• A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall In Public Cloud

    May 18, 2018

    Way back in the early days of the commercial Internet, when we all logged into what seemed to be new but what was actually a quite old service used by academic institutions and government agencies that rode on the backbones of the telecommunications network, there were many, many thousands of Internet service providers who provided the interface between our computers and the network capacity that was the onramp of the information superhighway.

    Most of these ISPs are gone today, and have been replaced by a few major telco, cable, and wireless network operators who provide us with our Internet service. …

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  • MapD Fires Up GPU Cloud Service

    April 5, 2018

    In the long run, provided there are enough API pipes into the code, software as a service might be the most popular way to consume applications and systems software for all but the largest organizations that are running at such a scale that they can command almost as good prices for components as the public cloud intermediaries. The hassle of setting up and managing complex code is in a lot of cases larger than the volume pricing benefits of do it yourself. The difference can be a profit margin for both cloud builders and the software companies that peddle their …

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  • Navigating The Revenue Streams And Profit Pools Of AWS

    February 5, 2018

    It will not happen for a long time, if ever, but we surely do wish that Amazon Web Services, the public cloud division of the online retailing giant, was a separate company. Because if AWS was a separate company, and it was a public company at that, it would have finer grained financial results that might give us some insight into exactly what more than 1 million customers are actually renting on the AWS cloud.

    As it is, all that the Amazon parent tells Wall Street about its AWS offspring is the revenue stream and operating profit levels for each …

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  • FICO CIO on the Costs, Concerns of Cloud Transition

    December 5, 2017 Jeffrey Burt

    Moving large-scale enterprise operations into the cloud is not a decision to be made lightly. There are engineering and financial considerations, and the process of determining the costs pros and cons of such a move is significantly more complex than simply comparing the expense of running a workload on-premises or in a public cloud.

    Still, the trend is toward businesses making the move to one degree or another, driven by the easy ability to scale up or down depending on the workload and paying only for the infrastructure resources they use, not having to put up the capital expense to …

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  • The Systems of the Future Will Be Conversational

    December 1, 2017 Jeffrey Burt

    It’d be difficult to downplay the impact Amazon Web Services has had on the computing industry over the past decade. Since launching in 2006, Amazon’s cloud computing division has become the set the pace in the public cloud market, rapidly growing out its capabilities from the first service – Simple Storage Service (S3) – it rolled out to now offering thousands of services that touch on everything from compute instances to databases, storage, application development and emerging technologies like machine learning and data analytics.

    The company has become dominant by offering organizations of all sizes a way of simply accessing …

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  • AWS Flexes Cloud Muscles with Host of New Additions

    November 29, 2017

    Tech vendors often like to boast about being first movers in a particular market, saying that leading the charge puts them at a great advantage over their competitors. It doesn’t always work that way, but sometimes it does.

    A case in point is Amazon Web Services (AWS), which officially launched in 2006 with the release of the Simple Storage Service (S3) after several years of development and with it kicked off what is now the fast-growing and increasingly crowded public cloud space. Eleven years later, AWS owns just over 44 percent of the market, according to CEO Andy Jassy, pointing …

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  • New AWS Instances Sport Customized Intel Skylakes, KVM Hypervisor

    November 7, 2017

    The global server market is increasingly driven by the hyperscalers, and the trendsetter for all of them is Amazon Web Services. The massive company dominates the fast-growing public cloud space, outpacing rivals like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM Cloud, and is the top consumer of servers among a group of hyperscalers that are becoming the most powerful buyers of systems and new components, such as processors.

    This can be seen in the numbers. According to IDC analysts, hyperscalers in the first and second quarters this year made a significant push to deploy servers, with AWS accounting for more …

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  • AWS First Up With Volta GPUs In The Cloud

    October 26, 2017

    It must be tough for the hyperscalers that are expanding into public cloud and the public cloud builders that also use their datacenters to run their own businesses to decide whether to hoard all of the new technologies that they can get their hands on for their own benefit, or to make money selling that capacity to others.

    For any new, and usually constrained, kind of capacity, such as shiny new “Skylake” Xeon SP processors from Intel or “Volta” Tesla GPU accelerators from Nvidia, it has to be a hard call for Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba to …

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  • Public Cloud Doesn’t Dominate IT Quite Yet

    October 10, 2017

    Everyone in the IT industry likes drama, and we here at The Next Platform are no different. But it is also important as the industry in undergoing gut-wrenching transformations, as it has been for five decades now and will probably do so for a decade or two more, to keep some perspective. While the public cloud is certainly an exciting part of the IT market, it hasn’t taken over the world even if it has become the dominant metaphor that all kinds of IT – public, private, and hybrid – aspired to mimic.

    That’s something, and it is important. But …

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  • Custom Server Makers Set The Datacenter Pace

    September 13, 2017

    Makers of tightly coupled, shared memory machines can make all of the arguments they want about how it is much more efficient and easier to program these NUMA machines than it is to do distributed computing across a cluster of more loosely coupled boxes, but for the most part, the IT market doesn’t care.

    Distributed computing, in its more modern implementation of frameworks running on virtual machines or containers – or both – is by far the norm, both in the datacenter and on the public clouds. You don’t have to look any further than the latest server sales statistics …

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