Structure News: Contain(er) this, sneaky security, and Instagram's milestone

Where You Can't Stop Us, You Can Only Hope To Contain Us September 25th, 2015 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about Amazon's infrastructure, OpenStack's challenges, and Instagram's big bet. STRUCTURE NEWS HOW GE IS CLOSING DATACENTERS AND MOVING TO THE PUBLIC CLOUD Last week we showcased an upcoming Structure 2015 speaker (ClearSky Data's Ellen Rubin) who is a big believer in the pragmatic hybrid cloud, but this week we talked to GE's Chris Drumgoole, who is taking one of the world's biggest and more storied companies kicking and screaming into the public cloud. It's a work in progress, but Chris, who will also be speaking at the show this November, is a big proponent of the cost savings and efficiency of the public cloud, and he had a lot of interesting things to say about that strategy. CONTAINERS, CONTAINERS EVERYWHERE! LEARN WHY THAT IS AT STRUCTURE Another hot topic for Structure 2015 is sure to be containers, and Derrick Harris stopped by to share some thoughts on this important new trend in software development. While a few other Structure speakers I've chatted with over the past month are taking a wait-and-see approach to containers, there's little doubt that this model will have a huge impact on the future of cloud computing. Check out Derrick's thoughts on this increasingly vital technology. Remember, Structure 2015 takes place November 18th and 19th in San Francisco. Buy your tickets here. INDUSTRY NEWS CYBER RISK ISN'T ALWAYS IN THE COMPUTER Sure, you've got the best firewall protection money can buy around your datacenter, but do you know how well your cooling systems are secured? The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) has a look at a new vector for datacenter attacks that will unfortunately add to the sleepless nights of many a CIO. INSIDE AMAZON'S CLOUD COMPUTING INFRASTRUCTURE Amazon doesn't like to talk in detail about the infrastructure that runs the world's leading public cloud service, but Datacenter Frontier was able to pull together some interesting tidbits about the scale of that operation. One perennial guessing game: how many servers does Amazon run? AMAZON CLOUD SNAFU IMPACTS NETFLIX, OTHER SITES ON SUNDAY While Amazon's infrastructure may be world class, it occasionally has a bad day or two. Fortune looks at the impact of Sunday's database issues on the internet, which took down sites and apps from Netflix to Wink. OPENSTACK CONTINUES TO COME UP SHORT OpenStack, the open-source cloud software used by several enterprise technology vendors, has had a bumpy road over the past few years. Infoworld argues that at this point, OpenStack is way too complex and unwieldy for most enterprises, even though Red Hat is putting a lot of effort behind the platform this year. BACKBLAZE LAUNCHES B2 OBJECT STORAGE SERVICES AT 1/4 THE COST OF AMAZON S3 Looking to save a little money on your storage costs? Venturebeat reports on the new service from Backblaze, which will certainly get your CFO's attention but lacks a lot of the bells and whistles that the bigger companies provide. MICROSOFT EXEC: OUR CLOUD IS BIGGER Cloud Wars: Seattle sounds like a horrible reality show, but Microsoft doesn't want people to think it's an also-ran in the cloud market behind its neighbor Amazon. Fortune brings word of Azure marketing executive Mike Schutz, who is claiming Microsoft offers its services in the greatest number of regions around the world. As with most things in enterprise technology marketing, however, the statement can be argued.   BIG PICTURE It's kind of amazing to think of a tech world in which Instagram remained an independent company. As mind-blowing as that $1 billion acquisition was in 2012, valuations at that level are now a routine signal that your startup matters, and it's kind of crazy to think about what Instagram might be worth in today's unicorn-driven world. But could Instagram have scaled to 400 million users, as it announced this week, without the benefit of Facebook's infrastructure largess? That's something I want to ask both Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger and Facebook infrastructure czar Jay Parikih at Structure 2015. Our own Derrick Harris explored this a little bit over the summer with Krieger, discussing the revamped Instagram search feature and how it came about after Instagram had migrated fully to Facebook's infrastructure. But it's an interesting question, in general: so many people have chastised Instagram over the years for selling to Facebook so early. But is this an example of a company that actually made the right decision for its users, in forgoing the temptations to stay independent (which Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg pointedly avoided) in order to marry a company with some of the most innovative infrastructure and engineering talent in the business? The fun of a thought exercise like that is that there are no wrong answers, because no one can accurately describe alternative tech histories. But Krieger and co-founder Kevin Systrom had to have thought about these issues back in 2012, when they were contemplating Zuckerberg's offer. And their thought process could help inform the decision making of a lot of modern startups mulling offers from the Googles and Microsofts of the world.       DISCOVER MORE   Unsubscribe subbusmr.enjoyment@blogger.com from this list. Our mailing address is: Structure 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Add us to your address book Copyright (C) 2015 Structure All rights reserved. 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Meet the FBI, The NFL, and Disney at Structure 2015

The Structure conference is uniquely crafted to pair influential cloud speakers with key brands who share cloud strategy best practices – all to help businesses large and small stay current in today’s morphing cloud landscape. Here are six must-hear sessions from the Structure agenda: Cloud security from the FBI’s perspective – Chief Information Security Officer, Arlette Hart The future of cloud landscape from past fails and successes – Partner at Khosla Ventures, Vinod Khosla How a $45B league manages their cloud strategy to appease 150M fans – SVP & CIO of the National Football League, Michelle McKenna-Doyle A new logo isn’t Google’s only differentiator – Senior VP, Technical Infrastructure & Google Fellow, Urs Hölzle Intel’s building-block strategy for the cloud, and why it’s working – SVP, GM, Data Center Group at Intel, Diane Bryant Global cloud strategy for 1.19 million monthly users – VP, Global Engineering and Infrastructure for Facebook, Jay Parikh The Structure Conference is consistently reviewed by attendees and speakers as an informative, high-level conference – we hope you join the conversation this November. Get me registered.   SPEAKERS   DIANE BRYANT Intel Corporation ARLETTE HART Federal Bureau of Investigation URS HÖLZLE Google VINOD KHOSLA Khosla Ventures MICHELLE MCKENNA-DOYLE NFL JAY PARIKH Facebook   SPONSORS   HEADLINE     PRIMETIME     SHOWTIME     PARTNERS     NOVEMBER 18 – 19, 2015 SAN FRANCISCO, CA REGISTER NOW   Unsubscribe subbusmr.enjoyment@blogger.com from this list. Our mailing address is: Structure 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Add us to your address book Copyright (C) 2015 Structure All rights reserved. Forward this email to a friend Update your profile

Structure News: Salesforce's party, Pinterest hits 100 million, HP's fight for relevance

Where The Party's On Howard Street September 18th, 2015 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about Facebook's big video transformation, Salesforce.com's spectacle in SoMa, and what could be the last shot for HP. STRUCTURE NEWS WHY ELLEN RUBIN AND CLEARSKY DATA ARE BETTING ON THE HYBRID CLOUD For the second addition to our new Medium publication, I had a chance to speak with Ellen Rubin, co-founder and CEO of ClearSky Data, a new startup with an interesting approach to cloud storage. ClearSky's "global storage network" is a mix of an on-premises storage appliance, metro-area cached storage, and "cold" Amazon S3 storage. Ellen will be speaking at Structure 2015 and she had some pointed and pragmatic things to say about the current state of the cloud services market, so check out the interview here. Remember, Structure 2015 takes place November 18th and 19th in San Francisco. Buy your tickets here. INDUSTRY NEWS HOW FACEBOOK IS PREPARING FOR THE VIDEO BOOM Facebook kicked off the week at the @Scale conference by revealing some interesting details about how it is building the next generation of its infrastructure to handle an explosion in video content. Fortune got a behind-the-scenes look at the process with Facebook's Jay Parikh, who will be speaking at Structure 2015. ACCENTURE ACQUIRES CLOUD SHERPAS TO ENHANCE CLOUD CONSULTING CHOPS, ESPECIALLY AROUND SALESFORCE.COM As bigger and bigger companies contemplate moving their workloads to the cloud, they're turning to their old consulting friends to help them make the leap. Techcrunch reports that Accenture's cloud team grew a little stronger this week with the pickup of Cloud Sherpas, a 1,100-person strong consulting company born of the cloud era. EVERYTHING ANNOUNCED AT DREAMFORCE 2015 SO FAR Speaking of Salesforce.com, it took over a city block in downtown San Francisco this week (much to the annoyance of the locals) for Dreamforce 2015. While the event is mostly a commercial for Salesforce and a party for its customers, Venturebeat compiled a list of the product news and interesting talks showcased during the week. PINTEREST CROSSES USER MILESTONE OF 100 MILLION Little did I know back when I talked to Pinterest's Raj Patel (a Structure 2015 speaker) a few weeks ago that he had already been putting plans in place to scale Pinterest from 76 million users as of July to 100 million as of Wednesday. The New York Times interviews Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann about the milestone, noting that the company still needs to grow to live up to its valuation. ORACLE SEES LIGHT AT THE END OF CLOUDY TUNNEL     While Dreamforce attendees were partying with Stevie Wonder, Oracle was releasing an earnings report that wasn't exactly an excuse to party. Fortune reports that while Oracle's revenue was lighter than analysts had expected, it is rapidly shifting its attention to the cloud software world, and even expects to produce margins akin to its Good Old Days. We shall see. WHY WHATSAPP ONLY NEEDS 50 ENGINEERS FOR ITS 900M USERS Few companies have scaled as quickly and smartly as WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging app that connects the planet. Wired looks at some of the secrets behind that rise, which includes the Erlang programming language and a cultural focus on simplicity. AWS RE:INVENT TO FOCUS ON CLOUD MANAGEMENT, SECURITY While we like to think you can get everything you need to know about the cloud world at Structure, Amazon's Re:Invent conference is obviously a must-attend event on your calendar. David Linthicum (who will be moderating a session at Structure 2015) has four predictions for what you can expect to hear at Amazon's big show.   BIG PICTURE At this point, it's a bit cliché to wonder what Bill and Dave would think of the fine mess that Hewlett-Packard has turned out to be over the last decade. Dysfunctional boards and an ongoing game of CEO musical chairs have allowed HP to miss out on most of the big transitions of the 21st century, including the explosion in mobile computing, the rise of cloud computing, and, amazingly, 3-D printing, a market which you'd think the company nearly synonymous with printing could have owned. But after an analyst meeting this week in which HP CEO Meg Whitman shed a little more light on the company's plans to split itself in two next year (and announced plans to lay off 30,000 people), it seems pretty clear this is HP's last shot. I've always loved this Lou Gerstner quote: "No institution will go through fundamental change unless it believes it is in deep trouble and needs to do something different to survive." The new Hewlett-Packard Enterprise will make its debut just a few weeks before Structure 2015 kicks off, and it's sure to be a topic of conversation during the event. One thing in HP's favor? The world might be more accepting of hybrid cloud than we once thought. Our interview with Ellen Rubin this week (see above) underscored that as cloud computing evolves, there won't necessarily be a one-size-fits-all model for large corporations with unique workloads that are starting to embrace the public cloud where it makes sense. This is HP's bet, that its years of selling and installing servers for the datacenters of the world will help it find a niche in a new world with fewer datacenters but more complexity. "Hybrid" is a dirty word in a lot of cloud circles, and it's on HP to prove that the strategy involves more than stoking fear in the hearts of CIOs about a migration to cloud computing. But one benefit of being a smaller organization is that HP Enterprise might find the breathing room to catch up to the cloud companies that stole its lunch while it was busy fighting the battles of the last century.  Here's hoping: the tech industry is better when there are multiple strong competitors advancing into the future, and HP hasn't quite turned into the 21st-century version of Digital Equipment Corp. just yet.       DISCOVER MORE   Unsubscribe subbusmr.enjoyment@blogger.com from this list. Our mailing address is: Structure 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Add us to your address book Copyright (C) 2015 Structure All rights reserved. Forward this email to a friend Update your profile

Structure News: A Pinteresting interview, Docker gears up, and why frenemies are the future

Where Summer's End Means It's Structure Season September 11th, 2015 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about how two cloud natives -- Pinterest and Airbnb -- plot their infrastructure strategy, what Docker plans to do with its new money man, and why thinking outside the Box is no longer a cliche (maybe). STRUCTURE NEWS HOW PINTEREST IS PREPARING FOR ITS FUTURE IN THE CLOUD - OR ON ITS OWN We published an interview this week with Pinterest's Raj Patel (left), which I teased in this space a few weeks back, on the challenges of scaling a consumer-facing web company based entirely in the public cloud. Check it out: it's a good preview of what Patel and I will be talking about in November at Structure 2015, and if it gives any of you ideas for specific things we should talk about, let us know. Structure 2015 will take place November 18th and 19th at the Julia Morgan Ballroom in downtown San Francisco. There's a lot more information here, and you can buy your tickets here. Also, follow our new Medium publication, which will highlight Structure speakers and themes over the next few weeks, here. INDUSTRY NEWS MICROSOFT ACQUIRES ADALLOM TO ADVANCE IDENTITY AND SECURITY IN THE CLOUD We're getting more and more interest in security-related topics for Structure 2015, and that will probably only increase as more and more businesses sign up for cloud services. Microsoft bolstered its security story this week with the purchase (for a reported $250 million, according to Techcrunch) of Adallom, a startup that helps companies protect their data as employees use multiple cloud services. FORMER TWITTER CFO MIKE GUPTA ON WHY HE JOINED THE STARTUP DOCKER When a company brings in a big-time money manager, it's a sign they're planning to get big. The Wall Street Journal interviews Mike Gupta, who took Twitter public, on his plans for Docker's revenue growth and the inevitable successful exit for its investors. OKTA IS NOW A UNICORN AFTER $75 MILLION FUNDING ROUND Speaking of investors, Okta hit up its existing investors for another $75 million, pushing its valuation into that mythical $1 billion "unicorn" territory. Recode reports that Okta, which helps IT departments manage access to internal applications across desktop and mobile devices, has now raised $230 million. ALIBABA'S CLOUD BUSINESS HAS BUILT A DATA CENTER COOLED BY LAKE WATER Cooling a data center is an expensive task (Facebook even built one near the Arctic Circle), but Alibaba has come up with an interesting way of cooling a data center using lake water. Fortune's Derrick Harris (who, ICYMI, is back in the Structure fold and planning Structure Data for next year) takes a look at Alibaba's technique, which the company says allows it to eliminate 90 percent of its data center cooling costs. SALESFORCE LAUNCHES APP CLOUD, PUTS DEVELOPER RESOURCES UNDER ONE ROOF Things might have gotten a little simpler for Salesforce customers now that they can log into several different Salesforce products all at once. ZDNet reports that the "overdue" App Cloud will make it easier for Salesforce users to see all their app data in one place, rather than logging into separate things like Heroku or Lightning. AIRBNB SHARES THE KEYS TO ITS INFRASTRUCTURE Along the lines of the Raj Patel interview noted above, The Platform has a similar but more in-depth look at Airbnb's infrastructure strategy with Mike Curtis, vice president of engineering at the company. It also touches on how Airbnb handles all its data and machine-learning techniques employed at the company.   BIG PICTURE It's been a rough year for Box: once a darling of the cloud startup scene, life as a public company has been a little trickier for CEO Aaron Levie (above). But after reporting revenue growth this week that made Wall Street a little more forgiving of Box's still quite-large losses, Levie expanded on a theme we've been hearing more and more from the Structure community: the future of cloud services has to involve interoperability. "Vendors realize that to stay relevant to customers, they have to open up to others, even if they compete in other ways,” Levie told financial analysts Wednesday, as reported by Forbes. “That’s how you get the head of Microsoft Office on stage with Apple. Everybody has to compete for customer value, which means you can’t win by closing off your technology.” Until Wednesday's earnings report, Box's stock price had fallen below its IPO price in January, a sign that investors aren't totally sure that Box will ever make money. And as I've noted in this space before, the notion that cloud enterprise software companies might have to struggle to match the margins of older enterprise software companies -- who loved to lock you into their playgrounds -- could have interesting ramifications down the road for the future of this movement. But this push is great for cloud users. True cloud interoperability will make it easier and less expensive to manage workloads across different vendors, and will give CIOs the ability to piece together different products for app development, payroll, storage, and hosting without having to buy everything from a single vendor that does a few of those things well, but not all of those things. And if Levie (and many of our Structure speakers) are right that a second era of cloud services is dawning in which big enterprise companies, rather than startups, will provide growth as they choose the right service provide for the right problem, there will be plenty of money to go around. (Photo courtesy Techcrunch/Flickr via Creative Commons 2.0.)       DISCOVER MORE   Unsubscribe subbusmr.enjoyment@blogger.com from this list. Our mailing address is: Structure 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Add us to your address book Copyright (C) 2015 Structure All rights reserved. Forward this email to a friend Update your profile