• When Will AWS Move Up The Stack To Real Applications?

    February 3, 2017

    Imagine how little fun online retailer Amazon would be having on its quarterly calls if it had not launched its Amazon Web Services cloud almost eleven years ago. The very premise of Amazon was to eliminate brick and mortar retailing, cutting out capital expenses as much as possible, to deliver books and then myriad other things to our doorsteps.

    How ironic is it that Amazon pivoted to one of the most capital intensive businesses on earth – running datacenters – and has been able to extract predictable and sizable profits from it to prop up its other businesses and strengthen …

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  • The Inevitability Of Private Public Clouds

    August 3, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    Call it a phase that companies will have to go through to get to the promised land of the public cloud. Call it a temporary inevitability, as Microsoft does. Call it stupid if you want to be ungenerous to IT shops used to controlling their own infrastructure. Call it what you will, but it sure does look like all of the big public clouds are going to have to figure out how to offer private cloud versions of their public cloud infrastructure, and Amazon Web Services be no exception if it hopes to capture dominant market share as it …

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  • In-Memory Breathes New Life Into NUMA

    May 18, 2016

    Hyperscalers and the academics that often do work with them have invented a slew of distributed computing methods and frameworks to get around the problem of scaling up shared memory systems based on symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) or non-uniform memory access (NUMA) techniques that have been in the systems market for decades. SMP and NUMA systems are expensive and they do not scale to hundreds or thousands of nodes, much less the tens of thousands of nodes that hyperscalers require to support their data processing needs.

    It sure would be convenient if they did. But for those who are not hyperscalers, …

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  • How Big Is The Ecosystem Growing On Clouds?

    May 2, 2016

    Letting go of infrastructure is hard, but once you do – or perhaps more precisely, once you can – picking it back up again is a whole lot harder.

    This is perhaps going to be the long-term lesson that cloud computing teaches the information technology industry as it moves back in time to data processing, as it used to be called, and back towards a rental model that got IBM sued by the US government in the nascent days of computing and compelled changes in Big Blue’s behavior that made it possible for others to create and sell systems against …

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  • How Long Can AWS Keep Climbing Its Steep Growth Curve?

    February 1, 2016

    With every new technology that takes off in the IT sector, there is a somewhat predictable curve. The product grows by leaps and bounds in triple digit percentages per quarter, then settles down to triple digit growth year-on-year, and then hits a natural level in the market where it does less than doubling annually, and finally cools down to some natural growth rate, and if all works out and the product is eating market share from rivals, it grows faster than the market.

    We say the curve is somewhat predictable because you can never tell how customers will react to …

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  • How Many Other Public Clouds Will Be Vaporized?

    October 22, 2015

    There are many vectors to scale, and we try to examine them all here at The Next Platform as we consider the implications for the systems, storage, and switching that IT organizations buy or rent to support their applications.

    One aspect of scale – and perhaps the most important one for the long term of platform architectures – has nothing to do with bits or flops, but is money and its effect on the economies of scale it can buy and the virtuous cycle, as Amazon Web Services calls it, that hyperscaling provides to those who do it. Time …

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  • The Custom Gear Inside Amazon’s Cloud

    October 12, 2015

    Long before it became the cloud computing juggernaut that it is today, Amazon was a fast-growing online retailer that bought its servers from traditional suppliers, starting with Hewlett-Packard and then moving on to Rackable Systems, an innovator in high density rack designs that is now part of SGI. But five years after its foray into cloud computing, Amazon Web Services did what most of what its hyperscaler peers did, and that was design its own custom switches and servers.

    At the re:Invent 2015 conference last week in Las Vegas last week, Jerry Hunter, vice president of infrastructure at AWS, talked …

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  • The AWS Machine Turns Your Former Datacenter Into Its Money

    October 7, 2015

    One of the founding premises of this publication is that companies want to build platforms – complete stacks of hardware and systems software – or use those built by others that are tailored specifically to run their applications. In days gone by, these platforms had names like IBM System/360 or Digital VAX or Windows on Intel and they ran inside the corporate datacenter. It is now safe to say that, nearly a decade since launching its first product, Amazon Web Services has become a platform in its own right.

    AWS is hosting its fourth annual re:Invent conference in Las …

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  • Google Refines Cloud Pricing Around Capacity Lessons

    September 8, 2015

    The public cloud has hit several growing pains over the last several years. From the hurdles of mitigating the cloud security conversations, to the invariable gripes about performance, application portability, management and most recently, pricing variability, it is definitely fair to say these are still evolving platforms.

    At the end of the day, however, many concerns still boil down to pricing. For some, it’s a matter of making build versus buy decisions for long-running applications, while for others the pricing worries are mounted on shorter-running but important applications. But moving past the user considerations, cloud providers have some unknowns as …

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  • AWS Skyrockets Despite, And Perhaps Thanks To, Price Cuts

    July 24, 2015

    It is difficult to argue with the fact that Amazon has upset the traditional model of IT as a cost center. By leveraging its investments in both hardware and software over the years to support its retail business, then flipping those over to become what might become a more profitable operation in its Amazon Web Services segment, the company has quite successfully turned risk into an entire cadre of rewards.

    The revenue for the AWS segment is a bit difficult to break out in fine-grained detail, but over the past quarter, revenue for the AWS segment increased 81% to $1.82 …

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