Google Cloud Platform, Mesosphere, Kubernetes, Containers

Google Partners With Mesosphere - Ramps Up Its Container Commitment: ".... it’s interesting to hear that the two companies are collaborating to bring together Mesosphere, Kubernetes and Google Cloud Platform in an effort to make it easier for users to run applications and containers at scale. What this means is that Mesosphere is delivering an application that enables customers to deploy Mesosphere clusters on the Google Cloud Platform rapidly. In addition they are incorporating Kubernetes into Mesos to manage the deployment of Docker workloads. Using the app, developers can spin up a Mesosphere cluster on GCP in a few clicks – the app installs and configures everything required to run the cluster. There is no charge for using the app, beyond the service fees for the Google Cloud Platform resources used. Customers can schedule Docker containers side by side on the same Mesosphere cluster as other Linux workloads such as data analytics tasks like Spark and Hadoop and more traditional tasks like shell scripts and jar files...."

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Apple iCloud Miss (video)

Apple’s Stock Price at All-Time High: Is It Deserved?: Video - Bloomberg:
(Allow video to load after clicking play or go to link above)
Elevation Partners Co-Founder Roger McNamee discusses Apple’s stock price, innovation and the company’s cloud product. He speaks on “Bloomberg West.” Aug. 20 (Bloomberg)

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NSA Revelations, Losses to US Cloud Industry Staggering

NSA Revelations Could Prove Costly to U.S. Cloud Industry | Statista:

The U.S. dominance in the cloud computing industry could soon be challenged by international competitors, as the revelations about the extent to which U.S. government agencies have obtained data from U.S. companies have damaged the trust in American cloud providers. Gartner recently valued the global cloud market at $131 billion with American companies taking the lion's share of that total. That was prior to the NSA leaks however. The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) put out a research paper ... quantifying the potential damages inflicted on the U.S. cloud industry between $22 and $35 billion in the next three years alone.(read more at link above)

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Money-Mining Botnet Hiding In Amazon Cloud

How Hackers Hid a Money-Mining Botnet in Amazon’s Cloud | Threat Level | WIRED: "... At the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas next month Ragan and Salazar plan to reveal how they built a botnet using only free trials and freemium accounts on online application-hosting services—the kind coders use for development and testing to avoid having to buy their own servers and storage. The hacker duo used an automated process to generate unique email addresses and sign up for those free accounts en masse, assembling a cloud-based botnet of around a thousand computers...." (read more at link above)

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Amazon WorkSpaces, cloud desktop security, multi-factor authentication

Amazon tightens WorkSpaces cloud desktop security with multi-factor authentication | ZDNet:"Your WorkSpaces users will now be able to authenticate themselves using the same mechanism that they already use for other forms of remote access to your organisation's resources," AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr said in a blog." (read more at links above)

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Digital Realty, Cloud Providers

Digital Realty Has A Powerful Moat Of Dividend Repeatability - Digital Realty Trust, Inc. (NYSE:DLR) | Seeking Alpha: ".... Modern cloud providers cater to small and medium-sized businesses, but they all aspire to penetrate the enterprise marketplace. The enterprise segment is our bread-and-butter customer base. They already populate our data centers around the world. Our recent leasing activity has been heavily skewed to cloud service providers, in part because they want access to our enterprise customer base. Enterprise customers in turn are attracted by the ability to easily and securely connect to multiple areas of their hybrid cloud. Both sets of customers choose to grow on our platform, in part because of the presence of the other. The final catalyst connecting our incredible enterprise customer base to the cloud service providers they now need to grow is the deployment of our global network ecosystem. This mutual attraction and our interconnected global portfolio essentially act as a wide moat that is extremely difficult for competitors to replicate...." (read more at link above)

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Storm Clouds Over Amazon AWS?

Storm Clouds Over Amazon Business - WSJ: "Amazon.com Inc. has been fighting two big rivals in the world of cloud computing. But that battle shows signs of becoming a free-for-all that threatens its profitability goals for the business. Large telecom and small startups have been forging into or expanding services that let companies rent computing cycles rather than operate their own servers and data centers. The broader competition comes amid a continuing price war in the business among Amazon, Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. Those pressures were underscored... when the online retailer reported a wider loss for its second quarter. Part of the reason: its Amazon Web Services, or AWS, recently cut prices by between 28% and 51% for various services as gains at AWS and similar businesses slowed to 38% from 60% in its first quarter." (read more at link above)

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Amazon, Google, Cloud price war

Amazon’s cloud price war with Google is starting to hurt - Quartz: "... Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud-computing business, is now mature enough to affect Amazon’s overall numbers. Amazon made a big price cut in late March to counter aggressive pricing from Google, with service price declines up to 65%. Customers loved it, with usage increasing 90% year-over-year, Amazon said today on its earnings call. But revenue growth took a hit as a result. + Amazon doesn’t break out AWS revenue specifically, but it’s the largest part of Amazon’s “North America – Other” segment, where growth fell to 38% year-over-year after consistent percentage growth rates in the 50s and 60s over the past two years...."

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Amazon Cloud, Fast Growth Business

Amazon's Cloud Is One of the Fastest-Growing Software Businesses in History - Businessweek: "Five billion dollars. That’s how much Amazon.com will rake in from its cloud computing business this year, according to a new estimate from Pacific Crest Securities. If true, it’s an incredible figure. It would mean that Amazon’s cloud revenue shot up 58 percent in a single year, from $3.1 billion in 2013. In a research note, Pacific Crest says it expects the business to keep growing at a clip, with revenue hitting $6.7 billion in 2015. (Amazon does not break out its cloud revenue figures.) The growth of Amazon’s cloud business is unprecedented, at least when compared to other business software ventures. It’s grown faster after hitting the $1 billion revenue mark than Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce.com. You would need to turn to Google —which had the advantage of the vast consumer market—to find a business that grew faster....

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Why Big Companies Delay Using the Cloud

Why Big Companies Delay Using the Cloud for Some Applications - WSJ: "But many of those software vendors' biggest customers are in no rush to make the switch, particularly when it comes to the applications that manage key parts of their businesses. There is no doubt that cloud software is gaining ground among corporate users of all sizes. Revenue for Oracle's cloud businesses in the quarter ended May 31 totaled $450 million, up about 22% from a year earlier, although it remains a relatively small portion of the company's overall revenue. While many larger companies have turned to cloud software to manage systems like human-resources management, they are slower to adopt the cloud for applications that handle inventory management, billing and other processes they rely on to run their businesses on a daily basis." (read more at link above)

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US Court Ruling, US Cloud Providers, Privacy

Microsoft ordered to produce overseas customer email addresses by US judge | Technology | theguardian.com: "Microsoft Corp must turn over a customer’s emails stored in a data center in Ireland to the US government, a US judge ruled on Thursday in a case that has drawn concern from privacy groups and major technology companies. Microsoft and other US companies had challenged a criminal search warrant for the emails, arguing federal prosecutors cannot seize customer information held in foreign countries. But following a two-hour court hearing in New York, US District Judge Loretta Preska said the warrant lawfully required the company to hand over any data it controlled, regardless of where it was stored. “It is a question of control, not a question of the location of that information,” Preska said...."

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Amazon, Next Steps in the Cloud

Amazon's Next Steps Toward Cloud Domination - InformationWeek: "Amazon Web Services introduced five new services to its vast and growing list of cloud capabilities on Thursday at the AWS Summit in New York. The headliner was clearly Amazon Zocalo, a file-sharing service, but the announcements also included new mobile app-support capabilities and a log-data-retention service called Logs for CloudWatch. Amazon Zocalo is a managed file-storage and sharing service aimed squarely at enterprises, and it appears to fit somewhere between DropBox-like offerings and Microsoft SharePoint Online. AWS CTO Werner Vogels introduced Zocalo as a "secure and reliable" service that will please IT, since it integrates with Active Directory and provides "easy" management and audit capabilities...."

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Amazon Zocalo, Secure Enterprise Storage

Amazon Goes After Box, Dropbox And Huddle, Launches Zocalo For Secure Enterprise Storage | TechCrunch: "E-Commerce giant Amazon has made huge competitive inroads into the cloud services market with Amazon Web Services, and today it’s adding another feature that will put it into direct competition with the likes of Box and Dropbox: it’s launching Zocalo, a secure enterprise storage service. The company is launching Zocalo in a limited preview from today. Amazon describes the service as “a fully managed, secure enterprise storage and sharing service with strong administrative controls and feedback capabilities that improve user productivity” that lets users “store, share, and gather feedback on documents, spreadsheets, presentations, webpages, images, PDFs, or text files – from the device of their choice.” In other words, it competes directly with the likes of Box and Huddle in offering enterprises a place to store, access and collaborate on documents. Pricing is very aggressive: It’s $5 per user per month, which includes 200 GB of storage for each user. A company pays only for active user accounts, and that’s on top of a 30-day trial for up to 50 users. There is a sweetener for the most loyal users of AWS. Amazon WorkSpaces customers, the company says, will get Zocalo for free — including 50 GB of storage per WorkSpaces user. For a discounted rate of $2 per WorkSpaces user per month, this can be upgraded to 200 GB of storage, the company says. On top of all of this is a sliding scale of extra charges based on space used...."

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