CompareCloud.in - a Cloud Roundup (May 2018)

CompareCloud.in is one of my fun project which i started in the end of 2016 based on the interest i found from viewers for the first version which i published in mid 2015 in the form of a lengthy presentation. The idea of this project is to do simple and unbiased comparison of managed cloud services across all the major cloud providers including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM, Oracle & Alibaba cloud. Quickly lot of like minded cloud enthusiasts joined this journey and contributed to the success of this project. Thanks to the contributors.

Quite frankly keeping track of cloud providers innovations, new announcements and launches is literally getting difficult because of the pace in which the services and enhancements are launched. Based on the visitors request, i launched newsletter subscription to offer monthly digest which captures the most interesting service or enhancement launched in the previous month. 

This article is the 3rd edition of the monthly digest and let's look at few of the top announcements & launches from the major clouds!

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

 AWS announced lot of new enhancements, expansions of services across region, availability of certain in new  regions etc, but out of all below are few of the new services launches in the month of May 2018, they are

 Amazon EC2 Fleet 

Those who want to launch 100s or event 1000s of EC2 instances for workloads like scietific researches or high performance computing across various pricing options like onDemand, spot or reserved instances, they had to call AWS Auto Scaling or RunInstanceAPI to launch a fleet of machines, now with EC2 Fleet services API, users can spin up thousands of EC2 instances with this feature. For more info, click here. 

IoT Device Simulator

Simulating IoT Devices on scale could help predict IoT solution developers to evaluate and benchmark the iot solutions behaviour under stress. Usually developers build their custom device simulations using EC2 across various regions for simulation. AWS Introduces IoT Device simulator, a solution built using various AWS services including Lambda, Fargate, ACS etc. For more info, click here. 

EC2 Bare Metal Instance hits GA

Generally Cloud is all about multi-tenant shared virtual resources to run most common workloads like hosting web applications, LOB applications etc, however there are tier-1 business apps like SAP which is best run on bare-metal hardware, similarly there are legacy solutions which can only be run on bare-metals. Until AWS launched EC2 bare-metal instance in preview last year, people could not host such aforementioned solution in AWS, now with EC2 Bare metal instance going GA, customers with Tier-1 workloads can migrate those applications to AWS. To read more, click here.

Note: There are only few providers including AWS offer bare-metal non virtualized hardware, to see those providers click comparecloud.in

Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Build 2018 didn't witness major new announcements or launches, rather there were few announcements on Microsoft AI Services and minor services updates under compute service category. Below are some of the interesting finds from Build 2018.

ML.Net

For most developers (including myself) C# & Open Source are two different worlds. C# developers who are interested to explore and learn machine learning techniques have to learn python(the language of choice for modern machine learning and AI). For many it might be a challenge (I highly recommend to pick up Python as there are zillions of usable machine learning modules to use from) to learn Python or any other language. For such people, Microsoft has introduced ML.Net.

According to Microsoft , ML.NET framework could make machine learning accessible for .NET developers. Develop and infuse custom AI into applications without expertise in developing machine-learning models. Quickly build models for regression, classification and clustering. Over time, ML.NET will enable additional tasks and leverage other popular libraries, such as Accord.NET and TensorFlow.

Soft delete for Azure Storage Blobs (Feature) 

Soft delete is a most requested feature that allows users to persist the object even after deleting, but it becomes invisible. When data is deleted, it transitions to a soft deleted state instead of being permanently erased. When soft delete is on and you overwrite data, a soft deleted snapshot is generated to save the state of the overwritten data. Soft deleted objects are invisible unless explicitly listed. 

 Azure Event Grid | Cloud events

Just imagine an integrated world, where data uploaded in Azure Blob Storage gets processed using AWS EMR service (Managed Hadoop Cluster) and visualized using Google’s Data Studio (BI & Reporting tool), this is no more a distant dream. With Azure’s Cloud Event, developers can seamlessly publish & consume cloud events across clouds.

Cloud Events emerged as part of Serverless Working Group of the Cloud Native Compute Foundation (CNCF), and Microsoft recently announced their support to be part of this initiative. To see other contributors of this project, click here.

Google Cloud

Like Microsoft Build, Google IO was also not impressive for Cloud Enthusiasts as there were not much cloud services announcement or launches, however there were lot of announcements and enhancements on Machine Learning APIs and Android. Let's look at some of the interesting finds from Google Cloud for the last month.

Google joins leader club in Gartner IaaS Magic Quadrant for 2018.

Gartner publishes yearly Magic Quadrants across various IT services and products from various vendors for IT decision makers and business users. Gartner’s magic quadrant for IaaS market is one of most sought after report by cloud providers. If you had followed this report for the last 2 years, you must have witnessed the new entrants in IaaS market and how gartner evaluated them and plotted them in the niche quadrant. This year astonishingly, most of the vendors who occupied “Niche” quadrant has been disappeared. Google however have leapfrogged to Leader quadrant within entering niche space in a year’s time. To get a free copy of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for IaaS click here. 

Stackdriver Kubernetes Monitoring Service

Eversince Google announced the first version of Kubernetes v1.0, a docker orchestration engine, the adoption of K8s has been tremendous between developers in the container eco-system. Those who use K8s on premise or on cloud understands how big is the pain to monitor and debug application failures, bottlenecks and other abnormal behavior. With this announcement, developers can get increased observability, inspect Kubernetes objects (e.g., clusters, services, workloads, pods, containers), behavior of your application, as well as analyze failures and optimize performance. This helps users focus more on building their app and less on instrumenting and managing your Kubernetes infrastructure. For more info, click here.

Google Cloud Composer

Google launched Cloud Composer(Beta), a managed Apache Airflow service to allow developers to create ETL data workflows using python. Apache Airflow is an ETL platform originally built by the data team at AirBnb and later opensourced under Apache foundation. To learn more about the service, click here.

IBM Softlayer

IBM Softlayer has got promoted to Niche from Visionary quadrant based on the various key parameters considered by Gartner and it's also visible in the overall maturity of IBM softlayer from the services point of view. Lets look at few of the latest announcements from IBM

IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service

Kubernetes is making waves and become synonymous in the docker cluster management system and the proof is  Microsoft renamed its managed container management service from Azure Container service to Azure Kubernetes service, the next one to follow is IBM. Now IBM is renaming their existing service called as “IBM Cloud container Service” to IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service. Read more about the service from here.

IBM Cognos Embedded Dashboard

Cognos is IBM’s self service based business intelligence solution offered on SaaS model. Business users and developers can now feed data from various data sources like databases, files and object store and create reports, dashboards and charts etc interactively. With embedded dashboards, users can now embed the reports and charts created in cosmos in external websites and allow users to further slice and dice the data and visualize.

 Alibaba cloud

Alibaba cloud is in a huge rush in launching new services to compete with the rest of the cloud service providers which is very much visible by the bunch of new services launched recently. Out of many services, let's look at few of the interesting services.

Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch

This service is based on the open-source Elasticsearch engine and alibaba claims to provide commercial X-Pack plug-ins on top of this service. Elasticsearch is a very powerful search engine for variety of use cases including Log analytics, Full Text Search, click-stream analytics and so on. As most of the customers for Alibaba are E-commerce customers managed elasticsearch can be very useful for their users. Alibaba cloud’s ElasticSearch will compete with likes of AWS ElasticSearch and Microsoft’s Search service. Read more about the service from here.

AnalyticDB

AnalyticDB is a managed data warehousing solution for processing real time Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) data. As per Alibaba, the service is compatible with MySQL Protocol and tt can process highly concurrent and multi-dimensional data structures. Additionally it can offer Automatic indexing without requiring schema or secondary indexes.Quickly exports massive amounts of data at high speed. Built-in functions such as spatial computing and segmentation. Click here for more info.

Until the next cloud round up, be cloudy!