Comcast partners with AWS as it struggles to fight cord-cutting disruption

Cloud providers are eager to brag about their customers and Amazon has received a big prize today by announcing that Comcast chose AWS as the preferred provider of the cloud.

What does this mean exactly? Comcast probably puts most of its workloads in the cloud on AWS. At a time when Comcast is fighting the trend of cable, it may be important to be able to create cloud services and applications that distinguish them from a simple content provider.

These services include features such as voice search via the Comcast Remote or the Xfinity TV Remote App, which lets you see what is currently turned on and lets you choose which programs you record on your DVR. They also created XFi, an application that gives customers more control over their Comcast WiFi networks.

Comcast has used a number of AWS services, such as computing, storage and analysis, to help generate these applications. The company hopes that by using this relationship, cloud flexibility can be used to keep fighting malfunctions.

Nowadays, everything you need from Comcast and other cable providers is access to the internet. With a streaming device such as Apple TV, Roku, Amazon Fire TV or Google Chromecast, you can make a large number of choices, usually at a lower cost than cable TV subscriptions.

Cutting the cord is faster than expected. According to eMarketer's survey, more than 22 million people have dropped their cable subscriptions last year, a 33% increase over 2016. Not all Comcast customers are, of course, but the trend must be to be the company concerned.

With so many substantive options, even Comcast, who also owns NBC Universal, has ended up in a crisis. One way to combat this disruptive power is to offer content-based services to differentiate themselves from other offers such as Netflix and Hulu, not to mention purer cable alternatives such as Hulu Live TV, Playstation Vue and YouTube TV.

AWS is by far the largest provider of cloud infrastructure. Comcast is one of the leading providers of cable television with 22.5 million subscribers. AT & T had slightly more than 25 million subscribers, both based on last year's figures.

AWS for Beginners: Learning To Use Big Computing For Small Projects

I recently started managing all my own hosting via Amazon Web Services. It may sound crazy - it's not that I run Netflix or a computer-consuming start-up in my spare time - but I've discovered that AWS learning is a rewarding, interesting and even useful one. Of course it is sometimes frightening and AWS is exaggerated by orders of magnitude, but in a few months I have discovered that I am building a new skill, control in a number of areas, and actually save money.

Trust me, nobody is more surprised than me. I always knew that AWS was a powerful tool and I knew it was somewhat accessible, because most of its products are not as technical or command-line as they were years ago, but it turns out that AWS is more accessible (and more affordable) than I had guessed.

If you've read my previous article about the best product management tools, you may have noticed a trend: I'm having trouble accepting second-rate tools. As far as professional products are concerned, if something better exists, I want it. The logic of all of this was clear a year ago when a team team from a Hewlett Packard team explained to me why so many companies wanted to buy their $ 8,000 workstations.

At that time, the costs seemed crazy to me. Do you not get 80% of the performance for 50% of the price? Why do companies not do what I asked? She explained it very clearly: engineers earn a lot of money and every minute they do not spend on engineering is a waste of money. So, if an abbreviated calculation time or abbreviated data calculation can mean the difference between a person who does more work or goes to a coffee while the work ends, most companies like to pay the cost of the increased treatment flow. The lesson for me was that powerful tools could mean an increase in costs in advance, but huge savings in the long term.

I have always seen tools as a way to develop a skill. To go back to this previous article, you can manage your project with a shared Google document or a simple tool like Basecamp, but if you use JIRA, you will learn the ins and outs of a power tool. a transferable tool. competence. This logic does not always work - sometimes speed must be a priority over learning - so it's best to take advantage when you can.

Combine this thought and my desire to launch a few websites, and the result was that I dusted off my AWS account instead of searching for the best cheap web hosting and signing up for GoDaddy or something similar.

Now I have a few months experience with what is essentially an AWS beginners course and I am making real progress. My first goal of hosting as many static sites as cheaply as possible was quickly achieved. Admittedly, I spent a week with what could be achieved in a few minutes, but already learned all that time. From that point on I wanted to give them SSL, manage URL routing with S3 bucket policy, create a subdomain and learn how to handle the CloudFront CDN. These are all things that I can do without outside help during my nights and weekends (except for one AWS premium support ticket).

Lately, my goal was to build a WordPress site on AWS. I am happy to say that I have done so. This is a blog about learning about cloud hosting and I hope that some people will avoid some of the headaches and pitfalls that I had to circumvent (almost all of them were not as confusing or difficult as they seemed at the time). I have a long list of To-Dos that is linked to the separate WordPress site: add SSL to the VPS subsystem, experiment with different levels of server performance and create e-mail accounts, to name a few. Sooner or later I will experiment with caching, digging in my logs, setting up multi-zone redundancy and basically continuing to play Ops until it becomes boring.

A good thing about technology is that it spreads in the course of time. Today's academic experience is the ultra-modern technology of tomorrow, the prosumer tool of tomorrow, and ultimately a standard feature of all products in the category ... to humor and ridicule (try to buy a laptop with a DVD player). That is exactly what we see with AWS, so for me it is everything

AWS-VMware partnership remains a win-win

The collaboration with AWS-VMware is still in its infancy, but at the beginning of the new year it's time to emphasize the real goals of both companies and what they mean for IT. company.

Although some experts have scratched the deal, both companies can benefit from the collaboration, and their users hope for the same. Let's look at the case from the standpoint of every company.

VMware tried to develop its own public cloud, vCloud Air, a few years ago, but then sold it to focus on its core business, virtualization. But when AWS gained market relevance, companies dropped VMware for AWS. This drew the attention of the VMware management team and probably led to his interest in a partnership.

Let's not waste words: the deal actually makes AWS a co-location provider for VMware, which is strange. VMware runs on naked metal in AWS, which means that, with the exception of the underlying physical servers and the network, it has no dependencies on Amazon.

The AWS-VMware collaboration has yielded some important benefits for the virtualization giant. First, it slows the bleeding of those who leave VMware for AWS or other public clouds. VMware now has a powerful cloud offering based on its own technology and uses the most popular public cloud product.

Secondly, VMware has an aggressive sales team that can sell in cloud markets that were not open a year ago. Finally, this agreement offers some viability to VMware. To this partnership, some experts and analysts have merged VMware with other business dinosaurs.

The End of Larry Vs. Amazon? AWS Looking to Dump Oracle, Report Says

According to reports, Amazon Web Services (AWS) does not want to spend "another $ 50 million" on Oracle technology this quarter.

In the company's most recent revenue call, Larry Ellison, Oracle's Technical Director, relied on AWS, Salesforce and SAP using the Oracle software. Now at least two of the three companies, AWS and Salesforce, are working to get rid of Oracle and develop their own databases, according to The Information.

"Let me tell you that is not moving away from Oracle," said Ellison in Oracle's second fiscal quarter on fiscal year 2018 results. "A company you've heard of has given us 50 million dollars to buy. Oracle databases and other Oracle technologies, this company is Amazon. "

Ellison also said that Salesforce "works completely with Oracle".

However, Amazon has changed two internal databases that run its ecommerce business from Oracle to NoSQL, a type of open source database software, according to The Information, citing "two people with knowledge of change".

In the meantime, Salesforce plans to be completely out of Oracle by 2023, according to the report, which quotes a former Salesforce employee. The company has developed its own database to replace Oracle, with the code name Sayonara, Japanese for "say goodbye", and is ready to implement it internally.

Oracle declined to comment and AWS did not respond to requests for comments. A Salesforce spokesperson said the company was not commenting on the rumors, but added, "Salesforce is focused on providing the most reliable, reliable and resilient infrastructure available and we do it with a multi-vendor approach. . "

Will that result in a quieter Ellison, who likes to make fun of AWS at every possible opportunity? Probably not.

Another company that can lose if AWS develops its own software is Red Hat.

Jeff Barr of AWS writes about the new version of his Linux operating system, Amazon Linux 2, in a blog post published in December. This decision could put the cloud giant in direct competition with Linux and the open source software distributor Red Hat in the corporate space.

But while it's "not a good thing" for Red Hat, according to Karl Keirstead of Deutsche Bank, investors should not "overreact." AWS software is always pre-beta and the "full version will take time". "Barron's reports.