Apple signs up to Google Cloud services

Apple has moved some of its iCloud services onto the Google Cloud, marking one of the most high-profile wins for Alphabet's rival to Amazon Web Services since it came under new leadership last fall.

Google has been a distant third in its race with Amazon and Microsoft's Azure as the trio vie for market share in cloud computing, but it has made strides since the appointment of industry veteran Diane Greene as head of that business in November.

Google also scored a victory with Spotify last month, when the music streaming service announced it would shift away from Amazon Web Services and move most of its services onto the Google Cloud platform.

Apple's move to Google comes as part of a broader diversification for its wide range of internet services, which include iCloud backups such as photo storage, music streaming and video downloads. Apple already uses cloud services from Amazon and Microsoft, as well as its own data centers, according to people familiar with the matter.Apple could eventually take more of these services in-house, and it has disclosed plans to build three new data centres over the next two years, in addition to the four it already has.

As one of the world's biggest companies with rapidly growing needs for storage and computing, Apple is a prize customer for cloud service providers. Analysts suggested that it may be playing providers off of each other at a time of high competition.

Read More: http://www.cnbc.com/2016/03/17/apple-signs-up-to-google-cloud-services-in-major-win-over-amazon.html

Apple signs up to Google Cloud services

Apple has moved some of its iCloud services onto the Google Cloud, marking one of the most high-profile wins for Alphabet's rival to Amazon Web Services since it came under new leadership last fall.

Google has been a distant third in its race with Amazon and Microsoft's Azure as the trio vie for market share in cloud computing, but it has made strides since the appointment of industry veteran Diane Greene as head of that business in November.

Google also scored a victory with Spotify last month, when the music streaming service announced it would shift away from Amazon Web Services and move most of its services onto the Google Cloud platform.

Apple's move to Google comes as part of a broader diversification for its wide range of internet services, which include iCloud backups such as photo storage, music streaming and video downloads. Apple already uses cloud services from Amazon and Microsoft, as well as its own data centers, according to people familiar with the matter.

Apple could eventually take more of these services in-house, and it has disclosed plans to build three new data centres over the next two years, in addition to the four it already has.

As one of the world's biggest companies with rapidly growing needs for storage and computing, Apple is a prize customer for cloud service providers. Analysts suggested that it may be playing providers off of each other at a time of high competition.

Read More: http://www.cnbc.com/2016/03/17/apple-signs-up-to-google-cloud-services-in-major-win-over-amazon.html

Microsoft Profit and Revenue Fall, but Cloud Computing Grows

SEATTLE — Satya Nadella has put cloud computing at the center of Microsoft’s strategy. It is a move that looks to be paying off, at least in the eyes of investors.

On Thursday the company said its revenue and profit fell in the last quarter. But it mattered little, as Microsoft made more from cloud computing, and its stock jumped more than 5 percent immediately after the numbers were released.

The results underscored the good and bad trends that have come to characterize Microsoft’s financial results in recent years. On the negative side, there is the floundering personal computer business, which is hurting profits from longtime Microsoft software businesses, especially Windows. On the positive, the company’s cloud business keeps growing, giving investors hope that Microsoft will remain relevant for years to come.

The success of Microsoft’s cloud business under Mr. Nadella, its new chief executive, has put the company’s stock back in favor with investors. Even with recent anxiety in the stock market, Microsoft’s shares are up more than 28 percent for the last year, while shares in rivals like Apple, Oracle and IBM have declined by double digits.

By most analysts’ estimates, Microsoft is in second place in the most prominent segment of the cloud services market — in which computer storage and other services in data centers are rented to customers — after Amazon. IBM and Google are next.

For its second fiscal quarter, which ended on Dec. 31, the company reported net income of nearly $5 billion, or 62 cents a share, compared with $5.86 billion, or 71 cents a share, during the same period a year earlier.

Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/29/technology/microsoft-earnings.html?_r=0

Google To Amazon: Our Cloud's Still Cheaper

Amazon, Microsoft, and Google aren’t slashing cloud prices as fast and furious as they did two years ago, but there’s still plenty of smack talk going on.

For example, Google  GOOG -0.10%  on Friday took to its cloud blog to proclaim that its cloud computing service is less expensive than comparable Amazon  AMZN 0.78% Web Services products.

MORE: On cloud price cuts.

To back up a bit, AWS trimmed prices 5% on Tuesday for some Elastic Compute Cloud instances, its 51st cost cut to date across all its services. Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is Amazon’s term for units of computing power that it sells or rents to customers. EC2 “instances” are the cloud equivalent of a computer’s central processing unit.

Three days later, Google pointed out that its most comparable custom machine types (Google’s term for cloud computing resources) remain 15% to 41% less expensive than Amazon’s latest price, depending on configuration. And, it provided a helpful comparison chart.


Of course this is a discussion that high-level executives may not care about, but the accountants in the chief information officer’s office need to keep an eye on cloud costs. Cloud usage is initially cheaper than buying a lot of hardware and software to run in-house, but hey it still costs money.

Read More: http://fortune.com/2016/01/08/google-amazon-cloud-price-war/

How green is your cloud?

With the recent climate talks in Paris, energy consumption is a pressing topic. Unsurprisingly, cloud vendors have touted their infrastructure at scale as a way to reduce IT's carbon footprint due to the efficiencies gained from running such huge deployments.

That doesn't change the reality that data centers remain a large source of carbon emissions through their intense energy and cooling requirements. So when it comes to energy usage and renewables, how do the cloud providers stack up?

Amazon Web Services

AWS has committed to 100 percent renewable energy, but has not offered a date by when it plans to achieve that. As of December 2015, the energy mix across AWS is 25 percent renewable with a plan to reach 40 percent by the end of 2016. This will come from some newly announced generation facilities: wind farms in Fowler Ridge (online in Jan 2016), U.S. East (Dec 2016), and U.S. West (May 2017) -- plus a solar facility in the U.S. East due online in October 2016.

Amazon participates in a number of programs, including Buyer's Principles to help increase purchasing power for low-carbon energy sources (which also includes Microsoft and Google) and the American Council on Renewable Energy.


If you want to be green on AWS now, you have two public regions to choose from that are 100 percent carbon neutral: U.S. West (Oregon) and Frankfurt. AWS's GovCloud region is also carbon neutral.

Google Cloud Platform

Google has been carbon neutral since 2007 and now sources its energy from 37 percent renewables, following announcements this month to buy another 842 megawatts of renewable energy. It plans to triple its renewable energy purchases by 2025 on the road to 100 percent renewables (also, no date).


Read More: http://www.infoworld.com/article/3015632/cloud-computing/how-green-is-your-cloud.html

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Teams With Microsoft Azure on Hybrid Cloud

Hewlett Packard Enterprise says it has inked a partnership with Microsoft that will make the software giant’s Azure cloud computing service the preferred public cloud portion in its deals for hybrid cloud products.

HPE, the world’s largest vendor of server computers, has been strongly promoting the hybrid cloud concept since walking away from a plan to create its own public cloud service earlier this year. A hybrid cloud combines the use of a public cloud service like Azure, Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud with computing capacity that the customer owns.

Companies in the market for cloud services are said to like the ability to mix and match their computing capacity with different combinations of public and private infrastructure. They’re too uncomfortable — or in the case of some regulated industries, legally unable — to allow certain data to go out to the public cloud. In other cases the public cloud can be used to add short-term capacity when demand spikes for brief periods.

Read More: http://recode.net/2015/12/01/hewlett-packard-enterprise-teams-with-microsoft-azure-on-hybrid-cloud/

Google cloud outage caused by failure that saw admins run it manually ... and fail

A mistaken peering advertisement from a European network took Google Cloud's europe-west1 region offline last week for around 70 minutes.

The slip-up happened when an unnamed network owner connected a new peering link to Google, and in the process, it advertised reachability for far more traffic than it could handle.

As a result, as The Chocolate Factory explains in this post, most of the lost traffic carried destination addresses in eastern Europe and the Middle East.

“The peer's network signalled that it could route traffic to many more destinations than Google engineers had anticipated, and more than the link had capacity for. Google's network responded accordingly by routing a large volume of traffic to the link. At 11:55, the link saturated and began dropping the majority of its traffic”, the post states.

That kind of error, Google's report continues, would usually be caught by automated safety checks, but “the automation was not operational due to an unrelated failure, and the link was brought online manually, so the automation's safety checks did not occur”.

“To prevent recurrence of this issue, Google network engineers are changing procedure to disallow manual link activation”, the post notes.

Route announcement errors are a continuing headache on the Internet.

In June, Telekom Malaysia mis-advertised routes to Level 3, causing the US provider to sling most of its traffic onto a network that couldn't cope and dropped the packets.

Read More: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/30/euro_network_gobbles_googles_cloud/

Amazon is offering a year of unlimited cloud storage for just $5

There are plenty of options for keeping your digital media safe and easily accessible in the cloud. Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Yahoo all have services that will let you back up tons of old files. Amazon is a major player in providing cloud services to other companies and has leveraged that expertise to create offerings for average consumers and perks for its Prime subscribers. Today it's rolling out a limited-time offer just in time for Black Friday: $5 for unlimited online storage.

The deal may be of particular interest to users of Microsoft's OneDrive. Previously that company had been offering unlimited storage to Office 365 subscribers, but recently downgraded that to 1 TB of space, stating that a few extreme users were taking advantage of the system well beyond the needs of average users. "A small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings,” the company said. "In some instances, this exceeded 75 TB per user or 14,000 times the average."

Google Drive has unlimited storage for people who are signed up through a work account, but caps free consumer accounts at 15GB before asking for payment. The copious amount of free storage out there from companies with other principle revenue streams explains why Dropbox, which makes all its money charging for storage, is in danger of losing its luster among investors.

Read More: http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/26/9805438/amazon-one-year-unlimited-storage-five-dollars

Google Has a More Flexible Way to Buy Its Cloud

Google on Wednesday announced a set of new custom cloud capabilities that should make it easier for customers to select the cloud resources that best meet their needs, while cutting down on a common problem—buying more capability than needed.

The new Custom Machine Types let developers select up to 32 virtual central processing units (called vCPUs), and allocate memory from 6.5 gigabytes per vCpU on up. The new model means that customers can move a job to another, more appropriate, vCPU configuration if the job changes, according to Google.

Customers can pay for these machine types by the minute or run them for a month at a time, adjusting the number of vCPUs they use as needed. In the latter case, if their job runs at 100% capacity, Google’s “sustained use discount” automatically kicks in, which can bring the price down significantly.

Amazon Web Services is the pioneer in public cloud—a model in which massive compute services are divvied up for use by many customers who typically pay by the hour. Amazon [fortune stock symbol=”AMZN”] offers a huge array of instance types and several pricing models. Google  GOOG 2.03%  and Microsoft [fortune stock symbol=”MSFT”] are playing catchup in that field, investing billions in infrastructure.

Read More : http://fortune.com/2015/11/18/google-cloud-price-calculator/

Urs Holzle, Google's 8th employee and tech guru, thinks the cloud could make more money than ads

Urs Holzle, Google's eighth employee and overall cloud boss, thinks that within the next five years, the company's Google Cloud Platform revenues could surpass Google's advertising revenue in five years.
"The goal is for us to talk about Google as a cloud company by 2020," Holzle said on stage at today's Structure conference in San Francisco.

Google Cloud Platform is generally thought to be lagging Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, the leading players in the exploding cloud computing market, mostly because it's struggled to forge relationships with the major enterprise customers it needs to turn it into revenue.

But today, on stage at the Structure conference in San Francisco, Holzle said that while "we're clearly coming from behind," he defended Google's place in the cloud computing market, and said that there's only room to get bigger.

"Our cloud growth rate is probably industry-leading...and we have lots of enterprise customers, happy enterprise customers," Holzle said.

He says that the cloud game is a little bit like the rise of the smartphone: The iPhone was first in 2007, basically creating the demand for smartphones. But despite a later start, Android has become the single most popular operating system in the world.

Read More : http://www.businessinsider.in/Urs-Holzle-Googles-8th-employee-and-tech-guru-thinks-the-cloud-could-make-more-money-than-ads/articleshow/49838765.cms

IT pros should focus on largest public cloud providers

The cloud has seen massive rates of adoption among IT professionals this year, and it will spread even deeper into entrenched industries over the next 16 months, according to a new report from Forrester Research. Despite ongoing consolidation, the research firm reports that the cloud vendor landscape is too crowded and IT professionals should increasingly hedge their bets on major public cloud providers such as Amazon, IBM and Microsoft.

CIOs and IT leaders should be wary of small, specialized players due to their narrow focus and the increased risks these companies carry around longevity and security, Forrester reports. The market research firm predicts there will be a significant decline in the number of players providing infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud services and management software by the end of 2016.

While Google is making headway in the enterprise space with ongoing developments in its Google for Work suite of applications, Forrester doesn’t place the company in the upper echelon of today’s leading cloud vendors. “Despite excellent technology and scale, Google will only begin to develop momentum in large-enterprise business in 2016,” the report’s authors write.

Read More : http://www.cio.com/article/3005606/cloud-computing/it-pros-should-focus-on-largest-public-cloud-providers.html

Amazon 3Q results up on strong sales, cloud computing growth

NEW YORK — Amazon is primed for success as the busy holiday season approaches.

The e-commerce powerhouse reported a surprise third-quarter profit, driven by a boost in revenue from its Prime Day promotion and continued strong growth in its cloud-computing offerings.

Results beat expectations, and shares jumped 10 percent in aftermarket trading.

Amazon’s strategy has long been to invest the money it makes back into its businesses, particularly by expanding offerings in its $99-a-year Prime loyalty program and its cloud-computing business, called Amazon Web Services. But in recent quarters, it has shown an ability to turn a profit, too.

Revenue jumped 23 percent during the quarter, helped by strong sales of electronics and general merchandise, a good sign for the Seattle retailer ahead of the crucial holiday months of November and December, when retailers make a substantial percentage of their annual sales.

Prime Day, Amazon’s 20th-anniversary sale in July, boosted revenue by 2 percentage points, the company said. Amazon did not break out sales figures. The company also said that more people signed up for a free trial of Prime on that day than any other day ever. And it said people converted to the paid program at the same rate they do on major shopping days such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the busy shopping days after Thanksgiving.

“Prime growth is fueling Amazon (in) getting a bigger share of the household budget,” said Cowen analyst John Blackledge. He estimates there are about 38 million Prime members in the U.S.

Read more : http://www.tulsaworld.com/business/transportation/amazon-q-results-up-on-strong-sales-cloud-computing-growth/article_1cfd54ec-ba99-5034-8f67-52b850fc9898.html