Big public-cloud operators have often had to compete against each other — sometimes ferociously. Only rarely have they had to compete against alternative platforms for corporate IT, however. More often than not, chief information officers (CIOs) responsible for mission-critical IT have seen a move to the public cloud as low-risk, flexible, forward-looking and, ultimately, inexpensive. […]
Unexpected costs are driving some data-heavy and legacy applications back from public-cloud to on-premises locations. However, very few organizations are moving away from the public cloud strategically — let alone altogether. The past decade has seen numerous reports of so-called cloud “repatriations” — the migration of applications back to on-premises venues following negative experiences with, […]
Google was an underdog when it launched its infrastructure cloud in 2013. Amazon had already made a name for itself as a disruptive technology provider, having launched Amazon Web Services (AWS) seven years prior. Microsoft, a household name in commercial software, launched Azure in 2010. What chance did Google, a company known primarily for its […]
A debate has been raging since cloud computing entered the mainstream: which is the cheaper venue for enterprise customers — cloud or on-premises data centers? This debate has proved futile for two reasons. First, the characteristics of any specific application will dictate which venue is more expensive — there is no simple, unequivocal answer. Second […]
Cloud providers have experienced unprecedented growth over the past few years. CIOs the world over, often prompted by CFOs and CEOs, have been favoring the cloud over on-premises IT for new and major projects — with the result that the largest cloud provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS), has seen revenue increase by 30% to 40% […]
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has made a minor change to its private-cloud appliance, AWS Outposts, that could significantly impact resiliency. The cloud provider has enabled local access to cloud administration, removing the appliance’s reliance on the public cloud. In the event of a network failure between the public cloud and the user’s data center, the […]
In any market, fewer sellers or providers typically results in less choice for buyers. Where the number of sellers is very low this could, theoretically, lead to exploitation, through higher prices or lower-quality goods and services — with buyers having no choice but to accept such terms. Three hyperscale cloud providers — Amazon Web Services, […]
Organizations are becoming more confident in using the cloud for mission-critical workloads — partly due to a perception of improved visibility into operational resiliency. But many users aren’t taking basic steps to ensure their mission-critical applications can endure relatively frequent availability zone outages. Data from the 2022 Uptime Institute annual survey reflects this growing confidence in […]
A serverless platform is an abstracted cloud computing service that executes a user’s code without the user needing to provision the underlying server or operating environment. The physical server, resources and operating environment used to execute the user’s code are managed by the cloud provider and are not accessible to the user (hence “serverless”). In […]
New findings from research by Uptime Institute Intelligence reveals that organizations can cut both their cloud carbon emissions and costs by moving workloads to different regions. However, the trade off with this migration is an increase in latency. Cloud users choose regions based primarily on two factors: Locating the application close to end users improves […]