Wednesday, July 26th, 2017

Time	Event
12:30p	Packet Says Your Data Center Shouldn’t Have an Opinion Packet, the New York-based startup that provides dedicated high-performance bare-metal servers as a cloud service similar to AWS or Azure, has added 11 data center locations around the world to its previously existing four and launched a new edge computing service aimed at applications that require low-latency communication between end devices and compute infrastructure. The new service is called Edge Compute, and the reason for such rapid expansion is to make the company’s services more attractive to companies with those latency-sensitive workloads. But in general, Packet — which last year raised a $9.4 million Series A round led by the Japanese telco and technology investment powerhouse SoftBank — is on a mission to give developers access to unopinionated infrastructure. We’ll explain what that means later in the article. “It’s no longer the case that having infrastructure in one or two locations is reasonable,” Zachary Smith, Packet’s co-founder and CEO, explained to Data Center Knowledge. “Having infrastructure in 20 locations might be table stakes for a latency-focused application. We consider this a chasm that’s been created between the people who can do this and those who can’t.” See also: Vapor IO to Sell Data Center Colocation Services at Cell Towers The locations that became available today are Los Angeles, Seattle, Dallas, Chicago, Ashburn (Virginia), Atlanta, Toronto, Frankfurt, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Sydney. This is in addition to the company’s existing locations in New York, Sunnyvale, Amsterdam, and Tokyo. Another expansion is scheduled in October, which will add Paris, London, São Paulo, and Mumbai to the mix. “What we’re doing is taking our platform that’s already in four locations globally and expanding it to within five or ten milliseconds of all the major population centers,” he said. Edge Computing for IoT, Self-Driving Cars, and More As the name suggests, the new edge computing service is about better serving the outer perimeter of the internet, which is expected to see rapid growth with 5G, the upcoming high-speed mobile network standard expected to enable everything from more sophisticated — and-bandwidth hungry — Internet of Things devices to self-driving cars and augmented and virtual reality systems. “While edge compute is still in its infancy, new experiences are driving demand for distributed infrastructure, especially as software continues its relentless pursuit down the stack,” Smith said. “We believe that the developers building these new experiences are hungry for a distributed, unopinionated, and yet fully automated compute infrastructure, and that’s what we’re bringing to the market today.” For the time being, the new Edge Compute locations feature a single server configuration, Type 1E, which features an Intel E3-1578L v5 processor, Intel IRIS GPU, 32GB of RAM, 240GB of SSD storage, and 10 Gbps network interfaces. Packet is planning to add more configurations later, including servers powered by ARMv8 processors. The Type 1E lists at $0.50 an hour, but is also available through Packet’s new spot market, similar to AWS’s Spot Instances, offering marketplace-style pricing in all of Packet’s 15 locations. For users requiring customized hardware, Packet has a program it calls Private Deployment which has been extended to the new data center locations. Through this program, users can deploy custom configurations while benefiting from Packet’s platform and network automation. Equinix and Interxion For the record, in North America and Asia Pacific, Packet generally houses its servers in data centers operated by Equinix, and in Europe it partners primarily with Interxion. Smith said the amount of floor space the company occupies varies from data center to data center. “In some of our major facilities we’re obviously buying wholesale by the megawatt, because we’re in the cloud business and have thousands of servers. Some of the edge locations are fairly primitive, starting with small cages and allowing us to expand from there.” Many Locations, No Opinions Packet’s unique model helps remove infrastructure restrictions and the layers of abstraction that are inherent in most public clouds, Smith explained. “For any sort of innovative startup, it’s almost an impossibility for you to deploy infrastructure at 15 or 20 locations around the globe [on your own]. You’ve got to rely on somebody else’s infrastructure. At that point, you’re really consuming their opinion, and their viewpoint, and their abstraction away from the hardware.” Indeed, Packet isn’t your father’s cloud company. Unlike AWS, Azure, and GCP, which are based to a great extent on proprietary technologies and come with a degree of vendor lock-in, Packet is focused on the hardware. Software is available — plenty of operating systems, OpenStack, and more — but users can take the BYO approach and bring their own software — including operating systems. All instances are spun up on bare metal, with customers getting a fully isolated dedicated server with no shared resources. Packet supplies an extensive set of automation tools, but otherwise hands customers the cloud equivalent of an on-prem server, without vendor lock-in. “At its simplest, we give you a physical server as if you went into a data center and racked it,” Smith said. This means it’s not for everybody. It’s designed for experienced DevOps folks. Those who want to deploy containers with a couple of clicks without really knowing what they’re doing should probably look for another solution. According to Smith, about a third of the workloads on Packet are cloud native, specifically Kubernetes, Docker, Mesosphere, or automated DevOps services. Another large portion is enterprise IT, and includes applications running on OpenStack, VMware, CloudStack, and Hadoop. “We offer, effectively, primitives,” he said. “The ability to automate hardware, the ability to choose your own operating system (or build your own), or the ability to choose your own networking stack. We’re doing so in a way that’s very developer-friendly, so you can use DevOps tools such as Ansible, Terraform, Libcloud, jclouds, or whatever you want — or your own scripting — to automate that hardware as if it was in your own data center.” That’s exactly the way Smith and his team want to keep it. “We have no visions of moving up the stack to do a proprietary or opinionated service. There are enough options in the marketplace for that.”     (Comment on this)
4:47p	Uber’s New CEO Short List Is Said to Include HPE’s Meg Whitman (Bloomberg) — Uber Technologies Inc. hopes to name a new leader by early September to replace its ousted chief executive officer and steer the ride-hailing business out of a turbulent period. The San Francisco company has a short list of fewer than six CEO candidates, according to two employees, who attended a staff meeting where the plans were discussed. Liane Hornsey, Uber’s head of human resources, told employees she believes the company could hire a new CEO within six weeks, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the details are private. Among the remaining candidates is Meg Whitman, chief of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., said another person familiar with the matter. Whitman, who ran unsuccessfully for California governor as a Republican in 2010, has been meeting with Uber’s leadership in recent weeks, two people said. The names of the remaining candidates couldn’t be learned. “As Meg has said several times before, she is fully committed to HPE and plans to stay with the company until her work is done,” Howard Clabo, a spokesman for HPE, wrote in an email. Uber declined to comment. A subcommittee of Uber’s board is helping oversee the search, with assistance from executive recruitment firm Heidrick & Struggles, according to people familiar with the process. The group includes ex-CEO Travis Kalanick, Benchmark partner Matt Cohler, media mogul Arianna Huffington, TPG’s David Trujillo and Nestle’s Wan Ling Martello. Hornsey has been contributing to the process as a member of Uber’s 14-person management committee. (Comment on this)
6:33p	Hackers Breach 400,000 UniCredit Bank Accounts for Data Sonia Sirletti and Edward Robinson (Bloomberg) — UniCredit SpA, Italy’s No. 1 bank, said hackers took biographical and loan data from 400,000 client accounts in one of the biggest breaches of European banking security this year. The attack occurred in September and October of 2016 and June and July of this year, according to an emailed statement from the bank on Wednesday. UniCredit only discovered the breaches this week, two people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be identified discussing a possible criminal matter. Cyberattacks on corporations and banks are accelerating. In May and June, two ransomware assaults swept the globe, freezing databases and knocking out operations at entities ranging from Britain’s National Health Service to Russian oil giant Rosneft OAO. Dozens of Ukrainian lenders were also affected by the so-called Petya outbreak last month. See also: Quantum Computing Could Make Today’s Encryption Obsolete “This is the first attack targeting an Italian bank and confirms that IT systems, particularly in Italy, need massive investment to avoid a loss of confidence,” said Francesco Confuorti, chief executive officer of Advantage Financial SA, a Milan-based investment firm. “I expect that this case will lead to Italian banks reviewing their IT systems.” Today’s hack also comes after the Italian financial system had stabilized, with the nation’s taxpayers funding the wind-down of two troubled banks earlier this year. In Europe, lenders such as Barclays Plc, Banco Santander SA and Deutsche Bank AG have joined forces with law-enforcement personnel to mount a unified defense against cyber-criminals by sharing expertise and information. Industry chiefs are hiring former intelligence personnel and tapping startups for technology to safeguard their databases. ‘Vast Complexity’ Given the vast complexity of banking computer systems, it can be hard to root out hackers who burrow deep into networks and can operate for months undetected, said Thomas Lemon, a London-based managing director for technology consulting at Protiviti Ltd. “You have a complicated IT landscape with huge amounts of data to sift through to see if a breach is occurring,” Lemon said. “The bad guys are creative, and the history of past attacks doesn’t tell you the right indicators to look for, so you’re trying to find a needle in a haystack.” At UniCredit, the intruders gained unauthorized access to customer data through an outside company employed by the bank. The bank’s IT department discovered anomalies while conducting checks, finding that some users from the external commercial partner were accessing client data, said Daniele Tonella, CEO of UniCredit Business Integrated Solutions, the IT unit of the bank, in a phone interview. UniCredit immediately blocked the hackers, closed the breaches and upgraded the system, he said. UniCredit said international bank account numbers, also known as IBANs, and other personal information may have been taken. A spokesman declined to identify the third party involved. “There aren’t material damages for the bank and its clients from these attacks,” Tonella said. “No data, such as passwords allowing access to customer accounts or allowing for unauthorized transactions, has been affected.” UniCredit, which is investing 2.3 billion euros in upgrading and strengthening its IT systems, has started an audit and will file a report with the Milan prosecutor, it said. The bank is working to strengthen its core systems and update its digital infrastructure, while ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements. The country’s central bank and the Association of Italian Banks are monitoring the situation with a computer emergency response team created last year to strengthen financial cybersecurity, a Bank of Italy spokeswoman said in Rome. Cybersecurity experts are bracing for a wave of ever-more-ambitious hacks to hit in months to come, while their ability to catch perpetrators is often limited. Banking leaders are worried about more than the theft of customers’ data or money: cyber-criminals might also damage account databases and render them unusable, said Becky Pinkard, vice president of service delivery and intelligence at Digital Shadows Ltd., a London-based cyber-defense firm. “Banks are justified in their fear of corrupted data,” Pinkard said. “Attackers could harm the bank by adding or subtracting a zero to every balance, or even deleting entire accounts.” (Comment on this)
6:39p	Alphabet Q2 2017: Enterprise Efforts Pay Off for Google Cloud Brought to you by IT Pro Not long after Google Cloud senior vice president Diane Greene said that in the next five years it could overtake Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the top hyperscale cloud provider, Google appears to be making headway on this promise. Alphabet reported its Q2 2017 earnings on Monday, and while analysts were tripped up on the rising costs on its advertising side and the massive anti-trust fine, Google’s cloud business continues to hum along as investments in talent and infrastructure pay off. In Q2 2017, Alphabet reported revenues of $26 billion, an increase of 21 percent on the same period last year. Google Cloud revenues sit in the “other revenues” category, which reported over $3 billion in revenues, a rise of 42 percent from Q2 2016. See also: Google Says It’s Closing More Big Enterprise Cloud Deals than Ever Google’s ongoing focus on attracting enterprise customers to its cloud is starting to have a material impact on its earnings, according to second quarter results. Its enterprise cloud customers include Nintendo, Home Depot, Coca-Cola, and Spotify. Google CEO Sundar Pichai told analysts on Monday that Google Cloud Platform has a “diverse set of use cases across sectors and industries and geographies and so, I would say the breadth of what we have seen, it’s really surprised me.” “Google Cloud Platform, GCP, continues to experience impressive growth across products, sectors and geographies and increasingly with large enterprise customers in regulated sectors. To be more specific about our momentum with big customers, in Q2 the number of new deals we closed worth more than $0.5 million is three times what it was last year,” Pichai said. Ruth Porat, CFO, Alphabet and Google, said, “It’s obviously not a financial forecast but it does display the traction we are having with cloud in the market and GCP remains one of the fastest growing businesses across Alphabet, G-suite continues to have strong growth.” Pichai added later in the call that the combination of G Suite and GCP is an enticing part of the pitch for enterprise customers. As is its expanding international infrastructure footprint. “Responding to the growth in existing and new customers around the world, we continue to invest in datacenters to provide them the fastest most reliable service. We opened new Google Cloud regions in Northern Virginia, Singapore, Sydney and London,” he said. “We also continue to build out our partnerships, in Q2 we announced an expansion of our partnership at SAP and a new partnership with Nutanix to integrate their products with GCP. So customers can run workloads in hybrid environments, On-Prem and in the Cloud using containers and Kubernetes.” Infrastructure is of course not the only investment that Alphabet is making in its Google Cloud business. The company added 1,614 people in the quarter, with its total headcount reaching 75,606 in Q2. “Consistent with prior quarters the vast majority of new hires were engineers and product managers. In terms of product areas the most sizeable headcount additions were once again made in cloud for both technical and sales roles consistent with the priority we place on this business,” said Porat. “In R&D you can see the impact of the headcount increases in our priority areas particularly Cloud and machine learning and marketing spend similarly reflects the strategic priority areas we’ve delineated particularly hardware and YouTube subscription.” While Google still has a long way to go to catch up to Amazon Web Services (AWS) — and Microsoft for that matter — investing in talent and infrastructure across its “Other Bets” seems to be part of its plan for the foreseeable future. Analysts will be watching how these “Other Bets” will amount to tangible long-term growth for the business, and in particular are going to want to see machine learning investments improve products across its portfolio. This article originally appeared on IT Pro. (Comment on this)
7:00p	Microsoft Announces Azure Containers Instances (ACI) for Linux Brought to you by IT Pro Microsoft continues to innovate in the area of its Azure Containers service with today’s announcement of new Azur Container Instances (ACI). Corey Sanders, Microsoft’s Director of Computer for Azure, provided the details of this new feature over on the Microsoft Azure blog. “The very first service of its kind in the cloud, Azure Container Instances (ACI), a new Azure service delivering containers with great simplicity and speed and without any Virtual Machine infrastructure to manage. ACIs are the fastest and easiest way to run a container in the cloud.” He states that an ACI starts up in just seconds which is also how the service is billed for Azure users. The ACI feature flexible sizing options that include determining how much memory and vCPUs are used so that you can tailor the container to your need and not pay for excess services you do not need nor desire. Sanders confirms no virtual machine management is necessary between you and your containers means it is just your code in the container with it running in the cloud. ACIs also provide first time container users a simpler path to using the container service so that you can get up and running with them with minimal parameters necessary. The containers are in preview starting today for Linux based containers with Windows support following in the coming weeks. For more details, check out Corey’s blog post which also includes the basic Command Line Instructions for deploying an ACI. This article originally appeared on IT Pro. ———- But, wait…there’s probably more so be sure to follow me on Twitter and Google+. ———————————- Looking for an awesome, no-nonsense technical conference for IT Pros, Devs, and Devops? Check out IT/Dev Connections! (Comment on this)

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