AWS CEO Andy Jassy speaks at re:Invent 2018 (AWS Photo)
Welcome to Mostly Cloudy, a semi-weekly roundup of all the important cloud tech news you need to know! Today’s episode will look forward to next week, when Amazon Web Services will host its annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas for more than 50,000 people directing the future of cloud computing.
Next Week in Cloud: Place your bets
Las Vegas is a city of questionable merit, a place where you can have the time of your life and ruin your life in the same evening. Nevertheless, it remains the city of choice for far too many enterprise tech conferences, and more than 50,000 cloud tech nerds will dutifully file past the taxi lines and blackjack tables to attend Amazon Web Services’ re:Invent conference next week, which starts on Monday at the Venetian Hotel in Sin City.
Given how AWS dominates cloud computing, blessed by a first-mover advantage and current market share totals that are greater than those of its trailing two rivals combined, re:Invent is the most significant event on the enterprise tech calendar. It’s the event that sets the agenda for the coming year, and typically plays host to dozens of new service introductions from AWS across four days in the desert.
The re:Invent event has a predictable cadence at this point. AWS vice president of global infrastructure Peter DeSantis will kick off the formal part of the conference Monday evening, an opening keynote that last year introduced two of the most important things AWS announced at re:Invent 2018: its Arm-based Graviton chip and its Firecracker open-source serverless platform technology.
Tuesday morning, AWS CEO Andy Jassy will deliver a marathon three-hour keynote that, at least in his defense, usually ends on time, compared to other executive keynotes on the circuit. Doug Yeum, the newly installed head of AWS’s global partner division, will deliver a Wednesday morning keynote while Amazon CTO Werner Vogels closes down the show on Thursday with what is typically the nerdiest and most forward-looking speech of the week.
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels speaks at re:Invent 2018 (AWS Photo)
The grapevine has been quiet this year leading up to re:Invent, suggesting that either AWS is enforcing its leak policy or there’s nothing super interesting on tap. AWS did announce several new updates this week, which (as always) appear to have been updates that were cut from various keynote addresses for the sake of time, but none of them appeared to be anything that will move the needle for AWS customers or competitors.
Still, here’s a few predictions for what we can expect to hear at this year’s re:Invent.
AWS Outposts: AWS has been circumspect about one of the other big announcements from re:Invent 2018, the extension of its multiyear partnership with VMware to include rack-mounted hardware supplied and sold by AWS that would allow hybrid cloud customers to more easily access AWS cloud services. The service remains in preview, and there remain a lot of questions about the two specific configurations that will be offered at launch. It’s hard to imagine getting through the week without an update on the most visible part of its modern hybrid cloud strategy.
AWS Lambda: AWS first introduced the concept of cloud-based serverless computing to re:Invent attendees five years ago, long before any of its rivals were thinking about serverless. Serverless computing allows developers to build applications without having to know anything about the hardware that runs those applications, which is the kind of thing developers like. But given the industry-wide focus on containers and Kubernetes over the last several years, serverless appears to have been put on the back burner at re:Invent. I doubt that will last much longer.
Open source software: AWS has been working very hard to shed its reputation as a leech on open-source software development communities, with varying degrees of success. For the first time, the company has devoted a track to open-source development this week, and key executives are likely to emphasize why they think AWS isn’t taking more from open source than it is giving back.
New big household-name customers: No enterprise tech event would be complete without sharing a portion of the spotlight with customers, especially ones that AWS believes will convince prospective customers that it is the right bet. Whether they are “all-in” on AWS or simply chose it as its “preferred cloud provider,” re:Invent is a natural opportunity to demonstrate how cloud holdouts are taking the plunge.
I have a few projects of my own on tap for the week:
Is anybody actually using Graviton, the custom Arm server processor introduced last year?
How many AWS customers are using other cloud providers to some extent? You might not be allowed to exhibit your company at re:Invent using the term “multicloud,” but people are not shy about taking about multicloud at the many, many events serving free booze on the sidelines of the conference.
Will Seattle cover a -2.5 spread at home against the Vikings Monday night? I feel like we have to bet on Cloud City here, but we’ll see if the line changes.
Mostly Cloudy will be publishing morning newsletters for subscribers on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of re:Invent summing up everything that happened the day before. I’ll also be publishing interviews, observations, and analysis of re:Invent for all, making this newsletter the most exhaustive source of coverage for the most important event of the year on the cloud calendar.
Tell your friends.
(Disclosure: AWS paid for my accommodations in Las Vegas. They are not super luxurious.)
And Now, A Word…
The first of several interviews from KubeCon last week went up on Mostly Cloudy this morning: IBM has abandoned its IBM Cloud Private Kubernetes solution in favor of Red Hat’s OpenShift, which is a necessary but telling move about which company is going to drive the cloud-native train for the combined organization over the next few years. Stay tuned for more.
Around the Cloud
HPE’s stock falls as revenue comes up short (CNBC)
Revenue fell nine percent at HPE during its fiscal fourth-quarter, and that was even more than analysts had forecast, which is not good. Traditional IT vendors are getting hammered by the move to the cloud; AWS revenue growth of 39 percent last quarter was considered mildly disappointing.
Dell earnings top expectations, but sales come up a little shy (Marketwatch)
Exhibit B: HP and Dell dominated enterprise tech for well over a decade. While Dell still rakes in a lot of revenue, growth was essentially flat during its last quarter and revenue from Dell’s data-center business fell 6.1 percent.
VMware Q3 solid as it aims to integrate Carbon Black, Pivotal (ZDNet)
VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger (L) and Joe Beda, VMware principal engineer and one of the co-creators of Kubernetes, talk about something at VMware Europe 2019. (VMware Photo)
Arguably the brightest spot in the Dell Technologies conglomerate, VMware revenue and earnings growth came in as expected as the company digests a couple of huge acquisitions. VMware is almost certain to make an appearance at AWS re:Invent next week as the latest episode of the wide-ranging partnership the virtualization pioneer signed with the cloud pioneer several years ago.
Cloud Computing Gear Spending To Rise, But Who Will Grab Those Gains? (Investor’s Business Daily)
This is part of the problem for established data-center hardware companies like HPE and Dell: spending on server hardware is surging, but the cloud vendors buy their gear directly from system integrators and chip providers. IDC is predicting that public cloud providers will spend $45.3 billion on gear in 2020, an 8 percent increase over 2019, a year in which several cloud providers eased their spending after snapping up new Intel chips in 2018.
Microsoft is building a new team of technical trainers to grow its Azure cloud business and compete with Amazon Web Services (Business Insider)
As cloud spending growth shifts to companies with outdated skills, cloud providers are keen on helping them move their workloads onto cloud services as fast and seamlessly as possible. This new initiative from Microsoft seems equally focused on helping companies understand how they can use low-code/no-code technologies as part of their application strategies, which allows people without formal computer science training to build the business applications they need.
The Pentagon's AI Center Needs a Cloud Integrator (NextGov)
As we await the outcome of AWS’s challenge to the JEDI contract award process, turns out that the federal government hasn’t stopped investigating ways to upgrade its tech prowess. The Defense Information Systems Agency needs to find vendors who can integrate its AI tools across a hybrid cloud deployment, but until they figure out how gets to run the public cloud portion of that strategy, the Pentagon is in a bit of a holding pattern.
The pros and cons of cloud disaster recovery (TechTarget)
One of the easiest ways to get cloud holdouts interested in cloud computing is to promise cloud-based disaster recovery: you can run your own apps on your own hardware, but if anything goes wrong, your cloud buddy has your back. This is a good overview of the difference between backup and disaster recovery, and exposes one truism of the cloud: moving data out of cloud providers can be a lot more trouble than customers expect.
How to recognize AI snake oil (Arvind Narayanan)
I’d like to make this required reading for everyone involved in tech media, but I have yet to be granted those powers. In the interim, anyone looking at startups promising huge differentiated businesses that disrupt the status quo simply by adding “AI” should read this slide deck very carefully.
Oil is the New Data (Zero Cool)
As cloud computing becomes The IT Strategy for the world’s big businesses, it’s inevitable that cloud computing engineers will find themselves working in some of the less savory portions of the world economy. Personally, I don’t understand how the world can transition from dirty fuels to clean fuels in one fell swoop, but this is a great overview of what it’s actually like to work with the energy industry, and how energy industry concerns play outsized roles in the development of smaller countries around the world.
Amazon brings Alexa to AWS IoT Core devices (VentureBeat)
This was one of the more notable announcements that AWS made in the run-up to re:Invent, highlighting part of its strategy around edge computing. Microsoft has made edge computing a huge part of its cloud computing strategy, and AWS intends to build out its own edge strategy by using popular services like Alexa in devices with constrained computing requirements, such as light switches.
AT&T, Microsoft ramp up collaboration on edge, cloud (Fierce Wireless)
Speaking of edge computing and Microsoft, the company announced some of the first results of its partnership with mobile carrier AT&T, which operates one of the country’s largest edge computing networks. There’s going to be some sort of balance between existing edge network operators and centralized cloud computing providers like Microsoft, and while nobody knows exactly what that will look like at the moment, trials are underway.
Palo Alto Networks acquires Aporeto for cloud security (ZDNet)
Traditional security vendors like Palo Alto Networks continue to reinvent themselves for the cloud era by bringing outside talent into their organizations. Terms of the deal were undisclosed, but Aporeto should fit nicely alongside Palo Alto Networks’ most prominent acquisition of the last quarter, container security startup Twistlock.
Dear Search Guard users #2, including Amazon Elasticsearch Service and Open Distro, and others (Elastic)
It’s a little unclear how serious a threat this is from Elastic, the open-source database company that has butted heads with AWS in the past. But it comes off as a threat that anyone playing alongside the Elastic open-source project — including AWS itself, with its forked version of the project — might be getting some nasty letters from nasty lawyers as a holiday-season present.