M&A, CDN, earnings, edge, Russia, public cloud, remote management, HPC
A busy week saw more M&A activity, results from earnings season and developments that point to the emerging impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Internet infrastructure services.
Limelight Networks acquired CDN and security provider Edgecast in a deal that reflects the continued shift from legacy to next-generation services. This was also one of the drivers behind the recent Akamai acquisition of Linode.
On the earnings side, we took a closer took at the results coming from Alibaba Cloud and GoDaddy. Vendors also provide clues to the state of the infrastructure services market and NetApp’s results spoke volumes.
The move out to edge for compute infrastructure is changing the landscape and Akamai jumped in aggressively. That logic also drove the American Tower acquisition of CoreSite and we saw more gradual steps to edge computing in smaller increments with PhoenixNAP spinning up a bare metal cloud node at an American Tower edge site. Meanwhile, Dartpoints is building high-density infrastructure, enabled by liquid cooling, for edge locations.
The war in Ukraine continues to impact the Russian economy and Internet infrastructure has inevitably been impacted. We look at the AWS (and other major clouds and tech companies) decision to stop serving Russia-based customers and assess the impact, while tracking a number of builds that were planned and initiated well before the conflict. The outlook going forward is hazy to say the least.
Finally, AWS had a number of interesting cloud wins in the sports world, DoIT partnered with AMD, while data centre providers continue to add automated and remote management capabilities and enrich the customer portal experience.
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