Amazon EC2 now runs Windows Server 2016

A few days ago Amazon Web Services announced the support for Windows Server 2016 in its IaaS offering Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Windows Server 2016, released in GA last week, is the latest edition of Microsoft’s server operating system, marketed as a cloud-ready operating system, comes with a set of  new features among which the long awaited support for Docker and Windows containers.

Windows Server 2016 is now available in all AWS regions, in four different options:

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Gartner releases its Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service for 2016

Last week Gartner updated its Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for the year 2016. The Magic Quadrant for the year 2015 was released in May last year just like in 2014 (covered by cloudcomputing.info) while the Magic Quadrant for 2013 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.

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RightScale announces Docker Container Management

RightScale is a Santa Barbara, CA based company, provider of a Software as a Service (SaaS) management solution that so far only supported standard Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud infrastructures such Amazon EC2, Microsoft AWS, Google Compute Engine and various distributions of OpenStack, public and on-premises.

Today the company announced the support for Docker based containers through the installation of its RightLink agent on Docker hosts.

RightScale native capabilities easily allow to provision and scale Docker hosts, as well as container management tools such Kubernetes, Docker Swarm or Rancher, simply providing appropriate templates for these kind of services.

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Release: OpenStack Mitaka

Today OpenStack Foundation has released the 13th version of its IaaS platform for public, private and hybrid clouds. This new releases has been contributed by 2,336 developers, operators and users in its community representing 293 organizations.

Like the previous two releases, Mitaka tries to convince its potential audience about its maturity as an open source project, highly questioned by a number of analysts and stakeholders in the market.

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Cisco acquires CliQr

Today Cisco announced the intent to acquire CliQr Technologies Inc., a privately held company based in San Jose, CA.

CliQr is one of the most promising startups in the Cloud Service Brokers (CSB) space, it’s homonymous solution supports many different technologies across public and private clouds including Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine, various OpenStack distribution, VMware vSphere, etc.

The company, founded in 2010, went through 3 funding rounds for a total of nearly $40M while Cisco will pay $260M to own it, does it worth the money?

Looking at the shopping behaviour of other big companies, we can intercept a strong interest in the CSBs space. Think about Gravitant acquisition made by IBM in November 2015 for example, we can say that Cisco did a good deal this time.

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Release: VMware vCloud Suite 7 and vRealize Suite 7

Yesterday VMware announced version 7 of both its vCloud and vRealize suites, confirming its efforts to be relevant in the CMPs (Cloud Management Platforms) space.
vRealize Suite 7 is made of a mix and match of new products and solutions already available on the market: vRealize Automation 7, vRealize Operations 6.2, vRealize Business for Cloud 7 and vRealize Log Insight 3.3.
vCloud Suite 7, now aligned with its management counterpart, is the bundle with vSphere Enterprise Plus (for vCloud Suite).

The big news coming with these releases is the introduction of a brand new Portable Licensing Unit (PLU) which can be used to license on premises vSphere CPUs or Operating System Instances (OSIs) across other hypervisors and supported public cloud providers.

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Platform9 adds Multi-Region & Multi-Hypervisor management into Managed OpenStack

Platform9 solutions leverages a mix of SaaS and on premises Virtual Appliance to provide into supported environments capabilities typical of Cloud Management Platforms (CMPs) such self-service provisioning, monitoring, configuration management, etc.
Yesterday the company announced two new capabilities into its Platform9 Managed OpenStack solution:

  • Geographically distributed infrastructure that allows to aggregate multiple regions in the same management interface
  • Multiple vCenters/hypervisors which enhances hybrid cloud capabilities allowing to manage multiple vCenter servers and KVM hypervisors within a single “private cloud platform”

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Microsoft releases Azure Stack TP1

During Ignite 2015, back in September, Microsoft announced Microsoft Azure Stack as the building block for its hybrid cloud strategy.

What Microsoft is saying with this move is that, despite public cloud adoption being huge with Azure in the second place just behind Amazon AWS, many customers still want to run part of their workloads on-premises but ask for consistence with the positive experience they have with public services. What is also true is that having the entire stack in house will help to optimise existing workloads which, at that point, will become easy to migrate to public services. Two birds with one stone.

Compared with the Azure Pack already available for System Center, Azure Stack offers improvements in many different dimensions: from the front end, with a single Browser Experience consistent with Azure, to Azure Resource Manager, Authorization Service, Subscription Management Service, etc.

That makes it compelling enough to convince existing Azure Pack’s user to adopt this new solution.

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Pivotal acquires Slice of Lime

The Pivotal Initiative is the organization, born in December 2012 from the merge of EMC and VMware cloud application and big data offerings and offering primarily Pivotal CF (Cloud Foundry), its commercially supported hybrid Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) based on Cloud Foundry, which it first launched in November 2013.

This week the company announced that Slice of Lime, a UX design firm based in Colorado, will join Pivotal within its development and consultancy division.

Slice of Lime focuses on simple, developers-friendly, co-designed UIs and although the details of this agreement haven’t been disclosed yet, this move confirms the growing trend to invest into ease of use to increase users adoption and productivity shared among many IT companies.

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