Enjoyment: Structure News: Surge pricing for hybrid cloud strategies

Where, Believe It Or Not, We're Still Cloud Native

May 13, 2016 / by Tom Krazit

This week, we'll talk about some progress on Structure Security, the latest cutesy name in a long line of cutesy Google names, and two prominent tech companies that are finally kicking the tires on the public cloud.

STRUCTURE NEWS

We're working hard with our council of advisers getting plans in place for Structure Security, and we'll have a lot more information to share next week about our first trip into the world of security, including some new advisors and speakers. We're discovering a clear interest among professionals in the information security and technology worlds in finding better ways to work together, striking a balance between the relentless pressure of shipping product and the relentless pressure of playing defense against well-funded opponents. We're going to spend this summer examining these issues both here in the newsletter and elsewhere on the internets (stay tuned for more on that), and we welcome your feedback as we roll along.

INDUSTRY NEWS

TWITTER BARS INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES FROM USING ANALYTICS SERVICE

The market value of Twitter the company ain't what it used to be, but the value of Twitter data -- especially for those who have firehose access -- has never been greater. Dataminr, a Twitter analytics company backed by Twitter and In-Q-Tel, cut off U.S. intelligence agencies from using its service at Twitter's request, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal (subscription required), although Techcrunch reported that the agencies were using the service as part of an unpaid pilot period that would have come to an end soon enough anyway.

GOOGLE HAS OPEN-SOURCED SYNTAXNET, ITS AI FOR UNDERSTANDING LANGUAGE

Welcome “Parsey McParseface” to that ongoing tradition of “Oh, those wacky Googlers!” announcements. Following the release of TensorFlow last year, Wired reports that Google has open-sourced another artificial intelligence project called SyntaxNet, which aims to teach computers more sophisticated ways to understand text using an analysis tool that is actually called Parsey McParseface.

THE CREATORS OF SIRI JUST SHOWED OFF THEIR NEXT AI ASSISTANT, VIV, AND IT’S INCREDIBLE

So far, 2016 has been the year of AI and helpful friendly bots. Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, who you might remember from previous personal assistants such as Siri, have a new personal assistant called Viv that wowed the crowd at Techcrunch Disrupt, according to the Verge. Good demos are just that, good demos, but Viv bears watching given its pedigree.

COREOS SECURES $28 MILLION IN SERIES B FUNDING LED BY GOOGLE’S VENTURE CAPITAL ARM

You probably last saw Google and CoreOS together at Structure 2015, and they’re once again teaming up, in a way. ZDNet reports that Google Ventures led a $28 million Series B funding round in the container startup, which is building its container-management software on top of Google’s Kubernetes.

SLACK WANTS TO HELP YOU SIGN INTO ALL YOUR OTHER OFFICE APPS

Back when social media was just getting started, Facebook, Google, and Twitter all vied to provide sign-in capabilities to dozens of third-party apps and websites: Tinder still requires a Facebook login. Now Slack, the darling of the enterprise software world, is making a bid to provide similar capabilities for work-related apps, according to Recode.

DOCKER ROLLS OUT TOOLS TO SCAN CONTAINERS FOR VULNERABILITIES

One topic that has come up with nearly everyone we’ve talked to for Structure Security (as well as Structure 2016, for that matter) is container security, and Docker, the belle of the container ball, is paying attention to those concerns. eWeek reports that Docker Security Scanning -- once known as Project Nautilus -- is now generally available to Docker users and promises to simplify the process of scanning container images for vulnerabilities.

BIG PICTURE

The cloud computing watchers who have been predicting the rise of the hybrid cloud strategy -- a little AWS action, a little self-managed datacenter action -- were awarded two more feathers in their caps this week with reports involving Uber and Salesforce.com, two of tech's most prominent companies.

Salesforce is planning to build an internet of things cloud service on AWS, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal (subscription required), which would be the first time it has gotten cloudy with a company that it ostensibly competes with in a few areas. And The Information reports (subscription also required, but people, it's time to start subscribing to good stuff) Uber, the looming tech juggernaut of the post-iPhone era, is said to be considering all three major cloud providers for some infrastructure services despite its status as an outlier: a post-iPhone consumer company that built its own infrastructure.

At one point, hybrid cloud was once considered a cop-out for scaredy cats under the spell of Big Server, too backward in their thinking to completely let go of their boxes. At a time when every CIO in the world is aware of the potential of the public cloud to help their IT strategy, it’s obvious that the market for public cloud infrastructure has a lot more room for growth. Yet as container strategies evolve and infrastructure-management tools evolve along with them, more and more companies will start to see the value of mixing infrastructure they alone control with the flexibility and ease of the public cloud for certain workloads.

We think that one of the key questions of the maturing cloud computing market is the notion of “the datacenter tipping point,” or the idea that every startup that manages to become a webscale player on the back of public cloud infrastructure will start to consider the benefits of rolling their own. Sure, companies like Netflix and Pinterest are still great advertisements for the cloud-only lifestyle, but as cloud services become more complex, there’s something to be said for running your own boxes.

Yet Salesforce and Uber remind us that it works both ways: just as cloud-native webscale companies consider managing their own infrastructure, companies that manage their own infrastructure can’t ignore the benefits of the public cloud. That’s good news for Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and a host of other startups that provide services in their wake, and it’s evidence that notoriously conservative IT managers have realized they can loosen up a bit and direct their focus on the workloads that are most vital to their business.