Database shift: Start with open source but finish with AWS The cloud was supposed to kill open source. Instead, savvy cloud operators appear to be using open source as an on-ramp to proprietary services, giving them reason to increase investments in complementary open source projects. Google is the obvious example, spinning out TensorFlow and Kubernetes […]

Oracle’s and IBM’s IaaS cloud strategy: Talk big, invest little The cloud may rapidly be moving into serverless computing, but winning the cloud competition requires lots (and lots) of servers. Indeed, if you want to see who is winning biggest in IaaS, you simply need to follow the money to Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud […]

Making Kubernetes work for the average engineer—via PaaS Too consumed with your OpenStack deployment to put a Kubernetes cluster on the blockchain? Not to worry: Most people are still trying to figure out Kubernetes. Despite being the hottest thing since, well, Docker, Kubernetes remains a dark art for most mainstream enterprises. Birthed by the engineering […]

The era of the cloud database has finally begun Folks, it’s happening. Although enterprises have spent the last few years shifting on-premises workloads to the public cloud, databases have been a sticking point. Sure, Amazon Web Services can point to 64,000 database migrations over the last two years, but that still leaves millions more stuck […]

How AWS will own you through serverless computing If you could spend $1 to make $10, you’d do it, right? By the same token, if you could spend $9 billion to make $90 billion, you’d do that, too, right? With hundreds of billions at stake in cloud computing, and winner-takes-most economics in play, Amazon Web […]

Why Microsoft’s Cosmos DB may displace AWS’s cloud databases You might have gone into an alcohol-induced hibernation over the holidays, but cloud databases did not. More specifically, the cumbersomely named Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB did not, rocketing past AWS Redshift, as Begin founder Brian Leroux first noticed. While everything was “as you were” for AWS […]

Google Cloud Platform’s secret sauce: Its time is now 2017 was a good year for Google Cloud Platform. But 2018 promises to be even better. Although Google still sits well behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in cloud revenue, with just 2.3 percent market share against AWS’s 44.1 percent and Azure’s 7.1 percent, according […]

Open source innovation is now all about vendor on-ramps In the enterprise world, open source has long been a bit tentative. Starting in the early 2000s, various vendors started contributing bits and pieces of code, careful not to give away anything too valuable, all while hoping for positive marketing effect. It was, as Stephen Walli […]

Paper tiger? Alibaba Cloud faces a steep challenge outside China Public cloud attention has been so focused on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure for so long that it has been hard for would-be contenders to break into the “two-horse cloud race” narrative. Google Cloud Platform has been a distant third in terms of revenue, […]

Cloud lockin is here to stay, so learn to love it With all the gleeful finger-pointing over which cloud provider is the least (or most) generous with open source code, it’s worth remembering that all cloud providers essentially fail when it comes to open source. Why? Because the very nature of their platforms means that […]