Citrix kicks down door, breaks up OpenStack cloud party Two years ago, Rackspace went after Amazon in a big way, launching an open-source cloud initiative called OpenStack. Since that time, more than 150 companies have signed up to the anti-Amazon party. Last week, however, one big participant decided to leave OpenStack to create an after-party that by many accounts fixes a slew of …
to expect any product to reach a very mature solid state to where a big company would use it in serious production in only two years is expecting too much I think. Especially when it comes to storage(that object storage thing they have) - gotta make sure it's solid.
I suspect the only serious folks using these things are going to have on staff developers that can help maintain/fix issues in the product for some years to come.
OpenStack we see in the open is not the same as OpenStack used by the likes of HP, . It's good marketing as "Open" and saves them lots of $$$ though. Expect a fork and secret sauce (including important fixes) to reside behind closed doors, so in fact the project is worse off. There is a reason why the big vendors look for code under an Apache License. Don't forget, the big companies need some USP's and differentiation.
Despite all the hype, OpenStack is not "The Linux of the Cloud". Actually, Citrix have made a good move by making the CloudStack project neutral, as in properly neutral, not "Rackspace says it's open and there is a foundation and and and!!1???oneone". Wheels will fall off the OpenStack bus when people start to actually wake up and smell the coffee.
Updated Amazon has blasted a proposed antitrust law that aims to clamp down on anti-competitive practices by Big Tech.
The American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) led by Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and House Representative David Cicilline (D-RI) is a bipartisan bill, with Democrat and Republican support in the Senate and House. It is still making its way through Congress.
The bill [PDF] prohibits certain "online platforms" from unfairly promoting their own products and services in a way that prevents or hampers third-party businesses in competing. Said platforms with 50 million-plus active monthly users in the US or 100,000-plus US business users, and either $550 billion-plus in annual sales or market cap or a billion-plus worldwide users, that act as a "critical trading partner" for suppliers would be affected.
Updated The US House Oversight Committee has told Amazon CEO Andy Jassy to turn over documents pertaining to the collapse of an Amazon warehouse – and if he doesn't, the lawmakers say they will be forced to "consider alternative measures."
Penned by Oversight Committee members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Cori Bush (D-MO) and committee chairwoman Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY), the letter refers to the destruction of an Edwardsville, Illinois, Amazon fulfillment center in which six people were killed when a tornado hit. It was reported that the facility received two weather warnings about 20 minutes before the tornado struck at 8.27pm on December 10; most staff had headed to a shelter, some to an area where there were no windows but was hard hit by the storm.
In late March, the Oversight Committee sent a letter to Jassy with a mid-April deadline to hand over a variety of documents, including disaster policies and procedures, communication between managers, employees and contractors, and internal discussion of the tornado and its aftermath.
Amazon's attempt to dismiss a lawsuit, brought by one of its senior software engineers, asking it to reimburse workers for internet and electricity costs racked up while working from home in the pandemic, has been rejected by a California judge.
David George Williams sued his employer for refusing to foot his monthly home office expenses, claiming Amazon is violating California's labor laws. The state's Labor Code section 2802 states: "An employer shall indemnify his or her employee for all necessary expenditures or losses incurred by the employee in direct consequence of the discharge of his or her duties, or of his or her obedience to the directions of the employer."
Williams reckons Amazon should not only be paying for its techies' home internet and electricity, but also for any other expenses related to their ad-hoc home office space during the pandemic. Williams sued the cloud giant on behalf of himself and over 4,000 workers employed in California across 12 locations, arguing these costs will range from $50 to $100 per month during the time they were told to stay away from corporate campuses as the coronavirus spread.
OpenInfra Berlin OpenInfra still has ideas to share, including an intriguing funding model for open source projects the Foundation discussed at its in-person event last week in Berlin.
The "Directed Funding" initiative – a significant change to how some projects might be funded in the future – is about allowing organizations to fund a specific project rather than seeing their cash spread across projects for which they have no interest.
Jonathan Bryce, CEO and executive director of the OpenInfra Foundation, told The Register this wasn't a case of following a trend in the open-source world that he described as "this kind of pay to play-type scenario."
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy's first shareholder meeting was a rousing success for Amazon leadership and Jassy's bank account. But for activist investors intent on making Amazon more open and transparent, it was nothing short of a disaster.
While actual voting results haven't been released yet, Amazon general counsel David Zapolsky told Reuters that stock owners voted down fifteen shareholder resolutions addressing topics including workplace safety, labor organizing, sustainability, and pay fairness. Amazon's board recommended voting no on all of the proposals.
Jassy and the board scored additional victories in the form of shareholder approval for board appointments, executive compensation and a 20-for-1 stock split. Jassy's executive compensation package, which is tied to Amazon stock price and mostly delivered as stock awards over a multi-year period, was $212 million in 2021.
Amazon.com has decided to end its Kindle digital book business in China.
A statement posted to the Kindle China WeChat account states that Amazon has already stopped sending new Kindle devices to resellers and will cease operations of the Kindle China e-bookstore on June 30, 2023. The Kindle app will last another year, allowing users to download previously purchased e-books. But after June 30, 2024, Kindle devices in China won’t be able to access content.
An accompanying FAQ doesn’t offer a reason for the decision, but an Amazon spokesperson told Reuters “We periodically evaluate our offerings and make adjustments, wherever we operate.”
Alibaba Cloud offered a peek at its latest homegrown silicon at its annual summit this week, which it calls Cloud Infrastructure Processing Units (CIPU).
The data processing units (DPUs), which we're told have already been deployed in a “handful” of the Chinese giant’s datacenters, offload virtualization functions associated with storage, networking, and security from the host CPU cores onto dedicated hardware.
“The rapid increase in data volume and scale, together with higher demand for lower latency, call for the creation of new tech infrastructure,” Alibaba Cloud Intelligence President Jeff Zhang said in a release.
AWS is trying to help organizations migrate their mainframe-based workloads to the cloud and potentially transform them into modern cloud-native services.
The Mainframe Modernization initiative was unveiled at the cloud giant's Re:Invent conference at the end of last year, where CEO Adam Selipsky claimed that "customers are trying to get off their mainframes as fast as they can."
Whether this is based in reality or not, AWS concedes that such a migration will inevitably involve the customer going through a lengthy and complex process that requires multiple steps to discover, assess, test, and operate the new workload environments.
Comment What goes up must come down - even in the tech industry.
In a period of a little more than a month, the biggest tech companies have dropped trillions of dollars in valuation, setting off alarm bells across the industry. Recovering from this downturn will be different, though: Businesses will have to walk a fine line between meeting metrics and respecting a new work culture that has emerged since the pandemic.
Investors are telling companies in their portfolios to cut staff, reduce budgets, raise prices, and prepare for a long, slow recovery – and even the most cash-flush tech giants are reevaluating their employee spends, from salaries to stocks to perks.
The US datacenter construction boom may be faltering and the reasons are not difficult to predict. The same supply shortages, price hikes and a lack of labor that have characterized not-quite-post-pandemic life is a risk for DC builders, too.
Construction consultancy firm Turton Bond's Darren Flood authored the report making that argument. Flood said that the need for datacenters is stronger than ever, but that "COVID-19 variants, changing restrictions, constrained supply chains and strong demand create an unpredictable market."
All of this is hitting after the datacenter real estate market exploded into its own boom times, with unprecedented investments in suitable building sites.
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