Hyperscale, edge, managed third party cloud, APAC
It was a busy week as the sector began to pick up the pace.
Hyperscale cloud continues to be the big driver, but there is an accelerating shift towards the edge as providers of all shapes and sizes try to pivot and find new pockets of value. Just this past week, one of those provider forging ahead – New York-based Packet – raised a $25m Series B round and expanded its management team. A concerted edge footprint expansion is next. The edge is, however, going to come in smaller increments and EdgeMicro shared some data points on that recently.
The cloud is an infrastructure service and it can go down. The Azure cloud recently suffered a significant outage and the incident spoke to how important the underlying architecture is when it comes to building in the requisite redundancy to keep things going. The outage also was an interesting test case for the new kind of customer-MSP relationships that are arising from the managed third party cloud model. In short, things are different, and they are potentially better.
Cloud continues to drive the managed third party cloud market and it is bringing together varied combinations of service providers, integrators and MSPs. InterVision is one of them and they just acquired Infiniti Consulting Group to bolster its public cloud practice. Meanwhile, Spotinst raised $35m in a Series B.
There was also activity in APAC. Tencent confirmed expansion plans for its Chongqing data centre, Alibaba is set to open a UK-based data centre and in Australia, NEXTDC continues to roll along.
The sector continues to push toward a new world where edge, new compute infrastructure models like containers and DevOps-based tools are increasingly part of the norm. Organizations are already pivoting to that world and in some cases, overhauling existing systems. We have some details on one well known name – eBay – that is doing this.
It is somewhat paradoxical, but the sector seems to push and pull between the new and the old. There is still runway left for the old world to shift to the new. The pace of change has always been somewhat slow and deliberate. But things are moving faster. And the transition to new models and technologies is already well underway. The first wave is not yet over, but the second wave is already in motion.
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