Microsoft makes a small acquisition to help it catch Amazon's cloud

When Steve Ballmer CEO of Microsoft was, he had a good part of the scene in a conference wearing a sweaty shirt and shouting a word repeated: developers!

Ballmer's 14-year reign at the head of the software company was completed three years ago, in part because developers were going anywhere except Microsoft.

If Apple and Android to create mobile applications, Amazon Web Services run and test websites, or open source technology easier to implement and customize, many programmers have avoided the old Microsoft Developer platforms for bright toys elsewhere.

Since replacing Ballmer as CEO in early 2014, Satya Nadella has made it one of its primary goals to bring developers. His latest move came on Monday with the acquisition of Deis, an open source tool that allows developers to create, run and move applications between local computers and clouds from different Microsoft vendors. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.


Of Microsoft Azure Cloud is a second away for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Nadella is competing to gain a greater market share as companies quickly move the workloads from their own data centers to the cloud. The promotion of emerging open source projects is essential to win business from developers who want the widest possible range of software and platforms.

"With all the open source projects that plague developers, you should have the bids to respond to this option if you want to attract your cloud," said John Vrionis, partner at Venture Capital in Silicon Valley Lightspeed Venture Partners and a Enterprise software inverter. "If the developers start at AWS and meet, they do not come to think about Azure."

Microsoft recently began working with Databricks to integrate integration tools and start analyzing data in Azure. Databricks, one of the few companies marketing the open source Apache framework, has so far worked at AWS. And at the end of last year, Microsoft has made the astounding decision to join the Linux Foundation as a platinum member, publicly supporting the open source platform that has always competed with Microsoft's flagship Windows operating system.

This new emphasis on openness is not limited to Azure. One year ago, Microsoft spent $ 500 million on a company called Xamarin, whose software helps developers build applications on all major mobile platforms, namely iOS and Android.

Cloud is the great battle. This is where Microsoft Windows servers, which play an important role in the data centers of many companies, are thrown when companies unload their infrastructure. By the end of 2016, AWS controls 40 percent of the infrastructure market in the cloud, while the next three players - Microsoft, Google and IBM - accounted for 23 percent, according to Synergy Research Group.


The acquisition of Deis Microsoft pushes more deeply into the red packaging market. Containers allow developers to create code in a virtual box to be shared or moved between applications and the cloud easily. Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft's cloud group, called containers "the new currency in the cloud."

"At Microsoft, we've seen both explosive growth at once interesting and the deployment of container workloads on Azure, and we're committed to ensuring that Azure is the best place to run," Guthrie said in a blog entry on Monday .

Deis is proclaimed as "making Kubernetes easy to use." Kubernetes is an open source technology container developed by Google to deploy and scale applications. Microsoft bought Deis from Engine Yard, a company whose software is designed to make applications run smoothly in the cloud.

UKFast Opens Trapdoor under prices, Thumbs nose at AWS

The UK offers UK accommodation UKFast lowered its prices for overnight accommodation Openstack said, taking a burst of AWS.

The lowest prices refer to the UKFast Flex eCloud platform and the company says it has lowered its prices by up to 44 percent. Several discounts are available for wholesale purchases, including 30 percent for customers who have a three-year contract.

"It was very good for our industry where AWS entered the market as it fosters innovation and forces around the world to develop their game," said CEO Laurence Jones.

"But it is easy in the business to become a victim of their own success and I believe AWS because of its size as it is unable to match the level of support provided by some of the smaller British hosts and cloud games."

Jones added: "There is a lot of confusion as to how certain elastic and null products have a price clients end up paying a lot more than they expected while hidden costs arose .."

Is not wrong. While UKFast put their bids on a price calculator on a page, Amazon has a multitude of calculators and a wide range of options to choose from.

ECloud Flex UKFast said in a statement, it allows developers to "build and generate individual virtual machines programmatically with all virtual hosting platforms with the provided OpenStack APIs."

"The popularity of Flex is not a surprise," said the company, "but it has allowed us to expand the product and now we pass on the benefits to our customers. The investments we have made in our data centers mean that we now offer the cloud to A more competitive price.

The big elephant in the room to choose AWS is the cost of network out or bandwidth. Up to 10 tons / month bandwidth of the public Internet network Amazon EC2 (London area) on demand will cost you $ 0.09 / GB - $ 180 per month if you use all 10TB - then charge that UKFast To 10 TB of public Internet network bandwidth is £ 32.00 / month or $ 39.71.

On the other hand, an AWS "hard disk" can be moved from one server to another. Additionally, AWS scales for self-efficacy, which makes it more or less perfectly the highest amount of NIS bar leaving your wallet.

AWS says a typo caused the massive S3 failure this week

Everybody makes mistakes. But working with Amazon Web Services means that incorrect entry can lead to a massive failure that will paralyze popular sites and services. This is apparently what happened earlier this week, when the AWS Storage (S3) service at the Northern Virginia vendor experienced a 11-hour system failure.

All other Amazon services in the US-ESTE-1 region that rely on S3, such as Elastic Block Store, Lambda, and the launch of a new forum to offer them the Elastic Compute Cloud service infrastructures have been impacted by the interruption.

AWS has apologized for the incident at an autopsy published Thursday. The blackout affected the likes of Netflix, Reddit, Imgur and Adobe. More than half of the 100 online shopping sites have experienced slower load times during the failure, according to APICA's monitoring service site.

Here is what caused the failure, and what Amazon plans:

According to Amazon S3 authorized employee has executed a command that was supposed to be "extracting a small number of servers from one of the subsystems S3 S3 that is used by the billing process" in response to the service of the billing processes running more Slow than expected. One of the parameters of the command was incorrectly entered and fired at a large number of servers that support a pair of S3 critical subsystems.

The subsystem handles metadata index and location information for all S3 objects within the region, while the inversion subsystem manages the allocation of new storage facilities and requires the index subsystem to function properly. Fault-tolerant, the number of servers stopped requires both a full reboot.

As it turns out, Amazon has not completely restarted these systems in their larger regions for several years, and S3 has experienced massive growth in the interim time. Restarting these subsystems has taken longer than expected, which added to the duration of the outage.

In response to this incident, AWS makes several changes to its internal tools and processes. The responsible for the failure tool has been modified to remove the slower servers and block transactions that have capacity below the control security levels. AWS also evaluates its other tools to ensure they have similar security systems.

AWS engineers will also begin refactoring the S3 index subsystem to help accelerate restarts and reduce the Blast Radius problems in the future.

The cloud service provider has also modified its dashboard health service dashboard to run in several regions. AWS employees were unable to update the dashboard during the crash because the S3 console depended on the affected area.

Amazon may launch new AWS productivity suite to take on Microsoft and Google

Amazon Web Services intends to consolidate its messaging, file storage and videoconferencing services into a productivity package that would compete with Microsoft and Google, according to a report released on Friday.

The sources said the information that AWS is still in the early stages of development with its productivity suite and has not been settled exactly what applications would be included. The company is working to update its current WorkDocs Workmail and to attract more corporate customers.

The combination of applications helps AWS to compete with Google and Microsoft Office Suite G 365. Companies that are currently working with AWS told the information that Amazon Services does not sell as well as they are currently less advanced than Google or Microsoft products .

Amazon is catching up with other productivity suites by adding the functionality of existing applications such as Workmail. In November, for example, AWS has added the ability to record all emails sent and received so that companies in the finance and health sectors can comply with compliance regulations.

Last week AWS announced the application of the doorbell that combines video conferencing, voice, chat and screen sharing. Adding this application as a whole could make Amazon's services as suites feature meeting places or similar Microsoft computers.

The information indicated that it is not yet clear whether the AWS result includes an online word processing application that allows for collaboration such as Google Docs. Amazon does not currently offer such a service, but a source said it could enter this territory with a recent update of the existing AppStream service.

There are no details about the cost of the Amazon productivity suite. Suite G Google starts at $ 5 per user per month, and Microsoft Office 365 starts at $ 6 per user per month. AWS currently charges $ 6 for Workmail and WorkDocs.

Domino's moves online ordering from AWS to Azure

The global migration of the OneDigital cloud begins.

Domino Pizza Rest counting down the days until the baseline control system begins taking pizza orders to a new Azure platform environment as a service in Australia.

The retailer has recently taken the decision to withdraw the OneDigital AWS system globally and transfer it to Microsoft's cloud technology.

Domino has used Amazon Web Services as a hosting partner for all of its critical systems over the past four years. It has a small number of systems - such as Exchange, which is currently moving to Office 365 - housed in a server room in Brisbane.

While most of its core platforms remain in AWS, last year the pizza chain decided to move its own OneDigital Microsoft Azure PaaS .NET platform into the world.

OneDigital is the online ordering platform that is used by all Domino markets worldwide to process orders.

Unlike Domino's infrastructure as a service with AWS, Azure PaaS offers the pizzeria chain support for the entire web application lifecycle through servers, storage and networking, as well as development tools, intelligence Business, middleware and database management.

"Going to PaaS, we believe we will be able to advance in our high regional availability, better contain our development costs - because we will be able to use many of the standard Azure services - the experience closer to users," said Wayne McMahon, the IOC to ITnews.

Each instance of the Domino OneDigital Region will be centrally organized, but all cases worldwide orders from one of Domino's regional operations.

"If such an A / NZ converter hit the nearest body [at home] and it was not available, it would go to the next closest available, and so on," McMahon said.

However, the retailer will ensure that orders in the areas where the rules on personal data protection are processed are processed locally and not to take risks with the privacy of the customer.

Domino Pizza Rest Australia and New Zealand are in the final test of Azure, with live orders "imminent" according to McMahon. Japan will change in the coming months, with European markets to follow.

The objective of the company is to be fully migrated at the end of the current fiscal year.

However, McMahon said there are no plans to move any of the other major pizza chain systems out of the AWS and Azure environment.

"AWS is still a very important partner for us. There is no compelling reason to move our other critical systems," he said.

"They do not necessarily benefit from PaaS."

Code cleanup

Domino has taken the opportunity to embark on an improvement program that consists of optimizing thousands of services associated with the OneDigital platform.

"We use the PaaS opportunity, not only by getting services and moving, but methodically through all the services to make sure it is not optimal," said McMahon.

The IT team began clearing the code and "finding better ways to do things" last September and has since completed the process.

Large pieces of work include the service layer rewrite since the SQL Server approval on AWS DocumentDB in Azure, McMahon said - "very important parts of our architecture that can be done with the price and good and how we are managing."

Snapchat signs $1bn cloud deal with AWS

Snapchat has an agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide redundancy for its messaging platform, at a cost of $ 1 billion over the next five years.

Snap, the parent company's messaging-based photo messaging platform, already has an agreement with Google, spending $ 400 million a year on its cloud platform.

Snapchat has about 158 ​​million active users per day, but it works almost entirely in the cloud. It was one of the first prominent customers when Google agreed to its infrastructure-as-a-service offer in 2011.

In a presentation for an upcoming IPO, Snap revealed that it has also reached an agreement with Amazon to improve the redundancy service, taking its annual expenditure estimate into the cloud hosting of 450 million - more than the company obtained a Billing in 2016.

In the presentation, Snapchat said, "In March 2016, we concluded the AWS Enterprise contract for using cloud services from Amazon Web Services, Inc. or AWS, which was modified in March 2016 and again In February 2017. The agreement will continue indefinitely until it is terminated by either party.

"Under the addition of February 2017 for the agreement, we have committed to spend $ 1.0 billion between January 2017 and December 2021 AWS services (50.0 million in 2017, 125.0 million Dollars in 2018, $ 200.0 million in 2019, $ 275.0 million in 2020 and $ 350.0 million in 2021.) If the minimum purchase commitment of one year is not respected, we are required to pay the difference.

Snapchat also hinted that it could create its own infrastructure in the future in an attempt to reduce costs, adding: "In the future, we can invest in building our own infrastructure to better serve our customers.

AWS to Build Fourth Dublin Data Centre

Amazon announced the acquisition of a new site in Dublin where it will build another data center for the Irish cloud unit Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The multi-million dollar facility, which will be the fourth AWS data center in Dublin, will be installed in a former warehouse for storage and distribution of Barretts of the company. Located on the outskirts of Tallaght, south of Dublin, the new data center will be located very close to the other three facilities in Dublin, including a building under construction at the former Jacobs Cream Crackers biscuit factory.

Also in Tallaght it is the installation of AWS 22,300 square meters on the site of a former Tesco distribution center and a center converted into a factory formerly owned by Shinko Microelectronics.

After buying the Barretts site in late 2016, Amazon has already begun the construction process and asked for permission to demolish the building from the existing warehouse.

Local Dublin, Amazon is building a facility in Blanchardstown, where it already has two data centers. It is also building an additional center in Clonshaugh Business Park near Dublin Airport.

According to the Irish Independent, AWS investment in Ireland now stands at more than 1,000 million euros and the company is the largest provider of data center solutions in the country.

In addition to its expansion plans in Ireland, AWS announced the opening of a London area in the UK last year. The company said the new high availability region includes two different geographical areas, known as availability zones, each scheme meeting the Cyber Essentials Plus UK certification.

In addition, AWS offers all UK consulting clients on application development that are consistent with the principles of Cloud Security Center National Cyber Security in the UK and Compliance Compliance Governance reporting protocols on National Health (NHS).