Amazon AWS will open a region in Middle East by 2019
AWS is building a new region in Middle East (Bahrain), whose inauguration is expected by 2019.
It will have 3 Availability Zones (other ones are planned) to allow clients and AWS partners to create virtual instance, manage workloads and store data in Middle East.
Additionally, an “edge location” in the United Arab Emirates is expected to be launched in Q1 2018 which will allow to use the Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53, AWS Shield and AWS WAF services in Middle East.
These two announcements sum to the ones about the opening of two AWS offices in Dubai (UAE) and Manama (Bahrain), testifying the growing attention of Amazon towards this part of the World.
A Cloud Foundry report on containers is available
Cloud Foundry, the open source and multi-cloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) system of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, published a report on container suggestively titled “Hope Versus Reality, One Year Later -- An Update on Containers”.
Amongst the results highlighted by this report, we’d like to point out the growing percentage of companies that adopts container, which ramps from 52% to 67%, both in production (25%) and in evaluation (42%).
SAP joins the Cloud Native Computing Foundation
German enterprise software giant SAP joins the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the Linux Foundation foundation that manages, amongst the others, open source and container-related projects like Kubernetes (orchestration), rkt (runtime) and Prometheus (monitoring), and has sponsors like AWS, Cisco, CoreOs, Dell, Docker, Fujitsu, Google, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat and VMware.
Sixth Platinum sponsor to join the foundation this year, SAP testifies it attention and participation to the OSS (Open Source Software) ecosystem and commitment to the growing open source world: for instance the HANA Vora Big Data system, which is available on AWS with dedicated x1e.32xlarge instances, leveraged components of the Apache Hadoop stack for big data analysis and management.
This sponsorship grants SAP a seat in the foundation’s governance board and the right to vote each activity of the board.
Google Cloud Computing opens a new European region in Germany
Google Cloud Computing has launched a new region in Germany with 3 zones and datacenters in Frankfurt, called europe-west3, indeed the third in Europe after Belgium (europe-west1) and Great Britain (London, europe-west2).
Services available in this new region are about compute products (Compute Engine, App Engine, Container Engine), storage (Cloud Storage, Cloud Datastore, Cloud SQL, Persistent Disk), networking (Cloud Virtual Networking, Cloud Load Balancing), big data (Cloud Dataflow, Cloud Dataproc, Cloud Datalab).
In South America too a new region has been launched, southamerica-east1, with 3 zones and datacenters in Brazil (Sao Paulo). Services being offered are the same of the new european region. Details can be consulted at this address.
Besides, Google has installed more powerful GPUs: NVIDIA K80 in production and NVIDIA P100 in beta. They are available on instances created in the US West-Oregon, US East-South Carolina, Europe West-Belgium and Asia East-Taiwan regions.
The construction of Marea, a submarine cable between the US and Europe, is complete
Marea is a submarine cable between Europe and the US and financed by Microsoft, Facebook and Telxius (a Telefonica company). Its construction is officially completed.
Lying more than 17,000 feet below the ocean’s surface, Marea is the most technologically advanced subsea cable to cross the Atlantic Ocean, and the first cable to connect Virginia and Spain, landing in Virginia Beach and Bilbao.
At more than 4,000 miles (6,600 kilometers) long and almost 10.25 million pounds (4.65 million kilograms) — or about the weight of 34 blue whales — the Marea cable is a feat of engineering, collaboration and innovation. The cable can transmit up to 160 terabits of data per second. That’s more than 16 million times faster than the average home internet connection, making it capable of streaming 71 million high-definition videos simultaneously.
Azure introduces Availability Zones
Azure announces the introduction of Availability Zones, albeit in preview mode.
AV improve Azure’s resilience capabilities and extend the options available to clients when planning a business continuity solution.
Availability Zones, which are already being used by Google Cloud Computing and AWS, are isolated and fault-tolerant sector inside a datacenter region, each one with its own power system, cooling implant, connectivity, etc.. so to offer redundancy and a first line of defense against a failure inside the same region.
They are available as a preview in two regions: East US 2 (Virginia) and West Europe (Netherlands), and they are expected to be available by the end of the year in other regions in the US, Asia and Europe, including the new France Central region in Paris.
Supported instances and services are Av2, Dv2, DSv2 and Linux Virtual Machines, Windows Virtual Machines, Zonal Virtual Machine Scale Sets, Managed Disks and Load Balancer.
HPE acquires Cloud Technology Partners
HPE announces the purchase of Cloud Technology Partners, an IT consultancy company.
CTP’s mission is summarized in terms of cloud migration (by helping clients to determine which apps can be brought to a public or private cloud and by migrating them), innovation (by helping clients to create solutions with key technologies like IoT, Big Data and Machine Learning) and cloud operations (by helping clients with the Managed Cloud Controls suite to reach governance and compliance goals and by automating the alignment to effective cloud expenditures expected in the original business case).
CTP is cloud-agnostic, ie it works regardless of the platform: it works with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google and OpenStack.
HPE can now provide its clients with a vast array of strategic IT solutions for public, private and hybrid clouds, still in a context which aims towards hybrid cloud solutions that leverage the best of both world: on-premises infrastructures and virtual infrastructures in public clouds.
Equinix purchases Itconic
Equinix announces the purchase of Equinix, a provider in the datacenter, connectivity and cloud infrastructure field based in Spain and Portugal, and of its subsidiary CloudMas.
This acquisition bolsters Equinix’s position in Europe by expanding into two countries thanks to 5 datacenters in four metropolitan areas: Madrid, Barcelona, Sevilla and Lisboa. CloudMas team brings expertise in terms of hybrid cloud architectures, adoption strategies and cloud migration.
Moreover, Equinix can now handle a growth in the traffic between Europe, South America and Africa thanks to a number of submarine cables, including the one connected to the Lisboa datacenter: ACE (African Coast to Europe), WACS (West Africa Cable System), Tata Global Network and MainOne; Sevilla’s datacenter is connected to Canalink (mainland Spain and Canary islands).