• 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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  • Getting Cloud Out Of A Fugue State

    August 15, 2016

    The polyphonic weavings of a fugue in baroque music is a beautiful thing and an apt metaphor for how we want orchestration on cloud infrastructure to behave in a harmonic fashion. Unfortunately, most cloudy infrastructure is in more of a fugue state, complete with multiple personalities and amnesia.

    A startup founded by some architects and engineers from Amazon Web Services wants to get the metaphor, and therefore the tools, right and have just popped out of stealth mode with a company aptly called Fugue to do just that.

    Programmers are in charge of some of the largest and most profitable …

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  • AWS CTO on How Startups Define Large-Scale Competitiveness

    August 11, 2016

    Not long ago, we took a look back at the last decade of Amazon Web Services and its growth, particularly in terms of its reach into high performance computing and large-scale enterprise workloads. While the startup story is easier to tell for AWS in terms of the capex/opex advantage to compete with far larger companies, the enterprise use case growth of AWS is still a stunning story over time.

    This morning during his AWS Summit New York keynote, AWS Chief Technology Officer, Werner Vogels shared growth highlights of the company over the last ten years, noting that the message is …

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