• When Agility Outweighs Cost for Big Cloud Operations

    August 14, 2017

    If anything has become clear over the last several years of watching infrastructure and application trends among SaaS-businesses, it is that nothing is as simple as it seems. Even relatively straightforward services, like transactional email processing, have some hidden layers of complexity, which tends to equal cost.

    For most businesses providing web-based services, the solution for complexity was found by offloading infrastructure concerns to the public cloud. This provided geographic availability, pricing flexibility, and development agility, but not all web companies went the cloud route out of the gate. Consider SendGrid, which pushes out over 30 billion emails per month. …

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  • A Health Check For Code And Infrastructure In The Cloud

    May 24, 2017

    As businesses continue their migration to the cloud, the issue of monitoring the performance and health of their applications gets more challenging as they try to track them across both on-premises environments and in both private and public clouds. At the same time, as they become more cloud-based, they have to keep an eye on the entire stack, from the customer-facing applications to the underlying infrastructure they run on.

    Since its founding eight years ago, New Relic has steadily built upon its first product, a cloud-based application performance management (APM) tool that is designed to assess how well the …

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  • 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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  • Riding The Coattails Of Google Kubernetes And AWS Lambda

    February 1, 2017

    There are individuals and companies that create whole new technologies for their own consumption and that sometimes open source them for others to help steer their development and fix their bugs. And then there are still other companies that polish these tools, giving them some enterprise fit and finish, and thereby make it possible for others to deploy a particular technology without having to have PhDs, who are not available anyway, on staff.

    From the enterprise perspective, the Apache web server and related Tomcat application server needed its Big Blue, the Linux operating system needed its Red Hat, and the …

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  • AWS Outlines Current HPC Cloud User Trends

    January 26, 2017

    Last week we discussed the projected momentum for FPGAs in the cloud with Deepak Singh, general manager of container and HPC projects at Amazon Web Services. In the second half of our interview, we delved into the current state of high performance computing on Amazon’s cloud.

    While the company tends to offer generalizations versus specific breakdowns of “typical” workloads for different HPC application types, the insight reveals a continued emphasis on pushing new instances to feed both HPC and machine learning, continued drive to push ISVs to expand license models, and continued work to make running complex workflows more seamless. …

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  • AWS Details FPGA Rationale and Market Trajectory

    January 22, 2017

    At the end of 2016, Amazon Web Services announced it would be making high-end Xilinx FPGAs available via a cloud delivery model, beginning first in a developer preview mode before branching with higher-level tools to help potential new users onboard and experiment with FPGA acceleration as the year rolls on.

    As Deepak Singh, General Manager for the Container and HPC division within AWS tells The Next Platform, the application areas where the most growth is expected for cloud-based FPGAs are many of the same we detailed in our recent book, FPGA Frontiers: New Applications in Reconfigurable Computing. These …

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  • The FPGA Accelerated Cloud Push Just Got Stronger

    November 30, 2016

    FPGAs have been an emerging topic on the application acceleration front over the last couple of years, but despite increased attention around use cases in machine learning and other hot areas, hands have been tied due to simply on-boarding with both the hardware and software.

    As we have covered here, this is changing, especially with the addition of OpenCL and other higher-level interfaces to let developers talk to FPGAs for both network and application double-duty and for that matter, getting systems that have integrated capabilities to handle FPGAs just as they do with GPUs (PCIe) takes extra footwork as well. …

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  • AWS And VMware Acquaint As Strange Cloudfellows

    October 17, 2016

    What happens when the world’s largest public cloud and the biggest peddler of server virtualization in the enterprise team up to create a hybrid cloud?

    A few things. First, the many VMware partners who have built clouds based on the ESXi hypervisor get nervous. And second, VMware very delicately and carefully prices its software low enough that it can have a scalable public cloud play but not so low that Amazon Web Services doesn’t end up having the pricing leverage that its parent company had with the book business a decade ago. And third, AWS uses the might of a …

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  • Igneous Melds ARM Chips And Disks For Private S3 Storage

    October 11, 2016

    The only companies that want – and expect – all compute and storage to move to the public cloud are those public clouds that do not have a compelling private cloud story to tell. But the fact remains that for many enterprises, their most sensitive data and workloads cannot – and will not – move to the public cloud.

    This almost demands, as we have discussed before, the creation of private versions of public cloud infrastructure, which interestingly enough, is not as easy as it might seem. Scaling infrastructure down so it is still cost effective and usable by …

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  • Amazon Gets Serious About GPU Compute On Clouds

    September 30, 2016

    In the public cloud business, scale is everything – hyper, in fact – and having too many different kinds of compute, storage, or networking makes support more complex and investment in infrastructure more costly. So when a big public cloud like Amazon Web Services invests in a non-standard technology, that means something. In the case of Nvidia’s Tesla accelerators, it means that GPU compute has gone mainstream.

    In years gone by, AWS tended to hang back on some of the Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron compute on its cloud infrastructure, at least compared to the largest supercomputer centers and hyperscalers …

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