Year: 2015

Everyone wants to participate to the OpenStack Foundation, this time is Google which revealed to have signed as Corporate Sponsor. Google is going to focus on integrating containers management technologies (aka Kubernetes) providing engineering resources to the OpenStack project.

Google is not new to the community having collaborated lately to help integrating Kubernetes (the aforementioned Google’s open source container cluster manager) into OpenStack Magnum. The OpenStack community also developed an integration between Kubernetes and the OpenStack App Catalog Murano.

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Last week, Red Hat held its premiere event in Boston, Massachusetts from June 23 to 26, the Red Hat Summit,  where several announcements have been made.

The summit offered over 200 technical sessions and labs and has seen on stage executives from Red Hat (obviously), Cisco, SAP, Intel, Dell, Samsung and many other companies part of Red Hat’s ecosystem.

A special focus has been given to cloud computing, Docker container technology, mobile and storage technologies, everything empowered by open-source and its renovated coolishness.

Red Hat leveraged the event to make several announcements and unveil new products like Atomic Enterprise Platform, OpenShift Enterprise 3 and Red Hat Mobile Application Platform.

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IBM kept its word and as announced few months ago when it has opened its datacenter in Australia, now it has officially opened its first cloud data center in Italy, more specifically in Cornaredo, a small town close to Milan. The data center is joining existing SoftLayer EMEA cloud centers located in London, Paris, Frankfurt and Amsterdam and it is going to provide the Italian cloud market with a local IBM Cloud presence.

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Rancher Labs is a startup providing management on top of the Docker containers, today the company has announced that it has raised $10 million in a series A funding round.

The round was led by Mayfield and Nexus Venture Partners.

This funding round comes only a couple of months after Docker announced its series D fundings, the company stated that the money will be used to further develop its products and expand the company’s engineering and development teams.

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Almost at the same time when Cisco announced the acquisition of Piston Cloud Computing, another big name announced to have acquired another OpenStack-powered company: Blue Box.

Seattle based Blue Box is a privately-held company founded 2003, specialized in Private Cloud as a Service (PCaaS) offering its Blue Box Cloud as a remote-managed private cloud solution is managed on dedicated hardware, powered by OpenStack.

Big Blue, officially, acquired Blue Box to expand and strengthen its cloud computing services but ironically this makes harder to figure out IBM’s overall strategy on OpenStack.

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Cisco announced to be intentioned to acquire Piston Cloud Computing, a start-up founded by former NASA and Rackspace leaders, gold member of the OpenStack Foundation since 2012.

Both Cisco and Piston gave the news on June 3, Cisco announced the deal in a  blog post by Hilton Romanski, Senior Vice President head of Business Development, which explains the background of this acquisition in a plan to build Intercloud, a project to connect globally networks of secure clouds.

According to the post Piston will bring new expertise to the project from product, delivery and operational standpoints.

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There has been a lot of talk about OpenStack lately, last week Vancouver hosted the OpenStack Summit bringing us quite a few announcements about the open source cloud computing project. Among the highlights of the five days conference for developers, users, and administrators of OpenStack Cloud Software we have the Board of Directors of the foundation which approved Parallels, the hosting and cloud services company mostly known for its desktop virtualization software, as Gold Member.

Red Hat announcement of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform (RHELOSP) 7, based on OpenStack Kilo alongside CloudForms 3.2 which allows users to put a deeper level of policy enforcement, automation, monitoring, etc on top of OpenStack deployments.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZdEwQ-76P4[/youtube]

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EMC has acquired Virtustream, a Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider originally funded among the others from SAP for 1.2 billion US dollars. Virtustream also provides a Cloud Management Platform (CMP) called xStream which VirtuStream uses to manage their own cloud in North America and Western Europe.

EMC plans to make the Virtustream offerings available into its Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Solution, which is an on-premise cloud offering running Microsoft, VMware or OpenStack which is using pre-configured bundles built on Vblock and VSPEX infrastructures, providing connections to VMware vCloud Air,AWS and partners.

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Besides releasing their annual Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, research and consulting firm Gartner also made some predicitons about the growth of Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in 2015.

Gartner states that worldwide spending on Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service will grow to 32.8 Percent in 2015 reaching almost 16.5 billion US dollar. Analyst Lydia Leong states that the IaaS solution ecosystem is rapidly consolidating around a small numer of maket leaders.

“The sky is not falling — customers are getting great value out of cloud IaaS — but the competitive landscape is shifting,” Ms. Leong said. “Few providers have the financial resources to invest in being broadly competitive in the cloud IaaS market.”

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Gartner this week updated its Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for the year 2015. The Magic Qudrant for 2014 was released in May last year (covered by cloudcomputing.info) and the Magic Quadrant for 2013, which was released in August 2013 (covered by cloudcomputing.info). The Magic Quadrant aims to provide a qualitative analysis into a market and its direction, maturity and participants. The report details for each company in the Quadrant its strengths and cautions.

This years Quadrant, as analyzed by Lydia Leong, Douglas Toombs, Bob Gill has the following summary:

The market for cloud IaaS is in a state of upheaval, as many service providers are shifting their strategies after failing to gain enough market traction. Customers must exercise caution when choosing providers.

This Magic Quadrant covers all the common use cases for cloud IaaS, including development and testing, production environments (including those supporting mission-critical workloads) for both internal and customer-facing applications, batch computing (including high-performance computing [HPC]) and disaster recovery. It encompasses both single-application workloads and “virtual data centers” (VDCs) hosting many diverse workloads. It includes suitability for a wide range of application design patterns, including both “cloud-native” application architectures and enterprise application architectures.

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