GitLab and BitBucket. Of course, “running independently” doesn’t mean “we will make zero changes and everything will be the same as it always was,” although Microsoft has been relatively hands off with LinkedIn since that acquisition last year. Users moving to new development platforms isn’t the only response to this news, it prompted the popular GitHub alternative, GitLab, to migrate their infrastructure off of Azure and over to GKE. While this was a smart move for Microsoft, especially if they can add some Azure magic in there, I also see it opening a door for AWS and GCP to step in with their own offerings (next phase for AWS CodeStar?) or make acquisitions as well.

AKS, EKS, VKE and…GCKE?

In this month’s edition of “everyone wants a piece of that sweet Kubernetes pie,” we saw major news on FOUR different managed Kubernetes offerings. That’s right, four (or really 3.5, but let’s round up). What happened in Kubernetes land last month? Let’s count em off:

1. Amazon makes Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) Generally Available. The service that made a huge splash at re:Invent 2017 is now officially generally available. During the beta, customers were limited to running only a few nodes for each cluster on EKS, which prevented anyone from truly trying it out in production, but now that’s its GA, companies will really get the chance to put it through its paces. Given that a reported 57% of Kubernetes customers already run on AWS, it will be interesting to see how many make the move to EKS instead.
2. Microsoft makes Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Generally Available. Not to be left out, Microsoft also GA’d their managed Kubernetes service last month. With GA, Microsoft also expanded the availability of AKS to five additional regions, making it available in 10 total regions (EKS is available in two) This is on top of several enhancements they made last month to the service while it was still in preview.
3. VMware throws their hat into the Kubernetes ring with VMware Kubernetes Engine (VKE) announcement. Now for something a bit different: VMware announced the public beta of VKE, essentially a managed Kubernetes offering that runs on AWS. You will still create clusters within VKE that are comprised of native EC2 instances. In future, this will also run on other public clouds, or on-prem. It’s interesting that they didn’t START with an on-prem solution here, but I guess VMware finally sees where the puck is moving.
4. Don’t forget about Google! If we’re talking Kubernetes, we can’t ignore Google, the originators of the popular orchestrator. They made two small announcements last month that I will give partial credit to: first the GA of regional clusters for GKE, which allow you to improve high availability, and then several days later, a mysterious and vague announcement with Cisco that hinted of more things to come from the two tech giants.

Phew, I’m exhausted already. Let the managed container orchestration wars begin!

That wraps up the top cloud computing news in June 2018! Join me next month for the latest and greatest happenings in all things cloud computing.

Top Cloud Computing News: May 2018

This month was dominated by the release of two major analyst evaluations on cloud computing, one from Forrester and another from Gartner. Click here to read more.

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. Click here to read more.

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.