Two recent developments in the cloud community have caught my attention:
1. Cisco is making strategic acquisitions to cloudify.
A few days ago, Cisco announced that it would acquire Meraki, a maker of cloud-based network management. This is not the radical shift to SDN that some other vendors are making (VMware/Nicira comes to mind); however, it’s clear that Cisco wants Meraki’s DNA to beef up the software side of its business, and to make all its hardware more cloud-friendly.
An interesting footnote to this move is that Cisco also made a recent announcement about plans to acquire Cloupia. Cloupia puts Cisco into the same rapidly evolving marketspace as other vendors who want to sell datacenter management tools that blur the lines between physical and virtual, allowing private enterprises to possess and manage their own internal clouds.
A visualization of the largest cloud of all — the whole internet. No single tool or vendor has a strategy for management on this scale. Yet. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons.
2. AWS released interesting metrics on its growth.
Today was the first day of Amazon’s inaugural re:Invent conference, and at the keynote, Amazon disclosed some information about its customer base that I haven’t seen before. Among the best nuggets:
- AWS has customers in 190 countries. All those data centers opened in remote corners of the world are making its reach truly global.
- AWS customers include over 300 government agencies and 1500 educational institutions. (I have heard a popular perception that AWS mostly services small startups and media giants like Netflix; this is intriguing counterpoint.)
- S3 now hosts over 1.3 trillion objects, accessed at a rate of over 835,000 requests per second.
- Elastic MapReduce has launched 3.7 million Hadoop clusters in the past two years.
If we need any further proof that IaaS is here to stay, these statistics are a compelling answer.
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