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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