AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud Platform – Compute

 by Jess Panni

In this series, we’re comparing cloud services from AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform. A full breakdown and comparison of cloud providers and their services are available in this handy poster.

We have assessed services across three typical migration strategies:
Lift and shift – the cloud service can support running legacy systems with minimal change
Consume PaaS services – the cloud offering is a managed service that can be consumed by existing solutions with minimal architectural change
Re-architect for cloud – the cloud technology is typically used in solution architectures that have been optimised for cloud

And have grouped services into 10 categories:
Compute
Storage & Content Delivery
Database
Analytics & Big Data
Internet of Things
Mobile Services
Networking
Security & Identity
Management & Monitoring
Hybrid

In this post we are looking at…
Compute

This category covers all services that can be used to run applications in the cloud.
AWS

Amazon is often been seen as the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market leader with their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). AWS lets you choose from a range of 40 virtual server instance sizes from low cost ‘nano’ instances to high end memory, storage or GPU optimised products, offering up to 128 ‘vCPU’s and a whopping 2TB of memory (be warned this doesn’t come cheap!). The lower end T2 instances offer baseline performance with the ability to ‘burst’ above the baseline for short periods. EC2 comes with images for Linux and Windows Server. A free tier is available for 1 year (equivalent of running one low end instance) although this is unlikely to be a major decision factor for most organisations. On-demand instances are billed per-hour, and discounted prices are available on instances that are paid up-front, or reserved on a recurring schedule, and there is even a spot pricing option on excess capacity. Auto-scaling these instances is supported, with the ability to scale in response to a range of run-time thresholds reported by CloudWatch.

AWS offers persistent disk options through Elastic Block Store and comes with a variety of SSD and HDD flavours. Disk storage is backed by Elastic Block Store and is automatically replicated across multiple servers within an availability zone (a specific location with an AWS region). Replication across regions is supported by shipping snapshots.

AWS Container Service is Amazon’s solution for running and managing docker containers. It relies on ECS to provide the underlying container instances. Standard images are available or you are free to choose your own. EC2 Container Registryallows developers to publish their docker container images to a private managed repository which is important to support development and devops workflows.

Amazon also offers a good range of PaaS services. Elastic Beanstalk is a PaaS compute solution for running web applications written in Python, PHP, JavaScript, .NET, Ruby, Java and Go. It can scale on request or based on certain run-time thresholds such as CPU usage. Elastic Beanstalk also allows developers to run applications as docker images.

For running discrete compute tasks AWS has Lambda which executes code in response to various triggers, such as application or storage events. Lambda automatically scales to meet demand and supports JavaScript, Python and Java.

AWS has a large number of centers spread spread over 13 geographically dispersed regions, so there are good options for organisations with strict data sovereignty rules.
Azure

Azure has been rapidly closing the gap to Amazon in recent years with Virtual Machines. Coincidentally (perhaps) Azure also offers 40 instance sizes offering up to 20 cores and 140GB of memory. It is good to see Microsoft fully embracing Linux on Azure, so organisations with large Linux estates need not worry about choosing that platform. Red Hat and Windows images are available ‘out of the box’ with other distributions available from the Azure Marketplace. Virtual machines are billed per-minute (and discounts across all Azure services are available on 12 month pre-paid subscriptions or as part of an Enterprise Agreement).

Local (temporary) and persistent disk are supported, with VHDs being stored in Storage page blobs. SSDs are available as Premium Storage options. Azure will automatically replicate data to a neighbouring region (Standard Storage only) as well as locally across fault domains (physically isolated infrastructure). Cross region replication of Premium Storage disks is possible through snapshots.

Azure supports virtual machine auto scaling which can scale VMS in response to metrics reported through the Azure diagnostic extension.

Azure supports running docker containers with Container Service. Container Service supports both Docker Swarm and Mesosphere DC/OS orchestration engines and is backed by Virtual Machines running Linux container instances. Azure doesn’t offer a managed Docker registry, however it is possible to host your own on blob storage.

Microsoft has been traditionally strong with it’s PaaS offerings and they are not about to give up their crown just yet. App Service platform provides a fully managed environment for running .NET, Java, PHP and Node.JS applications. App Service includes Web Jobs for running background worker processes. It also comes with support for running APIs (as opposed to front-end web applications) and Logic Apps, Microsoft’s integration and workflow solution. The latest addition to the App Server family is Azure Functions, Azure’s answer to AWS Lambda.

In between App Services and Virtual Machines lives Cloud Services, the original PaaS solution offered on Azure. Cloud Services brings many of the benefits of PaaS while providing additional control over the underlying OS. This is a useful option for solutions that require the installation of third party components.

For batch workloads Azure has Batch allowing organisations to burst compute over hundreds of thousands of cores.

Microsoft is the first of the three providers to offer a fully fledged cloud microservice platform in Service Fabric. Service Fabric allows developers to write highly resilient and scalable solutions and offers full support for life-cycle management, provisioning, deploying, monitoring and upgrading services.

Azure is available in 24 regions, the most of all three providers. There are also specific Azure cloud instances for various special interests, such as the US Government and China.
Google Cloud Platform

Google’s Compute Engine provides a range virtual machine options. A number of pre-defined virtual server instances are available as well as a novel ‘build your own’ option which lets you choose between 1 and 32 ‘vCPU’/cores and up to 6.5GB of RAM per vCPU. Google’s ‘Predictable’ pricing is based on the number of cores and GB of memory. OS support comes with Linux and Windows, either pre-installed or bring your own. Compute Engine also offers a per-minute billing model and offers discounts for prolonged usage. Temporary and permanent HDD and SSD storage options are available with local redundancy built-in by default and comes with the ability to snapshot disks.

Auto scaling is fully supported with integration into Slackdriver, Google’s cloud monitoring and logging solution.

For batch workloads Google has Preemptible Vms, these are cost effective Compute Engine instances that take advantage of excess Compute Engine capacity. Google may terminate instances based on system events and will always stop instances running after 24 hours.

Google Container Engine can be used to run docker containers and is based on Kubernetes. Container Engine comes with a managed master instance, all other nodes are Compute Engine instances. This is reflected in the pricing which has a flat hourly fee (free for clusters with less than 6 nodes) plus the Compute Engine instance costs. Google offer a private container repository with Container Registry.

Google bundles its managed application services under the App Engine product. It offers a complete platform of running managed application written in Java, PHP, Node.js and Ruby. Where AWS and Azure have chosen to split out their services in to different products, App Engine comes with a no-sql store, memcache, search and traffic management (compared later in this series). This approach offers a cohesive set of related services that are easy to understand and consume.

Google offers their services across 5 geographically dispersed regions.
Conclusion

There is very little to choose between the 3 providers when it comes to virtual servers. Amazon has some impressive high end kit, on the face of it this sound like it would make AWS a clear winner. However, if your only option is to choose the biggest box available you will need to make sure you have very deep pockets, and perhaps your money may be better spent re-architecting your apps for horizontal scale.

Azure’s remains very strong in the PaaS space and now has a IaaS that can genuinely compete with AWS. Looking at the full migration journey, from lift and shift to fully cloud engineered solutions, Azure arguably has the best coverage of the three providers. It’s great to see Microsoft coming out with innovative new services such as Service Fabric, however, if your applications are written in Ruby then your options are limited to virtual machines or Docker containers.

Google offers a simple and very capable set of services that are easy to understand. However, with availability in only 5 regions it does not have the coverage of the other players.

Talking of regions, be aware that not all services are offered in every region. This applies to all three providers, so be sure to check if you have strict requirements on where your data resides.

Next up we will be looking at Storage and Content Delivery.




About the author


Jess has over 18 years’ experience helping companies succeed through the smart use of technology. He has spent most of his career working for leading Microsoft partners across the UK and Australia and is now Principal at endjin, working with clients to envision and execute disciplined innovation programmes. You can follow Jess on twitter.

Nasa and Amazon will stream a live conversation in 4K from the ISS on 26 April

Getty Images

For the first time ever, Earth-bound humans will partake of the glory of outer space via a 4K Ultra HD livestream, courtesy of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) and Amazon.

The stream is primarily intended for broadcasters at the NAB Show convention to be held in Las Vegas on 26 April, but regular folks can also tune into the stream here. Nasa will also make the stream available as a recording after the event.

Variety reports that the stream will begin at 10:30 AM PT on 26 April, which would translate to 11:00 PM on 26 April in India.

The stream is actually a demo of Amazon’s Elemental encoding technology as well as the power of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its Content Delivery Network (CDN). Elemental is a next-gen encoding format for compressing high-resolution video content in real-time, and NAB is a broadcaster’s convention, after all.

Nasa is also understandably excited for the technology. The ability to stream in 4K means that Nasa administrators on the ground will be able to better monitor whatever it is they need to in deep space or the ISS.

The stream itself will involve a conversation between astronaut Dr Peggy Whitson on the ISS and AWS Elemental CEO and co-founder Sam Blackman, reports Variety. There will also be a panel discussion with various engineers from Nasa and Amazon as well as people working in the field of AR, VR and broadcasting.

The stream will be available in 4K and HD.

Publish date: April 12, 2017 12:39 pm| Modified date: April 12, 2017 12:41 pm

Google Cloud Next 17 kicks off with Google Cloud going toe to toe with Amazon Web Services

#GOOGLE

By tech2 News Staff /  09 Mar 2017 , 12:50

The Google Cloud Next ’17 has kicked off with a promising start, and a number of new announcements have been made by Google including acquisitions, partnerships, new technological partners and products. More announcements are expected in the course of the three days that the event is going to be run. The measures are intended to solidify Google’s prominence in the market as a cloud services provider, directly taking on major cloud service providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.

SAP Partnership

Google has announced a strategic partnership with SAP, to develop enterprise solutions for customers. The best cloud and machine learning solutions from Google will be integrated into enterprise applications by SAP as a part of the strategic partnership. The in-memory database SAP HANA will be certified on the Google Cloud Platform, new G Suite integrations and Google’s machine learning capabilities.

Kaggle acquisition

Google has acquired Kaggle, a social network for data scientists and machine learning enthusiasts. The Kaggle platform is used to explore the latest breakthroughs in machine learning and data analytics. There are over 800,000 active users on Kaggle, which has emerged as one of the best communities to explore public datasets. Google will be introducing the ability to store and query large datasets. Google announced the Kaggle acquisition through a blog post.

Support for engineers working with Google Cloud

Google has introduced dedicated support from its engineers to the cloud platform, with pricing models. Google has partnered with Pivotal and Rackspace to deliver this cloud support. There is a flat monthly fees per user per month, and Google engineers will be providing the support. The three choices available are development engineering support with a response in four to eight hours, production engineering support with a response within an hour and on-call engineering support that guarantees a response within fifteen minutes.

Cloud Video Intelligence API

There have been a number of new product announcements. The Cloud Video Intelligence API is in beta testing with a select group of early customers. The service breaks down a video into shots, and provides a description of the content and action in each shot, along with a confidence score of how accurate the analysis is. Users can search through videos in much the same was as they search through text.

Cloud Machine Learning Engine

Cloud Machine Learning Engine is a tool to train models for artificial intelligence applications, and deploy them through the cloud. The models are based on the TensorFlow framework, and has been designed to interact with any kind of data at any scale. Cloud Vision API is a tool to analyse the content of images, and has been updated with additional capabilities. The enhanced OCR capabilities of the API can extract text from scans of documents. The Cloud Jobs API now has a Commute Search feature, which allows users to narrow down their job searches according to the amount of time they are willing to invest in daily commutes.

The three day event has been sold out, with 10,000 registered attendees, which is more than five times the number of people who attended Google Cloud Next ’16. Google will be providing over 200 training and informational sessions to attendees, apart from a series on talks by experts on how best to use enterprise cloud solutions and cutting edge technological solutions.

Alison Wagonfeld, VP of Engineering at Google Cloud said “Google’s cloud technology and approach to the market is the product of 16 years inventing, developing, and fine tuning tools for a fully connected enterprise.”

"AWS outages"--AWS is investigating S3 issues, affecting Quora, Slack, Trello (updated)

Above: Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Image Credit: Thomas Cloer/Flickr

Cloud infrastructure provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) today confirmed that it’s looking into issues with its widely used S3 storage service in the major us-east-1 region of data centers in Northern Virginia. Other services are affected as well.

“We are investigating increased error rates for Amazon S3 requests in the US-EAST-1 Region,” AWS said at the top of its status page.

The issues appear to be affecting Adobe’s services, Amazon’s Twitch, Atlassian’s Bitbucket and HipChat, Autodesk Live and Cloud Rendering, Buffer, Business Insider, Carto, Chef, Citrix, Clarifai, Codecademy, Coindesk, Convo, Coursera, Cracked, Docker, Elastic, Expedia, Expensify, FanDuel, FiftyThree, Flipboard, Flippa, Giphy, GitHub, GitLab, Google-owned Fabric, Greenhouse, Heroku, Home Chef, iFixit, IFTTT, Imgur, Ionic, isitdownrightnow.com, Jamf, JSTOR, Kickstarter, Lonely Planet, Mailchimp, Mapbox, Medium, Microsoft’s HockeyApp, the MIT Technology Review, MuckRock, New Relic, News Corp, OrderAhead, PagerDuty, Pantheon, Quora, Razer, Signal, Slack, Sprout Social, Square, StatusPage (which Atlassian recently acquired), Talkdesk, Travis CI, Trello, Twilio, Unbounce, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), The Verge, Vermont Public Radio, VSCO, Wix, Xero, and Zendesk, among other things. Airbnb, Down Detector, Freshdesk, Pinterest, SendGrid, Snapchat’s Bitmoji, and Time Inc. are currently working slowly.

Apple is acknowledging issues with its App Stores, Apple Music, FaceTime, iCloud services, iTunes, Photos, and other services on its system status page, but it’s not clear they’re attributable to today’s S3 difficulties.

Parts of Amazon itself also seems to be facing technical problems at the moment. Ironically, it’s restricting AWS’ ability to show errors.

The dashboard not changing color is related to S3 issue. See the banner at the top of the dashboard for updates.

— Amazon Web Services (@awscloud) February 28, 2017

AWS outages do happen from time to time. In 2015 an outage lasted five hours. And AWS plays an increasingly prominent role in the finances of Amazon; in the fourth quarter it yielded $926 million in operating income and $3.53 billion in revenue for its parent company.

Update at 10:30 a.m. Pacific: AWS has provided slightly more information about the S3 outage. “We’ve identified the issue as high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1, which is also impacting applications and services dependent on S3. We are actively working on remediating the issue,” AWS said on its status page.

Update at 10:51 a.m. Pacific: AWS has another S3 status update. “We’re continuing to work to remediate the availability issues for Amazon S3 in US-EAST-1. AWS services and customer applications depending on S3 will continue to experience high error rates as we are actively working to remediate the errors in Amazon S3,” AWS said on the status page.

Update at 11:40 a.m. Pacific: A bit of good news from Amazon. “We have now repaired the ability to update the service health dashboard. The service updates are below. We continue to experience high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1, which is impacting various AWS services. We are working hard at repairing S3, believe we understand root cause, and are working on implementing what we believe will remediate the issue,” AWS said on the status page.

Update at 11:52 a.m. Pacific: Among the services based out of Northern Virginia that are affected today, according to the status page, are Athena, CloudWatch, EC2, Elastic File System, Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Kinesis Analytics, Redshift, Relational Database Service (RDS), Simple Email Service (SES0, Simple Workflow Service, WorkDocs, WorkMail, CodeBuild, CodeCommit, CodeDeploy, Elastic Beanstalk (EBS), Key Management Service (KMS), Lambda, OpsWorks, Storage Gateway, and WAF (web application firewall). Yikes, that’s a lot.

Update at 11:59 a.m. Pacific: AppStream, CloudWatch, Elastic MapReduce (EMR), Kinesis Firehose, WorkSpaces, CloudFormation, CodePipeline are also dealing with issues now, according to the status page.

Update at 12:06 p.m. Pacific: Some more services are down now. We’ve got API Gateway, CloudSearch, Cognito, the EC2 Container Registry, ElastiCache, the Elasticsearch Service, Glacier cold storage, Lightsail, Mobile Analytics, Pinpoint, Certificate Manager, CloudTrail, Config, Data Pipeline, Mobile Hub, and QuickSight. Wow.

Update at 12:15 p.m. Pacific: Added information on issues affecting Apple.

Update at 12:51 p.m. Pacific: On its status page, Trello just said that “S3 services appear to be slowly coming back up now.”

Update at 12:52 p.m. Pacific: And now we hear from AWS! “We are seeing recovery for S3 object retrievals, listing and deletions. We continue to work on recovery for adding new objects to S3 and expect to start seeing improved error rates within the hour,” AWS said on its status page.

Update at 1:19 p.m. Pacific: Things are looking better now. “S3 object retrieval, listing and deletion are fully recovered now. We are still working to recover normal operations for adding new objects to S3,” AWS said.

Update at 2:35 p.m. Pacific: The S3 problems have been resolved! “As of 1:49 PM PST, we are fully recovered for operations for adding new objects in S3, which was our last operation showing a high error rate. The Amazon S3 service is operating normally,” Amazon said in a 2:08 p.m. update. But several other AWS services are still having problems.

Update at 6:38 p.m. Pacific: Almost all the services affected in today’s outage are back up and running. CloudTrail, Config, and Lambda are still not fixed.

Update at 10:16 p.m. Pacific: The status now indicates that all of today’s issues have been resolved. Back to work, everyone, move along.

Amazon goes all-in on AI and big data at AWS re:Invent 2016

Invent 2016 AWS

On Wednesday, at the first keynote of the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Andy Jassy took the stage to explain a host of new updates to the cloud provider's portfolio of services. And, it seems Amazon is making a big bet on next -generation technology.

Some of the biggest announcements were the first three services of the Amazon AI portfolio. For starters, Amazon Rekognition provides image recognition, categorization, and facial analysis in batch analysis or real time. The facial analysis can detect sentiment, and tell whether or not the subject is wearing glasses, for example.

Amazon Polly is a text-to-speech (TTS) service that is powered by deep learning. It takes a text input and returns an MP3 stream that is altered to sound more like actual conversation. For example, if the text contains "WA" the output might say Washington instead. Jassy also announced that a new service called Amazon Lex, which powers Alexa, is coming as well. Lex provides natural language understanding and automatic speech recognition.


The new AI tools announced by Jassy could make it much easier for enterprise customers to tap into, and leverage, technologies such as machine learning to build their next generation of applications.


In his address, Jassy also noted that Amazon would be launching a new analytics product called Amazon Athena. As a companion to the existing EMR and Redshift, Athena is an interactive query service that allows users to analyze data in S3 using SQL. This significantly lowers the bar for everyday IT to utilize big data analytics to glean insights.

To go along with these new services, Jassy also announced a slew of new compute instances and features as well. Here are the following compute types that were announced:
T2.xlarge - 16 GiB, 2 vCPU
T2.2xlarge - 32 GiB,. 2 vCPU
R4 - 48 GiB, DDR4, L3 cache, 64 vCPUs
I3 - 3.3 million IOPS, 488 GiB, 15.2 TB NVMe SSD, 64 vCPUS
C5 - 72 vCPUs, Intel Skylake, 12 Gbps to EBS, 144 GiB


The C5 instance shows just how much hardcore GPU processing is being done on AWS. However, to give a broader group of users access to GPU power, Jassy announced a new service called Elastic GPUs for EC2, which allows users to attach a GPU to any of the existing compute instances in AWS.


Continuing in the vein of simplifying some of the features available in AWS, Amazon Lightsail was revealed as a way to make virtual private servers (VPS) easier to launch. Users choose from five bundles, name their server, and create it. Additionally, packages start at only $5 a month.

AWS users will also get access to a preview of F1 instances, Amazon's new FPGA instance family. This will allow users to run custom logic on EC2.

Additionally, to touch on IoT deployments, Jassy also announced AWS Greengrass. This service embeds AWS Lambda compute and other AWS services in connected devices, and allows users to manage them from the AWS console.

Last year, AWS launched Snowball, a secure appliance that makes it easier to move data to the cloud. At the 2016 re:invent, Jassy unveiled the general availability of Snowball Edge, which has on-board compute, and more storage than the previous version.
The 3 big takeaways for TechRepublic readers


Amazon announced three new AI products for image recognition, text-to-speech, and the natural language understanding that powers Amazon Alexa.
Amazon also announced Amazon Athena, an analytics products that allows users to query S3 with simple SQL.
The majority of the compute instance lineup in AWS got an update, with new products as well.

Amazon announces three new AI services called Lex, Polly and Rekognition for AWS

AWS

By tech2 News Staff / 01 Dec 2016 , 13:24


Amazon has started to offer artificial intelligence based services on its AWS platform, to give developers more tools to engage with customers. The three new AI tools are called Lex, Polly and Rekognition. Lex is the technology that powers Amazon Alexa, and allows developers to integrate rich conversational experiences in their offerings. Polly is a state of the art text to speech service that has forty seven life like voices in twenty languages. Rekognition is an image processing service, that can identify content in images.

Raju Gulabani, VP, Databases, Analytics, and AI, AWS said “The combination of better algorithms and broad access to massive amounts of data and cost-effective computing power provided by the cloud is making AI a reality for application developers. We are excited to see how customers use Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, and Amazon Rekognition to build a new generation of apps that have human-like intelligence and can see, hear, speak, and interact with people and their environments”

Lex

Lex is the machine learning technologies that powers Amazon Alexa, with the key components being Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU). Lex can be used by developers to quickly make chat and voice bots, that can be integrated into services and applications. Lex is deployed as a fully managed service, requiring little time to set up, manage and scale.

The main concepts used by Amazon Lex. Image: Amazon.

Lex has an itnegrated development environment in a console. Developers can create bots, test them, and deploy them through the interface. There are some sample bots to start with as well. Bots built using Lex can be used on multiple platforms, and Amazon handles the authentication processes for different platforms. Lex can connect with Facebook Messenger as of now, but support for Slack and Twilio is being worked on. The Lex service is charged at the rate of $4 for 1000 speech requests, and $0.75 for 1000 text requests.

The testing interface for bots. Image: Amazon.

Benjamin Stein, Director of Messaging Products, Twilio said “Developers and businesses use Twilio to build apps that can communicate with customers in virtually every corner of the world. Amazon Lex will provide developers with an easy-to-use modular architecture and comprehensive APIs to enable building and deploying conversational bots on mobile platforms. We look forward to seeing what our customers build using Twilio and Amazon Lex.”

Polly

Polly is a cloud based text to speech service that generates human like voice based on a text string. The files can be downloaded as an mp3 for use in applications and services. Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) is supported for advanced functionality, such as mixed language text. Developers can use SSML to indicate to Polly that some words in an English sentence are in French. There is a vast language end region menu, with support for five regional accents for English, including Indian. There are two alternative accents each for French, Portuguese and Spanish.

Polly supports plain text or SSML. Image: Amazon.

The SDK or console can be used to send text to Polly, which then converts it to speech in the cloud and beams it back. The service can be integrated into e-book readers, personal assistants, entertainment apps, public service announcement systems, or e-learning platforms. Polly can handle high volumes of text rapidly as well. Polly can return input over a command line interface as well.

some of the accents and languages available in Polly. Image: Amazon.

Joseph Price, Senior Product Manager, The Washington Post said “We’ve long been interested in providing audio versions of our stories, but have found that existing text-to-speech solutions are not cost-effective for the speech quality they offer. With the arrival of Amazon Polly and its high-quality voices, we look forward to offering readers more rich and versatile ways to experience our content.”

Rekognition

Rekognition is an image analysis artificial intelligence. Rekognition can be used to recognise faces, objects and scenes in an image. The AI delivers a confidence score for each identification, which is a rating of how accurate the identification is likely to be. These confidence scores can be further processed by an app or a service. There are advanced facial analysis functionalities such as face comparison, and face search.

Rekognition gives scores on a picture, confidently identifying the image as that of a “dog” and a “pet”. Image: Amazon.

Some of the capabilities of Rekognition include assessing if the mouth of a person is open or shut, whether or not they are smiling, if they are happy, whether they are wearing sunglasses and identify the presence or lack of facial hair. Applications for Rekognition include security services, smart marketing implementations that track user engagements, or automatic indexing and tagging for vast image libraries.

AWS has advanced features for processing images of faces. Image: Amazon.

Don MacAskill, Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chief Geek, SmugMug said “SmugMug customers want to spend their time making more memories, not manually managing their photo collection. Amazon Rekognition will allow us to automatically identify the content in customers’ photos, unlocking a host of features that will allow them and their visitors to have more time to focus on enjoying life and celebrating their photos.”

The three new AI services are scalable and cost effective, with developers paying for only what they use. Amazon has simplified access to neural networks, data required for training, and expertise in machine learning. The heavy lifting is done by Amazon already, with the artificial intelligences trained for a wide variety of scenarios. Developers can directly start using the AI without building machine learning algorithms, training the AI with models, or commit to infrastructure investments up front.

Long time rivals VMware and AWS recently partnered to offer VMware's SDDC platform within the AWS data center, but questions remain.

Image: iStockphoto/peangdao

By Keith Townsend | October 14, 2016, 5:13 AM PST


VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger and AWS senior vice president Andy Jassy announced a significant partnership between the two companies on Thursday when the pair appeared on stage together to introduce VMware Cloud on AWS. According to VMware's press release, the VMware Cloud on AWS is an expansion of VMware's Cloud Foundation Program. VMware also announced a similar partnership with IBM's Softlayer. The VMware Cloud on AWS solution is now in preview with full availability expected mid 2017. VMware will manage, sell, and support the service directly.
The technology

It's helpful to understand the technology architecture associated with VMware Cloud on AWS and how it differs from existing solutions. Oracle's Ravello Systems offers a solution that runs VMware-based virtualization images on top. Oracle is essentially reselling AWS instances with a proprietary hypervisor that translates the VMware instructions. Ravello Systems' solution comes with a significant performance cost and is positioned for non-production workloads. Ravello Systems also doesn't support full integration with VMware's management interface or software-defined data center (SDDC) concept.


AWS has an existing vCenter plugin that allows for simple migration of VMware workloads to AWS. The AWS solution is production-class use cases. Similar to Ravello Systems, the AWS vCenter plugin is limited in the integration with extensions of the VMware SDDC platform.

Coming from the other side, VMware had an ill-fated attempt to build a large-scale public cloud. VMware's vCloud Air public cloud service leverages the vCloud Director (vCD) orchestration platform. VMware Cloud on AWS is a completely re-engineered cloud offering. VMware and AWS have teamed to run the entire SDDC portfolio on bare metal servers within AWS data centers. VMware Cloud on AWS supports vSphere, NSX, VSAN, and vRealize. Unlike vCloud Air, which required a vCD plugin, a VMware Cloud on AWS data center is managed directly from a customer's existing vCenter Plugin.
No mention of hybrid cloud


I found it curious neither VMware nor AWS called the solution hybrid cloud. Integration of operations between public cloud and traditional on-premises data centers has proven an elusive goal. The partnership highlights the business challenges of each vendor. VMware experienced many stops and starts with gaining traction as a public cloud provider. Likewise, AWS found it difficult to entice enterprises to move VMware-based workloads to EC2.

The theory of this partnership is that customers wanting to use their existing VMware software and operations strategy can leverage VMware Cloud on AWS. Customers seamlessly move workloads from their on-premises data center to vSphere servers running on AWS infrastructure. The use case is a similar value proposition as VMware's vCloud Air public cloud, but with the important distinction that the infrastructure is AWS.
More questions than answers

I walked away from this announcement with more questions than answers. VMware and AWS essentially presented hosted VMware in AWS. Today, the primary advantage over other hosted vSphere implementations is the proximity to AWS solutions. It's as close to co-location as VMware customers get into an AWS data center.


However, it doesn't solve the problem of building a hybrid infrastructure. Missing in the announcement were advanced tools for integration of the VMware Cloud on AWS with other AWS products. While possible for a customer to run NSX in the VMware Cloud on AWS, there isn't integration between AWS VPC and NSX. There's also the inverse challenge. VMware Cloud on AWS doesn't bring a private version of AWS to VMware infrastructure. Customers wanting a serverless computing option that leverages private data center resources still have to look toward solutions such as AzureStack.

I'm expecting more meat on the bone from both VMware and AWS. While an attractive technical solution, both companies have to fill in some blanks on what business challenges the solution solves. I'm looking forward to seeing further integration from products such as VMware Cross-Cloud and AWS Lambda.
What are your thoughts?

Is VMware Cloud on AWS a game-changing announcement? What use cases come to mind? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Downloading Oracle Log Files in AWS RDS

Article by:Doug Walton

Let's get right to it. The core of the file is all built around this aws cli command:

/usr/bin/aws rds download-db-log-file-portion --region $region --db-instance-identifier $instanceName --log-file-name trace/alert_$sid.log > $logfileThat downloads the current alert log for the specified RDS instance. That's all you really need to get started on a script of your own. Fill in the $variables with whatever values apply to your instance.

If you want to get actual alerting on the alert log, this is the script I setup to run every 5 minutes. It determines where it left off in the log using readPos() and writePos(). If it finds a trace file, it also downloads that and emails it to $mailRecipient. Downloading a trace file is the same as downloading the alert log.

Another thing to note are the .ignore and .trigger files, this is how I determine what lines are worth alerting on. I'd recommend alerting on everything at first, and then adding stuff to the ignore file as it comes up. Right now since this is for an RDS instance in AWS most of what we are ignoring we have little/no control over.

I don't recommend copying this directly, but rather using it to give you an idea on

Microsoft follows AWS into France with plan for new Azure data center

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke at a company event in Dublin on Oct. 3, 2016. Credit: Microsoft via IDG News Service


Peter Sayer
IDG News Service
Oct 3, 2016 9:22 AM
French businesses will be able to access Office 365, Dynamics 365 and Azure services from local servers, Nadella says

Microsoft is adding to its European cloud infrastructure, with plans to open new data centers in France next year, CEO Satya Nadella said Monday.

The company has already spent US$3 billion growing its European cloud capabilities. These include data centers in the U.K. hosting Azure and Office 365 services, and in Germany hosting Azure.

The French data centers will host Dynamics 365, Microsoft's new ERP and CRM offering, in addition to Azure and Office 365.

The company has already won over the the U.K.'s Ministry of Defence and German auto parts manufacturer ZF to its cloud services. Ireland's Health Service Executive and the Franco-Japanese car-making partnership Renault-Nissan Alliance are also customers, it said.

Key to winning European customers is the issue of "data sovereignty," according to Microsoft.

Data sovereignty is typically about ensuring data remains under the control of local laws, and in Europe those come at two levels.

Government rules on secrecy typically require that government data remain within national borders -- so data centers in the U.K. are vital if the U.K. government is to remain a customer, for example.

The storage and processing of personal information about European Union citizens faces other restrictions: It must only be done in jurisdictions offering the same level of privacy protection as EU law. While it's possible to export such data to the U.S. using legal mechanisms such as Privacy Shield, many companies are opting to keep things simple and keep the data within the EU.

The UK's recent "Brexit" referendum vote to leave the EU threatens to halve Microsoft's EU data center capacity, though, by putting UK servers outside the boundary if and when the exit happens. Adding more locations inside the EU will give Microsoft diversity.

"Trust and scale are some of the most important elements of our design plan for Microsoft cloud," CEO Satya Nadella said at a Microsoft event in Dublin on Monday.

Microsoft is not the only cloud company thinking of such things: Amazon.com last week announced that it will add a French location to its Amazon Web Services offering next year to increase geographic diversity. The company already has two data centers in the EU, in Ireland and Germany, and, in anticipation of Brexit, is building one in the U.K.

Mindful of recent attempts by U.S. authorities to subpoena email messages stored on its servers in Ireland, Microsoft has taken a hands-off approach to customer data in Germany, placing it under the control of a data trustee, T-Systems International, owned by German telco Deutsche Telekom.

Why Oracle needs to follow Microsoft's lead in its cloud strategy

Microsoft didn't try to beat AWS at its own game, and neither should Oracle. Rather, the company should focus on legacy workloads to remain competitive.

By Matt Asay | September 22, 2016, 6:33 AM PST

Oracle talked a big cloud game at the 2016 Oracle OpenWorld, but it's arguably telling the wrong story. Oracle insists it will compete vigorously on price and also on innovation, claiming its complete cloud stack ownership gives it a competitive advantage against AWS. Neither, however, is true, and neither speaks to Oracle's most compelling strength in the cloud: Oracle's legacy enterprise business.

Though CIOs seem ready to pack up and leave their