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 […]
IT hardware vendors, such as Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), are pivoting their revenue models away from product sales toward service-based subscriptions. The objective is to make hardware appear more flexible and cloud-like so buyers can retain servers in their choice of data center while receiving the critical benefit of the cloud: scalability. Much […]
Quantum computing promises a revolution in scientific discovery. Quantum computing’s main advantage over digital computing is in quickly solving highly complex problems that require significant time or resources to process. Currently, solutions to many complex problems can be estimated using supercomputers or pools of servers over days or weeks. Other problems are so complex that […]
Although big-name hyperscalers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft dominate the cloud arena, other companies also believe they have a role to play. Vultr, OVHcloud, Linode, DigitalOcean, Bluehost and Scaleway, for example, don’t offer huge portfolios of cutting-edge products but their products focus on simplicity and low cost for smaller businesses with relatively straightforward requirements. […]