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.

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