Friday 14 October 2016

Structure News: The week Amazon Web Services blessed the hybrid cloud

Your weekly tech news roundup, with a little bit of Structure.

STRUCTURE EVENTS Newsletter
Where Ken Bone Is Plotting His Structure 2017 Appearance
October 14th, 2016 / by Tom Krazit
This week, we'll talk about a big partnership between companies that once appeared to be on opposite sides of the cloud revolution, a possible path foward for traditional transistor designs, and why Facebook wants you to use Facebook at work even more than you already do.
BIG PICTURE

Sometimes it's nice to realize the world isn't as binary as it might appear.

Just three years ago, VMware and Amazon Web Services considered each other existential threats. VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger made it pretty clear how his company felt about AWS in 2013, implying that once VMware lost workloads to the public cloud, it would never get those back on the style of datacenter computing around which VMware rose to prominence. For its part, AWS has been championing the idea that all workloads should run in a public cloud for its entire existence, and admitting that large enterprises might have valid reasons to keep some workloads under their own control was anathema to its leaders around that time.

As the next generation of enterprise computing evolves, the hot takes of the past are cooling. The joint appearance between AWS CEO Andy Jassy and Gelsinger this week to introduce a ground-breaking partnership between the two companies shows that the hybrid cloud approach is here to stay.

Structure 2016 media partner Fortune broke news of this partnership last week, and summarized the deal here. (Network World also had a nice breakdown of the winners and losers in the deal here.) We'll have Matt Wood of AWS, who outlined details of the partnership in Thursday's press conference, at Structure 2016, and Guido Appenzeller of VMware is also going to be in the building, so we'll have much more to say about this partnership in a month.

This won't be available until the middle of next year, so we'll see how the details play out, but this appears to be a good deal for current and potential customers of both companies. AWS will make it easier to run VMware's software inside its environment and pick up workloads it wouldn't otherwise be able to access, and VMware will be able to offer its customers the flexibility they would have sought one way or another without VMware's help.

Last year at Structure 2015, worries about public cloud lock-in were front and center. Announcements like this should help calm those fears, and while AWS will continue to promote the idea that the cloud is easier, cheaper, and safer than rolling your own infrastructure, it appears to have decided that it wasn't going to be able to catch them all.

STRUCTURE NEWS
STRUCTURE 2016 JUST ONE MONTH AWAY
We're putting the finishing touches on the schedule for Structure 2016, the best and longest-running independent cloud computing conference. In addition to Matt and Guido, were welcoming back Structure veterans like Google's Urs Holzle and Facebook's Jay Parikh, and introducing newcomers like Seth Bodnar of GE Digital and Jeetu Patel of Box (pictured).

Our flagship event will be held November 8th (vote early, vote often) and November 9th at the UCSF Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. More details about the conference can be found here.
INDUSTRY NEWS
THE INTERNET HAS BEEN QUIETLY REWIRED, AND VIDEO IS THE REASON WHY
We extensively covered the battles over how video traffic should travel over the internet backbone in our last iteration, and more and more video providers are taking control of how their content makes it onto your laptop. Quartz has a nice overview of how companies like Google, Facebook, and Netflix are investing in core networking technology to control their own distribution, which sounds like something traditional media companies should have done 15 years ago.

TRANSISTOR WITH A 1NM GATE SIZE IS THE WORLD'S SMALLEST

We're fast approaching some fundamental materials science problems in semiconductor manufacturing, but Ars Technica reports that scientists have found a way to make a stable 1-nanometer wide gate with materials other than silicon. Who knows if anybody will be able to replicate their technique at scale, but somebody will spend a lot of money trying to keep Moore's Law afloat with more-or-less conventional transistors.

HOW DIANE GREENE IS REINVENTING GOOGLE CLOUD

There have been an awful lot of "Google's getting serious about the cloud" reports this year, right? While Google is obviously striving to get out in front of potential cloud customers, The Information (subscription required) has a good report on how things are going so far, which Urs can back up at Structure 2016.

HPE, IBM, ARM, SAMSUNG, AND PALS IN PLOT TO WEAVE 'MEMORY FABRIC'

The process of developing new standards for memory is extremely important and a enormous minefield at the same time. The Register reports on the efforts of a consortium of tech companies to develop new standards for the connections between memory and processors that lacks a rather prominent player in this world: Intel.

HOW TO WIN THE CYBER WAR AGAINST RUSSIA.

One good thing about this crazy election year is the canon of great spy movies that will be inspired by true events. Security experts I've talked to are divided on exactly how the U.S. should respond to this year's Russian cyber offensive, but Foreign Policy lays out a pretty hawkish case for fighting back.

WORKPLACE BY FACEBOOK OPENS TO SELL ENTERPRISE SOCIAL NETWORKING TO THE MASSES

Given that a lot of people spend half their workday on Facebook anyway, it's not surprising that the company has tried to get folks to use Facebook for actual work as well. Those efforts have not caught on, but Facebook is trying again with Workplace, which is clearly targeting Slack and Workday, according to Techcrunch.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
In some cases, it was a risk to put [Google engineers] in front of customers because they were too technical, lacked patience, and would tell the customer they were stupid."
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