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.

Qumulo goes all-flash and replicates to AWS

Scale-out file start up Qumulo has revealed all-flash filer nodes.

The all-flash QF2 (Qumulo File Fabric) P-series node joins its QC hardware with its hybrid flash and disk media drives.

The P-series' hardware design is straightforward enough: it's a 2U Intel box that can run up to 24 NVMe SSDs in U.2 format, dual Xeon Skylake Gold-level 6126 processors and 192GB (12 x 16GB) of RAM. The networking interface cards are dual 100GbitE or 40GbitE QSFP+ NICs, with separate front-end and back-end data paths.

Power supplies are fully-redundant.

The latest Qumulo Core software delivers continuous replication and supports AWS as a replication target that is synchronised to a source cluster. It has a REST API interface.

There are two models; the 23T is a 23TB model with 12 x 1.92TB SSDs while the 92T has a 92TB capacity using 24 x 3.84TB SSDs. The drives use 3bits/cell (TLC) 3D NAND.

There are a minimum of four nodes in a cluster. A node delivers 4GB/sec of bandwidth, hence a 4-node set provides 16GB/sec, and a 400-node set pumps out 1.6TB/sec. Qumulo says the system copes with both single-stream (video-editing) and multi-stream requirements.

It scales to billions of files and, Qumulo says, can handle small file workloads as well as large file applications.

The QF2 software can run in the AWS public cloud as well as on the on-premises QF2 nodes. An on-premises cluster can continuously replicate data to another on-premises cluster or to AWS so that AWS QF2 instances can be fired up when a burst of additional processing power is needed beyond available on-premises capabilities.

The system management provides real-time visibility and control of system performance, with analytics focussing down to the file level when trouble-shooting. Cloud-based monitoring of the filer cluster can detect an oncoming SSD failure and alert customers and provides historical trend data.

Qumulo expects to sell all-flash QF2s into the machine learning applications, genomic sequencing and analysis, high-resolution video editing and scientific computing markets. They all have a need for fast performance processing of file-based workloads, including large-scale datasets.

Peter Godman, Qumulo's co-founder and CTO, said; “Using QF2, our customers will sequence more genomes, create more special effects and train more learning models across all-flash and the public cloud.”

The company claims QF2 all-flash clusters deliver the best price performance of any all-flash file storage system available today. It has hundeds of customers, including DreamWorks.

Partners Praise AWS For Solving Intra-Region Connectivity Challenges With New Offering

Amazon Web Services on Wednesday resolved a major connectivity problem for partners working with some of their most important customers to extend virtual networks across multiple AWS regions in their backbone network.

The new service, Direct Connect Gateway, allows customers with private direct connection circuits that connect their AWS access data centers to the Amazon cloud in other geographic areas without significant investment in terms of time, money and administrative power.

Gateway makes it "simpler and more powerful than direct connection," commented Jeff Barr, AWS principal evangelist.

Partners told CRN that they expected the public cloud leader's ability and often listened to customers that the difficulties in the AWS regions have made them reluctant to adopt the dedicated connectivity solution.

Tom Ray, director of Cloudreach, an international cloud computing consultancy, said clients were asking for an intraregional capability for a long time.

Partners told CRN that they expected the public cloud leader's ability and often listened to customers that the difficulties in the AWS regions have made them reluctant to adopt the dedicated connectivity solution.

Tom Ray, director of Cloudreach, an international cloud computing consultancy, said clients were asking for an intraregional capability for a long time.

According to Amazon, there are more than 60 colocation service providers worldwide that offer direct connection. These dedicated links provide more predictable security, bandwidth and data transfer performance.

AWS vs. Alibaba — Round 1: Southeast Asia

AWS seems to be taking its battles wisely, and although Alibaba in China faces a number of disadvantages, Singapore is a different story. In addition to being named the most favorable country in the business world for several years, Singapore's Internet economy is expected to reach $ 200 billion by 2025. This will be an interesting combination because Alibaba has a large influence in the region, Singapore is not China, and if AWS is looking for a fair fight, this is definitely the place for that, so this seems to be the site of the first round of the AWS against Alibaba Cloud Wars.

The fight begins

The way the world giants exercise their weight strategically is almost like seeing "Game of Thrones", except that the "armies" here are made up of a lot of money. Speaking of a lot of money, Alibaba is injecting another billion dollars to increase its stake in Lazada, its latest acquisition. Lazada itself was the first billion-dollar acquisition in Southeast Asia and has since established a trade and logistics center in Malaysia's free digital trading zone and has doubled its data capacity in Hong Kong. The "History of Singapore" here is that Amazon has landed with Prime and has made all retail industries in the logistics of financial services throughout the region expect to experience a major commotion.

While the acquisition of Lazada and the launch of Amazon Prime have nothing to do with cloud computing, e-commerce is still a different battle from the same war as the cloud. The fact that both companies make their "bread and butter" mainly through e-commerce is just one of the striking similarities between the two companies, and many people think that the battle between Amazon Prime vs. Lazada in Singapore is just an "exhibition party" before the real war for dominance of the international cloud: AWS against Alibaba

AWS vs. Alibaba: King Kong Vs. Godzilla?

Earlier this year, Lazado CEO Maximilian Bittner explained that Amazon was not worried about saying, "It's very difficult for me to worry about someone who has not yet entered the market. they are here now and since there is a $ 250 billion gorilla behind him, the $ 400 billion gorilla in front of him probably does not look scary.

However, from the point of view of a computer director, especially in Southeast Asia, choosing between the two may not be as simple as choosing to buy Cheese and Chocolate Woody Prime or Lazada. Cloud providers offer different pricing models, unique upgrade options, frequent price reductions, different services and different billing styles. To increase confusion, customers' opinions vary according to their personal experience, which is always unique.

Cheaper by a dozen

If we have to generalize, prices and latency will be above any list of users in AWS vs.. Alibaba, and with respect to both, AWS seems to have the advantage. AWS has reduced its rates approximately 52 times so far, with current rates accounting for about half of those charged by the smaller clouds. In addition, Amazon has approximately five times the capacity of the next 14 largest competitors, so Alibaba Cloud will not win this war. Curiously, a recent Financial Times report indicates that Alibaba has "halved" its base prices.

Alibaba has three different price options to choose from, the base is $ 7.49 per month and comes with 1 core, 1 GB of memory and 40 GB of hard drive space. A similar AWS configuration costs about $ 9.50 a month on average, although all calculations are depleted when it increases or decreases. This is probably the reason why customer feedback indicates that there have been cases where Alibaba Cloud was more expensive than AWS

AWS posted

Another implication of the "cloud" of the Amazon Prime launch in Singapore is that it is essentially an AWS cloud ecosystem advertising for the entire region. From now on, millions of customers from Southeast Asian companies will see a concrete example of how a customer-obsessed business works with AWS cloud infrastructure and an ecosystem of powerful tools and services. both open source and custom. It is also speculated that AWS is an important customer for many cloud providers, data and analysis, which will accelerate the entry of these players in this region.

The above statement is funny, it's the ego

Following AWS, Google Compute Engine also moves to per-second billing

A week ago, AWS announced that it would rapidly change billing per second for users of its EC2 service. This is not a big surprise, while Google today announced a very similar move.

The Google Engine, Container Engine, Cloud Dataproc, and Flex Engine environments will now have per-second billing, starting immediately (AWS users should wait until October 2). This new pricing system extends to preferred virtual machines and machines running high-end operating systems such as Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Enterprise Linux Server. With this, AWS, which offers only invoicing per second for basic Linux instances and not for Windows Server and other Linux distributions on its platform, currently has a separate time load.

Like AWS, Google will charge for at least one minute.

Interestingly, Google has already introduced billing per second for its persistent disks, compromised GPUs and discounts.

While Google contends that for most use cases, billing per second will result in very small billing changes, the company also notes that there are many applications where the level up and down has a lot of meaning (websites, mobile apps and data processing jobs, for example).

"This is probably the reason why we have not heard many customers asking per second," said Paul Nash, Group Product Manager for Compute Engine, in today's announcement. "But we do not want you to choose between your morning coffee and your basic hours, so we're happy to bring billing per second to your virtual machines with a minimum of one minute."

Thus, while Google is not revealed at this time, this is clearly a reaction to the evolution of Amazon, although the company considers it as another box in a comparison of features between the two services in the cloud.

What about Microsoft?

So far, Microsoft has not made a similar move. "With Azure Container Instances, we paved the way for billing per second, with a service that runs in seconds and takes seconds, we realized that it was incredibly critical to give customers that granularity of costs," said Corey Sanders , Microsoft's Product Manager for Azure Compute, told me at the Microsoft Ignite conference when I asked him about his company's plans. "I look forward to seeing other clouds continue and to offer customers the best flexibility for their pricing."

As for regular virtual machines, Sanders remained in the message and noted that Microsoft wanted to focus on the containers because that is where billing per second is the most logical. "We are always looking to improve the billing constructions in our platform and make it more agile and more agile for our customers," he said. I would be very surprised if Microsoft did not try to verify invoicing per second in the near future.

As Target and Walmart Move Away From AWS, How Much Pain Will Amazon Feel?

As Amazon (AMZN - Get Report) moves into retailing of bricks and mortars with the purchase of Whole Foods, it makes sense that Target (TGT - Get Report), Walmart (WMT - Get Report) and other large retailers are looking for another partner in the cloud, rather than help fund a major rival.

Target would have followed the leadership of Walmart and plans to transfer its business to Amazon Web Services. A massive outflow of AWS retailers would benefit competitors such as Google Cloud Platform (Microsoft Cloud (MSFT - Get Report) and Google Cloud Platform (GOOGL - Get Report)). The Amazon cloud trade is so large that it could withstand losses, however. Microsoft, Google and other major cloud players have their own potential conflicts that could cost them business.

Although Target did not speak directly to Amazon Web Services, the company said it used several cloud service providers. "Earlier this year we evaluated suppliers, as we do on a regular basis, and we have determined that there are options that are more appropriate for our business," a spokesman said. "We have decided to implement changes and we have made changes since then."

Similarly, Amazon declined to comment. While the digital commerce giant may have friction with Walmart and Target, Amazon Web Services still has retail customers such as Brooks Brothers Group Inc., GameStop Corp. (GNE - Get Report) and Nordstrom Inc. (JWN - Get Report) and AWS are also using Lululemon Athletica Inc. (LULU - Get Report), Nike Inc. (NKE - Get Report) and Under Armor Inc..

"While AWS remains the 800-pound gorilla in the public cloud market, we believe that its parent's ambitions can begin to have a greater impact on AWS's ability to move to some vertical markets," said Everkite ISI, analyst "Combine it with the growing momentum behind hybrid cloud architectures and we believe that Azure remains well positioned to gain market share in the next few years as it will be considered a reliable partner and capabilities Azure technologies are essentially on a par with AWS in many areas now (if not in some). "

Although the loss of a large account is undeniably bad, John Dinsdale of Synergy Research Group said in an e-mail that Wal-Mart and Target's defections would be "cutbacks" rather than "big events" for Amazon.

Microsoft just made it easier for programmers to use archrival Amazon's cloud

Amazon and Microsoft, two archivists in cloud computing and rigorous competitors for Seattle's technological talent, cooperate much more.

Earlier this week we saw the wedding of Alexa's virtual assistant from Amazon and Cortana from Microsoft.

Then, on Thursday, the companies announced that they were joining together so that programmers could more easily take the code they handle in Microsoft tools and publish it in the Amazon cloud.

On Thursday, Microsoft launched a blog post detailing how its local Team Foundation Server software and its cloud service in Visual Studio Team Services can connect to various Amazon Web Services tools.

Once the new tools are installed, developers can transfer content to the widely used S3 storage service of AWS, automate implementations with the AWS CodeDeploy tool and execute applications with the server service without Lambda server, among others, without leaving the limits of Microsoft products

To build integrations, Amazon engineers have collaborated with members of the Microsoft Visual Studio ALM Rangers group, Microsoft program manager Joseph Bourne wrote in the blog entry. The ALM Rangers group is responsible for providing out-of-band solutions for missing features or guidelines, Microsoft said.

In fact, Microsoft provides a new revenue stream for AWS, the largest cloud around and the top competitor of Microsoft's Azure cloud. This is notable because historically, Microsoft has announced the possibility that people use their source code management programs with Azure.

But if Microsoft is serious about making things as simple as possible for end users, the move is logical.

The opening fits in with Microsoft's recent move led by Satya Nadella to work with non-Microsoft platforms. For example, Microsoft has allowed users to use Linux on their Windows 10 operating system.