Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!
Earlier this week on our blog, our co-founder and CTO Bernard Campbell shared a recap of his experience at VMworld 2019, including VMware’s big announcements around vRA 8 and Tanzu, their Kubernetes orchestrator project.
With that, onto this week’s news:
“Everything as a service” is coming—but we’re not there quite yet
Rob Pegoraro, Ars Technica, Sept. 10, 2019
“For the past decade, information technology and cloud computing vendors have increasingly pushed the virtualization and abstraction of every possible part of IT infrastructure further and further, turning what used to be things you bought and paid for into services that you subscribe to. First there was software as a service, and then compute and infrastructure as a service, then platforms as a service, and now even storage and databases as a service. The “private cloud” brought the same models into enterprise data centers. And the “hybrid cloud” blew the data center walls out and mixed everything together. But managing each decoupled element of this brave new world of randomly distributed infrastructure has become increasingly complex. Arguably, it hasn’t really changed the business of running enterprise IT as much as it has made things complex in new ways.
But what if there was an “as a service” to fix that, too?”
Try to contain yourselves: Google Cloud lights Spark for Kubernetes
Tim Anderson, The Register, Sept. 10, 2019
“Google Cloud Platform will soon emit the alpha release of its Dataproc service, specifically for Apache Spark jobs, running on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters.
Apache Spark is a cluster computing framework designed for use as a processing engine for ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) or data science applications. It is often used with Apache Hadoop, which provides Hadoop YARN (Yet Another Resource Negotiator) for managing resources and HDFS for distributed data storage. Google’s Dataproc service offers Hadoop and Spark on Google Cloud Platform. The service is similar to managed Hadoop distributions on AWS, which has Amazon EMR (Elastic Map Reduce) and Microsoft Azure, which has HDInsight.”
Microsoft Brings IBM Power Iron to Azure Cloud
Timothy Prickett Morgan, The Next Platform, Sept. 10, 2019
“Microsoft, Google’s hyperscale and public cloud rival, wants to broaden the applicability of its Azure cloud for all kinds of workloads, not just those that are born in the cloud and expect an X86 instruction set, and therefore it is going to be launching Power9 instances on its cloud. We have no idea what Microsoft’s intentions are for using Power9 processors internally, but just as it has ported Windows Server to Arm server chips for internal use, it can do a re-port and bring Windows Server back to the Power architecture any time it wants to. For all we know, Microsoft has already done this, making Power9 trays for its “Project Olympus” server designs.
As far as we know, this is not the case, and instead Microsoft will be tapping niche cloud provider Skytap to run Power-based systems inside of the Azure cloud, which will be sliced and diced into Azure VMs that can be sold by Microsoft alongside of the Xeon and Epyc server instances that it already sells.”
