Friday 2 October 2015

Structure News: Box it up, Azure's new features, and cloud customer, diversify thyself

STRUCTURE EVENTS Newsletter
 
Where One Cloud Isn't Enough
October 2nd, 2015 / by Tom Krazit
This week, we'll talk about Box's big conference, coding for security, and why everybody needs a backup plan.
STRUCTURE NEWS
Vinod KhoslaMomentum continues to build for Structure 2015, scheduled for November 18th and 19th at the Julia Morgan Ballroom in San Francisco. Check out our Medium publication for several interviews with key speakers that give a bit of a preview of what they plan to discuss in November.

Early-bird ticket prices end next week, so now is a good time to make sure you sign up to reserve your spot. We're thrilled to be able to bring this community back together again for what promises to be two awesome days of discussion about the future of the cloud.
INDUSTRY NEWS
BOX WANTS TO BE THE CENTER OF YOUR COMPANY'S CONTENT UNIVERSE
 
Box held its big annual developer event this week in San Francisco, complete with a not-exactly hard-hitting interview of Apple CEO Tim Cook by Box CEO Aaron Levie. Techcruch reports on the new products and services that were introduced at the show, including a tool that can connect cameras to Box's software and automatically uploads those pictures into the platform.

MICROSOFT SPLITS FINANCIAL RESULTS INTO 3 NEW OPERATING GROUPS, IN LINE WITH SATYA NADELLA'S VISION

Lest there be any doubt that Microsoft sees its future in cloud services, the company has decided to change the way it reports its financial performance to emphasis those services. Venturebeat reports that the new Intelligent Cloud segment will cover "public, private and hybrid server products and services" like Azure, although I'm not convinced we'll get specific Azure financial information.

MICROSOFT EXPANDS AZURE CLOUD WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM ITS FRIENDS

Speaking of Azure, Microsoft also held a conference this week, focused on its public cloud product. Fortune takes a look at some of the announcements that emerged from the event, such as a deal with Structure 2015 speaker Florian Liebert's Mesosphere on container-related services.

CODING IN THE CLOUD ERA DEMANDS A STRUCTURAL RETHINK TO BAKE IN SECURITY AND PRIVACY

One of the dominant themes we've heard from our Structure 2015 speakers as we've been preparing for the event is the need for companies thinking about moving toward cloud services -- or even ones that have always existed on cloud services -- to realize this world requires a whole new approach to application development. Techcrunch has a nice interview with Jean Yang, a MIT grad student and researcher with a strong background in modern security development, on what it takes to manage security policies in this cloud era.

WELCOME TO YOUR CLOUD NATIVE JOURNEY (PART 1)

Before you start overhauling your coding style for the cloud, there are a lot of high-level things to think about. Pivotal's marketing team put out a nice post this week detailing some of the challenges faced by different types of organizations (spoiler alert: it turns into a commercial for Pivotal Cloud Foundry).

EMC EXEC DEFENDS "THE FEDERATION"

The will-they/won't-they break-up saga of the EMC Federation hasn't really slowed down since news emerged that the parties are considering a restructuring of their relationship, but EMC's David Goulden is willing to defend the status quo. He told attendees at Recode's Code Enterprise conference (as reported by Fortune) that "we really believe strongly that breaking up is the wrong thing to do."
 
BIG PICTURE
Vinod KhoslaAs cloud service outages go, it wasn't the most spectacular one we've ever seen: I'd vote for the Christmas Eve 2012 Netflix outage or the Christmas Day 2014 Playstation Network outage as the most horribly timed cloud outages of the past few years. But Amazon's East Coast outage last week, which took out Netflix and Internet of Things products like Google's Nest, was certainly frustrating for a large amount of people.

In keeping with the characteristically cheeky British voice of his site, The Register's Gavin Clarke made a solid point last weekend: "dual-provider strategies are the future." It no longer makes any sense for companies that are building big businesses off cloud services to rely on a single provider -- no matter how rare outages really are -- to serve their customers.

In an interview with GE's Chris Drumgoole last week (a Structure 2015 speaker) he acknowledged that GE works with several different cloud providers to host the applications it is developing for the cloud. But earlier this year, Pinterest's Raj Patel confirmed to us that it relies exclusively on Amazon Web Services to keep its operations up and running.

Public cloud vendors need to realize that making their products and services interoperable will only help grow the overall size of the market. And customers need to start demanding better degrees of interoperability, because migrating to cloud services is complicated enough without having to figure out which workloads belong in which public cloud.

Structure 2015 will be a great venue to get this point across, and we'll see what Amazon has to say about it at Re:Invent next week.
 
 
 
 
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