AWS, egress fees, managed public cloud, hyperscale, Europe, APAC, Western Canada
It was a busy week coming out of the Thanksgiving weekend in the US, with hyperscale developments in Europe and APAC, and more progress for managed public cloud services as they transition to a more consultative and DevOps-based approach to managed services.
Leading up to the re:Invent show in Las Vegas, AWS decided to cut its egress fees, which has become the target of disruption attempts of late. The timing was not coincidental. On the managed public cloud side, it was a busy week at re:Invent, but an interesting recent service launch came from Cloudreach. It has a new SMART Management offering that attempts to combine DevOps and managed services in a single offering that has more flexibility than traditional support models.
On the hyperscale infrastructure side, there was plenty of activity coming out of Europe and Asia. Microsoft confirmed plans to launch in Belgium and EdgeConneX is starting a greenfield build in Brussels. Meanwhile, another European market Microsoft intends to push into is Vienna, Austria, and NTT GDC is expanding in this market. Elsewhere, CyrusOne acquired more land in Frankfurt for future expansions, while Google secured renewable energy as it looks to build out a bigger cloud infrastructure footprint in Germany. Other developments included Rostelecom in Moscow and Dataplex and Chirisa in Ireland.
In APAC, there was plenty of activity. Bridge Data Centres expanded in Malaysia to the emerging nearshore hub in Johor Bahru, while AirTrunk brought online initial phases in Tokyo, Japan and Digital Realty went live in Hong Kong.
Finally, Western Canada is starting to develop as hyperscale picks up momentum in Canada. AWS is set to enter Calgary and Vancouver is expected to emerge as both an edge location and a key connectivity hub carrying traffic across Canada and through to (and from) APAC. Carrier hotel capacity is limited in Vancouver and a new entrant – Spencer Building Carrier Hotel – confirmed plans to build a new downtown connectivity hub very close to the main carrier hotel in Harbour Centre at 555 West Hastings Street.
or