Top 9 Cloud Computing News: September Edition

The passage of 2020’s eighth month might seem a nonchalant affair amid the stay-at-home conditions. However, it is a proud moment for us because our Top Cloud news series has completed its first year. Here is the 13th edition of the same with all the latest news and events of the Cloud industry. Last month, a lot of new services were launched, and some big deals were signed. These were the top headline makers — NTT launches a private Cloud for Singapore and Hong Kong, JEDI contract gets delayed for one more month, Google hits it out the park with their Major League Baseball deal, and Google also made their Game Servers available to the developers. We tried our best to cover all the news from August, but if we missed some coverage, do mention it in our comments section. 

1. Cloud Tech Giants Face Increased Revenues Amid Slowing Growth.

Cloud giants like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform are thriving amid COVID-19 pandemic, the same pandemic that has caused other industries around the world to grind to a halt. 

While COVID-19 continues to disrupt communities and economies around the globe, there are signs that it will have a positive impact on Cloud industry. No doubt that the pandemic has brought some trouble to Cloud providers, but in these uncertain times, public Cloud provides flexibility and a haven for enterprises struggling to maintain normal operations. This is the reason why the Cloud market is currently growing and has a bright future ahead. Although, the growth rates took a hit, but revenue is steadily increasing. 

Read Full Story: Cloud Tech Giants Face Increased Revenues Amid Slowing Growth

2. AWS To Support 7 Indian Universities To Imbibe Cloud Computing in Curriculum

AWS announced that seven higher education institutions in India will adopt Cloud computing curriculum from its AWS Educate initiative. The education institutions that will offer the newly designed Bachelor of Technology degree programs in Information Technology (IT) and Computer Science are:

· Chitkara University (Punjab),

· Galgotias University (Uttar Pradesh),

· Manav Rachna University (Delhi -NCR),

· Noida Institute of Engineering and Technology (Uttar Pradesh),

· Sharda University (Delhi-NCR), and

· SRM Institute of Technology (Tamil Nadu).

Apart from Bachelor’s programs, the ASM Group of Institutes will also offer a syllabus combined with AWS Educate for Post-Graduate Diploma in Management-Emerging Technology. 

The Cloud computing curriculum will be included as an undergraduate degree and postgraduate diploma programs commencing in September 2020.

Read Full Story: AWS To Support 7 Indian Universities To Imbibe Cloud Computing in Curriculum

3. MLB Migrates To Google BigQuery Data Warehouse

Major League Baseball (MLB) has announced its migration to Google BigQuery from its Teradata-based on-premise servers. The migration had started back in May 2019 and was finally completed in November 2019 without any major issues. According to the organization, the migration has brought numerous advantages for MLB including ease of its data structure, lower costs, better performance, and lower operational overheads.

The migration comes after the organization had conducted a technical evaluation back in 2018, and felt the need to move toward a far more efficient system. MLB found the answer in Google BigQuery and Google delivered on every promise. 

Read Next: MLB migrates to Google BigQuery data warehouse

4. Maxar, NOAA, AWS Join Hands To Accelerate Weather Predictions Via Computing Solutions

Maxar Technologies Inc. embarked on a project and partnered with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Amazon Web Services. They have developed a high-performance computing solution that can generate numerical weather forecasts in 53 minutes. Currently, it takes 100 minutes to process that data. 

Maxar has four active satellites orbiting the Earth that collect images of 3 million square kilometers per day. The company has also designed a Cloud HPC cluster with 234 Amazon EC2 instances, in tandem with NOAA and the National Weather Service to provide forecasts for protecting life and property in the country.

By combining teams of data scientists and engineers, Maxar and AWS were able to create automated workflows, which upgrades the entire set of AWS tools and services, while allowing Maxar physicists to dig into the Earth Science side of NWP.

Read Full Story: Maxar, NOAA, AWS Join Hands To Accelerate Weather Predictions Via Computing Solutions

5. And Again! JEDI Contract Delayed By One More Month

The Department of Defense (DoD) and JEDI contract story refuses to die as DoD has asked for a one-month extension to review the JEDI deal. This comes just a few days before the initial date (August 17) that the deal was supposed to be finalized.

The DoD is currently reviewing new revised plans for its joint corporate security infrastructure agreement. The JEDI deal was awarded to Microsoft Corporation in October 2019 over Amazon Web Services Inc.’s competitive effort. Amazon, widely regarded as a favorite to win the deal, in turn, filed a lawsuit against the federal government. The Seattle Cloud giant stated that US President Donald Trump’s animosity toward the company affected the outcome of the contest. 

Read Full Story: And again! JEDI Contract Delayed by One More Month

6. NTT Unveils New Private Cloud In Singapore And Hong Kong

NTT has unveiled its new Hybrid Cloud value proposition along with the announcement of its Private Cloud for Enterprises in Hong Kong and Singapore. The new service is a core component of the global technology services provider’s Intelligent Data Center and Hybrid Cloud capabilities. The company’s latest offerings will be an integral part of its portfolio to help clients in their digital transformation journey.

Adopting Hybrid IT and Cloud computing services is essential to drive global business growth, agility, and digital transformation by adding benefits like greater scalability, cost efficiency, and security. This has resulted in the rise of Hybrid Cloud adoption in the market. Quoting markets and markets, “The hybrid Cloud market is expected to grow from USD 44.6 billion in 2018 to USD 97.6 billion by 2023, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 17.0% during the forecast period.“

Read Full Story: NTT Unveils New Private Cloud In Singapore and Hong Kong

7.Google Launches Game Servers As Multiplayer Gaming Booms Amid COVID-19

Google has announced that its Game Servers are now generally available for production workloads. The recent past has witnessed an exponential rise of multiplayer games. Back in March 2020, Google released the beta version of Game Servers, a managed service built on top of Agones, an open-source game server scaling project. Game Servers utilizes Kubernetes for container orchestration, and Agones for game server fleet orchestration and lifecycle management. It gives developers a modern and simpler model for managing and scaling games.

As more and more gamers across the world choose multiplayer games, developers have to scale up to meet the demand of never-ending player queue. Further, they also need to make sure that gameplay experience is not compromised as they manage the complex underlying global infrastructure.

Read Full Story: Google Launches Game Servers as Multiplayer Gaming Booms Amid COVID-19

8. Infosys Launches Cobalt, A Cloud Suite Targeted At Enterprise Businesses

Indian digital service provider and consulting giant Infosys has announced the launch of Infosys Cobalt. Cobalt is a suite of services, platforms, and solutions for Cloud, designed primarily for enterprise businesses to support digital transformation powered by Cloud.

The suite has tools that will encourage business users to migrate and employ Cloud-first development and deployment. As per Infosys, it will empower companies to scale up quickly based on their needs and make their business global, regional, industry regulatory, and security compliant.

The idea behind Infosys making Cobalt available is to support enterprise businesses and accelerate the adoption of Cloud technologies with a seamless experience of migration from on-premise infrastructure to Cloud ecosystem.

Read Full Story: Infosys Launches Cobalt, a Cloud Suite Targeted at Enterprise Businesses

9. Snowflake – A Cloud Data Platform Company Files For IPO

Speculation was rife for weeks that Snowflake confidentially filed for an IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Yesterday, the Silicon Valley-based Cloud data warehousing company made it official: It intends to start selling shares on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol SNOW.

The rapid ascent of Snowflake has been one of the better stories in the big data market over the past few years. Founded by database experts Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes, and Marcin Zukowski in 2012, Snowflake was created from the ground up to be an analytics database that runs in a Cloud-native manner, which means it separates compute and storage.

Snowflake is best known for running an efficient Cloud-based data warehouse upon which customers can quickly spin up big SQL analytics workloads, and then spin them down when they’re not needed, which saves money.

Read Full Story: Snowflake – A Cloud Data Platform Company Files For IPO