Digital Ocean, Rackspace, legacy versus traditional, subscale versus hyperscale, managed public cloud, JVs
It was a busy week as separation in the sector continues to play itself out. The lines between the subscale and hyperscale worlds have become more apparent and the same is happening between traditional and legacy services. A number of developments in the past week bear this out.
Digital Ocean confirmed plans for an increase in prices amid rising costs, investment in infrastructure and products, and inflation, while hyperscale cloud platforms continue to find ways to maintain pricing and even push it down. The ability to drive prices down, through massive scale, is one of the key differences between subscale and hyperscale.
Meanwhile, traditional and legacy services continue to gradually recede as next-generation moves in the opposite direction. There is positive growth on both sides, but it is clear which is driving the market’s future. Rackspace has started to evaluate big picture strategic options that could see the company split along these lines, while the same dynamic is happening in the CDN space. CDN continues to see declining growth rates as security and cloud computing drive growth at the edge. The transition is on and Akamai shared interesting data points coming out of its recents earnings report and Analyst Day. The acquisition of cloud provider Linode was front and centre in this discussion.
Another company moving in the same direction, perhaps at a more aggressive pace, is Cloudflare.We take a closer look at the details coming out of both their earnings reports.
Managed public cloud is at the centre of the legacy to next-generation transition and there were more development in this important segment. Logicworks moved a customer from traditional to AWS, while Claranet continues to push in this direction through M&A and is now focusing in on consolidating cloud consulting and management expertise in Spain, following multiple transactions in Portugal.
Hyperscale is always on the move and in the past week, Alibaba Cloud confirmed an expansion in Frankfurt, Germany and brought online a new region in Thailand. Southeast Asia continues to see significant momentum as hyperscale spread across the region. Elsewhere in the APAC region, AirTrunk is building further in the Tokyo market, SpaceDC formed a partnership in China and Cyxtera partnered with Sify Technologies in multiple India markets.
In other hyperscale developments, Evoque continues to reveal more about its market ambitions and its latest move saw it partner with Archer Data Centres to build a new data centre campus in Nashville, TN. This market could have hyperscale overflow opportunities.
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