AWS GameLift Now Supports Unreal Engine

Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of the online giant distribution, announced that its GameLift service is now available for games developed in the Unreal engine.

In a blog post, Daniel Kayser, Product Marketing Manager for Epic's Unreal Engine says developers can now benefit from the fee-based management system designed to deploy and host multiplayer games. The system is scalable and uses very capable infrastructure in the AWS cloud to support millions of concurrent players.

To go along with the aforementioned features, Kayser also emphasized the newly added GameLift twinning ability that "intelligently selects the closest game server based on the location of each player, giving players the lowest latency possible through Taking advantage of AWS global footprint.

Seth Sivak, executive director of the independent development studio Proletariat Inc. (manufacturers of Zombie Nation Worldwide and Streamline) states:

• For the Proletariat team, the choice was simple: hire a team of engineers who spend months building our own cloud infrastructure or launching our game in Amazon GameLift in a matter of days.
• GameLift Amazon has made it easy for us to give our inexpensive fans world-class online experience

The plug-in is available in the Unreal engine developers market, with availability in the following territories:

• (East), Western United States (Oregon), European Union Center (Frankfurt), Western European Union (Asia), Asia Pacific Northwest (Seoul Tokyo) Southeast Asia

Azure’s rise instills doubts in AWS shops

Microsoft's cloud computing platform is experiencing a surge in adoption, raising fears in some companies of betting on the wrong horse. But the race did not start

 The "State of the Cloud" RightScale report is now available and has been well covered by InfoWorld, so it will not give you the summary here. But there are important findings that I want to highlight in terms of business impact.

According to the report:

• In respondents, RightScale found that Azure has increased overall from 20 to 34 percent, while Amazon Web Services remained stable at 57 percent.
• Google has increased from 10 to 15 percent to maintain third position.
• Within companies, Azure has significantly increased adoption: 26 percent to 43 percent. However, adoption of the AWS has increased slightly from 56 percent to 59 percent.

Companies are questioning the latter, as they have made a huge investment in AWS, but are now late for their support.

 Make it clear: Azure's success is well deserved. Microsoft was late for the party, but not so late that he could not do the good things around the adoption of his cloud.

And Microsoft has intelligently leveraged its relationships with existing companies, unlike AWS and Google. Companies that have their IT solutions based on Windows servers, representing a large number of companies, are fruits, inexpensive for Microsoft Azure. Background for the migration is also tempting, although you can also get Windows servers in AWS.

However, AWS has followed the growth of the market. In fact, the growth of AWS almost matches that of the cloud computing market in general. AWS will continue to set the standard for IaaS platforms, and it will not give up its market share unless they do something really stupid. I suspect it will not happen.

 Companies have to understand that the cloud computing market is dynamic and in its early days, so the volatility will be with us for some time. Only about 5-7% of the workloads migrated to an IaaS platform, such as AWS or Azure. About 20 percent should be migrated at the end of the year. We do not hit 70% - when we really know if your chosen platform has won - over several years. Today, it could be anything.

It is a fact of life. Companies should not panic if the chosen platform is not the top scorer or the largest producer this quarter. While the market is different, it is clear that AWS, Azure and Google Cloud IaaS are the platforms that are suitable for most companies. If you use one of these, you'll be in good shape for the foreseeable future. This is as good as it is on the Paris gaming platform.

AWS Unveils Chime Conferencing Service

Amazon Web Services on Tuesday launched Amazon Ring, a unified cloud-based communications offering that allows users to participate in high-definition video and audio-quality video meetings on Windows and Mac desktops and on iOS mobile devices and Android.

Companies only have to download the application; They do not need to make initial investments in hardware or software.

Users can switch desktop and mobile applications when needed, even in the conference environment.

User-Friendly Disruption

 Participants click on a ring application button to join a meeting instead of dialing a number and enter a PIN.

A visual list of all participants. Any participant can silence the other, and silenced participants can wake up themselves.

Meetings may be limited. All communications are encrypted and the conversation history of a meeting is not stored on the devices used.

Chat facilities are provided for ongoing collaboration outside of meetings, where historical records and cats are stored safely.

"I'm very surprised that someone does not do the above," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group.

"The current tools are pretty dull ... and mostly unreliable," he told the E-Commerce Times.

"This will disrupt the segment, leaving no player unchanged and put everyone know that they should be better invest in improving the ability to use their products or output," warned Enderle.

"The timing of quality and high-end video and audio devices are fast becoming bets on the table," said Michael Brandenburg, an analyst at Frost & Sullivan.

Amazon Chime is "really on parity with other features on the market today," he told the E-Commerce Times, noting that Amazon brings its "scalability and rich conference feature solution to aggressive pricing.

Chime Pricing

There are three levels of pricing for Chime:

• Basic - The free version allows users to attend online meetings, to call another person in voice or video, and use email and chat services with Caller;
• The Plus edition, at US $ 2.50 per user per month, adds the ability to manage a mail domain, Active Directory to configure and integrate with identity management systems. Stores 1 GB of messages per user;
• Chime Pro, which costs $ 15 per user per month, adds the possibility of holding meetings with up to 100 participants with shared screen and video. It supports mobile, mobile and in-room video, and includes unlimited VoIP support.

 Basic and Plus users can join conferences created in Pro Chime.

Companies can combine and combine licenses to reduce costs. There is no minimum fee. Charges are based on usage, and users may cancel or change subscriptions at any time.

Interested users can sign up for a free trial of Amazon Pro. After 30 days, they can continue to use the baseline for free or subscribe to a payment level.

Chime will be available in the second quarter of the AWS partner Level 3 Communications and Vonage, which will offer free business customers Amazon Chime Pro.

Chime's Sweet and Sour Notes

 The Amazon Chime service is "much easier than almost all public offerings and cheap, considering the feature set," Enderle said. Still, "it is not new and still not fully tested, suggesting that, until a critical mass level is reached, the problems are not known and can not be addressed.

Many companies have already begun to move from conferencing solutions to cloud facilities, commented Brandenburg of Frost. However, "their contracts and conference investments in these ecosystems are likely to be more of a pure cost factor.

Chime's focus on usability and convenience "is critical to the widespread adoption of unified communications solutions," said Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research at Nucleus Research.

However, infrastructure buyers - typical Amazon customers - are within easy reach of commercial drivers that fuel demand for collaborative tools, the E-Commerce Times said.

Announcer to strengthen competition in the unified communications and collaboration market, which could reach $ 96 billion by 2023, according to projections of Global Market Outlook.

AWS CEO: Luck gave Amazon’s cloud-computing unit a boost

Andy Jassy, chief of Amazon Web Services, said that luck plays a role in the tremendous growth of AWS - but the first decisions that have paved the way for the domination of the cloud computing company.

The leader of Amazon Web Services (AWS) said that its dominance in the cloud comes partly from luck - but also from the first decisions that have proven essential for the establishment of a revolutionary organization.

"There's always a fair amount, it's an opportunity," Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS, said during a speech at the University of Washington's Department of Computer Science and Engineering. "You have to have a good time and some things to break."

Jassy's comments come as AWS - Amazon's cloud computing unit, which leases energy and storage businesses, governments and computer entrepreneurs - has become an activity at $ 14 billion a year, Driven by the recent years by the massive migration of data from private companies to shared data centers. This is an old company for a decade Amazon has launched - and a very profitable business.

In 2016, $ 3.1 billion was reported in operating revenues, or 32% more than the North American unit of the Amazon, the most important activity of the company in terms of billing. It is also by far the largest provider of cloud computing.

AWS sales growth rate, however, fell to 47 percent in the fourth quarter of 2016 from 69 percent in the period of last year, amid stiff competition from Microsoft, Google and other high-tech companies .

Among the first decisions of the foundation of the AWS fortune was the creation of "building blocks" primitive basic functions that customers could use and combine according to their needs, Jassy said.

Another key: AWS sells its services to the card and charge based on use, as a public service. It was a big deviation from the costly and multi-year contracts that technology providers usually need. "People gave us a lot of credit from the start to the pricing model," Jassy said.

The next key decision was the first AWS market has gone after.

AWS leaders "very early led software developers and start-ups," even though they knew companies and governments to end up being the main customers, according Jassy.

"This turned out to be a very underserved segment," Jassy said. Many of these developers have only spent a few dollars on AWS services, but "we do not care about that," the executive said. "Some of these will be the next big business in the next five to 10 years."

It was also necessary to continue innovating quickly, to adapt to the needs of growth. "Be quick and fast and be poor in functionality to start only works if you can deliver, and iterate quickly," Jassy said.

Now the scope and sophistication of AWS offers include artificial intelligence, voice data, databases and automated learning tools, some of which rely on innovations Amazon has deployed Alexa PDA and its execution centers.

As for growing competition, Jassy said that the IT services market is so large that there is no room for a number of successful cloud providers. However, "I do not think there will be 30 due to the scale that really matters."