AWS, Oracle Cloud, APAC, Canada, outages
It was a busy week on the cloud side of the game as all the hyperscale players pushed aggressively in the market.
AWS had another strong quarter and continues to innovate on the product side. But after a long battle, it ended up not winning the Pentagon JEDI cloud contract, which Microsoft ended up getting in a bit of an upset. Oracle and IBM had tried to get in on this and Oracle even filed suit but ultimately to no avail. It was not a finalist.
Oracle is moving to get into the mix, but before it can do that it must have the requisite infrastructure footprint on a global basis. It is working hard on that as we speak and recently opened up FedRAMP-compliant regions. Oracle continues to be motivated by a desire to move its legacy base to cloud. And it is in a good position to do that. But it is not inevitable and should not be taken for granted. AWS is going after this legacy base and proved it can be done as it completed its multi-year move from Oracle databases to its own proprietary technology on the AWS cloud.
Meanwhile, in APAC there continues to be cloud adoption. Alibaba won a customer in Indonesia and Huawei is starting to build an ecosystem of service provider partners around its cloud infrastructure service.
And in Canada, cloud continues to see uptake. IBM Cloud is expanding its footprint in Canada and AWS picked up more customers.
Not all the developments were rosy. Both AWS and Google had outages recently and the AWS service interruption was actually caused by a DDoS attack on a particular feature.
It was relatively quiet on the strategic front, though we saw one deal of note on the MSP side, with InterVision picking up Fotis, adding professional services and integration capabilities. On the data centre side, ServerFarm recently acquired a portfolio of data centres from 5NINES. And later into the week, after we wrote this, Digital Realty confirmed that it will merge with Interxion in a deal worth $8b. We will have more details and analysis.
Finally, with earnings season underway, there were some interesting comments coming out of the infrastructure world with respect to edge compute. There have been a few wireless tower operators (American Tower, SBA Communications) buying data centre assets. But another operator – Crown Castle – said on its earnings call that it would not get into the data centre game. We have some details.
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