Amazon Web Services
said it acquired a Portland cloud startup, Elemental, Thursday afternoon for a reported $500 million in cash (
according to The Information, subscription required). Elemental focuses on software for streaming video, which could help AWS attract and retain video companies as cloud customers.
CLOUD PROVIDERS SLAS: WHAT TO LOOK FOR We spend a lot of time talking about the servers, networking, and processors that enable the public cloud, but if you're a public cloud customer you should really focus your attention on one thing: your service-level agreement.
Datamation has some good pointers to consider before signing your next headache-as-a-service deal.
UBUNTU LINUX CONTINUES TO RULE THE CLOUD The impact of Linux on the development of the public cloud can't be understated, and it turns out that Canonical's Ubuntu is the most dominant flavor of that operating system used by public cloud providers.
ZDNet looks at a study by The Cloud Market that analyzed AWS instances, and that report sets up Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth's upcoming talk at Structure 2015 quite nicely.
THE FAA STARTS MOVING TO THE CLOUD The puns almost write themselves: The Federal Aviation Administration has agreed to start putting some workloads in the cloud (AWS and Microsoft's Azure were singled out) through government contractor CSC.
Techcrunch reports that it's a ten-year $109 million deal, and while the wheels of government bureaucracy turn far slower than the tech industry, it's a start when it comes to modernizing government IT infrastructure (which we pay for, after all).
ICONIQ LEADS $75 MILLION ROUND FOR NETSKOPE TO SECURE CLOUD APPS Looking for the next cloud gold rush? Security startup Netskope just raised another $75 million in a Series D funding round led by Iconiq Capital,
according to the Wall Street Journal. Netskope helps companies secure cloud apps that employees start using on their own, which can leave sensitive data exposed.
