When to Sell? Look at the HQ
Interesting read in The Wall Street Journal about the relationship between office headquarters and stock performance.
Exciting Trends in the technology and commercial real estate world
Interesting read in The Wall Street Journal about the relationship between office headquarters and stock performance.
By: Evan Smethurst
www.techrealestatetrends.com
The Public Cloud has become a massive force over the last several years. The major Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers have designed their Cloud Computing platforms for the ‘public’ at large and as a result there has been significant demand. The spectrum of demand has been comprehensive: startups, mid-market, corporations and the world’s biggest enterprises. An overwhelming percentage (95%+) of mid-market and enterprise companies are leveraging Public Cloud. The industry’s dominant company, Amazon Web Services (AWS), released financials showing 69% growth and $7.8B revenue in 2015. This incredible influx of users demands a significant engineering effort, and the major IaaS players have responded, architecting near-infinite scalability within their Clouds.
Near-infinite, on-demand computing scalability has its risks for the Cloud Computing vendor. Imagine a cross-section of a ‘hyperscale’ Cloud Computing data center in which a major IaaS provider operates: racks upon racks of horizontally stacked server, storage and networking gear, symmetrically deployed to make the most efficient use of space. To comprehend the immensity of a Cloud facility, visualize a data hall inhabited by computing racks endless enough to justify Segway transportation for the facility operations staff. Enterprise computing hardware doesn’t come cheap, but the IaaS business model necessitates that compute is available during peak business times. Since the IaaS vendors have promised the marketplace fully ‘elastic’ availability of computing resources, they take the risk of investment into ‘burst capacity’: the infrastructure deployed to support peak business demand. Inherent in a ‘burst capacity’ investment is the risk that the associated infrastructure commonly sits idle, waiting for paying users to rent Virtual Machines (VMs) on an hourly basis in order to generate revenue.
The executive staff at a leading global IaaS provider finally grew tired of the intervals in which their expensive investment into ‘burst capacity’ sat idle, and decided to create a stimulus for users: the Spot Market. The computing ‘instances’ (actively ‘leased’ VMs) on the Spot Market are functionally identical to the instances leased ‘on-demand’, but carry a tantalizing discount of up to 90%. Yes, there is a catch: ‘Spot’ Instances remain available for lease on the open market, even while it might be crunching data as a part of your computing fleet. This point is worth emphasizing: a user outside your network could offer a higher price for your Spot Instance, and the IaaS provider could unceremoniously remove the computing resource from your possession for presentation to the high bidder. By original design, these business continuity risks made Spot Instances appropriate only for development, Quality Assurance, and other non-production IT workloads.
Thankfully for the Cloud computing user, some of the most ‘gamechanging’ technology developments of 2016 include ‘Intelligent Workload Management’ (IWM). IWM in the Cloud includes the automation of bidding and failover processes for Spot Instances such that they can be used in a production-ready, customer-facing computing environment. There is no doubt this recent innovation has completely changed the economics of Cloud computing. With intelligent software-enablement, your IaaS compute is now 50-80% less expensive.
By: James P. Quinn
Techrealestatetrends.com
Amazon’s cloud computing service, Amazon Web Services (AWS), had an outage for four hours this week that affected a diverse group of approximately 1,000 U.S. corporations. The outage was limited to the U.S but had a huge impact. It was due to an Amazon employee making an error with a simple typo entered command. “The AWS outage affected our company’s productivity across the board. Websites using AWS for caching were slowed, several email platforms were disabled, and our primary source of web hosting had their site disabled by this outage. If we continue to experience outages like this, we will need to diversify our infrastructure,” says Eric Zwierzynski, a Designer at Swell Creative Group, a communication program development company based in Los Angeles.
This outage comes at a time when corporate IT departments are focused on restructuring their IT portfolio to build more flexibility and cost savings by migrating from more traditional legacy IT networks. Currently, cloud migration and cloud transformation are high priorities for corporations in evaluating the right approach to their IT infrastructure. “This outage is a warning flare that corporations need to deploy a diverse strategy to protect their IT infrastructure,” says Evan Smethurst, Vice President of Cloud Advisory at JLL. Smethurst focuses on providing cloud advisory services for corporations on a global basis.
There has been progress in corporations preparing for these cloud outages. NETActuate, a software-enabled IT infrastructure company that focuses on network, cloud and data center services has been working to prevent these possible outages from affecting their client’s infrastructure. “We have been able to implement a cloud transit service that enables people to connect their virtual private clouds in multiple regions to get instantaneous failover to mitigate the impact of this issue,” says Brandon Tedder, VP of Business Development at NETActuate.
The latest occurrence is another reminder why U.S. and global corporations need to be pro-active in their IT strategy and implementation.