Hyperscale, Europe, DevOps, interconnection, managed third party cloud
It was a busy week that featured a number of interesting developments coming out of Europe.
Hyperscale cloud continues to go global and investors are jumping in on the opportunity. Europe is emerging as the next frontier and not only in the FLAP markets. A second tier of hyperscale market is moving to the forefront and we look at what Equinix has been doing in markets like Milan, Madrid and Barcelona. New platforms want in on all this opportunity and KKR backed a new entrant: Global Technical Realty, with the former founder of Zenium as its CEO. Elsewhere, among independent operators, Germany’s Datacenter One opened a new facility in Dusseldorf.
Equinix has been busy building its footprint on a global basis and last week acquired Bell Canada’s data centre portfolio. We have a quick data point about absorption that was recently disclosed.
Speaking of hyperscale, the clouds in Asia continue to grow and expand. Alibaba Cloud is targeting the enterprise market and now supports VMware. On the heels of announcing major expansion initiatives, it also revealed plans to expand hiring over the next year.
The hyperscale value chain continues to expand. 2nd Watch is adding support for more clouds in its portfolio, while more managed third party cloud shops raise capital. Meanwhile, Rackspace continues its pivot to managing the public cloud and completed are-branding exercise to align with this new direction.
Back to the data centre side, CoreSite has been busy expanding its facilities, while QTS confirmed some new customers.
We also continue to see cloud and hosting services evolve. Aptum partnered for a new managed DevOps service and Linode put its Kubernetes Engine into GA.
Finally, there were more interconnection nodes coming online. Megaport expanded within Evoque’s footprint and Cologix deployed a Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute node in Minneapolis.
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