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Friday, July 15th, 2016
| Time | Event |
| 12:00p | Can Pied Piper Really Afford HPE’s Composable Infrastructure? With Starbucks and Apple logos so common in movies and TV shows that they’re practically unnoticeable, product placement for enterprise technology is the hot marketing challenge of the day. As we ROFLed watching the season-three finale of Mike Judge’s Silicon Valley, it was hard not to notice the gigantic black rack bearing a green rectangle sitting in the cluttered garage of the Pied Piper/Bachmanity headquarters that doubles as the startup’s data center and triples as Jared’s bedroom. HBO’s brilliant satirical take on the San Francisco Bay Area tech scene is where converged infrastructure vendors have found their perfect place for product placement. But compared to the subtle appearances of SimpliVity’s OmniCube on the show – that’s what the much dreaded “box” Pied Piper was forced to build by its promptly ousted CEO Jack Barker was based on – the appearance Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Synergy on the season finale is a rather clunky feat of enterprise product placement. More on HPE Synergy: HPE Rethinks Enterprise Computing The show generally gets things right about tech, the business and the technology. As we’ve pointed out before, it has been fairly spot-on on the data center side of things too, so it was puzzling to see HPE’s latest and greatest in data center gear, its composable infrastructure machine, sitting among the more fitting mess of servers, cables, milk crates, and tool shelves Gilfoyle had concocted to support the startup’s IT requirements earlier. Pied Piper is out of money at this point, and it’s hard to believe it can afford HPE’s latest iteration on converged infrastructure, let alone one whose official shipping date is unclear at the moment. Besides, hasn’t Pied Piper already migrated to the cloud? You can see the HPE Synergy rack briefly in the beginning of this promo clip for the season finale: |
| 3:00p | Google Stackdriver Hints at Self-Serve Cloud Future  Brought to you by MSPmentor The Google Stackdriver monitoring tool is speeding toward general availability, offering a glimpse of a future where consumers are encouraged to take to the cloud on their own, leveraging a growing array of self-service tools to perform all manner of once-complicated computing. Stackdriver is a unified monitoring, logging and diagnostics service for managing workloads on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and/or Amazon Web Services (AWS). Google Stackdriver has been in beta for a couple of months and figures to remain in final testing a few more. But in recent weeks, Google unveiled the tool’s pricing plan, whose details hint at a business built on empowering lay users to embrace cloud computing with the comfort of analyzing a Google Drive spreadsheet. “By integrating monitoring, logging and diagnostics, Google Stackdriver makes ops easier for the hybrid cloud, equipping customers with insight into the health, performance and availability of their applications,” product manager Dan Belcher said in a recent blog post. “We’re unifying these services into a single package, which makes Google Stackdriver affordable, easy-to-use, and flexible.” Cloud adoption worries MSPs Managed services providers (MSPs) and other channel firms are increasingly tackling the business challenge posed by cloud computing and storage. On one hand, migrating and managing cloud workloads and offering strategic IT advice offers new revenue opportunities. At the same time, there’s no ignoring that intense competition by some of tech’s biggest players is flooding the market with cheap cloud computing and innovative self-serve apps and tools. A recent CompTIA study found that managing the competitive implications of “cloud computing” was the number one concern keeping MSPs up at night. During Automation Nation last month, ConnectWise CEO Arnie Bellini described the trend toward cloud adoption as unfolding much more quickly than the advent of managed services years earlier, according to a report in TechTarget. “This trend is hitting very quickly and is moving much faster,” Bellini was quoted as saying. Cloud war tamps prices Google Stackdriver is currently free for beta users. Once the beta period ends, users will be able to opt for one of two pricing tiers: free and premium. Under the free plan, available only for GCP workloads, users get key metrics, traces, error reports and up to 5 gigabytes (GBs) a month of logs. The premium plan, whose cost is described in the somewhat-arcane language of cloud pricing, runs $8 per monitored resource, per month – prorated hourly. That includes 10 GBs of log storage, 30 days of log retention, alerting via text, Slack, Hipchat and other tools, and integration with Amazon Web Services. Add in free trials and hundreds of dollars worth of introductory credits, and the costs of public cloud appear attractive, indeed. After the beta, new users will get a month to use the premium option at no cost. Stackdriver is designed to work seamlessly with a variety of AWS and GCP tools. Among the powerful accessories available on GCP, users can pay pennies or less for increments of cloud computing time and storage to enable: App Engine allows users to build web and mobile apps that scale automatically based on demand. Compute Engine lets users leverage scalable, high-performance virtual machines. Cloud SQL is a fully managed database that can provide infrastructure for remote applications. It requires no software installation or maintenance. Global Load Balancing with autoscaling is a software-defined managed service that deliverers and routes network traffic in the most efficient way, anywhere in the world, reacting instantaneously to changes in users, traffic, network, back-end health and other conditions. CSPs drive simplicity Google’s moves come as several of public cloud’s biggest players are also maneuvering to improve the user-friendliness of their platforms and tools. This Spring, AWS announced Cloud With Me, a service aimed at dramatically reducing the complexity of setting up virtual machines. Greater simplicity was also the goal behind Microsoft’s decision to release Azure Stack as an appliance sometime in 2017. The initiative to deliver the product as a turnkey bundle was announced Tuesday during Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto, as a way to “reduce complexity and improve the odds of Azure Stack working well,” according to an article in ZDNet. To be sure, the day when every SMB owner can jump onto the public cloud service of their choice to set up and manage their own computing and storage still lies somewhere in the future. But if the rollout process for Google Stackdriver is any indication, leading cloud service providers are moving aggressively to see to it that lay consumers develop a comfort level with the new computing paradigm sooner, rather than later. This first ran at http://mspmentor.net/msp-mentor/google-s |
| 4:16p | AWS Sweetens Developer Pitch with Cloud9 Acquisition  Brought to You by Talkin’ Cloud Amazon Web Services has acquired cloud development startup Cloud9 on Thursday. The details of the transaction have not been disclosed. According to a report by Fortune, Cloud9 has built an integrated development environment. It offers a code editor with a full Ubuntu workspace in the cloud. The platform supports more than 40 languages and allows developers to build and test websites using WordPress, Django and Rails. The developer market is a huge focus for cloud providers, and this acquisition will certainly help support AWS’ pitch to developers. It is unclear exactly how AWS will utilize Cloud9 or its technology. See also: Top Cloud Providers Made $11B on IaaS in 2015, but It’s Only the Beginning According to a brief blog post on Thursday by Cloud9 CEO Ruben Daniels, the company will work with AWS on “terrific customer offerings for the future.” “On the occasion of this amazing milestone for Cloud9, I’d like to take this moment to express our appreciation for the trust you’ve placed in Cloud9 over the years and to say how excited we are at this new beginning and the opportunity to bring you more and more value under the AWS umbrella,” Daniels said. “Thanks so much for your business, and stay tuned for even more great things to come!” The startup is based in both Amsterdam and San Francisco with less than 50 employees. Cloud9 also launched a development environment built exclusively for Salesforce developers last August, described as a “seamless, unified hub for all your Salesforce projects and development needs – that is always up to date.” “The workspace automatically communicates with the Salesforce platform to synchronize any changes you make, allowing you to fully focus on coding,” Cloud9 said. Salesforce recently announced that it had selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider, a huge win for the public cloud company. Aside from its own investments, Salesforce could be a good partner in helping AWS sign on more developer customers. In June, Salesforce launched a $50 million fund for developers. This first ran at http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-m |
| 6:29p | OpenStack Fuels Surge of Regional Rivals to Top Cloud Providers As the handful of top cloud providers expand around the world, battling it out in as many markets as they can get to, they are also increasingly competing with smaller regional players in addition to each other. One of the biggest reasons for this surge in regional cloud players is OpenStack. The family of open source cloud infrastructure software has lowered the barrier for entry into the cloud service provider market. Combined with the rise of local regulatory and data sovereignty concerns and demand for alternatives to the top cloud providers, OpenStack has fueled an emergence of numerous regional cloud providers around the world over the last two years, according to the market research firm IDC. Most of these regional players are using OpenStack, IDC said in a statement this week. The analysts expect growth in regional cloud providers to continue. The announcement focuses on one major sector of the cloud market: Infrastructure-as-a-Service. Amazon Web Services continues to dominate it, “followed by a long tail of much smaller service providers.” The firm forecasts the size of the global IaaS market to more than triple between 2015 and 2020, going from $12.6 billion last year to $43.6 billion four years from now. This growth is poised to ensure continued growth in demand for data center capacity around the world, as both top cloud providers and smaller regional players expand their infrastructure to support more and more users. Read more: How Long Will the Cloud Data Center Land Grab Last? Unlike the early years of cloud, when the majority of the growth was driven by born-on-the-web startups and individual developers, the next phase of growth will be fueled to a large extent by enterprises. Almost two-thirds of respondents to a recent IDC survey of more than 6,000 IT organizations said they were already using public cloud IaaS or were planning to start using it by the end of this year. Enterprises are increasingly looking to public cloud services to help them make their businesses more agile, Deepak Mohan, a research director at IDC, said in a statement: “This is bringing about a shift in IT infrastructure spending, with implications for the incumbent leaders in enterprise infrastructure technologies. Growth of public cloud IaaS has also created new service opportunities around adoption and usage of public cloud resources. With changes at the infrastructure, architectural, and operational layers, public cloud IaaS is slowly transforming the enterprise IT value chain.” See also: Top Cloud Providers Made $11B on IaaS in 2015, but It’s Only the Beginning |
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